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Freesbie – BSD on LiveCD!

Yesterday I got around my free time to try out Freesbie, a BSD LiveCD based on FreeBSD.
Freesbie

The LiveCD is nice, as it boot on several of my pc without any problem. Upon booting, you’ll be presented with the typical FreeBSD boot screen. After that a screen will prompt you to your keyboard layout and your locale. The last screen will prompt you to choose whether you want to boot into console (tcsh), fluxbox or Xfce (GUI mode).

Upon entering Xfce window manager I could connect to internet instantly using DHCP, but as a challange, I tried to connect the internet through manual dialing using dial-up modem and adsl modem, both works perfectly!

Freesbie screenshot

Freesbie also took the initiatives to mount all mountable partitions it could find (Linux partition, vfat partitions, UFS partitions) and really ease the job. My USB drive also are detectable and mounted upon insertion (hotplug-style). Making everyday work a breeze.

The thing that I’m not fond of Freesbie is, the default user of the system is “root”. Well, that makes me a bit nervous when working with freesbie, because user apps is running as superuser priviledges.

FreeBSD includes movie player and xmms player, but unfortunately i cant enjoy any of it because the freesbie developer neglect to include my soundcard module “fm-801” inside the cd. So if your soundcard is not listed in the screenshot below, then you will have a mute freesbie box :

Freesbie screenshot

I must say that the choice of application included in Freesbie is friendly to home/average user (well since most people tells me BSD is for elite people, which i personally believe untrue), It includes among others, openoffice suite, moz firefox webbrowser, xchat irc client, gaim instant-messenger, thunderbird email client, bittorrent client and many goodies.

Freesbie screenshot

The LiveCD also double as installer cd as you can install a fully working FreeBSD 5.3 in your system. With stable internet connection, you can cvsup it to the current release of FreeBSD.

Overall, Freesbie is an nice LiveCD based on BSD, which offers usability for users who want to try out BSD-based operating system without messing up with their hdd. It’s convenient to use, and newbie friendly too, I hope that I can continue to see a better Freesbie in the future. :)

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Unsupportive Tech Support

This is a summary of a real-life story about upgrading a Microsoft product :

  • A client is having problems with Microsoft Money 2002. She is told upgrading to Money 2006 will solve the problem.
  • She buys Money 2006 Deluxe from Amazon.com, installs it, and begins the data import wizard, which repeatedly crashes the app.
  • She spends 1.5 hours on the phone with Microsoft trying to resolve the problem to no avail
  • She installs Money 2003 (an OEM version which came with her computer) and imports the data successfully.
  • She calls Microsoft Tech Support for help with 2003, and is told since it is an OEM version, no help is available without paying
  • She patiently explains that she just bought Money 2006 Deluxe on their advice and would prefer to run that, but has no choice since it won’t import her Money 2002 data successfully.
  • The support agent asks for the product key or serial number for Microsoft Money 2006.
  • There is no such number anywhere on the retail box, CD case, or CD itself, nor was one required during install.
  • No number = no help she is told
  • There is no such number she tries to explain again and again.
  • I pick up the phone and try to explain the situation, end up going postal, and get hung up on by the Indian support agent.

Conclusion :

  1. Read the EULA that comes with your software slowly and carefully, you’ll be suprised!
  2. Microsoft softly force people to upgrade without giving sufficient downward compatibility or support
  3. The OEM-edition user isn’t entitled for Microsoft support without paying first
  4. Even if you pay for the full product, doesnt mean that Microsoft Support would play nice with you

Remind me of my own experience with tech support, the lenghty one which tells me to check blinking lights, delete certain icons from my desktop and create it back. Oh sorry, there’s no winning prizes for those who can guess it right…

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Troubles with Copy and Paste job

Upon reading gaim source code and documentation, I came accross this interesting irc log :

CopyMe: ok, how do I copy a file and paste into another directory
Zilding: cp
CopyMe: what does that do
CopyMe: copy?
Zilding: yeah
CopyMe: then how do you paste it?

no comment :p

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A milestone!

My blog reached 100th post today! When i first started this blog, i never thought that I would have come this far, because I’m just not a person who likes to jot down every details on my life or even keep a simple journal.

Well now I did it, I even cant see when will I stop blogging! Thanks to all of you that supported me… :)

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Gaim-vv – Gaim with Webcam and Voice support

Gaim Logo

Do you miss the pleasure of viewing your friends’ webcam after you migrated to FOSS Operating System? Well, now you can try gaim-vv!

Gaim-vv is a fork of the multi-protocol messenger gaim project which support webcam and voice chat, which will eventually be backported to the main gaim project, when the functionality is complete.

Though currently only supports viewing webcam (no broadcasting support yet!) from Yahoo and MSN protocol, the main project of the Gaim-vv is to support full webcam and voice functionality of any IM protocol by developing a general framework to do that.

I’ve tried the latest release of gaim-vv, and i find it stable and useful enough to view my friends’ webcam. You can download gaim-vv and it’s depending library at gaim-vv website, make sure that you read the documentations first!

For those who are using Ubuntu and Debian, you can add this to your /etc/apt/sources.list file :

#gaim-vv
deb http://people.debian.org/~smimram/debian unstable main
deb-src http://people.debian.org/~smimram/debian unstable main

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Joomla! 1.0.0 is available for download!

Joomla!, a content management system based on the popular Mambo Open Source is now available for download. This marks the first Joomla! release after a group of Mambo former developers decided to form a new project over a dispute with Miro International.

Overall, the current version of Joomla! (1.0) is not much different than Mambo 4.5.2, be it the installation, administraton, and the main content page. The most noticable changes is mainly to the name Mambo being replaced by Joomla! to reflect the new directons.

  Joomla Screenshot

According to Joomla! website, Mambo modules, themes and database (except patches) can be use with Joomla! 1.0. However the Joomla! developers made no claim about its compatibility with Mambo in future releases, cited that both of the projects is heading different directions now.

Well, I don’t find appealing reasons for me to switch to Joomla! right now, hope the next version of Joomla will implement features that was held back in Mambo Open Source.

Here’s a link for those interested to download Joomla! 1.0