Some of the questions that readers have asked over the years.
The GNU/Linux family of operating systems (e.g. Debian, Fedora, KDE Neon, Kubuntu, LinuxMint, Red Hat, Ubuntu, Xubuntu et al) are not permitted to use the UNIX trademark. Instead, they are described as “unix-like“. In fact, the “GNU” in GNU/Linux (c/w the “G” in GIMP) is a recursive acronym meaning GNU’s not Unix. In a nutshell,…
As you may have noticed, quite a lot has changed here on Garfnet over the last few weeks. Biggest change of all is the decision to dump Joomla as our main CMS in favour of WordPress. I will go into more detail about the decision in another post. Suffice it to say that WordPress is…
Editors note: this article is a few years old and there are a few are updates and related posts that some readers may find helpful… 2016 – Converting inexpensive LED flood lights for use in the studio 2017 – Cheap but effective continuous studio lighting 2018 – Cheap and cheerful overhead camera mount for mirrorless…
Minority interest? Yes. Only used by geeks & programmers? Not necessarily… Ubuntu is a minority interest insofar as it only has a fraction of the users that M$ Windows has. Moreover, despite great improvements in recent years, some configuration issues with Ubuntu are still a pain. However I disagree that you need to be a…
Sometimes your Ubuntu sound system can stop working. Often this is caused by a media player plugin in your web browser. You might also notice that your computer goes very slowly and that if it is browser-related, then the browser will perform at a snail’s pace! As a Linux user, you will no doubt consider…
Unfortunately the new Google Chromium open source browser is not included in the Ubuntu software repositories yet. Therefore installing it is a little more complex than other Ubuntu applications. But it still takes less than five minutes. Here’s how… 1. You need to tell your system to connect to the appropriate software repository. That is,…
Editors note: Gerfnet radio tuner was effectively made obsolete by the fact that most modern browsers play media directly. However, some reader may find our static Internet Radio page helpful for finding stations and addressing other problems that may arise. The internet radio tuner is cross-platform compatible and should work on any modern operating system….
LAMPP – sometimes written as “LAMP” – is an abbreviation for Linux | Apache | MySQL (database) | PHP ((Pretty) Hypertext Pre-processor) | Perl (programming language). Today, many Linux distributions come with Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl & Python anyway – or they are very easily added from the distributions software repository. If you want to…
Editor’s note: this article dates back to 2009 and is VERY obsolete. It is here for historical interest only. Currently we are evaluating a number of quite different Content Management Systems. For the main part of the site it was a battle between Joomla & PHP-Nuke. Both are good systems. However Joomla’s administration tools are…
Editor’s note: Things have changed since this article was published. Today’s Debian installer is excellent and many of our desktop and laptop machines now run Debian “stable” branch. We have also found that in many cases Debian runs faster on old hardware than Ubuntu. Currently the editor’s own laptop is running Debian “testing” branch. Yes…
We believed it would make managing GarfNet much easier. However, recent issues upgrading to Joomla 1.5.x have brought this decision into question.
Editors note, as of June 2024 this web server, and indeed most of our web servers now run Debian. As do many of our desktop and laptop machines. In 1995 our ISP set us up on a server running FreeBSD. Then in 2005 we built our own server, moved to Linux and chose a ‘live…
At time of writing, Debian 5.0 Debian stable is arguably one of the most stable platforms upon which you can build a web server. It’s also free and so are its frequent updates. http://www.debian.org
Our old server ran since 1995 with only a handful of reboots. Needless to say, it was not an M$ Windows machine. It was a FreeBSD box and it served us well. When our ISP said we could build our own server, we had two choices; 1. Windows 2003 Server with IIS (Micro$oft Internet Information…
I am working on a new ‘Friends’ area where I plan to list most of the old team and their current projects. However there is plenty of work making this new Joomla release function properly, so the ‘Friends’ area may not happen for some time!
Yes. Fully searchable archive currently lives here http://www.garfnet.org.uk/new_mill
The ‘Milly’ as we affectionately called it was an experimental but slightly dysfunctional quarterly ezine that ran from 1995 December 27th through to 1999 December 25. It’s quirky but honest view of the world attracted contributors & readers from all around the planet. The New Millennium was a big project, undertaken on a shoestring budget….
I had Fuji S1, S2 & S3, all of which had dust magnets for sensors! They would get dirty even if I did not remove the lenses, simply from the air that got sucked in by varying the focal length of the lens. However, I cleaned them quite successfully with a vacuum cleaner. However there…
If you do a google search for “disruptrive technology” and the word “Linux”, you’re likely to get over 50,000 hits. Trouble is that many of the articles that appear are quite old, often going back as far as 2001 and further. A lot has happened in the last few years… For a start, today we…
Amidst lots of puff & bluster, Microsoft has released a half decent Beta version of its latest Windows 7 operating system. One of the claims made for it is that it is faster than Vista. Mind you, it needed to be. I dumped Windows nearly two years ago, largely because of the slug-like performance of…
There are several ways to stop Google and most other search engines indexing a page. The simplest is to use a “noindex” metatag on any pages you don’t want indexed. Here’s the HTML code, in context. (Obviously the text between the <title></title> tags is just there for show and is not relevant to the workings…
We all have our favourite methods of data backup. Certainly DVD is a good archiving and distribution medium. But for routine backup, I look for reliability, low cost, ease of use, high-speed, high capacity and redundancy – so I am not reliant on just one device. One of my favourite methods is a complete off-site…
Note this primarily applies to (K)Ubuntu 8.xx. For (K)Ubuntu 7.xx please visit earlier (and possibly outdated) article:- http://www.garfnet.org.uk/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=124&Itemid=58 This is a quickand very effective way to beef up your (K)Ubuntu installation. Basically the list below contains most of my favouirite (K)Ubuntu applications complete with their code libraries. The name "Goosebuntu" is not entirely serious –…
Firstly please back up anything that is important – as you would with any major upgrade on any computer system! Then you can either use the Synaptic package manager or in this instance it is probably quicker to install from a Terminal window. First we make sure the system is fully up to date. Simply…
