The Open Source Advocate

What do you do if you NEED to use Internet Explorer on your Linux system? Of course, nobody would WANT to use Internet Explorer on Linux but there are times when you need it to get your work done. This is a sad state of affairs, so remember to encourage your software vendors to always support open standards so that we can use the web browser of our choosing. Fortunately, someone has made it very easy to run IE on Linux. The project is called IEs 4 Linux , which will run IE using Wine . If you read the IE license from Microsoft, you will learn that you should own a copy of Windows if you want to install IE. There is no way for IEs4Linux to know if you have a license, so it simply uses the honor system . To install IEs4Linux on Ubuntu, you can follow these simple instructions . The script runs a simple text-based wizard, which offers you the choice of installing IE version 5.0, 5.5, or 6.0. If you hit "Enter" four times, it will install IE 6.0 with the Flash Player plugi...

Introduction People who work with Cisco network equipment need to be able to connect to the console port on their devices. In Windows, you can simply fire up HyperTerminal to get basic access to your devices. If you are using Linux, then you need to know how this can be done with an application called Minicom . Hardware First, you are going to need a Cisco console cable , a Cisco device, and a computer. If your computer has a serial port , then you can use the standard console cable that comes with every Cisco device. If you do not have a serial port (like most new laptops), then you need to purchase a USB to Serial adapter that supports Linux. This device will allow you to use the standard Cisco cable, which has a serial port on one end. Install Minicom You can easily install Minicom by using "System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager". Search for "minicom" and choose to install the package. Click "Apply" and Minicom should be insta...

I was recently surprised and blessed with a post that reached the front-page of Digg. This means that the post must be good, so you should read it . I had never really paid attention to Digg before this. I knew what it was, but I didn't really understand how the process worked, or how much traffic it could drive to my site. The best information that I have found about how Digg works is this article and of course the Wikipedia entry for Digg . The main concept about Digg is that it uses tens of thousands of internet surfers to decide how good a story is. It is easy to search through these submitted stories and decide if you think a story is worth your "Digg". Here is a screenshot of my post just as it was about to fall off the front page of Digg. Here is a graph of traffic to my blog website. As you can see, I went from about 100 visitors a day to over 10,000 visitors on the day of the Digg front-page. Then there is a quickly dwindling amount of visitors following...

No, I'm not talking about Xen You probably thought that this post was going to be about Xen , which is an excellent piece of virtualization software. Instead, I am going to share with you a newcomer into the field of open source virtualization. On January 15th, InnoTek announced the release of VirtualBox under the GPL license. Lets take a closer look at what this product does. VirtualBox has a similar feature set to VMware Workstation (~$200). You can use it to create virtual machines and run many different operating systems within the virtual machine. VirtualBox can be installed on Windows or Linux, and it supports many different operating systems as guests inside the virtual machine. VirtualBox also supports creating multiple snapshots of your virtual machines, which is a feature that is missing in the free VMware Player . By asking around in VirtualBox IRC channel , I learned that VirtualBox was built using some code from the Qemu project. If you have more questions a...

Take a look at this warning on the OpenSuse website: Warning: Updating from one version to another is unsupported and may result in system inconsistencies. Performing distribution upgrades in the running system increases the risk of causing damage. If you ask me, not being able to upgrade my operating system is major problem. Fedora also appears to have sub-par support for upgrading from one version to the next. Take a look at this warning on the Fedora wiki: Although upgrades with yum have been tested and work, live upgrades are not recommended by the Fedora Project. If you are not prepared to resolve issues on your own if things break, you should probably use the recommend installation methods instead. With a typical installation, this method usually works well, but it can break third-party packages not available in the Fedora repositories. Please search the mailing list archives first if you run into problems. Based on the information on that page, it appears that upgrading...

One of the major requirements for running Ubuntu at work is that I need to be able to access our department network drives on Novell Netware servers. I thought this was going to be a difficult procedure, but as you will soon learn it is not hard at all. Novell Netware servers use the NCP protocol to provide network shares. Therefore, an NCP client is needed to connect to these network drives. The NCP client for Linux is called " ncpfs ", which is available in the Universe repository for Ubuntu. Here are the steps it takes to access your Novell network drives. Enable the "Universe" repository Click on "System>Administration>Software Sources" Check this box: "Community maintained Open Source (universe)" Click on "Close" and let the system update the software catalog Use Synaptic to install "ncpfs" Click on "System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager" Search for "ncpfs" Choose to install ...

I recently installed Ubuntu 6.10 on a new PC at work. In this post I will document all the steps I had to perform to get it ready for everyday use. Each step is assigned a level of difficulty, which I define below: Very Easy Step can be completed without using the command prompt Intuitive to complete Easy Step can be completed without using the command prompt May require searching to find the right place to make the change Medium Requires a single command to be entered at the command prompt Requires searching internet resources to find the solution Hard Requires multiple commands to be entered at the command prompt Requires searching internet resources to find the solution Very Hard Requires multiple commands to be entered at the command prompt Requires searching internet resources to find the solution Requires the user to manually edit a configuration file These criteria are quite strict, because I believe that using an operating system should be intuitive, and not require any spec...

Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley have written an interesting paper called " World Domination 201 ". The main idea of this paper is that the entrance of 64-bit processors will force a new operating system to be adopted, which provides a unique opportunity for Linux to become the dominate operating system. Their conclusion is based on this theory: An operating system will become obsolete when low-end computers are sold with more memory than the operating system can support. Here is how this transition has happened before: 8-bit processors Dates: 1975-1984 (9 years) Supported Memory: 64 kilobytes Dominate Operating System: BASIC 16-bit processors Dates: 1981-1990 (9 years) Supported Memory: 1 megabyte Dominate Operating System: DOS 32-bit processors Dates: 1987-2008 (21 years) Supported Memory: 4 gigabytes Dominate Operating System: Windows 64-bit processors Dates: 2008-??? Supported Memory: 1 terabyte Dominate Operating System: Linux, OS X, or Windows Vista H...

The Fedora Legacy Project is shutting down . The goal of the Fedora Legacy Project was to provide security and critical bug fix errata packages for Fedora Core distributions in maintenance mode. Fedora users can no longer get support for releases older than Fedora Core 5, which was released in March, 2006 . If you installed Fedora more than 9 months ago, then you need to upgrade if you want to get security updates. People who use Linux, especially in commercial deployments, need to know that they can get security updates for a reasonable amount time. The Fedora Legacy Project provided an important service, but it was only sponsored by volunteers in the Fedora community. Red Hat decided not to provide this support, mainly because they wanted to encourage people to purchase their "Enterprise Linux" product. To illustrate Red Hat's position on this, you should read the answer to this question on the Fedora FAQ: Why should I pay for Red Hat Enterprise Linux when Fedora i...