Don Watkins

For the second time in three years I’ve survived a catastrophic hardware failure with a Lotus Domino server. Early Wednesday morning as I was trying to resurrect the crashed server I prayed that my backup plan had worked. In June I described how I use Rsync and some scripts to backup our Domino server. My prayers were answered on Wednesday morning as we rebuilt the Domino server from the backups. I had to put Domino on an extra Windows 2003 server temporarily and already it’s been more work. I  used WinSCP which is a great GUI utility for moving files to and from a Linux server. For now I have to manually “down” the server, back it up with Windows backup utility and then restart the server. If I was going to be staying on Windows for a longer period of time I might invest in a tape drive, but I got word today that our server’s problem was a defective main board and it’s been fixed and will be back in service soon.  Thanks to Mike Brown, one of the technicians at Great Lakes Electronics in nearby Buffalo, New York for the quick turnaround.  It’ll be good to have our Domino server back on Red Hat 5.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, calls on Linux developers to make the presentation layer of desktop Linux applications even more attractive to users than Apple’s Mac OS.

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Windows
’ memory usage went up by 0.07GB, or 71.68MB. The CPU still fluctuated madly but hung around 20%. Under Fedora, memory usage increased by only 50MB and with a maximum processor utilisation of 4%, shortly resuming to 1% while sitting idle (with Windows still jumping all about.)

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Until earlier this morning I’d never used XSane. It’s really easy to use and I’d recommend it. I was using a Dell Inspiron 6400 with Ubuntu 7.10 and a USB cable connected to my Hewlett-Packard 3100 PSC. Very straight forward process and easy to use. XSane can scan to JPEG, TIFF, Text, PDF, PNG and some other formats. It’s easy to use and intuitive. I’d recommend to anyone using Ubuntu. I’ve got some pictures and documents I wanted to scan and this is the ticket. It has an OCR feature which I did not use.

Read more on Dell’s blog about what’s happening with Ubuntu Hardy Heron on Dell systems. If you’d like to purchase one of these systems follow this link.  I’ve been using Ubuntu on Dell for over a year and I’m excited what this option has to offer.

After extensive development and testing, Dell PCs featuring Ubuntu are now shipping with version 8.04. In addition to the DVD Playback offered in version 7.10, the newly available version 8.04 offers even more peripheral options such as ATI Video Graphics, Dell Wireless, FingerPrint Readers, HDMI and even better Bluetooth and MP3/WMA/WMV support.–Dell

For more information follow this link.

Linux — especially Ubuntu — has become so reliable and simple that for most end users it’s simply not worth thinking about, any more than we think about tools like wrenches and screwdrivers. Does this mean desktop GNU/Linux has become so boring that it’s not worth noticing?

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There is no denying that Linux recently has gained traction in the consumer space and Microsoft may have to look a little more seriously at competing with Linux distributions on different levels

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This article is a number of months old but it echoes much of what I’ve been reading lately. The U.S Navy and the U.S. Military in general moving towards open source software. The benefits are for the users.

The Navy’s decision was informed by a combination of motivations, including the desire to provide the latest capabilities to warfighters and control the costs of its information technology operations, he added.

“We can’t accept the increasing costs of maintaining our present-day capabilities,” Edwards said. “In the civilian marketplace, it’s just the opposite. Some private-sector concerns are cutting their costs by 90 percent while expanding their performance.”

Read more here.

The loss of critical data can prove devastating. Still, millions of professionals ignore backing up their data. While individual reasons vary, one of the most common explanations is that performing routine backups can be a real chore. Good article here by the folks at IBM detailing some good backup solutions.

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Twenty years ago my brother told me how a friend of his was controlling his household appliances with a computer. That seemed incredible then and it seems quite practical now.

Home Automation is anything that your home does for you automatically to make living there more enjoyable or productive. It covers many areas, including remote and timed control of lights and electrical home appliances, distributed media services, and communication. Over the last 10 years, many hardware manufacturers have presented their own proprietary solutions to these problems. Unbeknownst to them, a groundswell of developers from around the world has been providing similar solutions to the free and open source community.

Read more here.