27 September 2007
YES! My new book about Ubuntu Linux is hitting the bookstores.
It finally arrived. Today I got a box with the first five copies of my new book entitled “Probleemloos overstappen op Linux”, translated “Switching to Linux without problems”. The book aims to help W2L migrators and guides the...
26 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 21: the bleeding edge of PBIs and what's the jail got to do with it?
I have discussed the PBIs a couple of times already, but there is one element that deserves some attention. The PC-BSD forum has a separate section for PBIs that are under development, let’s say the bleeding edge of PBIs. The list of available p...
25 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 20: Alternative desktops
KDE is the default desktop for PC-BSD. It is possible to install GNOME, but I ran into a few problems with that (no keyboard input possible and no window borders). One of the finer things about Linux and *BSD is that you can choose whatever desktop yo...
24 September 2007
PC-BSD 1.4 Da Vinci released
While I am still playing with the RC1 version PC-BSD released the final version. Along with it there appears to have been a make over of the website. One of the nice items is the section Migrate with some information about migrating to PC-BSD.
Well, ...
PC-BSD Day 19: Improving end-user security (day 2)
Vidalia and TOR
My my, this experiment took longer than I expected. Trying to install Vidalia via the ports collection didn’t work out. There were dependency issues with Qt-xx-4.3.1 packages while Qt-xx-4.3.0 were installed. That brought back so...
23 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 18: Improving end-user security (part 1)
This week the so-called Big Brother Award, a price given to a person or organization that most threatens civil liberties in the digital realm, was awarded in the Netherlands to the end-users. We can blame organizations and government institutions for ...
22 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 17: Multimedia
Any desktop that wants to cater to the needs and wants of end users has to be multimedia enabled or at least be enabled as easy and quickly as possible. There are Linux distributions that have solved this problem by just adding all the necessary drive...
21 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 16: Time for advocacy
Today I really have no time to play with PC-BSD. I will attend a workshop organized by Rednose ICT in cooperation with Holland Open, Gendo and Livre. And it has everything to do with what PC-BSD stands for.
A few months ago I noticed an announcement i...
20 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 15: PAMP your website
One application that always finds its way to my desktop is Apache-MySQL-PHP in one of its incarnations. MAMP for Mac OSX, XAMPP for Windows XP and my portable USB drive and LAMP for my Ubuntu box. In the latter case -and on *BSD- it shouldn’t be...
19 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 14: GNOME snags
Working with KDE for the last two weeks was enjoyable enough. I even decided to use KDE on my Debianized iMac. What I realize is that I have become pretty agnostic when it comes to the graphical desktop. I hardly care whether it is Windows, GNOME, KDE...
18 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 13: The KOffice workspace
Where Kontact is a shell around various communications applications for the KDE desktop, KOffice is a shell around the productivity applications. During install PC-BSD gives you the opportunity to install OpenOffice.org and that you need to do. The go...
17 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 12: A closer look at Kontact
On day 9 i tried my hand at KMail. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t overwhelming either. Having used Thunderbird for quite some time (with a small collection of extensions) it appeared a bit bare. KMail is a lot faster to load though and that ...
16 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 11: What's the community like?
I began writing about Linux and open source software because I like what is happening in that part of the digital realm, I like playing around with software and operating systems and I enjoy writing. But -at times- it is a trying exercise. When I writ...
15 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 10: Look N Feel
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, as the saying goes. It’s one thing Microsoft wanted to do right when launching Vista with “the wow is now” campaign. And, credit to whom credit is due, the Aero theme is way, ...
14 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 9: Communication
The KDE desktop is quite often the desktop of choice for distributions that want to tempt the Windows user. Xandros, Linspire, Mandriva and PCLinuxOS are Linux distributions that come to mind. PC-BSD also opted for KDE. In contrast, Ubuntu uses GNOME a...
13 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 8: Demons and Pirates?
It may seem like I am only busy with software management in this first week and the impression is correct. The graphical workspace -KDE by default on PC-BSD- is something I will focus on later, but first I wanted to delve into something I had no prior...
12 September 2007
PC- BSD Day 7: Ports of Call
Today I spend most of day on a Windows box. Alas, but my boss won’t allow anything but Windows on the workfloor. When the time to play is in short supply I automatically focus on the tools that are created to make life easy. That focus was on gr...
10 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 6: Getting the job done
With the basics of the pkg_add system in my grasp it was time to get some work done. I have a presentation later this week and I use mindmaps to set up the structure. Sad to say there still is no serious replacement for MindManager (which also doesn&#...
09 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 5: BSD Certification
The fresh install of PC-BSD was a very simple task. There was no need to make backups of important files and under Vmware the creation of new virtual computer is simply a matter of following the step in the wizard. I decided not to use disk 2 to instal...
PC-BSD Day 4: Making a fresh start
The first few days I have been busy with installing and trying to install new software. Maybe I am weird and a software glutton, but I like my install base to be fat (something I definitely don’t share with my viewpoint towards the opposite sex,...
08 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 3: Angels 1 - Demons 3
Between BSD and Linux there are plenty of similarities and differences from a technological, judicial and moral viewpoint. No doubt the various crowds could go head to head over those differences (which they actually do from time to time), but there is...
06 September 2007
PC-BSD Day 2: Synchronicity
Going GUI on the ports collections (continued)
When I returned back home the entire ports collection had been downloaded. The only thing I needed to do in KPorts was to fetch a new index file. Once that was done the available collection of software in...
PC-BSD Day 1: extending the system
On this first day with PC-BSD I sat down to extend the system. For one, I was curious whether I could play my MP3 files out of the box and -if not- how easy it was to remedy that. Secondly, I wanted to install a program for offline blogging. While bro...
05 September 2007
BSD Revisited: PC-BSD 1.4 RC
Eric’s response to my PCLinuxOS review was enough encouragement to take another step in getting reacquainted with BSD. The following remark promised me a whole new BSD experience:
So far this *BSD distro has done an unbelievable job in deliverin...
02 September 2007
Bye bye Dapper. Hello Feisty.
One wisdom in the realm of Linux says: “If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it”. Well, after a year of playing with Ubuntu Dapper Drake it was time to move ahead. It was getting broken. If I was surfing the interweb, checking my e-ma...
