Flightgear Flight Simulator

I rarely take time to play, but last week I had 30 minutes before I had to leave for an evening class. I'd been working hard all day and needed a quick break of fun before going off to more brain usage.

I decided to check out Flightgear Flight Simulator. It's a bit hard with the keyboard, but I was at a buddy's house and he let me borrow his USB joystick and it was so easy, just like flying a real plane. No thinking about keys to press, just all pretty natural.

Serial port redirection to console in Linux

There are times when keyboard and video monitor access (KVM) is not always accessible or scalable. Serial port redirection to console is a way to be able to access hosts before booting the OS in Linux.

I will discuss 3 different steps that are needed to accomplish this in Linux.

IT Geek Breakfast @ Huckleberry's, Modesto

"IT Geek Breakfast" at Huckleberry's is back on again for March! Saturday, March 13th, 8am. I've set up a Facebook Event to RSVP at. After last months success, we set up a Facebook Fan Page for IT Geek Breakfast so that we can centralize announcements.

This is a get-together breakfast of some Christians who work in the IT/IS/computer field (or are just hobbiests/enthusiasts!) so we can fellowship.

Everyone (non-Christians friends too) are welcome. But the topics will probably be highly geek/technical in nature, and probably boring for non-technical spouses.

Dropbox - The must-have online filesharing utility - Making it work on Fedora 12

Dropbox is a free online file transfer and storage synchronizing utility, which also optionally allows you to publicly share files and photos. It works on Linux, Mac, and Windows.

To get started with Dropbox, you first need a free account. You can sign-up for Dropbox free here.

IT Geek Breakfast @ Huckleberry's, Modesto

I wanted to invite everyone around Modesto to an "IT Geek Breakfast" at Huckleberry's this Saturday, Feb 6th, 8am. I've set up a Facebook Event to RSVP at.
If that link doesn't work, try searching Facebook Events for "IT Geek Breakfast".

Nothing formal, just a get-together breakfast of some Christians who
work in the IT/IS/computer field so we can fellowship.

Everyone (non-Christians friends too) are welcome, but the topics will
probably be highly geek/techno in nature, and probably boring for non-technical spouses.

HTML5 video tag, Ogg Theora & H.264

About a month ago I went to a family memorial for my Aunt that passed. We had a ton of pictures and videos that I collected from everyone's cameras and I consolidated and made into CDs before we all went back home.

However, I've a very large family on my mother's side (she's got 12 bothers and sisters), and more than half didn't make it to the memorial. I wanted to put it all online to send links to all the family.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 speculation

There has been much speculation regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 will be shipped and support regarding RHEL5. Many of us speculated that RHEL6 would ship Q1 2010.

VirtualBox and licensing

I wanted to clarify something I'd said in the past about VirtualBox. VirtualBox OSE (Open Source Edition) binaries are available via Fedora and other distributions are OSS via the GPLv2, but the binaries from virtualbox.org are Personal Use and Evaluation License (PUEL). Sun/VirtualBox.org does not provide OSE binaries. To clarify for less-technical folks, binaries are programs in executable code format (meaning your computer knows how to run it), vs. source code needs to be compiled.

Preserving long-term backups with minimal storage

There are many tools and many ways to accomplish backups of systems. I find that the simpler something is, the less likely it is to fail, or if it does fail I can sort out what is broken that much easier.

There is no backup simpler at its core than a simple copy (cp in *nix or xcopy in Windows) with the right option flags. However, for many things this is too simplistic and isn't the most efficient.

Following Fedora Package releases for RHEL/CentOS admins

There comes times where you need a feature not yet in the version of a Package that RedHat has released yet for Enterprise Linux (RHEL, or just EL). BIND is a perfect example of this.

RedHat still ships BIND 9.3 (with back-ported bug-fixes for security), but for full DNSSEC support you want Fedora's BIND 9.6.

My goal: don't go totally off the beaten path and compile from source from the BIND upstream, don't become a package maintainer, don't trust a non-RedHat source, but still don't want to even have to think much about any of these non-Official Packages I'm using until updates come out. Fast and proven aren't always compatible, so at least "tested" from RedHat/Fedora will work for me.

Using local media first with Fedora and Yum

With CentOS, if you have the DVD or ISO install image on your CentOS system, just disable the [base] repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo and enable [c5-media] repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Media.repo and point baseurl= to the right location where the ISO or DVD is mounted (baseurl=/media/PATH-TO-DVD).

This works out great as the CentOS [base] repo and the DVD have the identical contents.

However, with Fedora 7 and newer, this is not the case and things are a bit messy. The contents of the [fedora] repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/fedora.repo have Everything in Fedora since the Core split was dropped, which is a huge amount of packages than ever ship on the DVD.

So, how to use local [InstallMedia] first, while still searching the [fedora] repo, and still get [updates]?

Fedora 12 nVidia woes

Fedora 12 has been the best install in my time of using Redhat/Fedora (RH5.2, RH6.x, RH7.x, RH8.x, RH9, FC1, FC2, FC3, FC5, FC6, F9, F11, and now F12). I started early with Fedora 12 Beta, actually, and have installed the released F12 on a number of systems since.

My home MythDora 10.21 MythTV system was showing its age (based on Fedora 10, which is no longer supported). I decided it was time to upgrade to F12.

VirtualBox

Recently I upgraded from Fedora 9 to F11. With the upgrade, my VMWare Server setup has had nothing but problems. I've limped along, but finally bit the bullet and learned VirtualBox. VBox is free and OSS. It supports branching or forking snapshots, meaning you can have thousands of VMs taking up very little disk space (just the differentials from the base os or wherever you fork/branch). This is a feature you need VMWare Workstation (pay) to enjoy.

So just what is VirtualBox or these "Virtual Machine" technologies? In short, they give you the ability to run many operating systems (Windows, Linux) at the same time on the same physical hardware, plus many other options (like redundancy and such on larger systems).

One use I have for Virtual Machines is to run Windows in a VM Guest without having to run Windows as my main OS, and never having to reboot ("dual booting") to Windows. I do this because often there are proprietary things I need to do that won't work on Linux for one reason or another (VPN software that only works on Windows is the primary reason, or software that requires Internet Explorer and/or ActiveX or something else which IEs 4 Linux don't support or do well). I also use Quickbooks for my business needs (I use GnuCash for my personal needs, but I need to be able to quickly get my bookkeeper what they need and with Quickbooks I can talk the same language without having to learn too much accounting beyond the basics). I need Quickbooks to just work, and I don't have time to deal with it breaking under Linux, as if it is broken, I don't bill out customers. VirtualBox allows me to run Quickbooks in Windows XP in a very stable way - I use snapshots so that my Windows XP OS never changes, only the separate partition that contains my actual Quickbooks data files ever changes, but that's another story for another day. Another advantage I have running Quickbooks this way is that my VM Guest for it is never allowed Internet access, so it is virtually hack proof (essentially you'd need to have physical access to my laptop to get to my Quickbooks).

Capturing Radio

One cool feature of many TV capture cards is the ability to hook up an FM antenna and listen to the radio. There is plenty of support for listening to live radio. But as for capturing the radio, there isn't much support. However, as with anything, if there is a will, there is a way. This isn't really anything new, if you compare it to using a cassette tape player to record the radio. What is novel is the ability to gather and store radio like a DVR (or in my case, on my DVR) - all nice and scheduled and automated.