I thought I had already posted this, but I looked the other day and didn’t find the article, so I’m posting it now… if it’s a duplicate, sorry… I’m still using Ubuntu’s Dapper Drake 6.06(.1) as a base install for many things… the Long term support idea fo rthe server “stuff” is somewhat reassuring and I don’t want to be chasing minor revision upgrades every 6 months. But, there is another reason, a lot of the installs I’ve done have been a base for VMWare server and there are some very good (and clear) how-to’s in that arena….howtoforge has a good walkthrough that I’ve used as a starting point….
Tag: support
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Symantec Internet Security 2007 antispyware protection off….
and you can’t turn it on without an error… Oh boy… last week I first saw this system and it was running less than the minimum amount of memory, so I thought that could be part of the issue. (It certainly made it slightly less than tolerable to work on.) So, now, with new memory installed. Norton still shows problems, Antispyware is off, phishing protection is off and the catch is when trying to enable either there’s a cryptic error message….”internal program error” and a string of numbers which is nowhere to be found in symantecs online support. But the online support does say to try and use symantecs utility to “fix” the problem and if that fails or is unavailable uninstall using the Norton remover that they provide as a free download and reinstall…. thanks Symantec…. (You might find the antivirus removal tool list helpful.)
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Big Ubuntu Linux news
This is something that really looks interesting. Recently Linspire announced their intent to open source the CNR (Click N Run) concept for installing software, launching a wiki based web site that would allow supported linux distributions to install software (open source or commercial) with as easy a process as possible (visit web site, browse, click). Well, today Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) and Linspire have announced how some of this will look and then some. For starters, Freespire and Linspire are going to be based upon Ubuntu in the future (instead of directly based on debian linux.) That is a fair enough shift. The other part of the news is that as of the release of Fiesty Fawn (The Ubuntu Linux release due in April), Ubuntu users will be able to access Click N Run. So what does this mean?
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Making sense of the different versions of Vista
Microsoft Vista is now out, the next version of Windows, successor to XP. While Windows XP will continue to receive updates into 2014 there are many that might be eager to upgrade and move to the latest greatest. (Note to those: Service Pack one may be en route THIS calendar year, so unless you like to bleed on the edge…. you MIGHT hold off until that’s out.) But those that do look at getting Vista are met with a dizzying array of choices.
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Windows 98 and the upcoming daylight savings time change
Of course, you
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be using Windows 98 anymore, it’s unsupported (i.e. no security updates.) However the reality is that there are quite a few Win 98 installs out there perking away. But, with the recent law change with regards to the start/end of Daylight savings time in the US… many Windows 98 users may have to resort to changing the time manually. There is another way though..
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Extended support for XP Home and Media center
I want to make a note of this here… Microsoft has announced that XP Home and Media center editions will get extended support on par with that of XP Pro. Essentially this means security updates for these versions of the OS should be available until 2014. Previously support for XP Home was to have ended as soon as December 2006, but was then extended modestly until after the release of Vista. The “Home” oriented products weren’t given the same length of support as the “Professional” or Business class products at that time. This announcement puts the two versions of XP on par with Pro.
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Dell “open source” PC’s for sale
I saw yesterday that Dell has a page advertising computers with NO preinstalled OS. Dimension line… n series and they are targetted towards people that want to install an Open Source operating system like Linux. They do ship with a freedos install disc, but come without formatting/preinstalling anything on the hard drives.
They do note that they don’t support a non-dell installed operating system. (i.e. even if you put XP pro on it well make you prove that it’s a hardware problem.) Still, it’s good to see the option becoming available.
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Blacklists and rejecting mail with Sendmail
A long time ago I had found how easy it was to reject messages outright with Postfix that came from non-existent domains. You know… junk from asdflkjuasdlfkjh@imadethisupmyselfanditsnotregisteredanywhere.com
Well, since the mailserver at THIS site runs sendmail I wanted to fix sendmail the same as my home server. My home server is postfix based and uses fetchmail to pull from the website. Since I had the rules set to reject non-existent domains at home it would essentially strand messages in the account here at the website which would then need to be cleaned out manually.
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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.
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VMware guest unable to access USB devices
I ran into this some time back and found the solution a few months later and was reminded today to document it here…. The situation is this… Linux host for VMWare server, the guest machine has usb support and in vmware, you can go to VM, Removable devices and in spite of the fact you have usb devices on the system, nothing is listed as available to use in the VM. Well, it seems this is not an isolated problem. First you need to be sure the usb device is not in use by the host system. But, there’s something else that you need. VMWare uses usbfs to keep track of usb devices and a few distributions ( Ubuntu Linux 6.06 SUSE Linux 10.1, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10, Mandriva Linux 2006, SLES9 SP3 64 bit) don’t enable it by default. ( mount -t usbfs none /proc/bus/usb ) should do the trick (as root) or you could set it in fstab usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs auto 0 0 (and now I’m thinking I may have already posted this once…. )