Apple apparently decided to not leave it up to hackers to get Win up and running on their new Intel machines. Check out Boot Camp (for now). I have no desire to run Win on my Continue reading Win XP on the Mac, now officially supported
Category Archives: OS
UbuntuBook, ctd.
And yes, it can work. Grant and I successfully installed Ubuntu’s Breezy Badger on a vintage 500MHz iBook. This time we have a filesystem complete with the Nautilus file browser. Online updates downloaded and istalled successfully, too. We were trying to set it up with the latest Firefox browser and Thunderbird email app to use it as a lightweight web station. Does anybody know how to actually install Firefox 1.5 in Ubuntu? Being the ignorant Mac users we are, we were hoping for an installer to do the trick, but we were unable to get that going… Any thoughts?
Airset.com – Online Calendaring
OK, you all know I am on this quest to find the best online calendaring program so my wife and I can orginize our lives with our two small children, work, pets, family, etc. I think I have found it with 30boxes. However, I just learned of a different one I have never heard of before called airset.com. This not only does calendar sharing but does contact sharing in the same app. It also allows you to do multiple calendars for groups incorporating bloggin and such. Very interesting. I would love to hear your thoughts on this web app. Michael, I know you hate them all so I won’t expect one from you. :) Patrick, I expect to hear feedback from you especially please. For you geeks having new babies you might want to think of an online calendar to organize your new more busy lives with your better halves. And of course coordinating all the Dr. appts, feedings, etc for the baby (and the mental health check-ups for yourselves). OK, check airset out below, if nothing else watch the demo.
The Ubuntu Adventure
So this conversation at the last Geek Gather & Munch inspired me, and so while Amy and I are awaiting the birth of our first child, I decided to spend a little bit of time trying to put new life into an old iBook G3-500 with a lean installation of Ubuntu. I like the idea of a second life for old computers.
I successfully ran the Ubuntu live CD on this machine and therefore decided to download the “Breezy Badger” for PPC from Ubuntu’s website. Installation commenced without any Continue reading The Ubuntu Adventure
Use Linux!
Often, people claim they’re stuck with MS Windows because of the requirement of some specific application. Often, they’re right. While Codeweaver’s Crossover Office has saved me from that fate, allowing me to run MS Office on Linux, there’s a whole bunch of applications that aren’t MS Office out there. In many cases, there is no easy way to run them on Linux, but there may be a functional substitute. This article provides some substitutes for the ‘most wanted’ apps in Windows land. The list includes alternatives for Photoshop, AutoCAD, iTunes, and Flash.
Of course, it’s worth noting that many of these apps will run on other operating systems too. You might even be able to try them out without leaving the comfort of your Mac.
30 Boxes
OK, since it is repost day, here is a review of an upcoming web based calendar that looks like it will be just plain sweet. It is called:
Oh, I can feel the Now Up-to-Date & Contact fading into my memory right now…
VMWare GSX Server For Free (as in beer)?
This article over at C-Net indicates that VMWare is going to start giving away their GSX Server product. That means that people could create and manage VMWare images for free! Currently, they provide a VMPlayer that lets anyone use a VM, but not create them.
Virtualization is all the rage in IT. Being able to run multiple OSs on a single piece of hardware dramatically decreases costs of administration and management. VMWare also has a snapshot feature that allows you to revert the entire system to a previously saved state. It’s pretty cool for testing and for disaster recovery.
Honestly, I have mixed feelings about this move. I really like VMWare. I use it practically every day. It is, however, proprietary. I’d rather see an open standard for virtualization like xen. VMWare is already somewhat of a de-facto standard, and we all know how de-facto propietary standards can result in lesser software becoming entrenched in the enterprise and consumer markets.
So Far So Good…
As many of you know my company is implemeting Active Directory and MS Exchange over the next month. We decided to contract First Tech Computer in Minneapolis to handle the migration from our NT4 domain to Active Directoy and setup/configure MS Exchange to handle our email and eventually our other collaboration efforts. I must say that I have been VERY happy with how it has gone so far. We are all setup and ready to go with some minor cleaning up to do with respects to our NT4 accounts and email accounts, lists, etc. Scott at First Tech has been amazing in not only the setup and configuration of both AD and Exchange, but with explaining himself along the way and making sure I’m involved with things I need to care about once he’s gone. I am also very happy with how Dantz Retrospect handles the backup of Exchange. We tested it out and it is really slick. I have to start getting in the mind set that everything will now reside on a server instead of our clients POP’ing there mail into the email client. It’s amazing to me that Retrospect can backup an individual mailbox and retrieve an individual message back out of the mailbox. Hopefully our users will not start being careless with respect to there email messages because I can see how this could suck up a lot of IT resources.
As we go along with the setup/migration I will keep you updated because I know a lot of people out there have opinions on Exchange and especially how it plays with the Mac. I too have read all the good and bad that people have to say. I will bring you an objective (as much as I can be) perspective of how it’s going and how it actually goes on D-Day (the weekend of Feb. 25th) when we actually go live.
That is all for now. I wonder which of the newly formed MS Companies handles Exchange. Does anyone know. I know MS broke up into three companies, one that handles the OS, one that handles XBox on peripherals and one that handles Office. Am I wrong on this?
The Music-Streaming Dilemma
This post is in response to an entry on Tim Erlin’s blog
I have actually talked to MPR as well as a German Public Radio station called ‘Einslive’ that I like about streaming formats. MPR used to offer an XMMS/iTunes compatible stream as well as Real and Windows Media. For now they eliminated all other formats except for their Continue reading The Music-Streaming Dilemma
dyne:bolic – The multimedia OS
dyne:bolic is a bootable linux cd built for multimedia. That means you can run it without installing anything. This means you can turn any PC/Mac into a multimedia editing machine without installing a new OS on it. If you’re into text, you can even stream ascii video on the web with dyne:bolic. Gives you that matrix feel for real.
And it’s optimized for old hardware:
“This operating system is designed to run on a minimum of Pentium 1 MMX processor with at least 64MB of RAM (memory), not even an harddisk is needed. It can be used to stream online radio with a Pentium 2 400MHZ or a Xbox game console, all very cheap on the second hand market.”
Oh, if you try it out, post a comment.