I am a massive GNU/Linux fan. I switched to GNU/Linux back in 2007 following Microsoft’s Vista fiasco. Never looked back. Today, all my workstations and server run GNU/Linux. Mostly Debian these days, or some derivative thereof.
This is the fourth article in a series of case studies illustrating the difficulty one has purchasing a PC in the UK without being forced to pay a “Microsoft Tax”. We use Linux on all our PC’s and have done so for several years. Therefore we do not need, nor should we be forced to…
We eventually did hear back from Laptops direct. Amazingly, its sales team openly admits that it ignores the Microsoft EULA! So nil penguin points! But if there were a category for honesty then it would get plenty of penguins! The emails are in reverse order and since I guess the sales person is just “following…
Rationale At the moment, everyone who buys a PC from a UK supplier has to buy a Microsoft Windows license whether they want it or not. One has no choice, it is included in the price one pays. So, even if you are using one of the many free alternative operating systems such as Ubuntu,…
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…
This is an update to the Dell OS-free laptop fiasco:- http://www.garfnet.org.uk/joomla/index.php? option=com_content&view=article&id=182&Itemid=331 Seems that whilst Dell cannot be bothered to respond to our enquires with regard to buying laptops OS-free, or whether it is prepared to refund customers for unused Microsoft licenses as per Microsoft’s EULA, it is however perfectly happy to spam its customers…
This is the second article in a new series of case studies illustrating the difficulty one has purchasing a PC in the UK without being forced to pay a “Microsoft Tax”. We use Linux on all our PC’s and have done so for several years. Therefore we do not need, nor should we be forced…
I always found dual booting is a pain and I’d far rather have removable boot disks that can be sized and optimised for the OS they contain. In the old days when we used to run Windows, I fitted removable boot drives in our servers & desktops and cloned the boot disks so that if…
This is a new series of case studies illustrating the difficulty one has purchasing a PC in the UK without being forced to pay a “Microsoft Tax”. We use Linux on all our PC’s and have done so for several years. Therefore we do not need, nor should we be forced to pay for any…
This is the third article in a new series of case studies illustrating the difficulty one has purchasing a PC in the UK without being forced to pay a “Microsoft Tax”. We use Linux on all our PC’s and have done so for several years. Therefore we do not need, nor should we be forced…
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…
Two events this week could herald in the clash of the titans as the two global IT giants, Google & Microsoft slug it out for global internet dominance. Or so one might believe. MS started rolling-out its much-hyped Microsoft Online Services (MOS). The new services are scheduled to be available to customers by mid-July 2009….
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…
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…
Editor’s note: We became so sick and tired of Joomla’s bugs and upgrade issues that we eventually dumped it altogether in 2018, in favour of WordPress. It actually took less time to move to WordPress than it did to perform yet another Joomla upgrade “migration”. Upgrading from Joomla 1.0 to version 1.5 must be one…
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…
I’m a big fan of WINE and an even bigger fan of CrossoverLinux. This is the commercial implementation of WINE by CodeWeavers. For many Windows apps it works very well indeed. In many ways I prefer it to using a virtual machine (VM) because firstly one does not have to start a VM just to…
I just completed my UK tax return on-line today. At the end of it all, HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs) ask for some feedback. I thought that fans of open source software might be interested in my response:- “This is certainly a great improvement over previous years. It actually saved me a lot of…
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…
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…
