Recently in Debian Category

Whoever is behind XKCD is a genius.

Today's gem is pure geek, but linux zealots will appreciate it (click to enlarge):

If you want to check which version of Ubuntu is installed on a machine run the following command:

lsb_release -a

On Debian the command is:

cat /etc/debian_version

The redhat equivalent, which would work on redhat derivatives as well, is:

cat /etc/redhat-release

The guys at XKCD have done it again!

I took delivery of some of their tshirts this morning, as well as my Top Gun tshirt

Dell has launched its range of Ubuntu powered desktops. At present the product range is only available for purchase in the US. If you go to the dedicated OSS site you will be greeted with this (click to enlarge) : and the product page has the following: (click to enlarge) The introductory text is pretty clear:

ou asked, we listened. For advanced users and tech enthusiasts, we’re happy to offer a new open-source operating system, so you can dive in and truly enjoy a PC experience just the way you want it. In addition to the FreeDOS systems we already offer, we are proud to announce PCs with Ubuntu. Not sure Open Source is for You? The main thing to note is that when you choose open source you don’t get a Windows® operating system. If you’re here by mistake and you are looking for a Dell PC with Windows.....

I wonder how long before we'll be able to order these from Dell in Europe ....

For a variety of reasons I'm currently using windows as my desktop at home (this will probably change as soon as I have the energy to do something about it :) ) In any case I ran into an interesting issue this evening with a domain's DNS. While I could see that the root nameservers had picked up the change and any server on our network could see the new IP, my windows desktop couldn't. I wanted to see what was going on, so I grabbed a copy of dig for windows. It's a handy little package that also includes a command line whois. Seemingly it was ported from debian and can handle most things quite well (it didn't know what to do with a .mobi though!)

I really like the way Debian and Ubuntu handle Apache 2 modules and virtual host configurations. By using symlinks between the installed modules and the directory for the active ones, you can easily turn them on and off. It couldn't be easier, or could it? Well it can actually! There are a number of binaries available that can handle all of this even more gracefully (at least they appear to): a2enmod a2ensite a2dismod a2dissite a2enmod enables modules, while a2dismod disables them. The other two have a similar function with regard to virtual sites (vhosts). Nifty! Of course they may have a downside as well.. I'm yet to experiment that much with them

Google have finally made Picasa available for linux users (via).

There are three installer packages available which should cater for most linux distributions:

• RPM
• .deb
• .bin

As I'm using Ubuntu on my desktop I opted for the .deb.

The package file is just over 20 MB, so it doesn't take that long to download.

Once downloaded all you have to do is double-click on it, provide your password and off it goes to install itself.
 
On Ubuntu it creates an icon under the Applications > Graphics menu.

The first time you run it you need to agree to the usual licensing stuff and after that you can play away with it to your heart's content.

It's got some nice little features and was able to find all the photos on my desktop.

The various effects and filters that come with it are pretty handy, but I couldn't see any simple way to export photos to use on my blog. It does have an option to export photos to a web page using its own templates, but when I chose that option the resulting photos were horribly pixelated and looked awful.

I'm not 100% sure where Picasa fits into the "mix", but it's quite handy.. if nothing else it makes pulling photos off my camera that bit more intuitive than the standard gnome tools, though it can't really come close to other image editors for basic operations such as resizing and cropping

I'm scheduled to give a talk at the ICT Expo this Friday afternoon on "Linux and some of its friends in the enterprise " So what should I be talking about? Of course I have some ideas already formulated, but what kind of images / ideas spring to mind when someone mentions OSS and business? Are we talking about desktops? Servers? Mail? Web? Replacements for proprietary software? Any thoughts welcome

One of the few things that Eurid seem to have done properly is providing a DAS server to supplement whois lookups. While a whois query on a .eu domain will return none too verbose results the das query is simplistic:

whois -h das.eu:4343 get 1.0 mneylon % .eu Domain Availability Server 1.0 % % (c) 2005 (http://www.eurid.eu) % %% RC = 0 Domain: mneylon Status: REGISTERED

No extra legal junk or dns etc., Simple results.