Tag: Linux

  • Park Your Virus Impervious Smugness Mac (and Linux) Users

    Screenshot of ClamTk 3.08 running on Ubuntu 8....
    Image via Wikipedia

    I use linux. I prefer it over Windows for many reasons. It’s more resistant to viruses, less of a target, but that doesn’t mean that malware or other viruses are impossible. If someone were to trick me into running something and even worse, trick me into using my administrator password to install something system wide, it could be the same end result as a windows malware infection. To be fair Microsoft has improved their security over the years. They are still the most likely platform though to get a drive by virus just by visiting a site (with no user interaction.) That much said, Mac users and Linux users should avoid being smug. Why? They aren’t completely safe. No one is. Social engineering is the most common (and most effective) path to getting malware on a computer.

    (more…)

  • Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 1200 Pro

    Scanners… I had a nice microtek scanner that for the last year has refused to work and I decided to replace it. I have a project coming up that would require scanning some larger format pages so I was really pleased to find a $165 A3 scanner (usually the larger format are much more expensive.) This is the Mustek ScanExpress A3 USB 1200 Pro. So…. being a linux user I look to see if it’s supported by sane and naively…. finding a mustek usb scanner with 1200 in the name assume that it’s supported that way. (It’s not – mustek’s model numbering is quite cryptic and enigmatic. I have found multiple (different) scanexpress something 1200 scanners that are usb based. All with varying levels of support.

    On inspection though mustek has a linux driver on their website…

    (more…)

  • Linux Software Raid Notes – Replacing Drives

    This post is going to be somewhat of a “link dump” for me of some pages that I’ve been perusing lately. After playing with RT (request tracker) – I added a few ticket items for the home network. Now, if you’ve been a longtime reader and sorted through ALL of these posts here you’ll know that I’ve made use of software raid on the home systems. Why? Linux software raid seems fairly reliable (so far – 2 years +). It doesn’t depend on a specific piece of hardware. In short IF the worst happens and the array fails I should be able to retrieve data from an individual drive more easily than if it were hardware raid. I’m using Raid Level 1 (cloning/mirroring) and ext3 is the filesystem on top. I’ve had some slight problems with one drive in both the Desktop and server arrays and both arrays had been degraded for some time. My goal was ultimately redundancy and to eliminate the disruption that hard drive failures have given over the last few years.

    (more…)

  • Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Netbook Remix on an Acer Aspire One ZG5 trackpad issues

    Recently I had the opportunity to work on an Acer Aspire One netbook. It’s rare that I get the chance to work on a linux desktop system for a client. Most of my desktop users that I support run Windows (although I primarily run linux on my machines.) I get to do a fair amount of server level work with linux variants, but this one, being a desktop install, intrigued me.

    The issue was that the buttons on the trackpad didn’t work. She also indicated that she had tried a usb mouse and those buttons didn’t work either. As I looked at it, I had already spent some time browsing through bug reports getting ideas on what might be the issue. It behaved exactly as she described and so then the real fun began.

    (more…)

  • Checking the SMART details of a hard drive with an Ubuntu Boot CD

    S.M.A.R.T. is a self monitoring and reporting tool built into every modern hard drive. Did you know that you can use an ubuntu linux boot cd to check that smart status and run SMART tests on your drive? This is the same boot cd that you can use to test out or install the ubuntu linux environment, but you can do the SMART testing without installing linux on your hard drive.

    How?

    (more…)

  • Linux Market Share Growing Faster than Apple! | Linux adoption rate beats iPhone

    I had to find a twist like that headline above reading this article. Net Applications does a monthly survey across sites that receive 160 million visitors to gauge the “market share” of operating systems and web browsers. According to the November numbers, Microsoft Windows has no fallen below 90% market share, Mac is up to 8.87% and linux is around 0.83%. The growth rate for Mac is 7.43%, Linux growth rate is at 15.49% The iPhone is “only” growing at 12.12%

    Of course, looking at numbers from one month to the next you can see variations caused by a number of factors that may or may not accurately reflect the situation. Are people surfing more from work this month for some reason? Maybe there is a weather related reason that causes more web traffic than last month/less/etc…. Still the trends are that Windows is shrinking and NON windows use is growing…

    (more…)

  • Flash Player Version 10 for Linux

    Adobe has released the new version 10 of Flash Player. What’s notable is that the Linux version is out at the same time as the Windows version. Thanks VERY much to Adobe for making this happen. Linux users missed out on version 8 of Flash player entirely and version 9 was about 6 months later for Linux than for Windows.

  • Alfa 500mw usb wireless

    I’ve seen some high powered wireless cards from Senao, but… 500mw I think is the most powerful wireless radio I’ve seen. This Alfa USB adapter appears to require 2 (!) USB ports for full power, but it can use just 1. It also appears that this is a USB wireless adapter compatible with linux (even some of the wireless scanning utilities on linux as well…)

    (more…)

  • Linux – Convert PDF to TIF

    Recently I had a request for help with some free pdf’s I’ve published elsewhere. I wasn’t really keen to spend a lot of time for free supporting free pdfs and really just wanted to give an alternative file format. (I suspected the pdf format may not have been one that their computer liked. So, I wanted to convert to a tif image as that’s something that should be universally usable. Some quick websearching reminded me that in linux it’s a very simple conversion. In fact, the command line program convert is all you need.

    (more…)

  • Mac/Linux/Windows usb wireless adapter D-link DWL-G122

    One of the tools I looked at having for my expanding kit has been a usb wireless adapter that would work with minimal install on Windows/Mac or Linux. As you can imagine…. it’s not as straightforward as just getting one that’s compatible with Windows…. well, after much searching I found the D-Link DWL-G122 802.11g Wireless USB adapter…. (Revision B it seems is the one to get…) Anyway, using a generic driver downloadable for the Mac it will work (from ralink http://www.ralinktech.com). On linux, you have choices (isn’t that the truth…) anyway, there is a native driver (from ralink for the RT2571W/RT2671 chipset) and there’s the rt2x00 driver project and it’s also possible (and fairly easy) to install the Windows driver via ndiswrapper.

    (more…)