Yet Another Linux Blog

I am continuously happy with the improvements in the Linux world.

Here’s the old way to configure NDISWrapper on your machine: Hoary NDISWrapper HOWTO. You have to wade through a relatively complicated set of instructions, including creating a deb.

Here’s the new way to configure NDISWrapper on your machine: Breezy NDISgtk. Simply download the Windows .inf file and the .sys file and run ndisgtk. Then Configure the interface as usual. Works like a charm.

LinuxJournal has a nice article about Scalix and Zimbra and their web mail clients. I’m not too sure about how corporate would react to those names, but it’s nice to see that there are more alternatives appearing for MS Exchange. Scalix is a proprietary app, but it has a free-as-in-beer edition and is cheaper than Exchange in any case. Zimbra is Free Software, but the more advanced functionality add-ons are closed source.

Even Apple can’t get it right, not to mention Microsoft. Here’s an example: iPhoto 6 Preferences. Now, at first glance, I’d say that there are too few options (compared to the usual myriad of checkboxes in a typical Microsoft / FLOSS app), but as the writer explains, there are in fact too many options.

Interestingly enough, on my father’s Mac mini, running Panther, the iPhoto app only e-mails photos via Mail, ignoring the fact that he uses Thunderbird as his “default mail client.”

get the InsightToolkit TAR from itk.org

install cmake, make, gcc-3.4, g++-3.4, and the recommended packages

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-3.4 /usr/bin/gcc
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/g++-3.4 /usr/bin/g++

as in the ITK Software Guide:
mkdir Insight-binary
cd Insight-binary
ccmake PATH_TO_SOURCES

hit c to configure; if everything went well, hit g to generate

make

Just watch this short video which introduces some of the features.

It’s too bad we’ll have to wait so long (end of 2006?) before we can use those features.

Take a look at these:
Dots in the first part of the e-mail don’t matter
Use delimiters in your e-mail address.

People have traditionally registered a domain and then used different addresses like from_amazon@yourname.com and from_other_store@yourname.com to know where the mail was coming from. Now you can do the same thing with your gmail account!

One day I wanted to make a Windows share that people could write to temporarily, without writing anything to disk. The machine I was doing this on had 1GB of RAM, so I made a file in the ramdisk.

1. Click on the Knoppix icon -> Services -> Start SAMBA
2. set a password in the dialog box that pops up
3. export all? yes
4. touch share (this will make a file called share)
5. mkdir share_dir
6. sudo losetup /dev/loop0 share
7. sudo mkfs -t ext2 /dev/loop0
8. sudo mount -t ext2 /dev/loop0 share_dir
9. edit /etc/samba/smb.conf (add the appropriate share)
10. smbcontrol smbd reload-config

1. Install Ubuntu Server 5.10 (or any Debian distribution)
2. Apt-get install backuppc
3. Apt-get install exim4-daemon-light
4. /etc/init.d/backuppc restart
5. It should now have the web interface up. Check http://localhost/backuppc and use the u/p pair provided during installation. The documentation in /usr/share/doc/backuppc says the default password is “backuppc”, but this is not correct.
6. Edit /etc/backuppc/config.pl I added my username and password and CompressLevel.
7. Edit /etc/backuppc/hosts I added a couple of computers. Our machines use DHCP, but nmblookup finds them, so I set the DHCP flag in this file to 0. After editing the hosts file, the service has to be restarted.
8. Add /var/lib/backuppc/pc/officepc/config.pl To specify different directories per pc. The contents of this file are as follows:

   ###############################

   # What to backup and when to do it

   # (can be overridden in the per-PC config.pl)

   ###############################

   #

   # Name of the host share that is backed up when using SMB. This can be a

   # string or an array of strings if there are multiple shares per host.

   # Examples:

   #

   # $Conf{SmbShareName} = ‘c’; # backup ‘c’ share

   # $Conf{SmbShareName} = ['c', 'd']; # backup ‘c’ and ‘d’ shares

   #

   # This setting only matters if $Conf{XferMethod} = ’smb’.

   #

   $Conf{SmbShareName} = ’speed-test’;

   In this case, this is for host “officepc” and the only directory backed up on this host is the windows share named “speed-test”.

Like Hitler and like today’s advertising industry, open source needs to realize that you have to get them young. If a kid grows up hating the Jews and believing in the dominance of the Aryan race, then it’ll be quite difficult to convince him otherwise. If a kid grows up using MS Office, then that’s what they’ll use.

That’s the point Glyn Moody makes in his post about the need to introduce kids to FOSS.

The reason I became interested in Free Software is because my high school programming class was taught using emacs and gcc and gdb on Linux machines.

Do you want a good way to share your files between multiple locations? Most people would suggest that you carry them around on a USB key. With 4GB flash drives available these days, it’s simple and gives lots of room. But what if you don’t want to carry something around with you? What if you don’t want to lose the tiny device or forget it somewhere?

Some people would suggest that you e-mail the files to yourself. But maybe the file is too big. Then you can use a site like YouSendIt.com

But maybe you want to leave a copy on the server. Or maybe you want to synchronize your files between a couple of locations. The old-school method is simply to have an FTP server that you can upload files to. There are now a number of services that give you exactly that, with a web interface:

• http://www.xdrive.com/
• http://www.filesanywhere.com/
• http://www.flipdrive.com/
• https://www.foldershare.com/

The winner from the above services seems to be foldershare.com. They were recently purchased by Microsoft and their service is free, unlike the others.

But the point of this post is to mention iFolder, a piece of software that does the same thing. You’ll obviously need your own file server that will run iFolder, but you won’t have to pay the monthly fees of the other services. And with software requirements like these, it’ll run on any platform.