One of the beautiful things about using Linux these days is the ability to play music of almost any sort under one player – the fantastic amaroK player/organizer. My laptop running SUSE 10.0 currently shows 6,218 tracks in my collection. These are songs I’ve collected, downloaded, ripped, and recorded over the past eight years. Most are encoded with MP3, while some are pure WAV. The newer ones are created using the OGG format.

Over the years, I’ve used many Windows and Linux based rippers to encode my CD and LP collections. Up until I found KAudio Creator, I hadn’t been entirely happy with the features I was finding. Either the ripper was too complicated or it didn’t provide enough flexibility. KAudioCreator – shipped with SUSE 10.0 – provides exactly the functionality I need. This short tutorial should provide you with enough information to rip your collection onto your system for convenient listening.

Well...okay. It isn't actually iTunes running Native in Linux. I just thought the title sounded catchy. :) My parental unit called this evening and asked if I knew if iTunes would be supported on her system. (She's running SuSE 9.2 still - need to upgrade her...)

Sure enough, it appears to be so. I guess that means she'll join the ranks of the oh so trendy who have an iPod. Next thing you know, she'll be buying an XBox...

Okay, I've been working with Picasa - the new(ish) application from Google to get my pictures online. They are located on this page for you to view. It is an awesome app!

Just this weekend, Novell released OpenSUSE 10.1 to the world. It was a little late, but we were still very excited. This is my initial review of the product.

The Operating System - now released under the OpenSUSE name - decends from the SuSE distribution of Linux. Novell - who owns the SUSE brand - has been releasing SUSE as both an official boxed release and as a community edition, labeled OpenSUSE. At this time, only the OpenSUSE version is available.

I downloaded the new version from www.opensuse.org and created a DVD ISO from the five CDs using this script, which I saw on the SUSE mailing list. I then used the DVD to upgrade an Athlon XP 2400 machine I have which was running SuSE 9.2 and was ready for a new version. The upgrade process took some work, as there were many applications which needed to be manually changed in YaST prior to the actual upgrading of the files. Once complete, however, I had a working system.

Comparing Database Counts

Recently my company did an upgrade of a vendor-supplied product from one version to another. The new version includes some schema changes to the database. Just to be safe, we decided it prudent to create a new database on our SQL Server 2000 system and use the vendor's migration tool to transform the data. As there was some customization done to the original source database, we wanted to be sure we had all the rows copied. It took a bit of research to find this but here's an example of how to write a quick and dirty query in MS SQL Server to compare table-by-table two databases.

Okay, there has to be a first post. This is my first post on my new website.

Windows is more secure than Linux….or is it?

It was announced that – according to the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team – Windows is better secured than Linux. Their website is here if you want to look at it. This information was summarized in an Information Week article with the headline, “Linux/Unix Vulnerabilities Outnumber Microsoft Windows' 3 To 1.”

The article goes on to say that, “Linux/Unix accounted for a whopping 2,328 vulnerabilities, about 45 percent of the 5,198 total. Windows, on the other hand, sported just 812 vulnerabilities during the year, said US-CERT, or 16 percent of the total.”

Using K3B to Burn Bootlegs

So you want to know how to burn a bootleg Audio CD using K3B?

You’ve come to the right article. There are several sources of information on how to burn data and standard audio CD’s using K3B, the very cool CD/DVD utility for Linux systems. Novell has one such article at their Cool Solutions site. Others are very easy to find. However, burning a bootleg CD of a concert can seem a little tricky. Here’s how to do it.

Suse 10 review

I have been a Linux user for almost two years now. I think it is about time I put together a review of my favorite distribution. Suse 10.0 was released to the world on October 6th. I got my copy a few days after, having purchased the boxed DVD directly from Novell. I have been using SuSE consistently as my distribution since 9.1 back in 2004. Previously, I hadn't been able to consider any distribution as ready for prime-time on a desktop since there were too many features missing or difficult for a user like me. (See the article on how hotplug was enhanced.)

Since July, I have been using SuSE 9.3 – the FTP version - on a Dell laptop purchased with Windows XP Home. I setup 9.3 as a dual-boot and had little issue getting everything working, Wanting the latest, I was eager to purchase the new 10.0 when it came out. Instead of dual-booting, however, I removed the Windows XP partition and installed everything fresh. Unlike many reviews, I won't go into the installation except to say that everything went as expected. It took about two hours, including downloading new updates and multimedia enhancements not shipped with the distribution. Another few hours of tweaking KDE to my liking and I currently have 10 running. So far there have been no issues.

I posted this on Usenet a while back. It is a collection of links to various "newbie" Linux sites. I hope it is helpful.

Desktop Linux dot com - http://www.desktoplinux.com/ - this site has some
good informaiton for beginners.

Tux Magazine - http://www.tuxmagazine.com/ - this was supposed to be a
print magazine, but turned into a PDF download. Great stuff for people
like me who haven't a clue what they're doing.

Linux Planet has some cool articles...