ZDnet UK has another article on how many businesses prefer to make a move to open source software fairly quietly. This should be no surprise really given the news and circus-type feel some of the public “studies” of a large company or other organization moving to linux or replacing Microsoft Office. In many cases, there’ve been “personal visits” from Steve Ballmer to try to keep the organization in the Microsoft camp, lot’s of news articles, outside individuals lobbying one way or the other.
Category: Software
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ZDNET.uk takes a look at linux on the business desktop
It was nice to see linux on the business desktop getting a serious look at zdnet.uk It looks like they give a fair run down of the main business class applications (Office Suite/email/etc.) While pointing out that the installers were something that in a business environment IT staff would be dealing with. They seem to favor the GNOME desktop over KDE as being able to sit down and get right to work in.
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Linux LiveCD for security professionals/penetration testers
I hadn’t heard of this distro before, but read at distrowatch, that Troppix has released version 1.2 of their livecd. It supports many wireless chipsets, is aimed to improve look and feel and include the latest versions of several utilities (nessus, metasploit, aircrack).
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ABC news weighs in on the new browser wars
ABC News has an article weighing in on the renewed browser wars in a comparison of the upcoming release of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. Basically, they say that those with little motivation to move from Explorer will have even less after the release of 7 (the user interface will be similar to the others…tabbed browsing, etc.) He does point out that the other browsers aren’t standing still.
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Linux won’t boot – corrupt MBR (Master Boot Record) repair tip
How many times have I seen this, a dual-boot system with a sideways Master Boot Record (MBR). This is one of those ways that Windows systems sometimes don’t “play well with others”. This tip at linuxhelp.blogspot.com tells of an unfortunate Windows hibernate that rendered his system unbootable. A linux cd is all it takes to repair the damage.
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Mozilla Firefox 1.5 to be released November 29th
Word has it that Mozilla Firefox 1.5 will be released Tuesday, November 29th, 2005. It’s gone through three release candidates and a number of betas. I think there are some good improvements from what I’ve seen of the 1.5 release candidates. One of the features I like is the auto-update feature allowing updates from within the browser to automatically happen. (Also, the updates can be done on a smaller scale than the old “download the whole thing and reinstall the whole application.”)
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VMWare’s free VMPlayer
One of the other things I had hoped to do this weekend was play around with the new VMWare player. VMware is a company that makes virtual machine software, the entry level pricing usually starting at $199 and going up from there. They’ve recently released a “Player” that can run preconfigured vmware system images. Which means a person can setup a system image in a file then zip it up and send to another person to run in their “player”.
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Free personal firewalls for windows will be a bit scarcer
It’s too bad that Symantec will be killing off a free personal firewall. I guess they didn’t like supporting competition for their (large) Internet Security with included firewall… About three months ago, Symantec bought Sygate who made a Sygate Pro and Sygate free personal firewall. Both the Pro and the free version will get the ax from what it looks like…
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part II
Well the saga continues. I suspect there will be a three as I get all software installed and mention tips and tweaks. III may not be named as such, I may just do a series of articles on little things that I’ve changed. At this hour I’ve got the KDE desktop for Mandriva 2006 up and running and am as I type letting more software install. I’ve had a few bumps along the way and let me tell you about them. First was the bad md5sum on the first disk image… my fault. I expected bittorrent to have checked it and made sure it was correct, but apparently that failed. Again, my fault.
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part I
I had a chance today to start the upgrade process for Mandriva 2006 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8000). Now, let’s see…. a bit of background. Mandriva (Mandrive/Mandrake) has been my favorite distro since converting to linux several years back (around Mandrake 8.1 or 8.2) I’ve had it running on the laptop since then and was up to 10.1 official (if I remember correctly). The last upgrade I did, I just setup the install sources in urpmi and did urpmi –auto-select –auto from the command line and off it went. In short order I had a fresh upgraded system. Today was not to be so smooth.