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this page: Digitis, digitalis Linux and Open Source Software (OSS) Surfing, chatting, mailing, networking Command line fun openSUSE 11.0 Custom boot themes for openSUSE & KDE Churches, ministers and computers The prophetic voice of Linux Who's the best? Wine Crash Course Latin-Dutch lexicon ATi Graphic Card Tricks Download from YouTube Email & Phishing Archive: Virus scanning for Linux Special Page: Geek Code Weapons Inversion |
Digitis,
digitalis First published 11/04/2008
'Digital' is a funny word. It comes from Latin digitus, which means 'finger'. From Plautus we can learn about computare digitis, the fine art of counting with your fingers. So, computer science already started with the ancient Romans... And if a computer is a digital device, it cannot be too complicated, because it simply counts on the fingers of one hand. Actually it is even simpler: it only needs two fingers, 0 and 1. If that is all, then why does society pay all these billions to software monopolists and hardware giants? We will probably have to blame the digitos novi, the 'clever counting', of the company accountants for that. But, do not be afraid, there is Hope! First of all, there is no Conspiracy, no Evil Masterplan behind all that digital money-making. It is only part of the System and these accountants just do what the System tells them. And here is the first glimpse of Hope: a system is not an unbreakable law set in stone. Castles were set in stone, but see how few have survived. Systems only last as long as we together decide to keep them going. As soon as we stop doing that, they will start to fall apart. It must have been Confucius who said, 'You cannot make any system foolproof, because fools are so ingenious'. |
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Well, these fools
do exist. They are called 'programmers' and they use
their fingers - digitis
- to hit their keyboards diligently, laboriously and painstakingly.
Doing so they produce massive heaps of Code. Nothing to do with Da
Vinci, but it makes the very core of loads of beautiful software. And
then a
Miracle happens: these fools do not rush to their accountants to see
how
much money they can make out of it. In fact most of them do not even
have an accountant, and some use keyboards without a numpad anyway.
Instead of going for the big cash, these fools freely share their
software with anyone who wants to use it. They even give their Code
away in case some other fools would like to improve, extend or update
their product. Indeed, they are Holy Fools. Now isn't this Great? There is Hope for a world lost in silicon snares. There is a Community in a world of poor lonely accountants. There is Freedom at last for those enslaved by patents and licenses. God? Root? What's the difference? Back to top |
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Linux
and Open Source Software (OSS) First published 11/04/2008
One of the wonderful outcomes of this movement for freely shared software is Linux, initially written as an operating system for PCs, but by now applicable to virtually anything running a microchip. In the same flow an enormous amount of open source applications has become available, often for Linux platforms, but also for Windows or Mac. This whole wealth of software has much to offer for office use, education, multimedia, mobile computing and even gaming. Read more... Back to top |
| Surfing,
chatting, mailing, networking First published 11/04/2008
There is a whole wide world out there, digitally speaking. Wonders, excitement, danger - you name it. We are interconnected in many ways, sometimes knowingly, often unknowingly, sometimes against our will. Human communication extended hugely in volume and in speed, and consequently its character also changed considerably. There's a lot to think about. I am not too worried, but a careful review of possibilities and undesirabilities is urgently needed to ensure a positive use of all these new ways of linking people. I'm still thinking... Hope to write something some time. Back to top |
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Command
line fun First published 11/04/2008
An important part of the fun and power of a Linux system is the command line. In fact, behind everything you do in the graphical environment (GUI) there is some script and command line active to actually perform the desired action. To work from the command line you open a terminal, or console (a DOS box in the Windows world). If that is not an obvious one for you, please think twice before you continue to use the actions I will describe below. A basic knowledge of Linux commands is presumed, although I aim at Linux newbies. Read more about... Back to top |
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openSUSE
11.0 First published 21/11/2008
Once upon a time some adventurous Germans started an IT firm, called Software- und System-Entwicklung. They translated Slackware 1.1 -- with Linux kernel 0.99 & born in the USA -- into German and when they got the hang of it, they called their product S.u.S.E. Linux. That was 1994. Since then S.u.S.E. grew up to become SuSE, still being gorgeously German, but in 2004 the wealthy American Novell hooked her and took her across the mighty Atlantic. 'Tell me that you want the kind of things, that money just can't buy...' But new offspring emerged. As a testing field for its commercial Linux releases, Novell open sourced SUSE Linux. That's openSUSE, which started at version 10.0. So, openSUSE is always ahead of the herd, adding the latest tools, drivers and applications to its repositories. That's nice for home users who are not bothered too much by unintended and unexpected bugs or flaws, but just want to keep up with the latest developments. For companies like Novell it's a useful way to find all these imperfections and repair them before they are added to their commercial distributions, which should be absolutely safe for heavy duty company systems. This does not at all mean that openSUSE is somewhat crippled. Fedora performs exactly the same role for RedHat, and more companies use the open source community as a laboratory for new stuff. It just means that you need to fix some things sometimes, or accept that something in particular won't work for the time being. Though it never concerns essential things. My access to Linux land was actually SuSE 7.0, which I could not really get to work, followed by Mandrake 10.0 during my Linux courses in Oostend. I also tried Slackware, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo and Kubuntu at some point and to some extend, but returned to openSUSE, 'die Suese'. Version 10.2 was OK for me, because updating to 10.3 was not a success. But then I started to lack functionality from the 2.6 kernel for some applications and decided to move to version 11.0. Of course it took some time to get it all right. But now it's fine and it's really nicer and faster than version 10.2. Read more about openSUSE 11.0's peculiarities... Back to top |
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Custom
boot themes for openSUSE & KDE First published 28/05/2008
Updated 21/11/2008 There is a lot you can customise about the graphics during your system boot. Information about it, however, is a bit hard to find or simply confusing. But at last I found out how to do the job and I happily share my knowledge here (PDF, 1.1 MB, updated). It has become a long story. You can read a summary here... Back to top |
| Churches,
ministers and computers First published 11/04/2008
Updated 26/12/2008 This was the subject of my last study leave in 2004. The report can still be downloaded here (PDF, 6.7 MB, Dutch). Of course, things keep changing in the IT world as well as in the church. And so does my understanding. In due time I will write something about it here. Here is a first contribution (dd. 23/11/2008): an essay about why churches should urgently opt for the Linux concept, and why that is a matter of faith. The title is: The Prophetic Voice of Linux. Thanks for pushing me, Jane! Read the introduction here, or directly download the whole essay (PDF, 283 KB). Back to top |
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Who's
the best? First published 26/10/2008
Updated 03/11/2008 'Who's the best' is an old game, rooted in ancient Germanic paganism. The warrior-like society of Europe AD 100 is still alive. We call it Western civilisation. And thus, even in the most democratic environments, such as the open source software (aka OSS) community, there are unlimited fights about 'who is the best' issues. You may have noticed the feuds between Microsoft (aka M$) and Linux (aka Tux) fans? They are endless, boundless and often pointless. So I rather skip making any contribution to this silly game. Instead I will just explain why I like working on a Linux platform most. Think positive, man! My major reasons for choosing Linux:
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Wine Crash Course (450 KB) |
Wine
Crash Course First published 24/05/2009
After installing, reinstalling, restoring, and starting all over again, I thought it could be useful to write down my experiences with getting Wine to work (properly). Below is a summary. Beside is a link to download a more detailed PDF version.
$ wine
$ winetricks
Recommended
packages: allfonts, gecko, ie6, flash,
quicktime, vbrun, allcodecs.
$ wineboot -r
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Latin-Dutch
Lexicon First published 24/05/2009
Once upon a time there was this beautiful Latin-Dutch lexicon with a very useful digital version. Alas! Windows only. Meanwhile I managed to get it running with Wine. So if you like to translate from Latin to Dutch -- why not? -- you can download the Howto (PDF, 500KB). In Dutch of course. Back to top |
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ATi Graphic Card Tricks First published 11/06/2009
updated 24/10/2009 The on-board nVidia graphic chip on my new Asus M2N68-AM SE2 motherboard did not perform as good as I had expected. So I installed a Sapphire PCIe card with an ATi Radeon HD3450 chipset. And openSUSE makes it easy by providing a dedicated ATI Repository. At least, that's what I thought. Until I tried in vain to get Google Earth running. Which just kept crashing and even caused KDE to go blank. Browsing through the forums to find a solution to the problem I came across comments on the ATi graphics. To cut short a longer story: I needed to install the proprietary drivers from ATi instead of the buggy ones provided by openSUSE. In short this is how to do that. (This is a wee update from what I wrote earlier to avoid problems that could occur if you un/install or update graphic drivers while the X Server -- the graphic desktop interface -- is running). First, make sure you have the yast2-ncurses package installed (with YaST Software Manager). Then: + download drivers (Catalyst for Linux) from the AMD/ATi website; + also download -- and READ! -- the Release Notes and Installer Instructions; + make a RPM package for your particular Linux distro, following the guidelines in the Installer Instructions, and save this to a directory you can remember; + in YaST Software Repositories add this directory as 'Local directory'; + in YaST Software Manager uninstall the ATi driver you installed from the openSUSE ATi repository, OR any driver you got directly from ATi and want to upgrade to a newer version. + Reboot the computer -- I know this is falling back to Windoze levels, but it is the easiest way to reload kernel modules -- and once you arrive at the login screen, choose a console login; + login as root and type 'yast'; + YaST will start and from there you can start the Software Manager in ncurses mode (jolly keyboard navigation!); + install the ATi driver package from the Local Packages repository; + after installation type 'aticonfig --initial' to complete the ATi driver configuration (you can check the outcome by typing 'aticonfig --initial=check'). + Reboot and login as usually; + now you can tweak the settings for your graphic card using the Catalyst Control Center (if you cannot find a menu item, open a terminal and type 'kdesu amdcccle'). So, that is how I got Google Earth to work nicely in the first (and second) place, and that is how you can greatly optimise the graphic performance of your ATi card in general. Back to top |
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Download
from YouTube First published 30/10/2009
YouTube is a bit like the London tube: a great concept, but with a lot of rubbish too. Having said that, quite regularly one is compelled to download a clip. How to do that? (Wee confession: it took me some time to find out...) First: use Firefox, because of its safety and its massive collection of add-ons. There is a number of add-ons that allow you, in different ways, to get the YouTube video sitting in your own box. The one I like most is a truly easy one: Easy YouTube Video Downloader. It places buttons beside the video you are watching, allowing you to download it as e.g. *.FLV (Flash Video, small file) or *.MP4 (AVI/MPEG, better quality & larger). Another useful add-on is Download Helper, which lists all downloadable graphics & videos on the page you are visiting. Can be quite overwhelming though. However, with a bit of effort you can get your YouTubies even without add-ons. Provided you run your box on Linux, of course. NOTE: make sure you have watched the whole videoclip before you start doing anything of the following, or else you may miss out parts of it. And if you want to read the following in more detail, check out with master Cheng Renquan himself in Linux Journal TechTips. First the most simple way. Open your favourite file manager, browse to your /tmp directory (in the root, not in your home directory), and find a file the like of 'FlashZzxR2D2'. That is the actual *.FLV you've just been watching. Simply copy & rename (with extension .flv) to where you keep your videos. (This should actually work under Windows just as well, if you can find the corresponding Temp folder in Windoze's labyrinth.) This method works fine to get a single video. But if you are a heavy watcher, your /tmp directory will be full of similar files. Only one solution: just open & check. Then the more sophisticated way, That is, of course, commandline stuff. So, open a terminal (or console -- the black 'DOS window' -- oops I've said it). Find Firefox's process ID: $ ps xfa | grep firefox
Look at the line refering to /usr/lib/firefox where you will find something like '22175'. Remember that! Then list the opened files: $ ls -lU /proc/22175/fd
(With the correct process ID, aye.) Look for the line matching this:
lrwx------ 1 grp usr ... 56 -> /tmp/Flash??????
Truly I tell you, that is the one you are looking for. Copy, rename and rejoice. Again: heavy YouTube users may need to check which file is which. Back to top |
Email & Phishing (PDF, 1.1MB) |
Email & Phishing First published 03/11/2009
Updated 04/11/2009 Today I got yet another email ‘from my bank’ urging me to go online and ‘confirm my details’. Of course it was fake, and of course I deleted it. Because we all know ‒ hopefully! ‒ that not any bank ever sends this kind of emails to its customers. This is what is usually called ‘phishing’, an attempt to steal your personal details, like bank account numbers, PIN codes, passwords etcetera. However, me being curious, before deleting the message I had a closer look into it to see how it was set up. A brief summary follows; if you want to read the whole story, download the PDF via the link to the left. These kind of spam messages, with phishing in mind, always take your details to somewhere else. So, never ever type anything into the fields of these fake web forms. Actually, don't even go there and just delete the message straight away. For the rest this general policy it advisable:
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Download summary (PDF, 300KB) |
Darwin and the Internet First published 24/01/2010
On 9 September 2009 prof.dr. Gerard van Oortmerssen delivered his inaugural lecture as Professor of The Evolution of the Internet at the Tilburg Centre for Creative Computing. It was not geeky, it was not really shocking, but in its clarity it drew a very helpful and thought-provoking image of where we come from, where we are now and where we are -- probably -- heading for with our totally ICT controlled word. ICT, with Internet as its iconic expression, has caused a major cultural shift which spans the globe and of which we only start to realise the consequences. Van Oortmerssen emphatically calls for ethical discussion and input at the early stages of development of any webservice or piece of software, because we have already reached the stage where the Internet is highly self-regulating and increasingly autonomous. Anything we do locally can and will have global effects, and all of that can and will be used against us. So, without lapsing into fear and awe, we need to create development ecosystems that include ethical considerations. There was only one minor disadvantage: the lecture was in Dutch. But here is a summary in English for the few that do not speak the Mother of All Languages (well, that is according to mathematician Simon Stevin, 1548-1620). Prof. Van Oortmerssen kindly agreed to make this summary available on this website, but, of course, any error in the contents is entirely mine. Back to top |
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