One of the only features some of us here like about Windows is that you can alt-ctrl-del and look at the open tasks and programs running at any given time.
It's nice to know what's sucking up all of your memory (pr0n) and what's bogging down your processor (DVD burning). Sloth for Mac OS X shows us exactly what's running, Windows style.
You can see which application is running which process, reveal the directory it's running out of, and kill it off if you want. If you're super geeky and/or bored you can even look at the IP and Unix sockets to see what application is connecting to the interwebs at any given time.
This is a really handy dandy tool, and the source is available too for monkeying...er, slothing around.
One of the better parts about Sloth is that it's a Cocoa app, and runs nice and slick on your Mac.
Search engines don't get much easier to use than Google. You type what you're looking for into a text box, and the web site will spit results back at you. But if you're looking for a slightly geekier experience, you owe it to yourself to check out goosh.
Goosh has the look and feel of a Unix or Linux shell, but the site is powered by Google. If you want to conduct a web search, just enter a search term, like "download" and hit enter. If you want to search Google News you can type "news download" (without the quotes) or just "n download." You can even search Google Maps by typing "place" before your query. For a complete list of commands, type "help."
The site gives you access to a bunch of Google services from a single web page, which is kind of useful. But the site's true appeal lies in the fact that it's incredibly geeky.
Way back in the dark ages of 1993, we were introduced to this thing called email. Email in the olden days was not like email now. All the packets traveled uphill no matter where they were going, and usually there was a good three or four feet of snow on the internet backbone. We used these big hulking things called VAX/VMS nodes that were attached to some pretty sweet fourteen inch monochrome VT 100 terminals. There were also these machines that ran something called UNIX, which sounded to us like something that should have been found in the college health center, not the computer lab.
Eons passed, and things changed. Though there were many more email packets flying around, plate tectonics had changed the course of things so that now they traveled downhill, really really fast. The internet backbone became a series of tubes. All the VT 100 terminals banded together and created an archipelago in the South Pacific. And UNIX...
UNIX evolved. Mutated. It trickled down into various UNIX brands and distributions. There were things like BSD UNIX, HP-UX, and AT&T Bell Labs UNIX. There were other branches, too, rogue sprouts on the evolutionary tree: FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. Slightly alien but vaguely reminiscent life forms injected their DNA into the gene pool: Linux, and this weird little UNIX-esque animal called Solaris.
Sun recently let Solaris go open source. OpenSolaris is more a traditional UNIX environment than a Linux type environment, but the appeal of taking a peek at the 2008.05 OpenSolaris release was too great for us to resist. The folks at OpenSolaris knew this, and baked some goodies into the OS that no Linux user could refuse.
We were given a no-strings attached liveCD, so our Linux install would never know we cheated. We had a bash shell, and the GNOME desktop environment, so our eye candy and commands would feel familiar and easy.
Man Viewer is a small application that does a simple job: it lets you view/export all of the man pages installed in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. Man (short for manual) pages are Unix documents that explain how to use Unix commands. The general command usage to display a man page in Unix is: man <command> as in man cp (to show how to use the copy command).
Man Viewer automatically finds your man pages and displays them in a searchable list. Clicking a specific page will display the contents on the right pane for easy reading. You can then export the document to plain text or post script.
The iPhone has become one of best loved geek toys of the decade, and it's not hard to see why: the slim phone that Steve built packs a powerful processor, 3d graphics, and the power of Mac OS X. In the past, we have seen various 3rd party apps available for the device, but nothing quite so nerdy of as this:
Apparently, there is some demand for APT on the iPhone, and somebody went ahead and ported it. UNIX enthusiasts, when they're not cleaning their pocket protector or watching Monty Python, can now replace the BSD UNIX subsystem in the iPhone with up to date software from FreeBSD, all delivered by good old apt-get. Why anyone would want to do this, we have no idea, but sometimes "because I can" is a valid reason.
MacVim is a port of the popular open-source text editor Vim for Mac OS X. It supports tabs, full-screen editing, and transparent backgrounds. The toolbar is also helpful as it provides easy access to save files, run vim scripts, make a project, save/load sessions, and undo editing.
MacVim also has handy syntax highlighting to make editing/reading text files easier on the eyes. If you need to edit remote files, you can use the --remote switch.
Vim is basically an enhanced version of the vi editor that comes on UNIX systems. If you'd like a quick lesson on vi/vim syntax, check out this University of Hawaii tutorial.
Amarok has just released a preview of its new version 2, codenamed "Kutie." In case you didn't know, Amarok is the free music player for Linux and Unix, with support for album art, lyrics, and Wikipedia and last.fm integration.
A word of warning: this is a very early release and a technical preview only (it's called a pre-alpha release; if you've ever wondered what came before alpha, this is your chance to find out). The developers admit that many things are broken or not feature complete, though it does play music; which is, upon deeper reflection, a nice thing to have in a music player.
So why release such an early version? Call it an inspiration, a call to arms. They need developers and artists to help finish Amarok 2.0. If you hear that siren song, you can join them in their IRC channel #amarok on freenode or let them know via email.
The time between Christmas and New Year's is what folks in the biz typically like to call a slow news period. But in the fast-paced world of technology (cue the Quantum Leap-them song styled synth pop), the news never stops. Here are some of the stories you might have missed if you were spending too much quality time with the family this week.
Flipping the Linux Switch: The GNOME Desktop Environment So there's this operating system called Linux. You may have heard of it. It's kind of like Windows or OS X, but it's highly customizable, stable, and runs on all kinds of machines. Linux has come a long way since the days when you had to understand and love the command line in order to use it at all. But unlike Windows or OS X, Linux presents users with a choice of graphical user interfaces. Our resident Linux guru Kristin Shoemaker will help you decide which desktop environment is right for you. In part one, she looks at GNOME. Stay tuned for part two, an in-depth look at KDE coming soon.
The world ends on January 19, 2038: Thank Unix! Remember how the world ended in Y2K? You know, power went out around the world, airplanes fell from the sky and all the nuclear warheads stored in government bunkers just up and exploded. Oh right, yeah, that never happened. But if you're looking for another potential disaster to worry about, look no further than 2038. That's when Linux machines will start to party like it's 1901. Of course, there's about 30 years to fix this problem, so you might not need to invest in a bomb shelter just yet.
The Download Squad team got really excited this morning. When we contemplated installing Paint-Mono, we pictured it and GIMP arming themselves with swords, screaming "There can be only one!" We thought there would be an epic battle, and the victor would lop off the other's head in a firestorm of light.
Instead, we ended up compiling Mono.
Paint-Mono is a Unix port of Paint.NET. To install, it requires Mono 1.2.6, your favorite flavor of Unix (OSX, BSD, Linux, or Solaris), and a Subversion client. (Here's a little warning: if you're running Ubuntu Gutsy, you don't have the right version of Mono. Deb packages for this version are hard to find, so that most likely means compiling from source. The Mono installer didn't work for us).
So is it a GIMP killer? At this point we'd have to say no. We couldn't get Paint-Mono to compile (even after installing Mono 1.2.6). According to Miguel de Icaza, most of the features in Paint.NET have been ported over to Paint-Mono, with more to come. It might be a nice alternative as it develops, but we'll have to wait and see. Right now, it could have all the features of GIMP and more, but we'd still recommend GIMP to our friends just because they'd actually be able to install it and run it on their Windows, Linux, or even Mac computers.
If you thought the Y2K bug had a lot of world ending potential, you might want to skip this post right now. If we don't blow ourselves up by 2038, the end of the world is going to have little to do with nukes and a lot to do with Unix because Unix systems can't keep track of the date past January 19, 2038.
According to Y2K38.info, Unix keeps track of the date and time using a four byte integer that represents the number of seconds past January 1, 1970. The integer can only get so big before having to restart from zero. If a machine can't restart it's time, which may be the case for many Unix systems, it will crash. Hackosis confirms this problem has the potential to affect Linux boxes too. Unfortunately, machines running on *nix operating systems act as the backbone for much of the cyber-world, meaning we may see anything from planes falling out of the sky to the internet shutting down when this hits.
Are you scared yet? Probably not, and neither are we. 2038 is far, far away, and it's very unlikely that we'll be using the same technology for pretty much anything when the year comes. Also, there's way too much money to be lost to a simple little bug, and no company's going to stand by and let that happen. Finally, keep in mind that Y2K38.info has been around since before the year 2000, meaning the author wrote much of the content on the site without seeing the results of the Y2K bug. However, the site is still up, so the author must believe it's still a problem. For those interested, the site is headlined by a countdown timer in binary, decimal, and date forms, which are definitely worth checking out if you're into ones and zeros.
NetBSD 4.0 is finally out, and, if you don't know what that is, sit tight and we'll get to that later. For those that know all about NetBSD, here's the lowdown on the latest major update to the operating system:
The 4.0 release includes support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor (yawn). It also includes support for Bluetooth (welcome to 2005) and many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. It also contains complete binaries for 51 different machine types.
For those who aren't into the NetBSD scene, NetBSD 4.0 is a Unix-like operating system often used in production and research environments. It's open source and easily redistributable. It's available at various sites around the web, and you can get many of the popular NetBSD programs through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection.
Repetitive tasks are what computers do best, although in many areas that's a point we seem to have forgotten.
This IBM Linux tip gives you all the knowledge you need to schedule repetitive tasks like a pro. Covering the common cron, as well as Anacron and AT, if you're in need of some job scheduling so you can enjoy a martini while some repetitive process runs, this is the ticket to your virtual freedom.
Whatever the platform, if you're a serious computer user, you've been there. You're copying a huge volume of files from one disk or partition to another, only your computer is lagging so bad that you can't get anything else done! Fear no more Linux fans, a great tutorial at Fried CPU shows you to use ionice to control that unruly I/O that's sapping your real-time productivity.
John of Fried CPU writes, "The best usecase for using ionice to improve performance is when you need to do two classes of tasks at once: The ones that don't use much disk IO but demand fast response, and the ones that do a LOT of disk IO but don't need it done urgently."
Ionice allows the user to tune the performance of specific operations to keep everything running nice and smooth, even when there's lots to be done.
Released on January 15th, FreeSBIE 2.0 is a FreeBSD live CD for those looking to experience FreeBSD without making any commitment. Version 2.0, based on FreeBSD 6.2, is the result of almost 2 years of work by the FreeSBIE team (the last release was Dec 6th, 2004). FreeSBIE includes many popular desktop packages such as Gaim, Firefox 1.5, AbiWord, The Gimp and others (including MP3-playback codecs). I like that it also includes Wireshark and NmapFE, both handy tools for troubleshooting network issues and anomalies.
By default it features Xfce as its desktop environment and alternately Fluxbox. Both are not as popular as the obvious picks Gnome or KDE, but both are perfectly usable and are a nice change of pace. If you decide to do some actual work you can save and restore it from FAT32, UFS2 (Unix File System), ext2 (Linux) or ReiserFS disks or "slices" (partitions), including USB thumb drives - just use the mountdisks cheatcode at boot.
While not as mature as comparable Linux live CDs, FreeSBIE 2.0 is a big milestone for the team and good step forward for the project. If you are curious about the Unix-world beyond Linux, FreeSBIE is a great and easy way to get a feel for FreeBSD.
Ubuntu 6.10 final is about to be released this Thursday, marking the journey's end for the "Edgy" release, and a new beginning for the next Ubuntu version, 7.04, dubbed the "Feisty Fawn." No, seriously, don't laugh, that is what they are calling it. Sorry, but I still love the name "IceWeasel" a little too much, and "Feisty Fawn" is even better. At the Ubuntu developer's conference Nov. 5th - Nov. 10th. Feisty Fawn will be the topic of debate and discussion fo-sho. Ubuntu 7.04 is set for a release date of April 19th, 2007. Everyone is invited to the developer's conference to get in on the next version of Ubuntu and voice your opinion on the features and fun included in the next Ubuntu, so get your tickets now and reserve a seat. Something tells me the Ubuntu will be offering telekinesis support long before Microsoft's codename Vienna ever sees the light of day. Somehow Ubuntu developers are so blazing fast and keep cranking out releases, which doesn't put me in a bad mood at all. Be looking for more news on 7.04 right here in coming months, we'll keep bringing it to you as we hear it. While we're on the subject, what would you name the next release of Ubuntu after "Feisty Fawn?" Any brilliant ideas? "Kool Komodo" or "Krazy Kelp" or "Kunning Kangaroo" perhaps?
One of the only features some of us here like about Windows is that you can alt-ctrl-del and look at the open tasks and programs running at any given time.
Way back in the dark ages of 1993, we were introduced to this thing called email. Email in the olden days was not like email now. All the packets traveled uphill no matter where they were going, and usually there was a good three or four feet of snow on the internet backbone. We used these big hulking things called VAX/VMS nodes that were attached to some pretty sweet fourteen inch monochrome VT 100 terminals. There were also these machines that ran something called UNIX, which sounded to us like something that should have been found in the college health center, not the computer lab.
Man Viewer
The iPhone has become one of best loved geek toys of the decade, and it's not hard to see why: the slim phone that Steve built packs a powerful processor, 3d graphics, and the power of Mac OS X. In the past, we have seen various 3rd party apps available for the device, but nothing quite so nerdy of as this:---vim1-1.jpg)
The time between Christmas and New Year's is what folks in the biz typically like to call a slow news period. But in the fast-paced world of technology (cue the Quantum Leap-them song styled synth pop), the news never stops. Here are some of the stories you might have missed if you were spending too much quality time with the family this week.
The Download Squad team got really excited this morning. When we contemplated installing Paint-Mono, we pictured it and GIMP arming themselves with swords, screaming "There can be only one!" We thought there would be an epic battle, and the victor would lop off the other's head in a firestorm of light.
