freebsd posts

Filed under: Fun, Utilities, Open Source, Unix

FreeSBIE 2.0 - FreeBSD live CD hits major milestone

by Chris Brentano Jan 30th 2007

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.

[Thanks, Dolores!]

Tags: fluxbox, freebsd, freesbie, linux, open source, unix, xfce

Filed under: Design, Developer, Text

FreeTechBooks.com

by Ryan Carter Oct 7th 2006

Looking for some great free books, or some stored knowledge in the form of e-books, lecture notes, programming texts? FreeTechBooks.com has you covered. All books are legally free and available for online viewing or download. There is a lot of great stuff here, and the only "catch" is that the texts are bound by their own terms, which isn't a problem in my book. Most of the titles are in the computer science or related areas like operating systems, programming, logic and systems analysis and design. There is enough stuff here to keep you busy for a weekend, or several weekends depending on how many programming languages and texts you are interested in.

Tags: algorithm, books, C, free, FreeBSD, Logic, programming, tech

Filed under: Photo, Utilities, Macintosh, Freeware

filtr: Turn cheap digital pics into works of art

by Jordan Running Aug 1st 2006

Camera phones are undoubtedly alluring, but even the best of them produce mediocre images. Aaron Straup Cope, unsatisfied with his results, built filtr, a shell script for FreeBSD and OSX that will takes your blah camera phone photos and lets you apply one of seven filters to it: dazd, heathr, postcrd, postr, stndpipe, rockstr, and filtr. There's also movr, which will turn a video file into a series of images, apply one of the above filters to each. All of the results are interesting, universally moreso than your average camera phone pic. It's a shell script, like I said, so if you're not comfy with the command line (and willing to hunt down and install a few dependencies first), filtr may not be the tool for you. You can download filtr for free here.

Tags: Aaron Straup Cope, AaronStraupCope, cameraphone, filger, filtr, freebsd, freeware, mac, osx, photo, photography, script, shellscript

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Office, Adobe, Freeware

PDFTK: Free PDF split, merge and more for the command line

by Jordan Running Jul 31st 2006

I'm gonna warn you: If you're not comfy with a blinking white cursor on a black background, PDFTK probably isn't for you. However, I think it's fantastic. PDFTK is a tool that lets you do a variety of operations on PDF files from the command line. The feature that I found particularly valuable today was the ability to merge an arbitrary number of PDF files into a single PDF document. It can also split a single PDF into multiple documents, produce an unencrypted PDF from an encrypted one (provided you have the password) or vice versa, unpack file attachments from a PDF or attach files to a document, watermark pages, dump data like bookmarks or metadata, and more. PDFTK is totally free and very fast and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. The catch, of course, is that the only GUI is your keyboard, and for many tasks you'll probably--gasp--have to read the documentation. However, the PDFTK web site does have some handy sample commands for common tasks. Happy PDFing!

Update: Reader MM alerts us to the existence of GUIPDFTK, a GUI front-end for PDFTK by Dirk Paehl. It's also free and available for Windows and Linux.

Tags: adobe, free, freebsd, freeware, join, linux, mac, merge, osx, pdf, pdftk, split, windows

Filed under: Utilities, Open Source

FreeNAS: One-stop network-attached storage

by Jordan Running Jan 19th 2006

I've often thought about dropping a couple of hard drives in an old PC and using it as a network file server, but the task of setting up the OS and getting things running seems daunting. FreeNAS, short for Free Network-Attached Storage, looks like it might be the solution I'vee been looking for. It's a 15MB download that includes a FreeBSD OS, CIFS (Samba), FTP, and NFS support, software RAID, and a web-based configuration interface. What's more, it'll boot from a USB key.

Tags: freebsd, freenas, nas, network storage

Filed under: Security, Open Source

Self-contained anonymizing OS

by Jordan Running Jan 16th 2006

Wired News is running an article about Anonym.OS, a project of kaos.theory security research that aims to bring an easy, anonymizing Internet experience to the masses. Anonym.OS is an OpenBSD live CD and when you put it into any PC, you're "presented with a text based wizard-style list of questions to answer, one at a time, with defaults that will work for most users. Within a few moments, a fairly naive user can be up and running and connected to an open Wi-Fi point, if one is available." Built from the inside out with privacy in mind, Anonym.OS appears to be Windows XP SP1 to anyone snooping and uses the Tor routing network to anonymize Internet use. The article says Anonym.OS has a long way to go before granny will really be able to use it, but it sounds like a worthwhile project.

Tags: anonymity, anonymizer, anonymous, freebsd, privacy, tor

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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