barnskilinux

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

I feel like noting that I now use CentOS instead of Fedora Core for my main home server. This is for one main reason: Fedora updates too often.

I use my home server to provide file serving, DNS and iTunes sharing to my home LAN. I also use it as a VMWare workstation for systems design and development work that I do. That's it; Samba, BIND, daapd and VMWare.

When I was running Fedora Core (up until a couple of weeks ago), I would have to fight with VMWare on a regular basis. Fedora Core would release a new kernel every month or two, and often the new kernel was compiled with a newer version of GCC than was installed on the system. Fedora would not provide the newer version of GCC as an update. This breaks VMWare big style, as the vmware-config.pl script that you have to run after a kernel update will not complete if the kernel is compiled with a different version of GCC than is on the system. There are ways around this, but it's a big frickin' pain in the arse to have to go through on a regular basis.

CentOS is a pretty close clone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and as such is built with stability and reliability in mind. This means that you get security updates, but not "bleeding edge" software upgrades - updates are much less frequent. As a server, it beats Fedora hands down (although if you were running as a desktop, you might still consider Fedora, as RPMs for apps are more common, cutting-edge features are there, and multimedia is much easier to get working).

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

XYZ Computing - Vista to Open Doors for Desktop Linux.

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Get It Together - an Open Source, Java-based (?) daap client/server.
Not strictly a Linux or Open Source post, as this runs on Winblows and Mac OS X as well (although why you'd want to use it on those platforms when you have iTunes is not clear). I want this for Linux machines though.

Wednesday, August 24, 2005

davyd: libopendaap/tunesbrowser - debian packages for tunesbrowser and libopendaap.
Untested, but potentially handy.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005

phpMyAdmin is a PHP admin interface for MySQL.

Monday, August 22, 2005

Linux World Expo 2005, October, Olympia, London - check it out.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

This Register article on Solaris 10 does a pretty good job of showing where it's at by comparison with Linux.
I personally run Solaris on Sparc, so many of the problems they ran into don't apply to me......

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Learn UNIX in 10 minutes - a basic html file giving the basics of basic UNIX shell operations. Handy for thos n00bs ;)

Monday, August 08, 2005

Symphony OS is a promising distro, based on Debian and Knoppix. It has a new UI based on FVWM and uses perl and html code for GUI applications. Overall, it promises to be a really simple to use environment. I reckon that next time I get asked if an old PC could be recycled as a web browser kiosk/terminal, then this might be worth a look.

Wednesday, August 03, 2005

Under Novell stewardship, SuSE is going open source. More here.