Justin Hartman

Posts Tagged ‘Debian’


Posted on September 17, 2007 - by

Parallels for Mac OS X

If you’ve owned a Mac before I’m almost positive that you’ve tried some kind of virtualisation software before. Be it Microsoft’s Virtual PC or Apple’s Boot Camp neither have really solved the great need to run Windows applications on a Apple Mac machine.

Most Mac owners actually couldn’t be bothered with Virtual machines on the stable and powerful OS X operating system but at The Times we’ve been given some licenses of SWSoft’s Parallels so that we can run some Windows-only software and eliminate the need to have a PC sitting on our desk in addition to the nifty MacBook Pro most of us have.

As with most virtualisation products I’m sceptical because this normally equates to a slow Mac computer and many system crashes. My experience of virtualisation is that there simply isn’t enough memory allocated to a virtual machine and after a short period of time the virtual machine (i.e. Windows) becomes unusable. Parallels however is different.

The first noticeable difference is the quick install of Windows XP. Normally this can take many hours however within 35 minutes I had Windows XP installed and working.

Parallels

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Posted on January 18, 2007 - by

Debian Wiki Launched

I’m please to announce that I’ve officially launched my own Debian Wiki. Over the last two weeks I have been setting up a new server for Grabble and due to my growing attraction to Debian I decided this new server will be powered entirely off of the ever popular GNU/Linux distribution.

The Debian Wiki was created solely because I needed something to help me keep track of what I was doing when setting the server up and as such it has developed into a whole series of tutorials if you will. There is a lot of documentation out there for Debian however it is difficult to make that documentation work for the new (soon-to-be) stable release of Debian 4 a.k.a. Etch and the Debian Wiki aims to fix this problem.

Every single HOWTO on the Debian Wiki has had to be tailored to work with Etch and as such I hope that others can find value when needing to setup a similar item on their Debian based server. The Server Category items on the Wiki are confusing to the layman however as time goes on I want to have a whole bunch of Desktop related items so that people who’ve never used Linux before can actually see that it’s not that difficult to operate!

So head on over to http://linux.justinhartman.com and give me your thoughts!

 

Posted on December 20, 2006 - by

How to swap Control and Command keys on PowerPC

As a previous Apple OS X user I find that having to use the control key on my keyboard versus the Apple command key a real pain in the backside. Most Windows users don’t have a problem with this as the transition from Windows to Linux is easy with regards to using the control key. I’ve searched and asked and low and behold nearly a month later I now know how to swap the two around.

In Ubuntu and Debian it’s not as simple as configuring a shortcut or keymap and it requires a little bug-fix to get it working just as I’m used to it coming from OS X. Here’s a little step-by-step HOW-TO on how to achieve this on both an iBook G4 keyboard as well as the standard Apple USB keyboard.
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Posted on December 17, 2006 - by

Firefox not free?

I’ve been running Debian on my Apple iBook for about a week now and a recent upgrade to the unstable version of Debian made me realise that Firefox has been renamed Iceweasel. This was particularly strange to me and I couldn’t understand where this funny name came from suddenly so I decided to do some research.

It turns out that when most people think about the Firefox browser, they think of it as being open source and free but I have found that this is actually not true. While Mozilla Firefox is open source it is not entirely free and it may not even be legally compatible with Debian.
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Posted on December 15, 2006 - by

Debian etch is now my local flavour

After grabbling long and hard about the whole Ubuntu dropping PowerPC support issue I have made a decision to move my Apple iBook G4 from my recently installed Ubuntu 6.10 to the ever popular Debian platform.

Mark Shuttleworth’s email to me and the whole debate that has gone on about Ubuntu’s decision to drop PowerPC has made this decision difficult however seeing as I have only recently moved from Apple OSX to Ubuntu I figured it’s better to move now and stick with a distro that will support PowerPC for probably a few more years than be stuck with a distro that is left to the devices of a community that might simply let PowerPC support die a slow and bitter death.
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