TheOpenDisc

Some out there are horribly intimidated by Linux, there are a number of things to make it easy, however these guys have taken the Next step on that. What i have heard of this is that finding programs to replace/supplant what they already had found is often the reason people are most afraid of making the switch. Here is an answer to this.


http://www.theopendisc.com/


OpenDisc is a high quality collection of open source software (OSS) for the Microsoft Windows operating system.
The two main goals of the project are:
To provide a free alternative to costly software, with equal or often better quality equivalents to proprietary, shareware or freeware software for Microsoft Windows.
To educate users of Linux as an operating system for home, business and educational use.
The majority of programs featured on OpenDisc are also available on Linux.


In addition there is OpenEducationDisc


The OpenEducationDisc is a modification of the OpenDisc format by Teachers and Computer Specialists with a passion for education. The purpose of it is to provide students with the software that they need to complete school work at home. Most students don’t have jobs and it is unfair to ask for them or a parent/guardian to buy expensive software to get the best out of their education. Hence everything is free and we encourage you to make copies of this CD and lend it to you friends.

Linux power management

Linux has always been a lightweight operating system, and you can manually do a great number of things to dial in your settings, however when someone does allot of that work for you, and is willing to share I'm all for that. I have seen this nearly triple my beast of a laptop before.


http://www.jupiterapplet.org/


Jupiter is a light weight power and hardware control applet for Linux.  It is designed to improve battery life of a portable Linux computer by integrating with the operating system and changing parameters of the computer based on battery or powered connection.

Additionally, Jupiter provides quick access to some of the commonly needed hardware controls like screen output and resolution, WIFI, and bluetooth.

If you use Linux on a portable computer, let Jupiter take the effort out of going mobile.

Doing rude horrible and wonderful things to your disk partitions!

I will talk about a couple of Opensource tools i like here. One is Clonezilla. a great tool for disk to disk or disk to image cloning.


The other is Gparted, another wonderful tool that will do disk partition alteration and and editing.


This is a collection of information about Clonezilla.


What is Clonezilla:


Clonezilla is an open-source suite of cloning tools developed by Taiwan's National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) software lab under the GPL that works impeccably with Linux distributions. Clonezilla boasts high-performance cloning, simplified deployment and support for a multitude of system types (Windows, Linux and VMware), all of which make it a worthy competitor to its commercial counterparts.


This essentially means we have a tool that can replace an expensive purchase of Acronis True Image or Symantec's Ghost.


This matters, not just because it is platform agnostic, but it usually can talk to any Raid Controller that Linux can see and use (which is a large number) and it is free.


Supported Filesystems : (1) ext2, ext3, ext4, reiserfs, reiser4, xfs, jfs of GNU/Linux, (2) FAT, NTFS of MS Windows, (3) HFS+ of Mac OS, (4) UFS of FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, and (5) VMFS of VMWare ESX. Therefore you can clone GNU/Linux, MS windows, Intel-based Mac OS, and FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD, no matter it's 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x86-64) OS. For these file systems, only used blocks in partition are saved and restored. For unsupported file system, sector-to-sector copy is done by dd in Clonezilla.


Image repository locations: NFS, SSH, SMB (Samba/Windows share), or Local Device (drive)


Local Live CD or network server compatible


Fast, i have seen full computer images (windows 7 with software) dropped from USB and Network locations to disk in 10 minuets.


But thats enough of an introduction have some hard links.


http://clonezilla.org/ - Main Website
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php - Initial Live CD page, good information here.
http://clonezilla.org/downloads.php - Downloads page, you can get the latest version here
I strongly recommend the Alternative Stable Release, it is Ubuntu based and has the broadest hardware support
http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live-doc.php - documentation, how-to's etc. they are in order with pictures
http://clonezilla.org/general-live-use.php - useful, good intro on booting and getting ready to go.
Articles that i find regarding Clonezilla that i will be shareing over time.


http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/10884 - Article from the Linux Journal






Gparted LiveCD - Opensource Disk partition manager!


http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php


If you have ever run across a need to alter the structure of a disk layout. perhaps you had multiple partitions that need to be combined. maybe you are looking to change your hard drive without reinstalling and need to adjust things. I have used this before, the exception to what I can access is definitely a Microsoft dynamic volume. it cannot alter that type of disk.


GPartEd stands for: Gnome Partition Editor


GParted is a free partition editor for graphically managing your disk partitions.


GParted is useful for tasks such as: creating space for new operating systems, restructuring disk space to separate user and operating system data, and copying partitions to enable upgrading to a larger hard disk drive.


Your hard disk drive or USB flash drive can be subdivided into one or more partitions. GParted enables you to reorganize your disk partitions while preserving the contents of these partitions.


Features


Create partition tables (e.g., msdos, gpt)
Perform actions with partitions such as: 


create or delete
resize or move
check
label
copy and paste
Manipulate file systems such as:
btrfs
ext2 / ext3 / ext4
fat16 / fat32
hfs / hfs+
linux-swap
ntfs
reiserfs / reiser4
ufs
xfs
For specific actions supported see detailed features.
Enable and disable partition flags (e.g., boot, hidden)
Align partitions to mebibyte (MiB) or cylinder boundaries
Attempt data rescue from lost partitions
Supports hardware RAID, motherboard BIOS RAID, and Linux software RAID.
Supports all sector sizes (e.g., 512, 1024, 2048, 4096 byte sectors)

Coolness for Mac users

Im not a huge fan of apple products. however i do need to interact with them, and a couple of really amazing things i have found are below

http://refit.sourceforge.net/

rEFIt is amazing, it is an EFI boot an enhancement that allows you a truly dynamic boot process so if you need to boot to CD it will find it and give you an option to boot there. Today i used it to do a windows 7 install into an empty partition. no bootcamp!

also amazing is Carbon Copy Cloner
http://www.bombich.com/

if you have someplace to put it it makes a copy of your mac install, if its a physical drive or partition it is a bootable install. so if you do anything development like you can save your original in a bootable state and then horribly wreck your install and come back to something usable.

the combination of these tools was able to give me 2 OSX partitions, one i can destroy if needed and a windows 7 install and a nice boot menu to switch tot he one i want.

Microsoft Driver Verifier (verifier.exe)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driver_Verifier
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/244617

Driver Verifier is a tool included in Microsoft Windows that replaces the default operating system subroutines with ones that are specifically developed to catch device driver bugs. Once enabled, it monitors and stresses drivers to detect illegal function calls or actions that may be causing system corruption.

Tired of windows XP built in themes?

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20061029/royale-noir/#downloadlink

This is actually something Microsoft created and embedded into windows XP Media Center edition. However it is part of windows XP as well. Just put it there and it works. As it is officially built and signed by Microsoft you don't need to tweak your system. (which is how this stuff should work anyhow.)

Tools for Talking to you Linux Server

There are 3 tools depending on what you want to do.

The first is pretty obvious to most people who run a Linux server, Being putty. it is the nicer of ssh clients i have used, and enables many of the features that a native ssh client has to offer.

Next is WinSCP This allows for a very nice and clean interface for SSH based transfers of files. all you need is an ssh login and open port. far more secure than having FTP open.

Then finally there is XMing what it does is drops an Xwindow Renderer on your desktop, when combined with putty gives you a full remote control of applications running on your home or work Linux machine with far more security and availability than anything i have seen so far.

These three tools are an amazing combination of tools. for remote administration and use of your Linux Server or Desktop

Note this does not change the security benefits or weaknesses of having Xwindows installed on a server, however for a project machine this is very useful. and can allow you to use resources that normally wouldn't be available.