Today I took delivery of a shiny new Nokia N900. I have to say, my impressions over the first hour or so of using it are that I made the right choice.

I can't imagine any other smart phone that would let me run Openoffice.org remotely from my desktop machine without some serious hacking,not by just installing ssh!

Congratulations Nokia, with this one you seem to have embraced the Linux spirit of enabling users to do what they want! This entry was made from my N900 by the way.

Among my web pages is a piece comparing Linux and Windows. In it, I mention TCO. To me, Linux costs a lot less to maintain. I just went through a practical example of that theory.

I've just had a family laptop 'return to base' to make sure it's all up to date and virus free. I set it up as dual boot with Vista (Pre-installed.) and Mepis 8. This laptop hardly ever gets used on the internet, so the updates that needed applying went back to before Vista SP2 was generally available. I fired up the Vista partition first... It took 2-3 hours and more reboots than I cared to count to get Windows up to date. While this was going on, I upgraded Firefox and one or two other apps. Probably not best practice while Windows was doing it's thing, especially as one of the changes I made was to remove AVG and install a version of McAfee that comes included in my ISP subscription. (So, a little monetary cost there...) In summary, half an afternoon of my time and a small outlay of actual money.

Then on to the Mepis partition. I fired up Synaptic, hit reload, marked all upgrades and applied the changes. Synaptic downloaded the updates for the operating system AND installed apps in about the time it took the vista partition to 'do' one of the update/reboot cycles. Say, 15-20 mins? That done, I set about making a few enhancements like adding the Vista partition to fstab and putting a shortcut on the desktop to the Users directory to make sharing files between Mepis and Vista that little bit easier. I haven't attempted to enable Vista so that it'll see files from the Mepis partition. That would involve downloading and installing an app & I feel I've wasted enough time in the Vista environment to mess with that! Summary of the cost of the Mepis update? Enough time to make and enjoy a leisurely cup of tea while updates were applying, then maybe another hour tweaking things to make life even easier! Oh, and I recently made a donation in the community end of 2009 funds drive.

I just saw an article on TuxRadar about some stats from their web server logs. The amount of Windows machines visiting a Linux site was noted. I'd guess you'd find similar for this site! (That'd make an interesting blog post - hint...) What at first might seem a bit odd is, however, easily explained...

It all boils down to reluctant Windows users at work! In fact, I'm posting this from IE6 on an XP machine. Suffice to say, I'd rather be at home using my Mepis box! I wonder how much Windows 'desktop market share' is enforced?

I noticed recently that the community is making a start with KDE4 entry in the Mepis Wiki. My effort to start getting ready for Mepis 8.5 with KDE4 has been to install DanumLinux Canteras 3c on an external hard disk, running plugged in to a Dell Inspiron 1501.

So far, I'm impressed! It seems to run quite well on the Inspiron's modest spec, despite the disk i/o over USB no doubt being quite a bottleneck. The only issues of note, apart from out of the ordinary things I was trying to do have been, getting used to Aptitude instead of Synaptic. No doubt needed because of the mish-mash of different repositories. Also, on this machine I had no luck with either mxconfig or smxi getting the ATI Xpress 200M graphics adapter to work. What did do the trick was to run the install script downloaded from the ATI website. I'm not adverse to using proprietary solutions when needed...

So with some bells and whistles turned on and all the basics in place, I'm now really looking forward to the day when KDE4 can grace my main desktop. The way I do various tasks at the PC seem to have adapted well to the new interface, so I'm hopeful the real migration will be pretty straightforward!

This week, I decided to have a go at getting my main system to suspend to disk. I usually leave it running 24x7 which is a bit excessive because no-one is realistically likely to use it overnight.

Pretty much all I did was run dpkg-reconfigure uswsusp, accepting the defaults and entering '2' for the log level questions. Then it was a case of right clicking the Kpowersave icon in the System Tray to select the suspend to disk option.

The added bonus on my Dell Optiplex 740 is the option in the BIOS settings for the system to power itself up at a specified time. So, in effect, I have a system that is as readily available in practice as it was when running all the time and all I have to do is suspend it last thing at night.

The only potential problem that I've yet to investigate fully is that the Sony EyeToy I'm using as a webcam seems to be a bit tempramental...

I just read an SJVN blog about the much anticipated (Snort!) Windows 7 launch parties and want to pick up on the same theme he did.

Basically, the Linux community has been doing this sort of thing, quietly, for years! They're called Installfests!

I've had this link on my web pages for quite a while now. Although I haven't been a member of a local group for some time, I know when I did subscribe to a Linux Users' Group mailing list they had get togethers on a reasonably regular basis. I reckon getting involved in a LUG would be a great way for someone dipping their toes in the Linux waters to get the support they would probably need starting with perhaps getting someone experienced to help them through the install process.

Update! I just became aware of this initiative. I'll be sure to look out for that next year!

After having read a thread extolling the virtues of Google Chrome on MepisLovers, I thought I'd give it a go . I downloaded the DEB from the link provided in the Mepis Wiki entry and installed it using KPackage. There was an error due to an unmet dependency. I closed KPackage and opened Synaptic to look for the missing package using my preferred app. Synaptic showed Google Chrome as a broken package. I used the option to fix it and xdg-utils was marked to be installed. Once that was in place, the only other tweak was I added the --enable-plugins switch to the menu item for Google Chrome.

First impressions are that it is a very fast browser. I'm using it to write this short review, so it would seem that most day to day needs are met. The only problem is that it doesn't render the drop down menus on the MepisLovers site properly, an issue that has already been noted in the thread I linked to at the start of this post. Overall, I think I'll be using it for a while...

After that tripe Microsoft were peddling last week about the capabilities of Windows vs. Linux, somthing happened over the weekend that I thought illustrated the good and the bad of Linux quite nicely. Here's a summary in point format:

1. On the system I'm running currently, Flash Player has always worked flawlessly from day 1. - Good.

2. A handful of updates I applied over the weekend 'broke' Flash Player. - Bad.

3. From past experience (Gained by having an operating system that encourages you to gain experience and knowledge!) I was quickly able to deduce where the problem lay and fixed it with a couple of commands on the command line. - Good and Bad. It took me but a few minutes to fix but the method I used would for many involve the dreaded command line and therefore be too daunting. Please feel free to read a bit of sarcasm into that. ;-> (And, yes, I appreciate that comment was a bit 733t of me. Apologies to anyone who might feel offended.)

4. Having posted my findings on Mepislovers here, it was a matter of a few hours that morning before more knowledgeable members of the community were investigating and suggesting more elegant ways to fix the problem. - Good.

So to summarise this particular example, something that works perfectly might occasionally get broken by an update. However, you can usually rely on the community to do their utmost to fix the problem very quickly! The strengths of Linux in general and Mepis in particular, are the fact that an awful lot of functionality works right from the initial install and that when things do go wrong other users will help you out far quicker than any proprietary systems' helldesk operators can.

Well, Microsoft seem to have been playing with a loaded gun and it looks like it went off...

Just Google "Microsoft propaganda Best Buy Staples" or have a look at Blog of Helios or my Linuxquestions blog...

Lies will come back to bite you in the ass. Sometimes sooner rather than later!

I’ve been experimenting with remote access to one of my boxes recently. I think I’ve come up with a reasonably secure method of giving any particular remote user as much access as they could possibly need! Here’s how:

Install OpenSSH server and fail2ban and make sure they’re running & will restart on reboot.

Create a user specifically for the purpose of using remotely. Preferably nothing that might get brute force attacked like guest… I used an id with a combination of letters and numbers. The password is also definitely not in any dictionary. Edit sshd.conf to allow only this user to login using ssh.

If applicable, forward port 22 from your router to the target host. Give your remote user the router’s IP address (Or the address you’re visible as from the internet.) along with the user id and password.

The idea is that you can only get access remotely using one id. Once they have access, they can su to their local user id and carry on as normal. For example, the user on my system requiring remote access is in sudoers with his personal id. I certainly didn’t want to give the remote access user id that level of authority…