This is not a bad move from Novell. By setting up this Frapr mashup they have in some part begun to illustrate the depth and breadth of the Linux (mainly Suse) community. I put my name down just because of the rumours that there were Suse Linux licenses potentially up for grabs, I would not mind a Suse Linux Enterprise Server license as they are pretty pricey. Novell traditionally have been too old fashioned in their approach to Linux, hopefully this move and the growing quality of the Novell Open Audio podcast help in some way to break those old stodgy barriers down.

Over the weekend I have migrated the StressFree website across to the Drupal content management system. The move was spurred on by the shortcomings I kept finding in Joomla, the desire to be able to tag content and the knowledge that the next upgrade to Joomla 1.5 would require almost starting from scratch.

I have tried my best to maintain all the legacy links so hopefully the old Joomla and static file links should resolve okay. Overall it went really smoothly, Drupal is a little bit more difficult to get your head around compared to Joomla but now that I've made the switch I am very glad. There has been limited loss of functionality in the switch but a tonne of new features are now available:

This news is a pain because it effects my PowerBook's battery. It is not the original battery that came with the computer but one I bought six months ago. Unfortunately due to the number of batteries recalled it looks like Apple's support website has gone down too.

Probably the biggest untapped server market out there is at the small business level (two to twenty people). At the moment there are a number of Small Business Server (SBS) solutions in this market from a number of companies:

The desktops are the servers

Using Windows file sharing, Samba and Bonjour the business configures their own little desktop-based server for file and print sharing. Thanks to semi-intelligent Internet gateways from the likes of Linksys/DLink that handle DNS and DHCP setting this sort of thing up is relatively easy. Whilst ugly this is probably the most common file/print/Internet sharing solution in most non-tech related small businesses. Unfortunately when things go wrong they can really go very bad, I've seen a number of desktop-servers go belly up because of Internet spyware and viruses.

I have written previously on how cool the little NSLU2 is as a customisable NAS device. I have set mine up as a little backup device, it silently backs up my server files (using rsync), creates tar files from all the files and then presents these archives to Retrospect on my Mac for backing up to external media and taking off-site. Unfortunately the default 'ls' and 'tar' programs that come with the Unslung distribution do not support large file sizes or long filenames to fix this problem download the far more up-to-date versions using ipkg:

Last week this post on my local Linux user group got me rethinking email servers. The last time I did this was about six months ago when I made the move away from Hula onto Zimbra. At the time I looked at Scalix 9 but was deterred by its need for X-Windows during the install process and the overwhealming amount of installation documentation that came with the 100+mb download. I decided to go with Zimbra because it offered a text-based installer and some very nice looking UI features on the webmail client.

The administrator designated user is by default the first user created on an OSX system.
In many cases you probably only have one user on the system and in that case this account will have administrator privileges. Whilst administrator privileges are not complete 'root' privileges it does hold enough power to do serious damage.

Most of the so called OSX 'viruses' are actually trojan horses that are executed by an unsuspecting user. The most famous one was a bash script named like an image file and then given a picture icon (so when the user opened it the malicious script was run).

The easiest way to protect yourself from all of this is to create an admin account with administrator privileges and then take away administrator privileges from your everyday users. This will ensure that even if you accidentally run a trojan or just a malicious application it won't be able to cause any real harm (though it would still be possible to delete all your personal data files). Whenever a system modification is about to take place the authentication box will popup asking for the administrator username/password. This is a nice warning message to you that a system change is going to take place and a deterrent to those users who are not supposed to be making system changes (like kids wanting to install games or p2p clients).

It is a nice security blanket and something Apple should really consider doing by default (but I guess they are more concerned about ease of use). If you ever need true root privileges to edit system details (like files in /etc/) open the Terminal and do the following:

Novell has announced a public preview release of Novell Linux Desktop 10. It is looking really good, that new 'Computer' menu (aka Start) they have introduced looks really slick and extremely functional. There is a tonne of good looking things in the upcoming NLD10 release, many of which are demonstrated in the some very good promotional videos from Novell.

What is even better is that larger software makers like Google and Skype are releasing their flagship software for Linux. On my OpenSUSE 10.1 test system I have easily installed Picasa, Google Earth and Skype and had them work first time without any issues. It is really good to see that the application offerings are beginning to be fleshed out from the basic OS/browser/productivity offerings.

If you have ever mounted a network volume you'll know that chances are if the Mac goes to sleep it won't remount the volume when it wakes up. This is a pain for me because I have all my music on a single samba share, using SleepWatcher ensures that volume is always mounted when I wake my Mac from its slumber.

To perform tasks at the sleep/wakeup moment create .sleep and .wakeup files in the user's directory (e.g. /Users/david/.wakeup). These files are just plain old shell scripts so you can do anything you like within them, just ensure you mark them executable by the user. Below is my .wakeup file which I have symlinked to .sleep, it mounts my music volume (on the server SERENA) when waking up and disconnects when going to sleep.

Over the last couple of days I have come across three very useful tools:

Google Browser Sync
Just released it keeps all your Firefoxes in sync with each other. Great if you have more than one computer (or virtual computer). I have used other bookmark management tools in the past but as this is integrated right into Firefox, automatic and free it is hard to beat.

Letterbox
Widescreen view for Mail.app provides a three panel view very similar to that of Outlook or Thunderbird. When you have a widescreen display it makes a lot of sense.