As you certainly already know if you follow regularly this web site, the Internet addresses will soon be depleted (all used). The end of the Internet world as we know it should be reached around 2011 or 2012. That is the reason why some companies are working to push out the most common Internet protocol (IPv4) and to make space for its successor (IPv6).
This is why, while the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) was preparing a night without IPv4 to reach the largest possible public, Google launched a version of its search engine reserved to IPv6: ipv6.google.com (If you are like almost everybody, you will not see anything at the end of the link).
Usually, I would not comment about upcoming software applications and tools, but today there is an rumour that may be very important. We all know that switching from Windows to Linux is a difficult move because we have been used to so many applications available on one Operating System but not on the other (in my case, how could I do without Photoshop?)
Here comes Wine, an open source tool supposed to allow you to run native Windows applications in your Linux PC. In beta during years, Wine was incomplete and unable to provide the ultimate dream of OS migration, but things seem to be changing. Google invested a lot of effort, and it is said that version 1.0 of Wine is upcoming.
One of the important things I noticed, of course, is that there are plenty of games now supported (Baldur’s Gate II – Throne of Baal, Call of Duty 2, World of Warcraft, etc.) and I see that both Photoshop CS2 and CS3 are also in the list.
We never can get enough of them, but our computers are sometimes overflowing. Software applications are everywhere, but how to choose the right one for the task at hand? I built a real collection of pages where you will be able to find nearly all you can dream for nearly all computers:
And, last but not least, for old dinosaurs, let’s remind you that you can still use VAX-VMS on your Linux PC. If you don’t know what I am saying, either you’re too young, or you never received a hacker education. Or both.
If you have an old collection of PC MS-DOS games that has been sleeping at the bottom of a drawer, you may have two approaches: A/ you prefer to forget the old pixels and buy new games, B/ you were so found of those that you want to play even on your newest PC. However, it is difficult because most of these run only in a DOS box, but are so unusable because of the speed of the processor and the limited compatibility of the sound and graphics.
Now DOSBox.com offers a real solution with a free emulator.
Usable for MS-Windows, most Linux boxes, some Apple OS and OS/2.
Some GNU/Linux lovers like to optimize their Linux kernel with many recompilations. This is not absolutely needed, but a quite common hobby there. However, it is quite difficult to do correctly. Tips for successful Kernel Recompilation in Linux by bobcares.com.
Your good old laptop PC went back to meet its maker and you can’t accept the idea of dumping it into the next waste basket (not even considering recycling, would you really want to part in such a harsh way?). Let’s not forget some of the few uses that you can still have from the old mate:
What broke down:
You still can…
The screen is all dead and went black
…attach a desktop display and convert it to a small desktop PC.
The screen is all dead and went black
…install Linux, an SSH_server or PC_Anywhere and recycle it into a autonomous file server with low power consumption.
The motherboard is resting
…scrap the 2.5″ disk drive and put it into a nice little USB box to have a new external backup solution.
The battery is out of juice
…plug the power cord and convert it to a small desktop PC.
The keyboard is broken
…install Linux and recycle it into a autonomous file server with low power consumption.
When you have a computer with multiple partitions on the same disk or several disks with different partitions, things start getting bad if one of them is a Linux Ext or Ext2 partition: Usually, you can’t access the Linux partition from your Windows computer, Microsoft totally ignore your disk/partition.
In order to correct this, you can/must use a special Windows driver able to recognize correctly those Linux Ext/Ext2 partitions. Ext2 IFS provides full read/write access. It’s is essentially a kernel ext2/ext3 filesystem driver for Windows. When installed in your Windows computer, it simply becomes able to natively access the Linux disk. After installing, you can mount your Linux partition under a drive letter, just like you would an NTFS partition. The drive will be available in Explorer and within any file browser dialog in your favorite Windows applications.
You install your PC some time ago, it may be necessary to clean it up a little in order to keep or improve its raw speed. As a matter of fact, even if we are no longer in the old times of Windows 98 that were nearly forcing you to a re-install once or twice a year, it is not unusual to see that installing many new software packages (voluntarily or indirectly) leads to tons of data and roadblacks for your PC.
Here are a few solutions to improve the situation:
Optimize Windows start with the help of Microsoft BootVis (source: LH).
If you are a gamer (as in video games), if you like the challenge of confronting other players in FPS shootouts, if you are using GNU/Linux, you will be interested to find the comparison brought by LinuX-gamers.net: Comparison of Free Software Shooters with:
Do you remember my newsbit about LightZone for Linux? Unfortunately, you may also have noticed that some time later, LightCrafts had stopped distributing it.
It is still difficult to be sure if the final version 3.3 will be freely available, but I feel that it would still be a good way for LightCrafts to widen the paying distribution of this very good tool for digital photographers: LightZone.
Thanks to LifeHacker, and if you have the following, you will be able to use your iPhone to access Internet from your laptop.
A computer with Wi-Fi capable of creating an ad-hoc computer-to-computer connection (yours is)
A jailbroken iPhone (If you don’t know how to jailbreak your iPhone, the easiest way is to make sure you’re running 1.1.1 firmware and then start here.
The OpenSSH iPhone application
An SSH client on the computer you’re using. If you’re on a Mac or *nix machine, you should be fine. Windows users should check out how to install OpenSHH with Cygwin.
It may come as a surprise to some of you, but with the newest PC equipped with more than 1 gigabyte of DRAM, the 32-bit version of the Linux kernel is usually showing issues around the use of 2-4GB of central RAM.
When you have one computer under GNU/Linux, it is common to have it as a second machine to run experimentations or dedicated to one single task (run one program like BitTorrent, a backup server or a web server, for example). In this case, it is quite pleasant to be able to control it without leaving your main keyboard and screen (staying in front of your main machine). This is the problem that some bloggers tried to solve and I want to cite them here:
Previous Entries
If you have an old collection of PC MS-DOS games that has been sleeping at the bottom of a drawer, you may have two approaches: A/ you prefer to forget the old pixels and buy new games, B/ you were so found of those that you want to play even on your newest PC. However, it is difficult because most of these run only in a DOS box, but are so unusable because of the speed of the processor and the limited compatibility of the sound and graphics.
When you have one computer under GNU/Linux, it is common to have it as a second machine to run experimentations or dedicated to one single task (run one program like BitTorrent, a backup server or a web server, for example). In this case, it is quite pleasant to be able to control it without leaving your main keyboard and screen (staying in front of your main machine). This is the problem that some bloggers tried to solve and I want to cite them here:
