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Showing posts from January, 2008

Time for a laser printer?

I'm thinking about buying a laser printer as a complement to my ink printer. The reason is that laser printers costs less per printed page. I'm only interested in a black and white printer and will still use my ink printer for color prints. I have invested some time to look around among the cheapest printers for a around €100. All manufactures ships their printers with a toner filled to something between 25% and 50% of what a new toner includes. An a new toner costs close to the same as a the printer. The smallest difference between a new toner and the printer was about €10. That is ridiculous. So far I have found one manufacture that ships a full toner cassette with new printers ant that is Canon. Unfortunately Canon is not the best supplier to support Linux and Ubuntu with printer drivers. Linux printing database list the Canon LBP 2900 as not supported. But in mater of fact Canon say they support Linux to this printer. So who is telling the truth? After some googling I hav

Nokia acquires Trolltech

As all of you may already be aware of, Nokia want to acquire Trolltech . The Norwegian company Trolltech are behind Qt-toolkit, which is used for KDE, and the mobile platform Qtopia . My big question is what this will mean for Linux on mobile phones? Will Nokia start shipping Linux-phones? Is this a response to Googles Android -platform? Nokias Internet-tablets N770, N800, and N810 uses Gtk/Gnome as their toolkit. Will Nokia continue to be involved in Gnome? What will this mean for the Maemo community, which is the platform for the tablets? A lot of questions, and only time can tell the answers.

Three PostgreSQL books

I have for a long time been in the MySQL camp when it is about Open Source databases. It may depend on several different reasons, such as I am a Swede, it filled my needs etc. Of course, I have been using PostgreSQL at different occasions but not much. This fall we started a project at work were we use GIS-data (geographic-data). MySQL only support a flat surface and can only do geometric queries using boxes, not arbitrary surfaces. That was not good enough for us. We took a look at PostgreSQL and its addition PostGIS . This was exactly what we needed. Today I stumbled up on a three volume( 1 , 2 , 3 ) reference guide of Postgres which is a nice complement to Postgres already terrific documentation . Best of all, take a look at the bottom of the pages with the Postgres books and you will find an online version of them.

Securing passwords

I have now walked throw all sites where I had the same password and changed them to individual passwords. Yes I know I had been a bad boy using the same password on several places. At the same time I changed password for some systems where the password was pretty old. To remember my passwords I use Revelation and the complementary Revelation Gnome Taskbar app to make it easy to get a password when I need it. What I miss with Revelation is a Java application for my mobile phone which I can sync my passwords to from my Ubuntu laptop.

Kerberos and LDAP over the web

I have for several years had a kerberos/ldap Single-Sign-On (SSO) solution active on my home computer network. One part that had not been integrated is my Apache httpd web-server. I started to take a look on activate this at Christmas. It was easy to get Kerberos working for the webserver on my Ubuntu server. This assumes you have ssl working on your web-server for the area you want to password protect. Install the libapache2-mod-auth-kerb from Universe. Activate the module with the command: sudo a2enmod auth_kerb Add the following to the directory configuration in apache you want to protect using kerberos. AuthName "Realm" AuthType Kerberos KrbAuthRealms MYREALM Krb5Keytab /etc/apache2/http.keytab Require principal@MYREALM KrbServiceName HTTP/www.MYDOMAIN.org Require valid-user Change MYREALM and MYDOMAIN to values that fits you. Connect to the kerberos admin server and create a new principal and a keytab including this principal. If you use MIT Kerberos, do like this. S