Windows vs. Mac: Which is the better alternative to Linux?

Inspired by this article ive decided to put my short opinion on the topic.

none.

To elaborate: both Windows & Mac apply restrictions, non-disclosure development methods (due to their closed-source nature ofcourse), monopoly and overall dictatorship and abusing their customers – both financially (spend a months’ salary on one OS, and half a year on a new computer so you can own the other OS…) and methodically (“do it our way or else…”(tm)). Unlike Linux, which is to say – do what you like, as you like, when you like, to whatever you like. Freedom. oh yea, and it costs as much as you would care to donate…

So really, theres no comparecement. I couldnt care less for “99% windows users world wide” (bogus percentage intended). you know why? cause even 99% of world population CAN be wrong or simply mis/uninformed. but i trust the day will come, as i believe people will come to their senses eventually and learn THEY can control their system, instead of allowing their system to control THEM. And they will embrace Linux for what it truely is.

no comparecement.

none.

Recovering lost Windows passwords

I’ve just happened to stumble across these sites, and i don’t want to forget them… i hope others might find them useful too.

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/index.html

http://www.oxid.it/cain.html

just a quick update…

I know i havent been active much lately, but thats because im very busy with work and life. I didn’t touch Archie much, and i can hardly have time for personal stuff (ie, blogging) – my time is being consumed with work and my wife, which leaves me just a couple of hours sleep a day (ive been living lately on a 3 hours sleep daily… not enough for humans…) so updating the blog or Archie seems too far at the horizon. I hope after the delivery I’ll have more free time, but people keep telling me its gonna be even worse… so we’ll see.

in anyway, just to update with my current projects – im customizing a uclibc based system for a client of mine, which is cool, and along the way, im creating a uclibc based distro with samba on it to act as a PDC for old computers. the entire size of this distro is less than 60MB and i hope to be able to produce some web configuration tool so it won’t require ssh login and textual configuration. the best option atm seems to hack the FreeNAS project html pages, but we’ll see…

In anyway, I hope someone out there is praying for the health of our baby (and us…) since the doctors are telling us conflicting statements all the time (who said its better to have more than one opinion??? :/ ) but all agree the baby might have some problems – so we’re doing all kinda checks (we’re in hospital almost daily) to see what is wrong and how it can be treated. So – keep your prayers with us…

God Bless You All.

I am going to be a father!

Today i was told we (Victoria and I) are going to have a baby girl. a GIRL. so much for all those people telling me “i know you’re going to have a boy. i just feel it.”… yea right. I knew i’m going to have a girl. A man should know his work…

I can only say it’s one of the happiest days of my life. I can’t describe the feeling when looking for the 1st time at my baby’s face in that 3d machine, seeing her tiny hands… i can’t even find the words describing it in Hebrew… uplifting? doesn’t come close.

I can’t wait until October!!!

Archie installer, take 2

Although life has been keeping me busy, i worked hard on finishing the Archie installer – basically i recoded it from scratch… i used most of the inner functions, but the layout and gui functions were completely recoded. so, here are some screenshots :

its 99% complete – some minor tweaks here and there are left, but nothing major. i’m pretty much satisfied with it

i also tested it under qemu and except for one problem (setting the appropriate vga=xxx parameter for bootloader) it works flawlessly. so…

im still waiting for iphitus (James) to finish up the squashfs-lzma patch and put it into the ‘beyond’ kernel so we can release Archie 0.6 already… i just hope it won’t take TOO long…

Don’t give a man a fish. Teach him how to fish instead.

I doubt many people here knows who Fravia and +ORC are. Well, it’s time for this history lesson of the week…

Back in the days where internet was still being used with 36/56kbs modems, and software was “easily” cracked, those two formed what was known as The Academy – +HCU (Hackers/Crackers University) – it was were the idea of reverse engineering started to form and take shape.

Before +ORC joined the “scene” people have already cracked software – there was nothing new to this, but +ORC decided to join the efforts of all crackers and reversers out there, and spread the knowledge to everyone. Soon the Fravia pages started to fill up with tutorials, most for specific program and how to crack it, following each step of the way. The idea was not to teach you how to crack the program itself, but how to defeat the protection scheme, and thus to gain you some more knowledge of programming (and ofcourse – reversing…). People world wide had started joining in, adding their own knowledge and howto’s, supporting each other with a problem – this was (imo) the first internet community, or at least among the first. +ORC held the flag while Fravia took care of “business” – site, organization, etc.

The identity of the crackers participating in the Academy was mostly unknown (except ofcourse for their nicks) except for Fravia (He is a phd or something like that, living in europe). There were MANY theories about the identity of +ORC but its all speculations, and until this day (more than 12 years had passed) it’s mostly remains unknown.

Why is this such important? Why did the identity of this man became sometime more important than his actual work? well, for one reason – students like to know who their teacher is, and more when the students are the crackers and hackers of tomorrow – the people who worship knowledge and loves to learn and seek.

Several years after the Academy had established, +ORC dissapeard, leaving one trace behind him – what was known as the +ORC riddle. The solution for the riddle was supposed to lead the one who solves it to +ORC. Some said the riddle was solved by “+Hackmore Readwrite” (who btw, never claimed to do so) but it’s been never confirmed (well, some said it was…).

Regardless of who +ORC was (or is, although in Fravia’s latest interview to codebreakers a few years ago, he stated that “+ORC is dead. Died in Egypt. RIP.”), his contribution to the (computers) world remains unchanged – he believed in spreading the knowledge, teaching one another, contributing to a better world. Even if he’s gone, the fruits of his work remains. A very well known +ORC saying was “Don’t give a man a fish. Teach him how to fish instead.” and this is his legacy.

Today the enigma surrounding +ORC remains, but I believe +ORC prefers to remain in his solitude, leave the past behind him (and imo, this is what the actual answer of Fravia concerning +ORC realy means) and watch us from the outside… Fravia is still being very active, although not in RE per se, but in discovering the hidden world behind search engines and how to search (yes, i know it sounds weird…)

You can find in google thousands (if not more) sites dealing with +ORC, his tutorials, and his identity. The saga continues…

ps.
seems like Fravia is also acquainted with Richard Stallman… Why am i not surprised?

the +ORC riddle:
“Gold, with six bars, or with the visor raised (in full face) for royalty”
“Silver, with five bars, (in full face) for a duke or marquis”
“Silver, with four bars, with visor raised (in profile) for an earl, viscount or baron”
“Steel, without bars, and with visor open (in full face) for a knight or a baronet”
“Steel, with visor closed (in profile) for a squire or a gentleman”
And now try to correct this link http://131.92.15.128/+ORC to reach +ORC (?)”

NOTE:
I know there is much more information regarding HCU, Fravia, +ORC, RE, etc i have neglected, but this is why they invented google for…

update time

For the ubuntu users, there is a great site to generate sources.list file, but you need to obtain each GPG key manually for every entry in the file. So, here is a quick oneliner to obtain the GPG keys automatically, for all ubuntu lovers out there (copy and paste in 1 line in your terminal):
for KEY in `grep "GPG key:" /etc/apt/sources.list | awk {'print $4'}`; do gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys $KEY; gpg --export --armor $KEY | sudo apt-key add - ; done

and some quick update about Archie – i finished 99% of the gui installer, tested it, and all seems to work. i also redesigned the layout from scratch after hearing some ppl saying it “doesn’t look professional enough”… so i hope the new design does.

Also, our congregation (Messianic Jews) had lost one of our dear members from Cancer. She was an amazing woman, with ALWAYS a smile on her face, regardless of what she’s been up with. She always shown her love to everyone, and we won’t forget her. She left behind a husband and three children.

Archie installer

Well, i’ve spent last few days working hard on finishing Archie – fixed all kinda stuff, added, removed, upgraded – and seems all is working fine – even the installer…

Hopefully we’ll finally have a working Archie installer. Actually – two. A bash installer and a GUI installer. I’ve posted some screenshots here, so if you would like to comment, please do.

I hope thats enough for a start…

Just for the record – I didn’t code the gui installer. iphitus from Arch Linux did, but he left it buggy and didnt have the time to fix it, and although im not a python coder (never touched python in my life…) im doing my best to fix this stuff and have a working gui installer. so far, i actually made it work, though thru some usage of bash command,mainly cause i don’t know how to manipulate text files from python (like sed,awk, etc).

Universal package managment

I read a disturbing thread about autopackage. It started from an osnews.com article which I then followed to this thread. It goes on about why should or should not be a standard package manager for all Linux distributions out there. I think it should, and in-fact, it’s something i’ve been long thinking about. Why? well, for one, all the men power with all the different distributions going to waste, non of them inventing the wheel, but only rearranging it! Each distro with its own package management system, in todays world, requires package maintainer(s), package tester(s), repository(ies) and so on. Why on earth??? Why can’t we all live together (in peace)? Why do I have to see for every application out there a “SUSE package”, an “UBUNTU package”, etc? and usually non will have a “pacman package” (which is the Arch Linux package format) which means the Arch package maintainer will have to sit down and hack RPM sources or Gentoo ebuilds to create a working (and not always successfully, for example ubuntus’ usplash, suses’ kickoff, just to name a few) package. If there was a standard, which all distributions could adopt, without prejudice, wouldn’t it be beneficial for all of us? 1st, for the package maintainers/testers who would have more time with deal with more important issues than redoing something which already been done 20 times over already, secondly with the actual users, who wouldn’t have to wait (sometimes months) for their package maintainers to package the latest YYY application.
I think it would be amazing if I could download a package, and install it on both my Arch Linux and on my Ubuntu system. No need to learn apt-get/pacman/etc commands, but use _one_ installer for all. Less bandwidth usage, which means better usage of the network. And ofcourse, finally, magazines, software distributors, etc, could send me a cd with applications – ready to be installed, regardless of which Linux distribution im using!! Think about this again – We all could have 1 repository (or a cd) for ALL distributions! But this is just a dream, an utopia.

I read some people on that thread saying things like “if you can’t compile & make, you’re not a man”. (EDIT: it was actually “Real men use plain .deb and .rpm and resolve their own dependencies themselves!”) what a BS. My dad shouldn’t not know howto compile&make, does this makes him less of a man? Or is he simply banned from using Linux because of that? I believe in making Linux usable for the masses, regardless of age, gender, occupation, etc. This is what I call FREE. FREE FOR ALL. And universal package management is one step further in that direction. Too bad there are too many boolies in the Linux world preventing that from actually happening…

Why do i prefer Linux over Windows

Although there is a hype right now about Vista, where you can find at least a dozen articles on every news site about the new and latest Microsoft OS, I am not going to be part of that, but instead explain why i don’t take part of this celebration and calmly continue using my good old Linux OS.

1. FREEDOM!
   A lot has been said about “free as in speech not beer”. Well, The freedom I’m enjoying on Linux is the freedom to install only programs _I_ choose, and not some manufacture who doesn’t care about my own (free) will. The freedom to play any media files i want, without even the slightest concern about DRM or equivalent. The freedom to do WHAT I want, WHEN I want, to EVERYTHING I want in the OS.
   Linux is free in many ways, and it also includes cost – most Linux distributions doesn’t cost a penny, and some only require payment for customer service which you can get for free if you’re not technically-challenged. I do believe getting paid for service and support is totally valid, and that’s the proper way to handle software. I once said, that charging money for bytes and bits is ridiculous, as this is nothing your can hold, nor pass on to your child when your day comes. I know it’s a bit too extreme, but that’s my point of view – this is why i usually code for free, but charge money for my consulting.
2. Window Manager (Desktop Environment)
   I do think KDE is superior over any other WM/DE out there. Allowing me to customize everything on it, the suit my habits and mood in any particular time. There is nothing I can’t do with KDE, and although Windows allows much customization too, much of it is hidden and requires me using 3rd party tools (TweakUI, etc) or registry hacking – which brings me to the next point.
3. Registry horror
   After years of using Windows, I kinda grew up on the registry – it seems natural for me to hack it when things got crazy or when i needed to change some non-standard settings (I still remember my last month on Windows when i played with network settings to change some dhcp settings i needed for testing my network). No one knows exactly what is going on in the registry, not even many of Microsoft employees. And Linux? well, nothing is hidden in an obscure way – everything is in textual configuration files, most with comments explaining you what is what, and if not – google will.
4. Portability
   Ever tried installing Windows on one machine, and then moving the harddisk to another machine? Well, I have, and of-course, many times windows won’t even boot up, and on other times it will boot only into safe-mode, leaving me with a crippled OS. And Linux? I can move the hard-disk to any machine I want, and Linux won’t know the difference (well, it would, but I won’t feel it). This is because Windows binary drivers are so tight with the hardware it runs on, while Linux loads dynamically the drivers it needs upon startup, depending on the machine it runs on. This is the way to go, and Windows with it’s “driver database” simply can’t do it (well, it might, but it will take longer then reinstalling the OS on the new machine).
5. Old hardware
   I have many pc’s in my house, some are as 10 years old. Old I say? I’m sorry, but 10 years SHOULDN’T be considered old! I know now-days everyone thinks a good pc should be less than 6 months old, but I disagree. I don’t know where this idea of “must buy a new pc” came from (well, I believe its “thanks” to the Microsoft/Intel relationship) but it shouldn’t be this way! A 4-5 years computer should be perfectly fine for a desktop, and older ones can be used as terminals, firewalls, or very simple desktops (XFCE, OpenBox, etc). Windows, while cutting off Windows 95/98 out of the support line, won’t let me enjoy latest gimmicks and tools for those old OS’s, and many 3rd party tools won’t even consider compiling their software for such “old” computers. And Linux? As long as I am willing to execute the program on my computer, the program will be willing to be executed on my computer. Simple as that.
6. Beryl
   Yes, beryl. I enjoy showing off my friends the neat graphics effects while their mouth is opened wide and with a short breath they ask (unbelievably) “This is Linux?”. I don’t use beryl daily, but i like having it sometimes. I mostly enjoy comparing the amazing graphic effects of beryl with it’s standard hardware requirements to Aero and its crazy/non-realistic (in my book) requirements. As most Vista articles described, in order to enjoy the new Aero look, you will most likely need to buy a new machine with a brand-new-top-of-the-line graphics card. Beryl runs smoothly on my 4 years desktop testing machine, on my 2 years main desktop, and on my good ol’ 3 years laptop. Smoothly. without a hitch.

I’m sure others has their reasons for using this or the other. Well, that’s great! But since I know that in my country most people doesn’t even know Windows costs money (many people I know has non legit copy of Windows, which the neighbours’ son or similar had installed it for them after downloading it from amule) and think Windows “is free”, I am compelled to say that there is an alternative, which IS free, and which _I_ believe this alternative is superior.