Linux on a WinDev’s Laptop Part3 - CDArgs
CDArgs is an essential tool for me to aid navigating directories in a command shell (terminal) window. I used to have my own little utility on Windows, but this is waaay better.
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Linux on a Windows developer’s laptop - Part 1 of N
Well, I have a new laptop computer (Asus M51sn) as my primary machine, and finally I get to use Linux as my personal operating system - something the rest of my household has done for years. A reversal of the usual story where the geek uses Linux (or BSD or…) and has a partner or kids using Windows (usually because of lack-of-geekdom, or the need to play games).
I have been running such cross-platform apps as Openoffice.org and Firefox/Thunderbird but still had a very heavy need for Windows-only tools for a good deal of my day job - programming in .NET and Visual Foxpro. I wasn’t happy with running such things under Wine and my old computer wasn’t grunty enough to virtualise a Windows development environment (heavy development with ASP.NET websites or Windows Mobile PDAs was bringing it to its knees a bit anyway).
This has changed, and though I’m not the most reliable blogger in the world, some of things I’m doing to make this work could be interesting to the world. So here I go.
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Install Net::DNS perl module to make SpamAssassin blacklisting go
This was very frustrating - so I’m writing this in case someone else uses Google to find the answer, and finds me. My problem: RBL checks in my mail gateway weren’t working, and a missing Net::DNS turned out to be the cause. (more…)
Enabling sound for non-root Linux users
A few weeks ago I let my kids loose on a newly-setup computer running Kubuntu (a flavour of Linux). This is a shared computer between the two of them, and unlike any previous linux desktop I’ve configured, the primary users are not logging in with the account name entered into the nice Kubuntu setup program.
The problem was the silence. More specifically the silence of any of the programs running on either kid’s desktops. (more…)
Linux answering machine?
Someone came in the other day - well, it was probably a week or two now - asking about a “Linux answering machine”.
Turned out he had a Windows machine with a 56k modem attached, which was operating as an answering machine. I knew those modems were supposed to be “voice capable” but this is the first time I’d ever heard of anyone actually using this (except as a gimmick). He wanted to get rid of Windows entirely since his main machine was running Xandros.
My first thought was of Asterisk, which has got a lot of good press recently and has an active development community. However even Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@home) doesn’t scale down as far as a voice modem! I was also vaguely aware of vgetty, but one look at the documentation and it’s obviously techie territory.