computoman

  What happens when computer people get together much like old car talk. What's in you machine? You want to say more than I don's know. The newest devices such as the touchpads, some netbooks, and etc. today are pretty much unfortunately throwaways. As for desktop computers,  at least for a while you can upgrade them. It is very useful to know what equipment and and in some cases what software is on the inside. For insurance purposes, you would be well advised to have such a list tucked away in a safe deposit box or where ever. So I went on a little research expedition to find out what might be used to find out what is in my computer. Macintosh OS/X: (textedit to view) You can go to the system profiler and output a text list of the hardware. More info at: http://www.intego.com/...

Microsoft claims to be the encompassing operating system, Debian Linux supports all of these: Architecture Debian Designation Sub-architecture Flavor Intel x86-based i386 AMD64 & Intel 64 amd64 ARM armel Intel IXP4xx ixp4xx Marvell Kirkwood kirkwood Marvell Orion orion5x Versatile versatile ARM with hardware FPU armhf multiplatform armmp multiplatform for LPAE-capable systems armmp-lpae 64bit ARM arm64 MIPS (big endian) mips SGI IP22 (Indy/Indigo 2) r4k-ip22 SGI IP32 (O2) r5k-ip32 MIPS Malta (32 bit) 4kc-malta MIPS Malta (64 bit) 5kc-malta MIPS (little endian) mipsel MIPS Malta (32 bit) 4kc-malta MIPS Malta (64 bit) 5kc-malta IBM/Motorola PowerPC powerpc PowerMac pmac PReP prep Power Systems ppc64el IBM POWER8 or newer machines 64bit IBM S/390 s390x IPL from VM-reader and DASD generic So how many of these does Microsoft support? Only a fraction. So much for the Micro...

In an earlier article, I talked about doing a minimal install of Debian linux ( http://computoman.blogspot.com/2014/10/installing-debian.html ). Decided to get out an old machine (Gateway Solo 3350 laptop) that this was done with. In playing with the machine, found that there was no sound drivers set up. Did the traditional install of the alsa not the pulse audio stuff.  This an old systeml $ cat /proc/cpuinfo processor    : 0 vendor_id    : GenuineIntel cpu family    : 6 model        : 8 model name    : Pentium III (Coppermine) stepping    : 3 microcode    : 0x7 cpu MHz        : 597.424 cache size    : 256 KB fdiv_bug    : no hlt_bug        : no f00f_bug    : no coma_bug    : no fpu        : yes fpu...

Looks like the Chumby web site is back up again! Other goodies: http://www.instructables.com/id/Cheap-touchpad/ http://www.instructables.com/id/Cheap-touchpad-part-II/ Chumby running debian: Cjumby as a web based terminal: Another nice link:  http://wiki.chumby.com/index.php?title=Chumby_tricks

Actually I was researching ftpmail. Huh? Yes, before the WWW, email was the way you sent and received files. In some places you can still do that such  as:  http://www.nws.noaa.gov/tg/ftpmail _using.php Anyway, in pulling directories, I found the ibiblio page with all the old distros. So you want to see what some of the earliest versions of linux were like? Go to: http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/distributions/ Early Debian came on three floppies!?! First you used the boot disk. Start of a Debian install. One thing to note is that back then IDE (aka pata drives) were not widely supported yet. You had to use scsi drives.

Debian  testing ,  currently  aliased  jessie , contains software being tested for inclusion in the next major release. The packages included in this distribution have had some testing in  unstable  but they may not be completely fit for release yet. It contains more modern packages than  stable  but older than  unstable . This distribution is updated continually until it enters the “frozen” state. Security updates for  testing  distribution are provided by Debian testing security team. In this article, we are going to learn to install & setup Debian Xfce “jessie” testing from scratch using netinst/minimal iso which is around 300MB in size. Note: This method of installing Debian requires a functioning internet connection during installation . Although both Ethernet and wireless connections are supported, a wired Ethernet connection is better. This method requires internet connection because only minimal packages as o...

Linux Debian is kind of taking of the reigns of being one of the most popular linux distros. Like installing any operating system the traditional way, you can run into roadblocks.  For example, you may not be able to burn a linux cd, the machine you want to load linux on has a broken cd/dvd rom, or a host of other reasons. What we are about to do is what is known as pxeboot networking. Another words we will use a web server to get us started with a linux install on a system. Traditionally you actually had to have several servers to do the network install. You had to modify a Dhcp (Ipaddress servers) server,  a Tftp (boot files) server, and among other systems which general required a lot of setup and the blessing of the system administrator, Tried this with the python web server, but you have to have all the files in one directory from what I could see.  I just did not want to take the time to do it. $ python -m SimpleHTTPServer I went ahead and used the Apache...

Message of the day, Message of the day if the screen you see when you log into the command line. Usually if s short and mundane, You may want to jazz it up a little bit with some text graphics.Some of the settings for your computer are int he /etc directory. Message of the day or motd usually resides in this directory. Now if you add your message  or graphic to the regular motd file, it will usually get wiped out. What you can do is add your messages ad or graphics into a file call /etc/motd.tail. Then when you log in you will see your message. You will need to reboot to see the message.You can also edit /etc/issue that is used by mgetty for when you log into a serial port. (rs232).

Watching what is going on in your own home or even at your business is becoming more and more of a requirement for peace of mind. Schools even use them to prevent and or document cheating.  Had to set up the web cams in the testing center where I use to work just to do that. You probably do not want to spend a lot of money at first. If you have a Raspberry Pi ($35 us), Memory card ($10 us) to install Debian linux,  and a cheap web cam (under $15 us), you can set up your own system very quickly.  For more information see: http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads and http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-Jack-of-all-trades/ .   It is wonderful that the Raspberry Pi (aka RPi) is supported by Debian linux. There already so much software for Debian that the Raspberry Pi can take advantage of. One such piece of software is Motion. Motion is a security cam server software than does not require a gui, That is you can run Motion without a gui installed or activ...

What a banner year for Linux and it's derivatives. The computer landscape has changed. And in other news... Linux Torvalds the creator of linux dropped linux support for the old i386. Not a big deal. Probably use free dos and opengem if I had to use one of those units anyway. People sometimes ask me what linux distro I use. Underneath the hood they are all basically the same. Thought I do use Debian the most as it is uniform over different hardware platforms. I.E. Arm, X86, X86_64 and etc.

Actually Arm is the newer CPU (Central Processing Unit aka the brain)  on the block to power computers so to speak. Lots of devices use the Arm CPU. One such device is the Cisco Linksys Nslu2. The NSLU2 is  a front end for hard drives so the combination can be used as a NAS (networked addressed storage). Some very talented people have figured out a way to install computer operating systems on it. Now you can actually do this on quite a few units such as the Pogo Plug. Microsoft who disdained the Arm based units for a long time is now trying to get a foothold. It will be interesting. Linux has been around quite a few years supporting the Arm units. A lot of what is known as embedded  computing for industrial and other applications has used the Arm for years. We have an NSLU2  and have just reinstalled Debian 6 Linux. We installed Linux on the unit several years back, but reinstalled the original firmware  on the unit so it could still be used as a noobie NA...