The Dell Mini 9 comes with a small solid state drive, not a massive amount of firepower and running Ubuntu, but for $199 starting you can change all that (and the color) and still get away with an inexpensive and ultra-light system for less than $500. The Mini 12 starts closer to the $400 range, but comes with a lot more features (and weight). Why should this matter much? Well, they’re now on the hackintosh list, meaning you can install 10.5.5 on them. Imagine a less pretty, less flashy MacBook air, 64 GB solid state drive, 2GB of RAM for about $400 (plus Leopard license).
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Asus Eee 1000HE – Best Netbook for Price?
I have got to give it to Asus, they’ve knocked themselves out. At $375 the Asus Eee 1000HE is an awesome NetBook. Acer has one that is a little cheaper and Dell has one as well, but the Asus is a serious notebook for not a lot of cash. You can swap out the drive with a solid state drive and bump up the RAM for still less than a MacBook is going to cost you starting out. I’ve been test driving the Eee, which by the way is the actual screen shot used on wikipedia’s NetBook article, and not only do I like the machine but I also like…
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Sun's OpenStorage
OpenSolaris + Open Storage + ZFS = Open Source storage. Not that you can’t just pay Sun for an appliance if that’s what you’re after. They have the OpenStorage 7000, but really isn’t it fun to build up your own? If that’s what you’re after Sun has the Open Storage Community page. Using Open Storage you can go far beyond using Time Machine with an Open Solaris NAS. You can build your own truly enterprise class storage system and connect to it from pretty much any operating system. However, it’s not an appliance. Support isn’t necessarily going to be end=to-end if you BTO your own gear, rolling your own SAN.…
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Ubuntu: Installing Netatalk
Netatalk is an Open Source implementation of AFP. To get Netatalk you have to perform a custom build from the source code. To start: open system -> Administration -> Software Sources. Check the Source Code Box then click on close and click reload. Then open a terminal and type the following commands: sudo apt-get build-dep netatalk sudo apt-get install cracklib2-dev fakeroot libssl-dev sudo apt-get source netatalk cd netatalk-2* Next build the Netatalk package using: sudo DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=ssl dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot sudo dpkg -i ~/netatalk_2*.deb echo “netatalk hold” | sudo dpkg –set-selections That’s it.
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Ubuntu 8.04
Originally posted at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Ubuntu 8.04 is now available – the first major release since 7.10. Code named Hardy heron, 8.04 will look familiar to long-time Ubuntu users. But under the hood, 8.04 sports a new kernel (2.6.24-12.13), a new rev of Gnome (2.22), improved graphical elements (such as Xorg 7.3), a spiffy new installer (Wubi), the latest and greatest in software, enhanced security and of course more intelligent default settings. The build is free to download the desktop version from ubuntu.com. The new Ubuntu installer comes with a new utility called Wubi. Wubi can run as a Windows application, which means that Windows users will be able to more…
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Getting Started with tar
If we were in the directory Desktop and wanted to backup all the files to a tarball called backups.tar, we could issue this command: tar cvf backups.tar . The flags here:c creates an archive, v makes the process run verbose and f sets the file name. The . tells tar to back up the current working directory. Use pwd if you’re unsure what that is. As we didn’t tell tar where to put the file it will automagically put it in the working directory. By default tar is recursive although you can specify an n flag to alter that default behavior. Now, to display the contents of the tar file we just created,…
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hostname
OK, so this one is pretty easy. You can use the hostname command to return back the name of your computer. There’s also a nifty little s flag to remove any domain naming from the return string.
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Mac OS X: tail
I was on the phone with someone earlier today and they didn’t realize that they could dynamically watch new lines come into log files in Mac OS X. In order to do this you can use the tail command with the -f switch. So if you want to watch your system.log file and run some processes you think will cause errors you can use the following command: tail -f system.log When you’re done watching the log file use the Control-C keystroke to stop.
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Slow Browsing
Slow browsing issues can often be caused by poor wireless reception. Sure, a lot of poor performance should be linked to this but few are as obvious to an end user as browsing around on the web really, really slowly. If you’re finding that pages are taking awhile to load then consider checking out the signal strength and see if speeds get better the closer someone moves to a WAP (provided signal strength increases as you get closer of course).
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Pipes
A pipe’s command redirection used in Mac OS X and other *nix operating systems to send the output of a program to another for further processing (known as redirection). Redirection means transferring of a program to another destination, such as another program, file, or the monitor. Standard output is sometimes abbreviated stdout.