Quick Tip: Installing Linux from USB-stick
by Mats Hellman on 25.Nov, 2009 under Linux
This is a short tip so I will remember how to do this the next time I need to. It’s not a lengthy article or in-depth howto. Anyway, today I wanted to try out the latest Ubuntu (9.10) on my Lenovo X200s and my docking station was at work so I had no access to a dvd drive.
Installing from a USB-stick should be trivial so I decided to try it out and googled around to find some information on how to put Ubuntu on my Kingston Datatraveler.
Googling I found this wonderful program that, if needed, even downloads the files for you. But since I already had the Ubuntu ISO I could just start up UNetBootin and have it set Ubuntu on my USB-stick.
To do this just download http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ and start it. Select your ISO and the destination drive and you’re done. After that you have a fully functional USB Linux.
Are 64-bit operating systems ready for the desktop?
by Mats Hellman on 27.Apr, 2009 under Linux, Windows
I’ve been asking myself this for a while now. 64-bit has been a standard for several years now and still computers are sold with 32-bit operating systems. Why is this?
The only reliable 64-bit OS I’ve used was my MacBook Pro which I sold. It worked and I never really had any driver issues with it. So why are PC’s still sold with XP or Vista 32-bit. XP and Vista both have 64-bit versions and still vendors don’t supply decent drivers. Why? It makes me almost mad to be using a 64-bit OS only to notice I can’t get this or that working on it since there are no drivers. Which naturally makes me ask, has Linux passed Windows in hardware compatibility when it comes to 64-bit?
I recently got my Lenovo X200s and it came with Windows Vista business 32-bit. I ran it for a while but since it had 4Gb of RAM I wanted to try out Vista Enterprise 64-bit. Vista 64 has been a ride of ups and downs. The Intel graphics controller driver keeps crashing, even after several updates and the one thing I miss the most is my Targus USB-to-Serial cable. As I work with network appliances I need a serial connection and these days it’s almost impossible to get a serial port in a laptop so the fallback is a usb-to-serial cable. Targus does not supply 64-bit drivers for the cable so I have to keep an old IBM T42 for this purpose.
What is it that makes the normally fast moving computer industry to keep on feeding the 32-bit OS? Is it really to much to ask to get drivers for my 64-bit OS?
Do you have similar feelings or does your 64-bit computer work like a charm? Please comment.
Running OpenVPN-gui 2.X in Windows Vista
by Mats Hellman on 13.Feb, 2009 under Linux, Networking, Windows
This is a short short note how to get OpenVPN-GUI 2.X working under Windows Vista.
First of all you have to set it to always run as administrator. Go to the folder where it is installed and in the Bin folder you’ll find the OpenVPN-GUI executable. On the Compatibility tab you find Privilege Level, set it to Run this program as an Administrator
In your the parent folder find the config folder and open the config file. Add the following lines to the file.
route-method exe
route-delay 2
Linux ready for the masses/desktops?
by Mats Hellman on 06.Feb, 2009 under Linux, Windows
Being a fairly active StumbleUpon user I see these posts about Linux being ready for the desktops all the time. Actually I’ve been reading about it since I started using Linux back in 2002. Still Linux has not made a big leap into the home user market or the enterprise market. Why is this? Linux is a stable operating system that just keeps on working and you might think the TCO’s should help Linux on it’s way to world domination also. Still we see Microsoft and their products are dominating the market. The article/post that got me to write this one can be found at the breakingitdownblog.com.
After commenting I got a nice reply from the author, and I do understand his worries about dealing with the Linux community, but I give the Linux community a lot of credit and hope any comments here are sensible and wont start a war. That was never my intention.
If you start reading this, please read all of it. Don’t comment after reading only half because you won’t get the point.
Jungle of choice
As I see it there are a few things that makes Linux something administrators don’t want on their desktops. First of all, and this is something the open source community will hate, the number of choices. There are so many alternatives out there. Should you use RedHat, Novell, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo etc etc etc. Choice and competition is a good thing, but this is borderline ridiculous. If I don’t like your distribution or the way you manage your open source project I’ll just start my own. This is good right? No. This makes the jungle of open source products even worse. Let’s take a simple example, my parents. Go tell them to install Linux. First of all, how would they find a distribution? Would they read why a certain distribution is good for them? No. Never. They buy a computer and are happy to pay the Microsoft toll because they are able to use it.
And when it comes down to it, that’s exactly what most people want to do with their computers. Use them, not find bugs, submit bug reports or join mailing lists.
Office
I work in an organization with around 1500 users. We like so many others use Microsoft Office in our day to day work. Why? Well I guess because so many others are. That might seem like a stupid reason but try to tell a user that he/she can’t open the document just received by email because we only use OpenOffice.org, the possibility of it going the other way around is very small. This was visible already when the new Office 2007 suite was launched, because it saves documents in docx by default and Office 2003 does not open them.
Thank god there is a document converter for Office 2003 so we dodged that bullet, by installing it for anyone needing it and now it’s going out by group policies. Next you’ll try to tell me well this might, and only might be true for the corporate users but how about home users. Well I’ll tell you the same thing here. If I receive documents to my personal mail it’s almost certainly written in Microsoft’s Office, not necessarily 2007 but a version of it anyway. Well if it is written in a previous version I might get lucky and the document, spreadsheet or whatever might work as it should, but for most cases it won’t, Microsoft macros work in mysterious ways. If it is in the 2007 .docx format, well then I have some work to do. To be clear, I’m not saying this is OOo’s fault. On the contrary, I guess Microsoft doesn’t go easy on projects like this. And looking at their market situation why would they.
Let’s get on with it. If I’m running Microsoft Windows I can get the compatibility pack, or use an online converter, t to a .doc and then open it it OOo. And that’s just it, you can’t expect the average user to do this, or even be interested in doing it. They might google it and find the office converter install it and expect it to work. And it does.
Being a geek, word processors are not something that make me jump up and down of excitement, but I have tried OOo more than a few times. And it just doesn’t feel right, I can’t get it to do the things I want it to, not in the timeframe of learning I’m willing to use. I count my time in hard cash, and 3 hours of trying to make something work adds up to a Microsoft Office student license which you as a home user can buy and use, if your not making money with it.
You could argue that it took time to learn to use Office also, well it did. And that’s another reason for keeping it, why throw all those hours of training out the window if another program cant offer anything else than a smaller bill getting the software. It would be just plain madness.
Management
This is a big argument for me. I work with networks and servers and I like to keep the users as restricted as possible without making their daily work suffer. Also I want to be able to centrally manage users, passwords, desktop security settings, local firewalls and the installed software. Some of these are in fact possible to do in Linux. But it’s not as easy to manage as Microsoft’s Active Directory with systems center configuration manager.
Group policies are another thing making Active directory more attractive. We can handle system settings like services, WLAN, well just about anything via this sleek and fast interface, and most of the time it just works.
I do admit Microsoft’s products do have faults, but the good old pro/con list just doesn’t tip over to the advantage of Linux, at least not yet.
File Servers
As I said above I’ve been using Linux since 2002 and I still can’t always get file/folder permission set like I want them to. If you use shared folders, and I’d say every company today does you need a sane way of managing the shares. I like Microsoft’s approach to the security settings. Share and local settings are separated and in my little mind I can manage the settings just fine.
Nested groups helps a lot to. Since providing a group access to another groups files or folders helps to keep the rights simple. And if you manage a large file share it has to be easy and logical.
Distributed File System is another really nice feature of the Microsoft Server family. I wont go in-depth here but if you’re not familiar with it take a look at Microsoft DFS pages.
To clear this up, I’m not saying these things are impossible to accomplish in other systems, I’m just saying it takes more work. And work hours cost money.
Places I promote Linux
Well after my short and maybe even evil rant about why Linux has issues I’m going to turn the table a little, because there are places I’d rather use Linux than any Microsoft product. To mention a few:
- Databases with information that could save/take lives. Like patient journals.
- Backup systems, we use EMC Networker as our backup solution and it runs stable as a castle. I wouldn’t even dream of using Microsoft products as a foundation for this when it’s available for Linux.
- Some web applications. Because Apache is a great software and it runs so smooth on a Linux server.
Use the best tool for the job
To everyone out there who now wants to dig me a grave and make me suffer I have a few finishing words. The point of this article was to point out that you, at least in general, cannot say Linux or Windows or even OS X is better than one of it’s competitors. It all depends on who you are and what you are doing.
Let’s stop these flame wars now and agree that everyone should use the best tool available for their task at hand.
Getting wireless network working on CentOS 5 and Thinkpad T42
by Mats Hellman on 15.Dec, 2008 under Linux
I pulled an old IBM Thinkpad T42 to use as a “light” and “mobile” laptop on the daily train ride to Helsinki. It’s not new but more than usable with 768Mb RAM and CentOS 5 installed. This gives me a full development environment to work with on the train. What I noticed was the problem to get the wireless network up on this thing.
I tried editing /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf, I ran iwconfig. I scanned etc. And it just didn’t want to work.
The hardware seemed to be working, but not the network settings. Why?
Google to the rescue
As always when you are troubleshooting the place to start is google.com.After reading a lot of pages, some better some worse I found NetworkManager. How could I have missed this? Later I even found a document at centos.org describing how to use this.
Using NetworkManager
Finding I should use NetworkManager I started up the service and stopped the network service. I got a list of the Wireless networks and 10 seconds later I was surfing with the wireless network.
To set NetworkManager to start automatically you should do the following
[root@localhost ~]$ service NetworkManager start
[root@localhost ~]$ chkconfig –level 2345 network off
[root@localhost ~]$ service network stop
You should now have a nice network icon in your Gnome system tray and clicking it should show the wireless networks available.
Installs
To be clear this is what I installed.
The , to get a lot of packages. And after setting up rpmforge I just pulled firmware for the network card.
This page is mostly a note for myself but if it helps someone else out then all the better.
