NOTE: Apparently this doesn’t run under Windows Vista. I am unable to verify that, however.

If your daily routine means that you spend much of your time behind a Windows system, yet you love the power and flexibility of a Unix-based environment, it might be frustrating not to have access to the tools and environment that you want.

Alternatively, you might want to compile some Linux/Unix software, so that it can run natively under Windows.

Cygwin is a Linux-style environment for Windows, that gives you a set of libraries, a full Linux-style command line and a package manager so you can install many of the Unix programs you might be familiar with.

I thought I would take a look at Cygwin’s latest release and show you how to install it and get up and running.

First of all, head on over to the site and download setup.exe. This is the main installer/package manager for Cygwin and by default you use it to do an internet-based install, i.e. the setup program itself will download the packages.

Once the installer is up and running, click Next to bypass the initial welcome screen. You will be given several options on how you want to obtain packages. In most cases, Install from Internet is fine here.

Next, choose the directory to install Cygwin to on your Windows machine. This directory will become your root (/) from within the Cygwin shell.

On the next screen, choose the temporary folder where packages will be downloaded before they are installed into Cygwin. If you want, you can use a Windows temporary folder, but if you want to keep the source packages files around so you don’t have to redownload later, make it somewhere permanent.

Again, click the old Next button and choose whether you need to use a proxy. In most home computer situations, leave the defaults intact and move on.

The Installer will at this point go off and retrieve a list of the different download sites, or mirrors, available to you. Choose one geographically close to you in preference, but any of them should be fine.

Here, you need to choose the packages that you want to install. You can just leave this all as it is and move on, but if you want to install additional packages into Cygwin, follow these steps.

The categories can be either left at the Default setting, or you can choose to Install or Uninstall whole categories by clicking on the ‘recycling’ icon next to them (and the word ‘Default’).

For individual packages, expand a category and find the package you want. To install or uninstall it, add a check under the ‘Binary’ and/or ‘Source’ columns to grab what you want.

Once you’re done choosing packages, click Next yet again to move on. You can always come back to this stage later by re-running the installer to add or remove packages.

Download and installation now takes place. Depending on the speed of your machine and how much you’ve asked to download, this could take a while.

Once the installation is finished, pick your Desktop and Start menu shortcut options and Finish.

Finally - that’s the installation done! You can access Cygwin through the shortcuts you just made, or by browsing to the directory you installed it in and launching cygwin.bat.

You will be presented with a bash shell, just as on Linux, and all of the Cygwin packages you installed should now be available for use.

You can also access Windows programs and files through /cygdrive/[Windows drive letter].

And there you have it - a Linux compatible environment for your Windows machine. Cygwin isn’t really for the faint hearted, or those without Linux/Unix CLI experience, but it is a very powerful platform to bringing many features of the Unix platform to a Windows machine in a native way.

You can even run X on it.

Advance warning: While this application does look like a cool program, I haven’t been able to get it to actually work (everything is fine up until typing flickr:/// in Nautilus), on either Fedora 8 or Ubuntu Hardy. There have been reports of it working on older distros, for example you might have more luck if you are still running Ubuntu Edgy.

I’ll leave this tutorial up in the hope that it is useful to someone, but I can’t say that this will work for you, because I have had no luck at all. Try it at your own risk.

While this program is fairly old and hasn’t been updated in a while, it’s a pretty neat concept if you’re into photo sharing site Flickr.

What Gnickr does is that it gives you access to Flickr through your filesystem, so you can drag and drop files between your desktop and Flickr through Nautilus.

So, let’s install Gnickr. On my Fedora 8 system, I had to install the gnome-python2-devel package from yum in order to get Gnickr to compile. Head to the Download page and grab the tarball of the latest release.

Once you’ve got that, extract it and open a terminal into the directory where it has been extracted.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
$ make
[[become root]]
# make install

On my test system, I had the issue that Gnickr’s FlickrLib installation wasn’t getting put in the right Python directory, which meant it wasn’t working. If you get errors at the next stage, you might also need to try this:

# ln -s /usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/flickrlib.py /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages

Once you’re installed, you need to complete one final step, which is to authorise Gnickr to access your Flickr account. In the terminal (but not as root anymore), run this:

$ gnickr-auth.py

You’ll then be sent to Flickr in your browser to give Gnickr access.

Once that’s done, go back to the window on your desktop and Complete Authorisation. One more step to complete is to manually quit Nautilus, so that it loads back up and is ready to access Flickr. Your desktop and any File Browser windows open will disappear briefly.

$ killall nautilus

Now, to access your Flickr account through Gnickr, go to any File Browser window. Press Ctrl+L to bring up the location bar and enter flickr:/// to start browsing Flickr.

If you’re brand new to Ubuntu, or Linux, many concepts will be alien to you and whilst it is pretty simple to pick it up after a while, you may be left in the dark when things differ from how Windows works.

One of the key differences between the two is how you install software. With terms like package and repository flying around, it can be a challenge to know where to start to get some new software downloaded and installed.

For this reason, I’ve put together a two-sided printable guide which explains, in very simple and easy-to-understand terms, how to install most software in Ubuntu.

Click the image below to download it as a PDF file.

It is also available in two alternative formats:

• Source OpenDocument Text format
• HTML format (for online viewing)

In true open source and open content style, the printable guide is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported licence. This means you have the right to adapt and build upon it, provided that you credit FOSSwire (our logo and link should be fine!) and allow others to do the same to your versions too!

In fact, we’d love people to help us, particularly with translating this guide into other languages. It would be great if this information was available to every new Ubuntu user, regardless of where they are from and what language they speak!

If you want to do a translation, I suggest you download the OpenDocument Text version, do the business and then email it to me - peter at fosswire.com - and I will put it up here on FOSSwire.

Translations

• Spanish / Español

Finally, it would be great if you spread the word about this new guide - feel free to download and share this among your Linux newbie friends, put it up on your website as well, or just link to us so that the word gets out that help is at hand.

The WordPress team have announced the release of WordPress 2.6, the latest version of the popular open source blogging software.

It has only been a few months since the last major version update, 2.5 was released back in March, and this release was actually pushed out ahead of schedule according to the team.

The new release of WordPress adds many new features, including:

• Post revisioning - save multiple versions of a post while you are editing, compare and roll back at any time.
• New ‘Press This’ functionality for making a blog post directly from something you find on the web.
• Support for Gears to speed up blogging on slower connections.
• A new ‘theme preview’ function, so you can test out new blog themes without committing to applying them.

Find out more and watch a video detailing the new features on the announcement blog post.

The new WordPress 2.6 release can be obtained from the official download page.

Traditionally, Gentoo Linux has been a distribution designed more towards the more experienced Linux user, perhaps the ‘power user’, if you will.

Its source-based package management and offering the user complete control over the system installation and configuration have meant that traditionally, it can be difficult to approach.

Having myself tried and failed to install Gentoo in the past, I thought I would take the recently released 2008.0 Live CD for a spin, and see what the installation process is like, and how easy it is to use and understand. So here goes.

You get started like any other Live CD - throw it in the drive, reboot and press Enter to boot in. Before the GUI even arrives, you’ll be asked to pick a keyboard layout to use for the live CD, then eventually you will be greeted with this GDM login screen.

There’s an autologin set here, so you just have to wait a few seconds for the live user to be logged in. Gentoo now uses Xfce as the default GUI environment, so it will load up (fast, as it always seems to be).

As expected, this is a fully usable Gentoo system at this point, albeit running Live, so of limited utility. A fair selection of packages are installed, included Firefox 2.0.0.14, in a ‘Bon Echo’ branded guise.

Still, we’re interested in the installation procedure. Conveniently on the desktop is an installer shortcut. Actually there are two - a command-line based installer, and the graphical GTK+ version. I’ll be using the latter.

There’s no introduction or anything. As soon as you double-click the installer, you’re thrown straight in at a partitioning screen. Provided you have a clean disk and don’t mind Gentoo monopolising your hard drive, it’s simple to click the Recommend Layout button for a one-click solution to this screen.

It does, however, give its power user base the ability to fully control how Gentoo will inhabit their hard drives.

Click Next at this point and you are right away doing mount points for those partitions you just set up (and any others you want too). This is usually saved for the tail end of distro installations, but the way that the Gentoo installer works means that it will mount all of these partitions for you in the live distro too for the install, so it is done at this point.

You don’t get an awful lot of confirmation, so pretty much as soon as you hit Next, those partitions will be written to disk and a few files get copied over.

Once that initial set of files gets copied, you then go back into answering questions. Personally, I don’t like this sort of do some work, then ask more questions, then do more work thing.

It reminds me of the Windows XP installation procedure - when you can never just answer questions and set it off doing its own thing, it requires constant supervision. The Gentoo install isn’t nearly as bad, but the way it works doesn’t feel very ’standard’ in comparison to more mainstream Linux distros.

From this point on, you are asked about configuring network interfaces, your root password and setting up the different users for your newly installed system.

The users module could potentially be a little confusing without a fair bit of Linux experience, as you are asked to manually fill in details such as the user’s shell, home directory and user ID. You can leave things blank for defaults, however.

The final step before the proper copying of packages happens is to choose any additional packages you need. If you want a graphical system at the end of the install, you’ll need to make sure you check at least the xfce and xorg-x11 packages.

Finally, the proper copy operation gets started. This will probably take considerable time (it did in my VM installation, at least).

Once the copy is finished, just as abruptly as it begun, you are notified that the installation is complete and you can reboot into the installed system.

Conclusion

So, how easy is this to install?

It certainly doesn’t require much specific knowledge of Gentoo or how it works, but neither is it for the faint hearted.

A significant body of previous Linux experience is expected, as you’ll be on your own with respect to key concepts, such as partitioning, packages and users.

I imagine that in a ’safe’ environment - i.e. a machine that didn’t particularly matter, someone with only intermediate Linux skills could probably get through relatively easily and progress to using the distro.

Gentoo is still very oriented towards the more experienced user and the person who likes to endlessly fiddle with and tweak their system so it works exactly how they like it and has the maximum possible performance.

I don’t remember how I fell down on installing in the past, but it certainly seems like an achievable feat for someone with some Linux experience now, and that in itself has lowered the bar to learning and using Gentoo.

They could try to make it even easier to install, but then I guess there might be complaints from those who do not want their installer to be ’simplified’ any more.

People like control over their machines.

I recently posted about using nohup to run a command, particularly on a remote machine, that keeps running even when you close the terminal or connection that started it.

Several people in the comments there also suggested GNU Screen for a similar purpose.

So, what is Screen? It describes itself as:

… a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells.

Basically, among other things, it can create multiple ‘virtual terminals’ that run inside a single physical terminal or connection, and offers you additional features, such as resuming sessions later and basic copy and paste.

What we’re interested in in the context of my other post is running commands in the background on remote machines, so I can start a command running, disconnect from SSH, but the command will stay running.

Screen, unlike Nohup, will allow me to come back later and interact directly with the terminal that I started, not just dump the results of a command to a file.

On your remote machine, start the program:

$ screen

You’ll get a brief copyright notice and such, just press Space as directed. You are now running Screen (although it won’t look any different to a normal terminal session by default).

Now, feel free to go off and start that important task. Once it’s up and running, press Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+D. Screen sends you back to your shell and you can now disconnect.

Later, when you want to come back, run:

$ screen -r

Your old session is restored! Anything you started should still be running.

Screen is a lot more powerful than just offering this feature, however, but we’ll save the rest for another day.

Finally, when you are actually done with a Screen session for good, quit it by pressing Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+\ or you can simply type exit into the terminal as normal.

[image source]

This image has set the Internet on fire. No big details yet, but the main scoop is that GNOME 3 will also have GTK 3. Going by the current release schedule, that is a year and a half from now in 2010, unless things change.

What do you think will be in GNOME 3? What would you like to see in, or out?

It’s no coincidence that Ubuntu is now the most popular distribution of Linux for desktop PCs. It is one of the easiest distributions to set up and use for day-to-day tasks.

Despite this, getting onto the ‘Linux ladder’, making your first steps into the world of Linux, can be daunting, especially without support. There are lots of books specifically targeted towards beginners and Ubuntu, and Apress’s Beginning Ubuntu Linux, by Keir Thomas and Jaime Sicam is one.

I was given a copy of the third edition of the book, which is updated to specifically cover the latest release of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron (8.04). Its 700 odd pages are designed to take you all the way from a beginner moving from a Windows environment to a pretty proficient Linux user.

I should reiterate that point - this is very much a book for switchers (or people who want to use both). Throughout the text, comparisons are made between Ubuntu features and their Windows counterparts to aid the transition. It is also possible to follow coming from a Mac environment, but there is much more focus on Windows.

The book also includes a double-sized DVD with the full Ubuntu 8.04 distribution on one side, plus many alternative versions (including Kubuntu, etc.) in .iso image format on the other.

Structurally, the book is divided into eight parts, starting with an introduction to the world of Linux, progressing through installing Ubuntu and getting started with it, and then moving on to in-depth coverage of the command line, multimedia, many of the included applications and finally maintenance and optimisation of your system and appendices.

Introduction and Background

The first chapter gives a nice gentle introduction; it tells you in basic terms what an operating system is and how Linux differs from Windows. Even if you barely know anything, you should be able to follow.

Right after that, there is a pretty detailed and comprehensive ‘history and politics lesson’, explaining how Linux came about, GNU (and all the politics there) and the crucial concept of different Linux distributions.

The second chapter is a lot of historical information to digest for a complete beginner and it is tempting to skip it, but if you do, you will miss the explanation of how Ubuntu fits into the wider Linux picture and the concept of different distributions, which is critical knowledge.

This section is in depth, however, and is interesting to read, even if you’ve been using Linux for some time.

Installation

Installing Ubuntu is probably the biggest hurdle to many people. As easy as you can make an operating system installation procedure, you still have to have pretty solid computer knowledge to perform one.

A whole part of the book is dedicated to installation. Key concepts such as disk partitioning are explained well, but there is at this point a (largely unavoidable) assumption that you are already proficient with the management of a Windows system.

One element of the Installation section that could be improved is making the different installation options clearer in the step-by-step installation process.

For example, if you’re not aiming for a dual boot setup (Windows and Ubuntu co-existing), there are a lot of steps that are specific to dual booting, and you sort of have to filter the instructions relevant to you to get through the process.

Overall, though, the Installation part of the book is well detailed, such that with a little additional support, a proficient Windows user can end up with an installed copy of Ubuntu and get on to the rest of the book relatively easily.

Getting Started

The next task for the Linux newbie is getting to grips with the unfamiliar interface. Beginning Ubuntu Linux gives you a good rundown of the differences between Windows (or OS X) and the GNOME interface, including annotated screenshots and tables.

There is a slight concern in my mind that depending on the level of expertise of the reader, rushing in at this point to introducing concepts such as virtual desktops might be a bit too much to take in at once, but on the other hand, it would be difficult to fit that section elsewhere in the book.

Getting Up and Running

This part of the book focuses on getting things working post-install, such as getting connected to the internet, including wireless networking.The problem I have with this section is that it does jump quite noticeably in difficulty level.

Having had a gentle ride so far, it is as if you are suddenly thrown in at the deep end.

For example, using Ndiswrapper to configure Wi-Fi cards not natively supported by Ubuntu seems way beyond the level explored thus far.

While network access is quite fundamental to Ubuntu being useful, I can’t help thinking this would have better been saved for later.

The Command Line

It is assumed in some parts of the book that you want to take Ubuntu further than just using it and delve somewhat into the more technical side. Of course, while it is possible to skip whole sections on this, important concepts might be missed out.

The introduction to the shell in this part is well written. Everything you need to understand to do basic tasks at the command line is adequately explained, without throwing too much detail in too early. Again, we’re back to a gentle pace.

In itself, this section is actually an excellent beginner’s guide to any Linux CLI and gives a good solid framework of knowledge to learn about the more techie side of Ubuntu.

Of course, whether this section is of utility or interest, or at the right difficulty level, depends a lot on the reader.

Applications and Multimedia

For most of the rest of the book, you drop back down a difficulty level to being more of a consumer, focusing on multimedia and many of the productivity applications that Ubuntu provides.

The multimedia section discusses the legal issues of proprietary codecs well and its step-by-step tutorials makes it easy for users to enjoy media content in many different formats.

The applications that are covered are the OpenOffice.org productivity suite and the Evolution email and groupware client.

Each of OOo’s applications are covered in a good amount of detail, often comparing to similar features of Microsoft Office where appropriate. Again, these sections alone would make a formidable beginner’s reference to OOo, especially for those migrating from or working in conjunction with MS Office.

The same in depth coverage is given to Evolution, with the viewpoint of using it as a replacement for Outlook. Again, there is reference to Outlook, equivalent features and focus on integrating with users of other email systems.

I can’t really argue with these chapters. They provide an impressive go-to reference for OOo and Evolution and I can certainly see them being useful in easing the transition from a Windows/Office system.

Management, Optimisation and Appendices

Rather curiously, installing and removing software is left for this section, close to the end (but frequently referenced to elsewhere in the text). Again, the content is well written and all necessary concepts are explained perfectly well, but the placement of that section seems a little, well, bizarre.

Also detailed here are backups, connecting to remote machines as well as user and group management and more.

Finally, the appendices include a glossary of bash commands, how to get help as well as how to run the other versions of Ubuntu that ship on the other side of the DVD.

Overall

Beginning Ubuntu Linux is undoubtedly a good starting point for anyone with intermediate or greater Windows skills that wants to dip their toe in the Linux world.

In general, the book is detailed and comprehensive and makes a great introduction to desktop Linux and subsequently a sound reference tool.

It seems, however, to be a sort of hybrid book - as I just said, it starts with an introduction/getting started guide at the front and then suddenly switches into a reference book for much of the remainder.

A complete novice reading from cover to cover might well end up taking in too much in one go, getting confused and then giving up.

To get the most out of this title, I think you need to initially be very picky about what you read. Don’t be tempted to venture into the technical aspects, such as the command line, too quickly. Plenty of digestion time is necessary, unless you already have Linux experience and just want a refresher.

The book is a strong starting point for those who are good at Windows and want to venture into the world of Linux and I would recommend it for those people.

Again, though, it’s not necessarily to be read in a linear fashion; picking and choosing the right sections to read at the right times is important.

Full disclosure: Publisher Apress approached me asking me to review this book and sent me a free review copy. Other than that, there is no affiliation or other involvement between myself or FOSSwire and Apress.

[DVD image source]

Oftentimes you’ll be in a situation where you want to run a command on a remote machine that will take a long time to complete, but you want to be able to issue the command and then log off and have that command run in the background.

There are many ways you could achieve this, perhaps by using cron or at to schedule the command to run right away. However, there is a better way.

There is a command called nohup built into both the GNU toolset, and most shells, which allows you to run a command in this way. It is so called because the command being run is executed ignoring ‘hang up’ signals, which are given when you close the terminal you started the program from.

To use this, simply prefix your command with nohup, for example:

nohup wget bigfile

This will still run in the foreground, however, meaning that you will lose the ability to use that terminal while the command is executing. In most cases, you’ll want to use the ampersand (&) to run the command in the background.

nohup wget bigfile &

Now you can log off your remote machine, or close your terminal and the command will continue running in the background.

The output and errors from the command you run with nohup are stored in a file called nohup.out in the directory where you started the command, or your home directory if for some reason that’s not possible (e.g. permissions).

[image source]

The Gentoo Project have announced the release of Gentoo Linux 2008.0.

The new release boasts an updated Live CD installer, the Live CD now using Xfce by default, vastly improved hardware support and many updated packages to bring the core system up to date.

For those new, or who haven’t heard of the distribution, Gentoo is generally aimed towards the more experienced Linux user. While it does feature its Portage package management system, Gentoo puts emphasis on building software from source to fully optimise the system and squeeze as much performance as possible from your machine.

You can download many versions of the new release from the official download page.

Many financial applications, such as KMyMoney, can be very useful, however there is often quite a learning curve associated with them.

Buddi is an open source personal budgeting application for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X that is designed to keep things very simple, yet still be usable for the average home user to keep track of their finances.

Installation

Buddi is written in Java, and thus needs you to have a working installation of Java on your system to run. Whether you have Java and how to get it differs depending on your operating system. Mac users should be fine, Windows users can grab an installer, and this guide should help Linux users.

Once you’ve got Java, you can get the appropriate download for your system from the Downloads page. Here on Kubuntu Linux, I get the .deb and double-click it to install (which actually does Java as well for me if I don’t have it, but your results might differ).

Interface Impressions

On the Linux platform (and possibly elsewhere too), Buddi unfortunately sports a rather generic, and ugly, Java interface. This makes integration with the rest of your desktop poor. This is a symptom of the way it is developed and its cross platform Java nature, however, and something that can be difficult to avoid.

The main interface is divided into three simple tabs for accounts, budgets and reports. Unlike some competing programs, it’s a nice simple setup that is easy to digest and understand.

The first two tabs also work as you expect and it’s obvious how to use them. Aside from some commands being hidden away on the Edit menu, where it’s not immediately obvious to look, these two modules work as advertised and it’s really easy to get to grips with them.

On the subject of those Edit menu commands, it would be much better from an interface point of view to use a toolbar, with graphical buttons for the most frequently used commands, like Create Budget Category, for example.

The final tab, for reports, however, came across to me as working in a bit of a confusing way.

You select a report to view from a relevant drop-down box, but then there is an unnerving delay when it’s not clear whether that action worked, or didn’t. Turns out what is happening is that your web browser is being loaded, to display the report as an HTML file.

The reports are a good way of getting your data back out of the application and present the information in a clear way, but I think it wouldn’t hurt here to make it more clear that your browser would be invoked, and that there might be some delay.

A further criticism, which might be more to do with my Java setup, is that my default browser wasn’t loaded for some reason, instead it loaded in a different browser installed on the system.

Functionality

Buddi isn’t trying to do everything. Far from that, Buddi tries to be simple and is even described as being aimed at those with little financial experience.

Functionality wise, though, it offers enough to do basic financial recording and reporting. Transactions can be performed on your accounts, allowing you to keep track of what’s going in and coming out of your account.

These transactions can be linked to Budget categories and then allow you to track what you planned against what’s actually being spent in each category.

Speaking of those Budget categories, it’s trivial to add custom incoming and outgoing categories of different types to personalise your records and ease the process of tracking your personal data.

As I’ve already mentioned, the Reports are also good, giving you a nice overview of how well reality is matching with your budgeting, and allowing you to drill down into the categories and transactions to see where everything is going.

One final thing to say is you have to remember to save your accounts to a file, and then manually use File > Open when you relaunch the program to load in your saved data. It would be nice here to have Buddi remember your last file, and automatically open it.

Overall

Buddi doesn’t try to be too clever or complicated, and I personally think it succeeds in offering a simple solution for people who want to do basic personal budgeting.

While I do have some minor interface concerns, I can’t emphasise enough how simple Buddi is to use. Even if there are quirks, it’s likely that most people will quickly learn how to master the application given a bit of time.

If you want a budgeting solution a bit lighter than the others (and don’t mind braving a distinctly Java-y interface on Linux), Buddi is a win.

Getting music from a CD (that you own, of course) to your favourite media player, such as Amarok, isn’t always a clear process under KDE.

Amarok itself doesn’t have the facility to rip CDs, as with many other media players, so using an external program is sometimes the only option. KAudioCreator is one such ripping program.

To install, you should be able to search for it in your package manager. While you’re there, you might also want to snag flac, libvorbis and/or lame for encoding into FLAC, Ogg Vorbis and MP3 respectively.

Pop in an audio disc, and load up KAudioCreator.

If this is the first time, you’ve used the program, you’ll need to first head into the configuration and set up an encoder. You’ll be reminded of this through a dialogue box.

Go to Settings > Configure KAudioCreator.

Under the Encoder tab, you’ll want to pick which format you want your CD extracted to (make sure you’ve installed the right packages for your chosen encoder). Pick the one you want.

While you’re here, you might want to also choose the output folder for ripped tracks, under Encoded File Location. I’ve chosen to set a prefix of ~/Music.

Now you can get started ripping. The interface is a little… erm, unique, and takes some getting used to.

To simply rip all the tracks on the disc, choose Select All Tracks at the bottom of the interface, and then click the Gear icon in the toolbar to get started. Then check out the Jobs tab to watch the status of the rip and encode.

To rip only selected tracks, instead of choosing Select All Tracks, click each track individually to place a tick mark next to its name.

That’s it! Once the rip is complete, you’ll have a set of files.

Free Software Foundation chairman and all around computer freedom guru Richard Stallman has written an article for the BBC entitled ‘It’s not the Gates, it’s the bars’.

But Gates didn’t invent proprietary software, and thousands of other companies do the same thing. It’s wrong, no matter who does it.

Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and the rest, offer you software that gives them power over you. A change in executives or companies is not important. What we need to change is this system.

That’s what the free software movement is all about. “Free” refers to freedom: we write and publish software that users are free to share and modify.

We do this systematically, for freedom’s sake; some of us paid, many as volunteers. We already have complete free operating systems, including GNU/Linux.

If you’ve read up on Stallman’s views on the issue of proprietary software, most of that article simply reiterates the points he makes about the perils of proprietary software and how free software is meant to put the user back in control and give them freedom.

In a sense, it’s just the same old mantra being regurgitated, but using Bill Gates’ recent departure from an active role at Microsoft as a reason to bring up the issue.

I did think it was interesting, though, that Stallman has got an article on the BBC News Technology website. The overwhelming majority of computer users have no idea of the concept of free software (at least in the way that RMS means it) and using a reputable and very popular news source to get his message out.

If you’re new to the FOSS world and haven’t read Stallman’s views on this issue, it’s definitely worth a read to get his and the FSF’s view. I don’t for a minute expect everyone to agree on everything, and it obviously doesn’t necessarily reflect the viewpoints of the whole community. There’s a wide spectrum of differing views on whether proprietary software is a good thing and motivations for building and using free software.

For those of us who are familiar, I thought it would be interesting to point out the use of this channel to get the message out, as it’s certainly something I don’t remember seeing before.

[image source] in public domain

Cloc is a Perl script written to allow you to do just that. Download the script, and then from a command line, you simply pass it a directory of source code, or a single file if you wish.

$ perl cloc.pl /path/to/code

Cloc is more than just a tool for counting the number of lines in the file, it is more clever than that. Cloc detects the programming language if it can, and then shows you the number of blank lines, code and comments of each file.

With a single file, Cloc might give output similar to this:

As I’ve mentioned, however, Cloc’s real strong point is when you point it at a directory or several directories of source code.

Quite frankly, I think this is a pretty indispensable tool for any programmer interested in getting statistics on their code, especially when you want an overview of the whole project.

Cloc can be downloaded from here. The Perl script version should work on any operating system where you have a working installation of Perl. Windows users can download the pre-built exe as well.

Many of us have been in this scenario - you’re on the move, using a random WiFi connection that you can get. You want to browse around to all your favourite sites, including ones where you log in over normal HTTP, but you’re not entirely convinced of the security of the connection, so you don’t.

If you have access to pretty much any server running SSH where you can log in, you actually can set up a secure tunnel to route all of your data through using nothing more than what you already have. Kind of like a very simple VPN, that you can do on the fly.

This assumes your client/laptop is running Linux, Mac OS X or another Unix-like OS where ssh is installed and on the command line. We’ll also be configuring Firefox as the browser to route traffic through the tunnel. Windows users can use PuTTY to achieve the same effect.

Set Up the Tunnel

From your terminal, log in to your SSH server with the normal command, but add -D and a port number, to set up your tunnel on that local port. Something like this:

$ ssh -D 1080 user@host

You’ll be logged in as normal, and the prompt should come up. What has also happened, however, is that your SSH client is now listening on local port 1080. Anything you tunnel through there will go securely to the SSH server, and responses sent back through that tunnel.

Before we move on to configuring Firefox to route through this, here are a few more options for that command. If you don’t want a prompt to come up, i.e. you just want to set up the tunnel and don’t need to actually interactively log in to the server, add the -N switch, like so:

$ ssh -ND 1080 user@host

Also, you can use gzip compression to speed up the transfer. Combined with no login, that is:

$ ssh -CND 1080 user@host

Configuring Firefox

Our tunnel is now up and running, and should be accepting traffic. To configure Firefox to use this tunnel, first go to Edit > Preferences and choose the Advanced section.

Under Network, click the Settings button. Choose a Manual proxy configuration.

Under SOCKS Host, put localhost and port 1080. Leave it on SOCKS v5.

Say OK to that, close Preferences and now use something like Check IP to confirm that your IP address now appears to the outside world as your SSH server’s IP address. This tells you that your traffic is being tunnelled and you can now do anything you wish without fear of snooping (provided you trust your SSH server and its connection, of course).

Finishing Up

When you’re back home or you’ve closed the SSH session, make sure to go back to that dialogue in Firefox and choose No proxy (or whatever it was set to before). Otherwise, you won’t be loading any pages any time soon.

Speaking of which, when you’re done, go back to that SSH session in your terminal window and hit Ctrl+C to drop the connection and close your tunnel down.

This is a really simple way to securely browse on untrusted connections and the fact that it doesn’t require any special setup on the SSH server makes it particularly easy when you just happen to find a moment when you need to use it.

Quick, easy and gets the job done. You can’t ask for much more than that.

[image source]