Here’s another great reason to use Linux over Windows. Ksplice Uptrack provides for runtime patching of the Linux kernel without rebooting of the machine. This has great advantages where you need to maintain the security of a server but have limited opportunites to reboot due to SLA’s (Service Level Agreements). Ubuntu Linux was the first supported operating system, other variants are now available too, though often for a fee.
Posts Tagged ‘linux’
Linux kernel updates without reboot
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009Atari 2600 Emulator
Wednesday, April 29th, 2009While it was not technically a personal computer, the Atari 2600 was one of the first pieces of technology that I had experience with in my youth. I’ll likely outline the progression of machines/operating systems in a future post.
I’ve heard about Stella for quite a while, but never had any time to fiddle with it. Recently I found that Ubuntu includes an installer for it and took a chance look. Other versions are available for MacOS and Windows.
I also found a few websites that contain ROM images for the emulator and was playing some of my old games in a matter of minutes.
For those legal types out there… I actually do own the games that I played, in fact, they are currently boxed up in my basement.
References:
Happy Retro Gaming!!!
Free Computer Based VOIP
Monday, February 23rd, 2009I’ve used a variety of computer based VOIP over the years. My current preference in this space is Skype as it’s free for computer-to-computer calls and even allows calls to and from regular phones (at a fee).
Video and text chat are also provided, as is ‘white-boarding’ with additional plugins.
Skype is available for most platforms, even mobile phones… I’ve found that while the Windows beta versions has some additional features, the Linux release is rock-solid.
There are also several hardware based solutions, like Vonage, available to replace your traditional phone service… perhaps we’ll cover that later.
Skype me!
Open Source FTP Client (and Server)
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009At one time, FTP was the only means available to move large files, times have changed but the need still exists, especially for developers like myself.
For years I’ve happily used FileZilla for my FTP needs, the client is available on most platforms. There is also a server available for Windows as most Linux variants already provide FTP.
Happy file transfers!
Free Antivirus Software
Wednesday, April 16th, 2008So, a family member has recently approached me about virus scan products for Windows. It seems that, while he runs a commercial product, it’s a little dated and he does not keep up on the frequent updates, unfortunately this has put him into a position where his computer was infected and has become almost unusable. Using the same commercial products he’s unable to clean up the mess and has already lost many files.
I’ve been a convert to Avast for several years and even run it on my servers to scan for malicious content, it’s both free for non-commercial use and updates automatically.
Other products worth considering:
For Windows:
Unix/Linux:
Mac OS/X:
Cheers!
Windows Tools for reading NTFS and Linux partitions
Thursday, April 3rd, 2008I’ve had to do my share of hard-drive recoveries over the years and have found the tools provided by DiskInternals to be invaluable in several occurances.
I’d previously used their NTFS Reader software to recover files from bad partitions after multi-booting to an older Windows operating system drive on the same machine.
Now I’ve found that they offer an EXT2/EXT3 Reader to allow Windows to access Linux partitions.
This is great for less-technical users that experience fatal errors in their operating systems as there’s now a relatively simple way to access the ‘familiar’ Windows tooling to recover files on the ‘bad’ partition. For the power-user, this affords a means for people making the switch to Linux a means in which to access their files in Windows in the off chance that they have to use software not usable under WINE.
Product Pages:
NOTE: Similar tooling exists to read Mac HPFS partitions, that topic saved for a later post!
Cheers!
WINE Is Not an Emulator
Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008I post a lot about open source applications, WINE is another notable contender as it gives users an option to run many mainstream Window applications on a Linux (even Apple’s OS/X variant) platform by providing access to the Windows API’s to those host operating systems.
http://www.winehq.org/
http://appdb.winehq.org/ – List of applications supported
Ah, for those of you still running IBM’s OS/2 platform, you too can run Win32 applications with Odin:
http://odin.netlabs.org/
Cheers!
Open Source Operating Systems
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008I’ve posted a lot of information about the common ‘free’ open-source software that I routinely use, however… I just realized that I missed one of the most important applications you use, the Operating System itself.
While my “day job” relegates me to use Windows products for much of my work, I do a lot of additional work at home and for friends.
Currently I use and highly recommend Ubuntu Linux for most users, it’s got most of the usability features of Microsofr Windows and Apple OS/X, but without all of the additional baggage. It’s updated regularly, with new releases every 6 months and software patches made available almost daily. Updates are as non-intrusive as the Windows Update process, and only a very few ever require a reboot.
To quiet the other Linux users out there, I’ve used a lot of Linux ‘flavors’ in the past… each has had it’s place and may do so again…. this is my opinion for the moment and will likely change again in a few years. 
Here’s the list:
Cheers!
Open Source Text Editors
Wednesday, August 8th, 2007As an old UNIX developer, I spent a significant portion of my work experience using VI, as my development environment became more focused on Windows, I used Homesite for developing text formatted documents. I’ve found that the current offerings from Eclipse and other IDE’s are notoriously bad at displaying the source of many document types, particularly JSP, HTML, XML, JAVA, JS and CSS files; where you often want to see exactly how a document is structured. Additional spaces, tabs and carriage returns can cause display formatting issues and wasted bandwidth in many cases.
Many of my peers are fans of TextPad, but I’ve found Notepad++ to be quite up to the task:
- it is available for Windows and LINUX
- supports auto-formatting of many text file types
- can ‘replace’ the default Source-HTML viewer in MSIE.
http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net
Happy coding!