Operation Charlie: Status Report.

Charlie(link)(link) is currently up and running. I got the power cord I needed, yesterday, the package arrived slightly early. I immediately went down to my room, and plugged it in. I pressed the power button, hoping it would work.

*beep*

YES! It works! The first time I booted it up, it did not recognize the HDD, but one reboot fixed that, apparently it had just not been used in a long time, and so it needed to warm-up, first.

After that, I ran a normal boot-up, to discover that it was running Windows 98. Blech. It runs fairly fast, but the OS itself is terrible. I cannot get anything to work, except for my SD card reader. it has one of those tiny mice that are in the middle of the keyboard, and are incredible annoying and uncomfortable. However, one upside was that it has Office 2000 installed in it, and I got it to be a writing machine. Noting all of these items, I immediately proceeded to reboot, and run my Ubuntu Live CD, so I could install it.

(edit: I have the mouse working!  yay!)

no.

The CD drive does not work. Also, I cannot get it to recognize our external DVD drive. To that goal, I have been working on a way to install it without any external appliances.  I have tried several methods, and cannot get any of them to work.  I almost got one to work, I was running a Ubuntu installation from grub, but it needed to download the files, and could not connect to the internet, for some reason.  I am currently asking around in Ubuntu Forums, and I hope I can get some help soon.

… time passes …

I managed to get networking hooked up, and downloaded the iso at 800KB/s, instead of Charlie’s 54KB/s.  I did it from my original machine, and am transferring the file, now.  Now, all I need to do is figure out how to boot off of an iso.

Any thoughts/help?

Linux Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

This post will be updated as events occur.

1:26 p.m.: almost done downloading .iso file.

1:28: done downloading. took 22 minutes for download of 700MB file, at an avg speed of 553.98MB/s

1:34: Booted .iso file in 15GB VM machine. installing now. used entire HDD, Guided. currently: 23% installed

1:40: 50% installed.

1:46: 70% installed.

1:52: 94% installed.

1:57: Done installing. Rebooting now.

Notes so far: The install was pretty much identical to 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon, except there was an artsy background image of a heron. If you have installed Gutsy before, Hardy should not be a problem.

1:59: starting up…

2:02: booted successfully. Logging in… Done!

It looks identical to Gutsy, except it has a wallpaper of a heron. Already noticed some additional programs in the System tab. don’t quite know what all of them are.

Well, that was the installation.  I shall continue to test it, and post a review in a day or two, with some screenshots.

Here we go…

Okay, I am going to begin a learning experience, that will benefit both me, and you.   I am going to install  Ubuntu’s new version, 8.04 Hardy Heron, in a Virtual Machine.  I will write it as it happens, and we will see if it can live up to it’s amazing hype.

While you’re waiting, here is an interesting article about Hardy Heron, which I enjoyed, and learned a lot from.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 bug.

I have recently discovered a flaw in FF3b5: It crashes on some Flash apps, especially the more demanding ones, such as Pandora Internet Radio, and such. Fortunately, since Firefox saves all of your tabs in the event of a crash such as that, it is not that big of a problem, I just open the program again, and, if I really need/want the troublesome flash app, and it crashes several more times, I will use FF2 to open the page. I use FF2 for Pandora, now.

Charlie.

I think I am going to name my “new” lappy “Charlie.” Charlie is the name of one our dogs. He showed up on our doorstep one day, skinny, and injured. I thought that fit well with the laptop. It showed up in the garage one day, it was old, and slow, and lacks a power cord. Oh, on that topic, I purchased a power cord for it, for about $30. it should arrive next Monday-Wednesday. Plus, a RAM slot in another, barely-working laptop that we have, was damaged, and the card would not stay in, so I put it in Charlie, since it was compatible. Also, Dad found a compatible 108.11 G 54Mbs PCI wireless card, and I will use that. I just hope the power cord finally gets here, and I don’t figure out that the laptop does not actually work.

Oh, and, next week is our last week of school! Yay!

Change, Wonderful Change!

I am testing out a new theme for my blog, the other one was a little noisy.  Tell me what you think!

Facebook IM: Review.

Facebook finally came out with it’s long-awaited IM service.  Within a few hours, I had held conversations with 3 friends, 2 of which I had never before had any sort of IM chat with, ever.  The entire application is in the form of a little bar at the bottom of the window.  it has a icon for your notifications, and an icon indicating how many people are currently online.  you click the icon, and it shows you who is online.  click the appropriate person, and a little windows pops up, allowing you to chat with them. This window is ebmedded in the page, and so if you navigate away from it, it closes.  However, it can pop-out, and become a seperate window, with a slightly easier interface.  The concept is ingenious, and the convience is incredible, but the interface is lousy.  I use Pidgin for Myspace IM and Gtalk, and I will add Facebook IM when it is available on Pidgin, but, until then, I will just have to suffer with the need to have a browser windows open, coupled with a lousy-looking and feeling interface, and no transfer capability whatsoever.

If you are not viewing the window, and someone says something, no alert comes up in any form.  That is really annoying, especially for me, as a multi-tasker.  I like to talk to people, and then go to another desktop on Linux, and do something else, while I am chatting with someone.  with every other IM program, my icon that represents that open window, on my snazzy dock, will bounce up and down, twirl, and a tinny spotlight appear under it (the equivalent of the application in the start bar flashing on Windows).  that does not happen, so I have to keep looking back at it to see if someone has said something.  Also, it is incredibly slow.  it takes a significant amount of time for a person’s message to show up on the other person’s screen, and therefore the conversation takes a lot longer, and I have a fast internet connection.  Also, it crashed while I was using it.  The application froze, a window came up, saying it could not connect to Facebook IM, and I could not load my facebook home page, back on my main Firefox window.  I could load other pages, however.  Eventually, it reconnected, and the first message, a paragraph long, displayed 3 times, the second message, a “yes” repeated twice, and the third message that I typed immediately before the fluke, appeared only once.  Also, I was typing, immediately after that, and my friend said something, so I erased what I was about to say, and was about to type something else, when I realized that Facebook had interjected a little smiley, without me doing anything, and sent it. ugh…

In conclusion, my analysis of this application, is that it is a wonderful concept, but could easily be a LOT better.  I give this 3 stars.

Enjoy… or not.

Another Reason Linux trumps Windows any day!

I ran across this article on Cnet today:

“Comparisons between two mass Javascript injection attacks suggest they may be related, according to a security company. The latest attack has compromised various sites including one United Nations and several UK government sites with links to malicious servers.

On Tuesday Websense reported seeing distinct similarities between attacks staged earlier this month and over the weekend. Specifically, they cite the use of the same tool to execute the attack being resident on the malicious server. Last summer various groups used the MPACK toolkit to propagate a similar series of Javascript injections.

Javascript injections are browser attacks and require no more effort than appending a script tag to the end of the URL. If a legitimate site is vulnerable to script injection, an attacker can add a script tag to the Web-facing page of the site so that subsequent views will automatically download whatever content is within the script tag. Often the script tag contains calls out to a malicious server.

A user need only stumble upon a compromised site to become infected. In this case, when viewing a compromised site, the injected Javascript loads a file named 1,js. The file is located on a malicious server, which then attempts to execute eight different exploits targeting Microsoft applications.

As of Tuesday, two other files named McAfee.htm and Yahoo,php were no longer active.

A quick review by CNET News.com found that travel and academic sites continue to host the injected Javascript code.”

Yes, the virus was inserted through a vulnerability through the browser/site, and not Windows, but that is not the point I am trying to make here.  The key phrase in this story is ” attempts to execute eight different exploits targeting Microsoft applications.”  As I have mentioned before, one of the biggest reasons that viruses are less common on Linux systems, besides the fact that the OS itself is significantly more secure, is that pretty much all viruses designed these days are for Windows, and, recently for Macs. I use Ubuntu Linux, as you know if you have spent 2 minutes on this blog.  I have never gotten a virus.  Admittedly, I have not used Ubuntu that long, but In the amount of time that I have used Ubuntu, I would, at the rate I caught viruses on Windows, through AVG, have probably 7-10 on here by now.  I feel much safer when browsing the internet, and take a lot more risks.  I know that I can safely go onto any site I want, and not suffer any ill effects, because I am invulnerable to outside attack.  I would like to point out though, just to prove that I am being fair here, that browser-specific viruses can still be caught, while on Linux.  No matter what the Operating System, a virus designed for Firefox will still penetrate Firefox.  However, there are still ways to circumvent this.  Firefox is good, because the majority of the browser-specific viruses are targeted for IE6/7.  Also, Opera is another alternative, although it might be vulnerable to some of the Firefox-specific viruses, since it uses the same plugins as it.

Note: Original Cnet.com post can be found here.

…And one more thing…

Oh, by the way, for those of you that are new to this blog, and are just starting to read through it, keep in mind that this blog is still under development.  I am a teenager, who is an aspiring blogger, and so I am learning this as I go.  I welcome constructive feedback/criticism, and ask that you provide some.

(however, any demeaning and/or spam comments will be immediately deleted.)

A few things to note.

The Weekly Funnies have been terminated due to lack of intrest.  All monthly articles have been neglected as of late.  I am fairly new to blogging, and I am not used to have to post regular articles, please bear with me.  I will try to post interesting stuff as it occurs, but for now, I cannot do the monthly articles, I think I tried to do too much, to soon.  I will try to ease into the life of a blogger, at a somewhat slower pace.  I have deleted the Pages “Family News” and “Prayer Requests”  Due to lack of intrest, relevance, and updating.  I have kept the Church Events page, and I am thinking about how to continue to post family-related posts.  I have added some items to my blogroll, including some Ubuntu rescouces.  As my sister has left, I will return to posting more regularly.