Ok – I was thinking I might have been a bit too dismissive of flightgear. So, I took a second look (and a third and fourth.) In fact, I found a source rpm of the 0.99 version and rebuilt it for Mandriva 2006 and installed. And went in search of scenery for the local area. Now, to compare the two, X-Plane has more spit and polish and frankly the visuals (from the limited area I could see) are better. Flightgear is interesting from the standpoint that it’s open source (GPL) and can use a variety of flight models.
Tag: time
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X-Plane flight Simulator for Linux
I remember back when I was running Windows as my primary OS, one of my favorite diversions was Microsoft Flight Simulator (2000?) In fact, I clearly remember circumnavigating the globe in a Cessna in that program (landing at a small strip in Icelend, the old Hong Kong International airport and some airstrip in the Himalayas were the most challenging. In fact, for the altitude problems I didn’t think I’d make it past the himalayas…) Anyway, when I moved to linux it wouldn’t run under wine and there wasn’t much out there to compare that ran under linux.
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Migrating Contacts from Evolution to Kontact
I’ve toyed around with the idea of migrating everything over to Kontact for my mail. I’ve used Evolution since moving over to linux, but there are some things about Kontact that just seem slicker to me. While I was doing the install, I had the laptop setup to receive messages through IMAP and used Kontact as the client. There were a few features that I wanted to spend a bit more time with. So, the first thing is getting the data into Kontact.
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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year
For those that read this I’d like to wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I have several posts scheduled to come out each day through the 1st of the New Year, but will likely not be adding to that unless something big happens. I’ll also be taking the week away from scheduled computer appointments. I’m one of those people that has a hard time setting tasks aside, but this time of year is usually the best opportunity for me to have a week away from the typical routine of chasing computer problems.
I hope that everyone will have an opportunity during this Holiday season to reflect on those things that are truly important which aren’t necessarily those same things that we spend everyday working with.
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Disinfecting a PC… part 11
All in all, what I’ve documented was a bit over three hours worth of attention to the machine (much more for the full scans, but I didn’t have to stand and watch them.) I didn’t document a sidetrip to a second antivirus scanner. It’s nice to see a system cleaned up that had been so thoroughly infected. There are a couple other notes I should pass along though. When a system has been trojaned the BEST advice is to wipe the disc and reinstall from scratch. (Erase/reformate/install from scratch.)
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Network administration over the holidays
Nobody wants to be tied to their job over the holidays, but what if someone has hacked your servers and is using your machine to scam thousands of people a day? Does that keep for two weeks? Does someone monitor the abuse address? Incidents.org has a post on messages they’ve got from some reporting to abuse administrators receiving back vacation notices that things are basically on “autopilot until sometime next year.”
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The 2nd journey begins… Mandriva 2006 upgrade 2 – Part 10
I think it’s time to wrap things up. The KDE start new session option is back after the changes I mentioned to the /etc/kde/kdm/kdmrc file I mentioned in a previous post. There are no outstanding issues from the upgrade. (I need to adjust the font sizes down a bit, but that’s not a big deal.) This series, of course, has been spread out over days. The actual event covered two afternoon’s/evening’s. The first day was the attempted urpmi upgrade (which didn’t go too well.)
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Quicktime and iTunes vulnerabilities
Details of a vulnerability in Apple’s Quicktime and iTunes reported at betanews.com. Secunia also has an advisory. It is listed as moderately critical and affects the current version of both quicktime and itunes on Mac or Windows.
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Disinfecting a PC… part 9
Ok – about 22 or 23 critical updates for Windows ME. I’m suspecting it’s never visited the Windows update site. While it’s going I make sure that the adware scanners and antivirus scanner get to pull updates from the web as well. It’s also time to scan for running network services that shouldn’t be running. It may be a dialup machine, but we don’t want UPNP listening over the connection.
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Disinfecting a PC… part 8
All right, now it’s time to give ad-aware a spin. I like being able to use several spyware scanners to get full coverage and cleaning. Ad-aware and spybot s&d are usually my first two choices. Realize that I’ve already taken a pass at this machine with AVG, BHODemon (for the browser helper objects) and Spybot S&D. Ad-aware finds a total of 700+ items.