Back to Newsletters KEYWORDS= Davrom Consulting Newsletter - Issue # 51 - Dated: 12 Jun 2012 From the desk of David Clark In this newsletter I have focussed on an end-user desktop approach in the articles just to help show that Linux is a wonderful desktop alternative to the other paid for versions out there - we won't mention names. Support for me here has been quite varied these past few months since the last newsletter and ranges from working with SnapGears (there are still SnapGears available if you need them), Cyberoam firewall routers, keeping old SCO servers going, network performance diagnosing, e-mail shenanigans - you name it. I would like to thank the reader for their time in reading this newsletter. David.M.Clark UNIX Quote In honour of my son's t-shirt: There's no place like 127.0.0.1 Gramps This is more a personal use of Linux article rather than a business one but demonstrates yet again the practical end-user use of Linux as a desktop. I have used Linux as my personal desktop since 2000 and before that ran a UNIX graphical desktop on SCO Unixware 7 "Gemini".... (and before that a text desktop). In the past two years I have begun recording my family tree and finding myself now the amateur genealogist for the greater part of my family. The decision came on what to use to record all of the family members and preferably with a feature rich product that didn't cost an arm and a leg. This is when I found Gramps. Gramps is a free open source genealogy recording database that runs on Linux (also has Mac and Windows versions) and as I have started to use this product over time I have begun to truly appreciate the rich features of this light weight database. Gramps allows you to incorporate photos, documents, maps and other sources into its setup and the most powerful feature for me was its Web Report facility. The Web Report allows you to generate a complete website of the family tree to a local directory on your PC and naturally being into I.T web technology, I am running a complete "family access only" website which is updated from a simple script I wrote (essentially using rsync) for each time I change something in Gramps. It also has all of the export setup with features like GEDCOM compatibility and conforms to the latest genealogy standards. I particularly love the ability to generate individual ancestor reports in PDF format for family members as well. At the time of writing this article Gramps version 3.4.0 is the current version and with a large fan base the on-going development is something well worth being part of. For more information on Gramps: http://www.gramps-project.org Desktop usage In light of the article on Gramps, here is a quick list of desktop products that I have used (some for a very long time) to demonstrate alternatives to the Microsoft products (Mac users will overlap with some of these no doubt): Browsers: Firefox, Google-Chrome, Konqueror E-mail Client: Thunderbird, Kmail Office product: Libre Office (Open Office), KOffice PDF document creation: Libre Office Graphics: Scribus, KPaint Instant Messaging: Pidgin, Skype Music Players: Clementine, Jajuk, Amarok, Songbird Sound recording: Audacity Virtual hosts: VirtaulBox, VMware CD/DVD Media burner: K3b, xRoast Remote Desktop: rdesktop, vncviewer, xrdp (server) Text editing: vim, kate, gedit Text to speech: festival These are the major products I have used and still use and there are a host of Linux alternatives to these as well and all run on Linux across the board regardless of your choice of Linux flavour (Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Mint, Debian). From the Trenches Some comic or not so comic relief from the support days gone by. I recall having a front seat window view of a flurry of activity from our office in 1991 with a large lot next to our building filled with cars that were behind a large bricked enclosure. None of us thought much of it seeing cars being driven in as there were a large number of car dealerships in the area. We all assumed it was just a holding area. Some very fancy cars were in being brought in at that. The buzz came one morning when the police were everywhere retrieving these stolen cars. Talk about hiding something in plain sight. We only had limited access to the UUNet (that which came before the Internet) but I sometimes wonder if we would have wised up earlier to what the yard full of cars really was. A quick Google or browsing to a regular news/police information web site and we may have been the ones to help the police get all the stolen cars back to their owners. Tech Tip Accessing other desktops from Linux such as Linux and Windows can be done using common and often default installed products, rdesktop and vncviewer. The access a remote desktop running the RDP protocol (common to Microsoft desktops): rdesktop -g 80% 192.168.1.1 or if it is a port forward through the Internet: rdesktop -g 80% mail.somedomain.com:3391 The above examples show using the -g option which gives you an eighty percent usage of your existing screen display. Note that to access an alternative port rather than the default 3389, you simply add the port number to the remote hostname/IP address separated with the colon (being :3391 in the example shown). For servers/PCs running VNC access protocols, using vncviewer from the command line: vncviewer 192.168.1.1 or vncviewer mail.davrom.com:5902 again note the use of the remote port number if it is not the VNC defaults. There are geometry settings but for VNC I normally find the default screen offers a fairly large screen work area. Back to Newsletters 
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