*Words of Wisdom From The Elder

It was a big night this past week in Ann Arbor when this past Thursday evening Eric Raymond, the gentlemen who’s paper “The Cathedral and the Bazaare” caused Netscape to open source their browswer, gave his speech at the University of Michigan Union. This is not Eric’s first time to grace us with his prescence as he seems to visit Ann Arbor about once every year. Here are some of the topics he covered

Why the Open Source Model in Programming
How to make money with Open Source
Anthropolgy involved with Open Source
Linux Advocacy

If you happended to miss Eric’s talk, you can visit the Metro Detroit Linux User’s Group home page for MP3’s of the talk.

This is a little old news but several people I have talked to haven’t heard so here it is. Change your /etc/apt/sources.list file and change the word potato or woody to “sid”. Sid is the latest most unstable release of the Debian Linux distribution. Basically if you want to run all of the latest updates to all of the current Linux packages use “sid”. If you are running a server, point it it to potato (current stable).

Nuge sent this little tid bit of information in for all of you PHP/MySQL users out there. He is trying to set the world straight and he decided to use ZorKa.Com to do it, so read, listen, and learn.

Just thought you should know. This is right off the MySQL website:

Thanks for clearing that up Nuge, our next question is who is going to win the election and the world series?

The official way to pronounce MySQL is “My Ess Que Ell” (not MY-SEQUEL). But we try to avoid correcting people who say MY-SEQUEL.

I have been playing with a couple of new apps for quite awhile but thought I would share it with the rest of you. VNC is a an open source package that allows one to display a remote Linux, Windows (and other platforms) to their local workstation. Example, you want get to your desktop at the office but are at home. Simple, start vncserver on the workstation in the office and then run vncviewer on your PC at home. You can then control your PC in the office. This is not a new concept but if you have several hundred dollars I am sure that Symantec won’t mind taking your money for PCAnywhere that only runs on Windows.

Although this package works on both Linux and Windows, Linux is the preferred method of running the application since X-Windows was built to run remote applications anywhere anyway. Although I don’t have enough room here to go into detail about setup, installation, etc. it is something work checking out. Here is a screen shot of me using my PC workstation and then also controlling my laptop’s desktop accross the lan. Oh, and by the way don’t ever run the window manager Enlightenment with VNC, bad things will happen.