Archive for 'Linux'

After praising openSUSE 10.2 in my last post, I of course ended up somewhat disappointed today … starting up my PC and lo-and-behold syslogd, klogd and most network connectivity broken. GrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrR! For example, error messages such as the following, when trying to ping an IP address:

Socket: permission denied

However, dig and smart were working in terms of network connectivity so I was able to update my system, in the hopes this would resolve the problem. However, one kernel update and a reboot later still the same problem.

Fortunately, after a more careful read of the boot message I realised the fault is with apparmor and disabled this… rebooted and all is fine. Whether I need apparmor really or not I don’t know but all is fine so far and the system is running fine again.

… well, here’s hoping that all will be ok, but I wonder what is in store with the next update.

After the the previous problems I had, I managed to completely revert KDE 3.5.7 to 3.5.5 and fixed the desktop problem after lots of time spent playing with YaST2.

Although initially a frustrating experience, I’m finding 10.2 to be another great release. I’ve even started using smart again - although the GUI is still a bit unstable when doing a channel update this always works fine in shell mode. Of course, I’ve removed the KDE and GNOME channels which seem to cause no end of problems (in fact, my GNOME installation is still dysfunctional and unusable…) so the system is now updating smoothly and remaining stable.

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Just now, I encountered an extremely frustating problem with opensuse 10.2. Having previously worked supporting SuSE Linux, I am a life-long user and fan of SuSE but 10.2 has been a bit of disappointment compared to some earlier versions.

After KDE 3.5.7 had messed up my desktop, I found myself trying to downgrade to fix the issue. Unfortunately, that didn’t go well - the same problem still after reverting back to KDE 3.5.5 and as far as I know I’d reverted all the changes.

So I decided enough messing around with smart (which I’ve had only bad experiences with so far in opensuse 10.2) and switched back to YaST. Unfortunately, both YaST and zypper were throwing up the same error message: “bad media attach point”.

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Simple File Encryption Decryption In Linux I was recently looking for a quick method of encrypting/decrypting my important files in Linux (but didn’t want to go as far as CryptFS). I chose to use OpenSSL, which has a vareity of uses and one of those includes encryption and decryption of files. It’s fairly easy to use and a passphrase is required for encrypting/decrypting a file.

A quick guide to encrypting a file:

openssl enc -des-cbc -in <filename.txt> -out <filename.enc>

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Microsoft today waved goodbye to Windows 98, 98 Second Edition and ME [Millennium Edition], despite the fact that there are still an estimated 70 million users, as the products reached their End of Support [1].

This is not the first time Windows 98 has reached End of Support, either. It was originally scheduled for End of Support in 2003, however due to protests by many users the support life was extended until 11 July 2006.

Users of Windows 98/ME will now need to upgrade to Windows XP (with at least Service Pack 2) in order to receive critical/security updates.

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