techies – extending life of an old PC by migrating to Linux The PC I am currrently posting this on is an old Pentium III with 384MB of RAM, various random hard drives (about 40 GB total) plus a USB2.0 external drive (160GB) connected to a Belkin USB2.0 card..
(Its a Dell Dimension L866r)
This is old (my other PC is a newish laptop); and is currently running Windows 2000. Its getting to the stage where ite becoming a bit clunky; but I don't want to spend more money on hardware upgrades at the moment and would like to use this as a sort of server on my home network for storing multimedia files etc.
When I lived in Reading me and my mates tried setting up a Linux box for our network in a shared house but it turned out to be more complicated (especially as it was done over weekends when we were all quite mashed) and eventually the guy who owned it went back to Windoze...
Would this new distribution of Linux that I read about on Wikipedia be any good for the purposes I mentioned?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_%28Linux_distribution%29
Windows XP password help?! Please - someone - help me!!!!
My bloke can't get into his computer, cos, well basically he was nutted and, subsequently paranoid, and decided to change his Windows XP password. The one for the main Windows XP screen u get when u switch on. Not just once, but a few times (yes he's a nob. But he's my nob and i love him, ok!)
There is no option on this screen to ask for help or request a new password. It just keeps saying "have you forgotten your password? Please enter your password again, check for spelling, caps lock, blah blah blah" There is no other option ie "YES! I HAVE FORGOTTEN MY BLOODY PASSWORD AAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!"
Please help me to get him in his computer, he's getting well aggro with it, threatening to just rebuild it again (does this every time it won;t do what he wants lol!) Seems extreme to me.
Does anyone know what to do in this situation?? He can't be the only twit to forget his main password!!!!
Many thanks in advance, meanwhile its going to be a long night, i can see that!!
:rant:
For Oxfam volunteer-driven free software makes sense By Frederick Noronha
8 March, 2006
In a carefully-planned operation that took more than a year to complete the British charity Oxfam switched three thousand users from using its proprietary collaboration platform to one which is closer to their mission: volunteer-created Free/Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS).
Oxfam's deputy international support manager Fran Boon explained to Frederick Noronha how the switch-over was achieved over the past two years.
To manage its volunteer efforts in the developing world Oxfam uses a callborative Intranet platform that serves around 3000 users and 100 authors. That platform was previously built on proprietary software using Microsoft's IIS, ASP and FrontPage.
"We migrated this system to the LAMP (Linux-Apache-MySQL-Php) stack [but] to make the migration as easy as possible we used Mod_Frontpage, an Apache module which allows the Frontpage client to be used," says Boon. He says that by separating the authoring component from the backend they eliminated the need to retrain editors.
They then put Apache at the front of the system so all the users 'talked' only to Apache. The DNS also pointed only to the Apache server and Apache did the work of deciding which bits of content would come from itself, and which bits of content it would proxy and get from the legacy server. "So we achieved a seamless migration for the users," says Boon.
So what sort of problems did the switch-over cause?
One was case-sensitivity, says Boon. GNU/Linux, like its Unix predecessor, tends to be case-sensitive. "We used the Apache module called mod_speling -- which allows people to misspell the URL a bit, and yet gives you the page which it thinks is right," says Boon, explaining their workaround.
Another challenge, he says, was bookmarks. "You can't go around 3000 PCs and edit bookmarks. To solve this they used the mod_proxy and mod_rewrite Apache modules to rewrite a whole lot of filenames from filename.asp to filename.php.
The other challenge was deciding on wether to re-write the applications in PHP or to use a tool such as asp2php to convert the applicaitons. With concerns that a straight conversion might cause unforseen problems the team opted to re-create the code using Smarty templates. "Using Smarty Templates we felt we had a very rapid application development anyway. Smarty Templates are templates within PHP which enables you to develop code very quickly," says Boon.
What were the motives for Oxfam to switch to free software?
"Convergence," says Boon. "We had an open source Internet platform and wanted to standardise on one platform. We did have some philosophical debates but in terms of which way to move we had to jump one way or another. There were fairly strong views but what won it over was that the content people wanted the open source platform. And we could show on
the backend that Apache was the market leader and had a better history of security."
So, although the philosophy behind free software was a motivating factor it wasn't the deciding factor.
Does Oxfam plan to expand its use of FLOSS?
"For web-based stuff we're building on that platform. We're moving to a document-content management system based on Zope-Plone and also having single sign-ons with the mod_pub cookie. So people could enter their sign-on once, and across all partner sites, could get personalised content and the benefits of security," explains Boon.
Freedom… This came off a computer news site - the quote is from Richard Stallman who devised the GNU/Linux concept of co-operative free software; a concept which keeps this very messageboard and web-server running as well as SJ and many others. But it relates a lot to life in general, not just computer software..
Quote:
If you give people freedom today, but they don't appreciate it as freedom, then they will lose it because they won't make the effort to keep it. Freedom doesn't defend itself automatically. If you want to keep your freedom, you have to be ready to defend it.
However, you can't defend the indefensible - how do you justify stuff like trashed buildings filled with human excrement, parties where there is violence, injuries and ambulance admissions (the cost of which is picked up by the local community) etc? (I guess this ties in with what the matey said about "not appreciating the freedom")
Something to think about...
RPC Errors (Anyone running Windows 2000/XP – read) alright, anyone whos been getting RPC errors, your computer has been under attack. Apparently theres a security flaw in any NT based PC which Microsoft (being the geniuses they are) just lovingly left out in the open, and over the past 24 hours, tens upon thousands of PCs have been under relentless attack.
To prevent this RPC warning (the primary issues it causes are inexpected system shut downs) download the Security Patch issued by Microsoft in the link below:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/security/bulletin/MS03-026.asp
Spread the information, this is getting quite severe (people on my buddy list have been dropping like flies).
This warning does not pertain to Windows ME, 98, or 95 based PCs.
