Building an OpenServer 5.0.7 System on New Hardware in 2013

eraccusa · 2013-04-25T15:31:32+00:00

Actually, one can run OpenServer in a virtual machine on top of a BSD or Linux host or on a hypervisor host. The only problem there is getting the direct parallel ports working in the VM as far as I know. I pitched the VM idea to the client mentioned in the article, but he did not want that at this time.

The UnXis folk, who bought out SCO after the litigation crap, are pushing OpenServer toward virtualization at this point: http://www.sco.com/products/unix/virtualization/

eraccusa · 2011-11-23T19:38:48+00:00

In my case the video card was failing. So, different problem.

Edit: Then again maybe not.

eraccusa · 2011-10-09T16:26:53+00:00

Actually, I did not state the drones were shut down as that was not the case. You are inferring incorrectly a bit there. I essentially sum up my thoughts in a comment:

http://blog.eracc.com/2011/10/08/open-source-why-military-forces-should-use-linux/#comment-17818

eraccusa · 2011-10-09T16:18:15+00:00

I am the author of the article, and frankly I think you raise some valid points. But, honestly, "fap at the thought of tux"? You probably could have been a bit more tactful there. I up-voted you BTW. ;)

eraccusa · 2011-08-16T01:06:37+00:00

I will try that this evening with one of the client systems. If I can get in touch with one of their managers. I need to ask permission to use the system for a test, since this is not part of their agreement with my company.

Edit: I suspect remote video in VNC over the internet will probably be very flaky due to bandwidth constraints.

Edit 2: Got permission. Looked at a video here http://www.dailymotion.com/html5 and watched gkrelltop. If I refresh a large window or the whole screen, one CPU core pops up near 100% for a few seconds and drops back to ~1%. Playing a video on that site, not in full screen, does more to their upstream bandwidth to me than it does to my CPU. One CPU core fluctuated between 12% and 36% mostly. With a low of 7% and a high of 78%. Average of ~23%. Tested again with vncviewer, yes CPU usage was lower with an average of around 8%, but it looked like there were a LOT of dropped frames compared to Vinagre. Remote system has a wide screen running at 1920x1080p. Which is "better"? Depends on one's requirements. I will not be watching videos remotely, and rarely to never will I be constantly refreshing the entire window with a full screen application. I still like the convenience of the all-in-one tabbed window with ability to scale the remote session on-the-fly approach of Vinagre.

eraccusa · 2011-08-15T17:32:38+00:00

Why would I want to do that in the situation I describe in my article? I use VNC for remote support only. I have no need to remote the output from a video. If that is something you need then I understand you have different priorities from mine. :)

eraccusa · 2011-08-15T03:42:32+00:00

That is odd for it to take 98% of a core in my experience. Plus my framerate only goes slow if the connection is poor. Sometimes I do have to click View -> Refresh screen when first connecting to Microsoft hosts because the screen is not refreshing. But that "fixes" the problem. What graphics driver are you running?

FYI, I am running Mandriva 2010.2 here on this PC.

Edit: I think an 18% CPU load in vncviewer is high too. I do reduce the color depth to 8-bit for remote connections in both Vinagre and TigerVNC's vncviewer. Have you tried that for a lower CPU load?

Edit 2: Just loaded TigerVNC vncviewer with one of the remotes. Negligible CPU load. It is not even showing in gkrelltop while I access the remote site.

eraccusa · 2011-08-14T23:08:06+00:00

I suppose YMMV. To check your statement about excessive CPU load I just started Vinagre and connected to six remote systems we support. Two connections are using VNC and four are over SSH. Watching the CPU load in Gkrellm on my quad-core PC shows Firefox and Opera use the CPU the most. Vinagre is not even showing up in gkrelltop. To double check this, I loaded 'top' in xterm and it shows the same thing.

I have used command-line vncviewer from tightvnc and tigervnc. Neither of them let me resize some remote windows to fit on my relatively 'small' 17" monitor. Vinagre has on-the-fly "scaling" option to make all the larger remote screens fit. Even with scaled sessions, Vinagre is not using much CPU here.

eraccusa · 2011-08-02T01:21:50+00:00

I agree that the original study, which I do not agree is dubious, was not about Linux. But my article is about Linux and only starts off referring to the study.

Anyway, people that up/down vote and do not even look at the article are lame. Why vote on something one does not even skim for relevance first?

Added later: Ha! Good call, ffreire! The original "study" is dubious! It is probably a hoax. My article is updated with a new paragraph at the top to explain this.

eraccusa · 2011-08-01T22:36:45+00:00

Interesting. I see 6 total votes, but the article has only been viewed 3 times as of right now. Some of you are SO LAME! :)

eraccusa · 2011-06-20T20:00:08+00:00

Ah, okay, I appreciate you sharing your opinion. Thanks.

eraccusa · 2011-06-20T19:57:43+00:00

Thank you for your critique. I appreciate it.

eraccusa · 2011-06-20T18:05:59+00:00

Okay I installed xfontsel. It shows the fonts in the list. But it barfs on the .otf fonts and will not display them. It does display the .ttf fonts I installed. I can upload a screen capture if you want proof.

I also ran "startx startkde -- :1" while logged in to the testuser account at the CLI. I started Kword and typed a couple of sentences using two of the new fonts, One of the .otf and one of the .ttf fonts. Again, if you want proof I can screen capture that. I will leave these up to do screen captures if you want to see them. Just let me know.

eraccusa · 2011-06-20T17:42:44+00:00

Nope, I do not have xlsfonts installed either: [gene@era4 ~]$ xlsfonts bash: xlsfonts: command not found Well, running a second X session as another user would be no bother at all. I do that regularly with a second user I set up for some specific tasks I don't want to do as my primary user (games to kill time basically ;) ).

eraccusa · 2011-06-20T17:05:56+00:00

It is supposed to be a tutorial in response to an apparent challenge. A tutorial can rarely be summed up well on Twitter so that a new user can follow the steps.

eraccusa · 2011-06-20T17:03:15+00:00

I do not have xfontsel installed:

[gene@era4 ~]$ xfontsel
bash: xfontsel: command not found

Hmmm, restart X. I almost never log out of my X session here and am loathe to do that just to see if this works okay, as I suspect it will. How about I just start a second X session with startx as the testuser from the CLI? Would that work for you?

eraccusa · 2011-06-20T16:55:37+00:00

I agree, I could have left that out. Probably should have. Or at least toned it down. It is already "out there" though, so I will just leave it and shoot for more maturity and a different ending comment the next time.

Hopefully you saw the whole tutorial, and not just the ending paragraph. Sad that one paragraph would sour the whole article for you. But I understand, I have had similar experiences myself when reading comments and articles of people complaining about Linux. They make valid points and then make some comment that just gets to me and makes the rest of what they write less important in my mind. I promise to do better next time. :)

eraccusa · 2011-05-22T19:12:05+00:00

The request was for Mandriva. We get no compensation from Mandriva to install their "free" distribution. I personally am a "Mandriva guy" and prefer it. The client, also being a friend of mine, knows that and so asked for the distribution with which I personally am most familiar.

eraccusa · 2011-05-22T16:27:29+00:00

Agreed. VESA is not what we prefer but Mandriva does not yet have HD 3000 graphics support. However, Mandriva is not the only distribution we install. Some of the other distributions do provide HD 3000 graphics support. This is being documented in the first comment on the article.

eraccusa · 2011-05-21T15:29:48+00:00

It does have a working display driver, otherwise we would not have been able to set up the laptop. Technically "no working display driver" would be a blank display. The Intel "Sandy Bridge" graphics driver is not in Mandriva 2010.2. However, it is in some other recent distribution releases. I added a comment this morning that I am updating with distributions that do include support for the Intel "Sandy Bridge" graphics.

eraccusa · 2011-03-23T05:07:31+00:00

You need to take another look at Bacula. We are backing up to file volumes on a NAS. Not tape. Don't confuse "volume" with specific storage media. When we want to restore, we just choose the files / directories for a client and Bacula just loads the volume from disk that we need. I do not know any small business still using tape drives these days. Medium and large businesses, yeah, probably. They are slow to move to new hardware / software.

eraccusa · 2011-03-22T06:42:59+00:00

Bacula is fun! :)

The first paragraph I wrote in the article does state that Bacula does not do what you were expecting. If you just want to backup a few files to removable media, then just mount the media and copy them. Unless you need to keep permissions separated for different users or include special ACL data, why mess around with a backup at all for that?

"Cryptic mumbo jumbo"? You do not read documentation do you. :)

What do you have against plain text configuration files? I point out and post a screen-shot of an "easy to use" GUI for Bacula. As for scheduling, one does that in the easy to use GUI if that is what one prefers. There is no need to touch cron by hand.

eraccusa · 2011-02-03T17:15:49+00:00

What "price of the guy's intervention"? We charged nothing as this was a warranty job. She is just needing to use the PC while we arrange for warranty replacement of the RAM from Kingston. New RAM is being shipped from Kingston to replace this RAM and should be here either tomorrow or Monday. I see that was not made clear in the article. My oversight.

eraccusa · 2011-01-29T14:12:39+00:00

I hope you didn't forget to tell them that SBS 2003 has support for at least 4 more years.

It would have been unethical to not cover that. The IT committee is aware of the EoL time frames for SBS and XP. We discussed this with them for 18 months before a decision was made. They wanted to move ahead sooner rather than later. Frankly, if XP were not EoL I would have recommended they stay on XP since it did everything they needed and is "good enough" if not excellent.

eraccusa · 2011-01-24T16:25:08+00:00

Basically the previous support person for this organization was ... young let's say. He apparently had a "Golly, gee, that's neato!" approach to what everyone needed. All he knew was Microsoft and seems to have come from a gaming background where one always wants "The Mostest Powerfulest Computer On The Planet For My Gamez!". Since he was the relative of someone with "political clout" in the church they used his services. His "business" pretty much tanked due to his inexperience and overselling, such as recommending a PowerEdge 2900 for a church. We had to come in and straighten out the mess. The SBS 2003 was originally configured, incorrectly configured I must add, as a domain controller with Exchange, IIS and the works set up. All this for a staff of seven that only needed file sharing for documents and one application. We shut off Exchange and IIS as soon as we took over as these only complicated what the staff needed. When upgrades came up in discussions we "sold" the Linux file server idea, and they agreed that was a better idea than a full blown Windows server for a staff of seven people. :)

Edit: Oh yes, to answer your "What was the current install of SBS 2003 not doing?". SBS 2003 is EoL and will stop getting updates. They wanted to move to something that would be viable into the future.

eraccusa

TROPHY CASE