Tag: UNIX

After a decade of vehement distrust for its open source cousin, Microsoft looks like it is finally ready to embrace one of the features that makes Linux and its variants so damn desirable. Speaking frankly, Garrett Serack of Open Source Development at Microsoft laments the current state of open source package management and installation on the Windows platform. It's time for things to change, ...

What with all the furore over Google Buzz and its questionable security, the big picture since the launch has been more than a little occluded. I hope, with the dust settling, we can now begin to look at what Google Buzz actually brings to the table -- without hyperbole, without the Mashablesque over-reporting -- the actual goodies. As always, controversy or not, Google has brought us a very ...

Regardless of what operating system you happen to be running, it's always a good idea to be conversant with the command line. For new (or should that be Gnu?) Linux and Unix users, Command-line Fu is a site that deserves a spot in your bookmarks. It's designed to be a social resource for terminal commands. Submit a command, describe it, and the community votes it up or down. Sign up for an ...

In honor of UNIX time displaying 1234567890 tomorrow, here's the episode about UNIX on Computer Chronicles from 1985. Notice: they didn't warn us about the temporal rift! If you aren't familiar with the Computer Chronicles series, click as fast as you can to the Internet Archive and check it out. Good times, great oldies. ...

One of the only features some of us here like about Windows is that you can alt-ctrl-del and look at the open tasks and programs running at any given time. It's nice to know what's sucking up all of your memory (pr0n) and what's bogging down your processor (DVD burning). Sloth for Mac OS X shows us exactly what's running, Windows style. You can see which application is running which process, ...

Search engines don't get much easier to use than Google. You type what you're looking for into a text box, and the web site will spit results back at you. But if you're looking for a slightly geekier experience, you owe it to yourself to check out goosh. Goosh has the look and feel of a Unix or Linux shell, but the site is powered by Google. If you want to conduct a web search, just enter a ...

Way back in the dark ages of 1993, we were introduced to this thing called email. Email in the olden days was not like email now. All the packets traveled uphill no matter where they were going, and usually there was a good three or four feet of snow on the internet backbone. We used these big hulking things called VAX/VMS nodes that were attached to some pretty sweet fourteen inch monochrome VT ...

Man Viewer is a small application that does a simple job: it lets you view/export all of the man pages installed in Mac OS 10.5 Leopard. Man (short for manual) pages are Unix documents that explain how to use Unix commands. The general command usage to display a man page in Unix is: man <command> as in man cp (to show how to use the copy command). Man Viewer automatically finds your man ...

The iPhone has become one of best loved geek toys of the decade, and it's not hard to see why: the slim phone that Steve built packs a powerful processor, 3d graphics, and the power of Mac OS X. In the past, we have seen various 3rd party apps available for the device, but nothing quite so nerdy of as this: Apparently, there is some demand for APT on the iPhone, and somebody went ahead and ported ...

MacVim is a port of the popular open-source text editor Vim for Mac OS X. It supports tabs, full-screen editing, and transparent backgrounds. The toolbar is also helpful as it provides easy access to save files, run vim scripts, make a project, save/load sessions, and undo editing. MacVim also has handy syntax highlighting to make editing/reading text files easier on the eyes. If you need to ...

Amarok has just released a preview of its new version 2, codenamed "Kutie." In case you didn't know, Amarok is the free music player for Linux and Unix, with support for album art, lyrics, and Wikipedia and last.fm integration. A word of warning: this is a very early release and a technical preview only (it's called a pre-alpha release; if you've ever wondered what came before alpha, this is your ...

The time between Christmas and New Year's is what folks in the biz typically like to call a slow news period. But in the fast-paced world of technology (cue the Quantum Leap-them song styled synth pop), the news never stops. Here are some of the stories you might have missed if you were spending too much quality time with the family this week. Flipping the Linux Switch: The GNOME Desktop ...

The Download Squad team got really excited this morning. When we contemplated installing Paint-Mono, we pictured it and GIMP arming themselves with swords, screaming "There can be only one!" We thought there would be an epic battle, and the victor would lop off the other's head in a firestorm of light. Instead, we ended up compiling Mono. Paint-Mono is a Unix port of Paint.NET. To install, it ...

If you thought the Y2K bug had a lot of world ending potential, you might want to skip this post right now. If we don't blow ourselves up by 2038, the end of the world is going to have little to do with nukes and a lot to do with Unix because Unix systems can't keep track of the date past January 19, 2038. According to Y2K38.info, Unix keeps track of the date and time using a four byte integer ...

NetBSD 4.0 is finally out, and, if you don't know what that is, sit tight and we'll get to that later. For those that know all about NetBSD, here's the lowdown on the latest major update to the operating system: The 4.0 release includes support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor (yawn). It also includes support for Bluetooth (welcome to 2005) and many new device drivers and ...