Computers

distro ? unix : linux

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Since it’s time to plan for a probable addition to my LAN this December/January I want to start planning now.

I have my brothers old Dell 4500 PC on hand, well what is left of it hehe. The Pentium 4 is still there, which should be a Northwood core @ 2.0Ghz but it could possibly be a Willamette with a slower clock-speed, only a successful boot will tell.

Before I can boot her, I need some RAM. So the plan is to buy Ma a pair of 512MB (total 1GB) chips for her PC. And to take her old 2x256MB (total 512MB) for this salvage operation. The PC’s are very close models and as far as I can tell the Mother Boards are the same chipset and as much research as I’ve had time to do shows that I shouldn’t run into an problems here.

The box also needs a Networking card, because even if there was a way to get two 56K Winmodems chained together, I wouldn’t want to LOL. I’m figuring that I’ll try to buy a Wireless adopter or an Ethernet NIC depending on my final plan. One of these computers, my Desktop (SAL1600), File Server (Vectra), or this Dell 4500 I’m repairing will likely go in my bedroom with a Wifi card. While the other remain/swap into place with its/its swapped Ethernet card.

If I can, I’ll probably leave it on 24/7 as a workstation or use it to transition my File Servers OpenBSD install over to better hardware. If I do make use of it as a Work system, I’d like to run GNU/Linux on it, because most of my experience has been with FreeBSD and OpenBSD. The problem with that is there are very few Linux Distros I can stand using…. Ether way I need to start planning and testing for what I’m going to do, and this damn blasted parakeet is not helping with the insensent squaking… After ~8 years or so, you’d think he’d STHU!

The only GNU/Linux distributions that I respect are Debian and Slackware. Debian, can be a bit of a hard case about things but you’ve got to give them credit to sticking to their guns. The differences between Debian’s Iceweasel, Icedove, Iceowl, Iceape and Mozilla’s Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, and the communities SeaMonkey come to mind… Slackware, well hehe enough said. The only problem is they are both more trouble then they are worth in this case, I want to get the system set up but without having to screw with it to much along the way.

Other then Debian and Slackware, the only distro to interest me is Gentoo, I think if I ever put the effort into setting it up, Gentoo and I would get along very well. The only problem is I don’t have time to fiddle with it. I would probably have to go with trying a Stage 1 install, and that is a little time consuming… Hehe.

Other Distros that I have considered are Ubuntu, I’ve tested Ubuntu when it was at 6.06 but I don’t care for it. It is a nice system but I don’t really ‘dig’ it. It’s just not my cup of tea, although it’s what I would recommend to users who just want an easy to use OS, without having to learn more then using Synaptic. One of my reasons for FreeBSD, is I wanted to learn about the underlaying system and it’s complexity, not just write an E-Mail without having to tell it my POP3 server (for which no MUA can do, until they invent mind-reading ones). I have no interest in using Ubuntu on this system unless I *have* to.

The install is likely to be a cross between a server and a desktop as far as software goes, it will include X and a proper development environment either way. My OpenBSD box basically only has what it needs to run the services I use it for by comparison.

Two suggestions that came up were PLD Linux and KateOS, both from Poland. PLD looks like a nice system but not my style. I’m not found of the RPM’s either… KateOS on the other hand is based on Slackware. So far it looks like a very nice system to my tastes, my plan is to test it on my desktop (SAL1600). Because I maintain my ‘gaming’ install of WinXP on it along with a dedicated Linux and BSD partition for testing purposes. I might even use KQEMU if it supports DVD ISO’s.

It looks like a good system for me but no one told me that the Polish and US mirrors download at about 20~26kb/sec !!! Since I’d want at least 2 or 3 of the 3 CD sets… I figured I would get the DVD since I don’t want to test the minimal install. There are also 2 ‘extension’ disks, one for GNOME and one for KDE so one can skip installing them over the Internet. It’s looking like an 11 hour download for my initial testing…. Joy.

I need to get to work on the planning for when I’ll need to get the system working, so while KateOS 3.6 downloads I may as well get cracking, current factors are:

location
use/purpose
software
hardware
management
cost
time

I’ve yet to think of any thing else I need to do yet, the biggest issue is going to be location, most importantly what systems physically go where. And which system will be doing what.

Vista gone loco, connection limits!

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Windows Vista tcpip.sys Connection Limit Patch for Event ID 4226

I have officially lost any respect or regard for Microsoft Windows Vista and I’ve yet to have a chance to test the bloody thing.

My Windows XP machine has SP2 installed by the connection limit is returned to a extremely high level. Because I was getting some crap with being the only box to drop off the ‘net connection, making that change had a noticable impovement for me. The difference between VISA versions shows it all to true, it’s about the money.

Instead of doing some thing about it, they make a buck off it. What ever happened to passion ruling OS development? Not the dollar…..

I love BSD !!!!

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Well to make a long story short, I’ve got my older brothers old PC (whats left of it). It’s missing it’s Graphics card, Optical Drives, and DDR1 SDRAM and only has a WinModem for it’s Cards but other wise it’s functional. It’s a originally a Dell Dimension 4500, Ma has a 4550 so i used her user manual to check what kind of RAM I would need.

If I bought 256~512mb of RAM and a Networking card I could get a 4th PC running, maybe try and get a Wifi adopter for it so I could move one of the Towers into my room (where my Laptop usually is stored)… 5 PC’s hehe that would be nice!! And if I get enough money for Christmas I could do it.. I could also buy Ma some RAM to upgrade her PC, or just buy her a new 1GB’s worth and take her old 512’s set.

The Box has a Pentium 4, probably ~2Ghz… Compare to my File Servers Katmai (Pentium 3, 500Mhz).

Having 512MB RAM would be an upgrade from 384MB-8MB for Matrox Gfx that the server has. Even if I had to make do with only 256MB, the processor upgrade would be worth it imho.

I have an old ATI Ultra Rage 128 AGP4X card on my shelf, a 32MB card should be overkill for any thing but gaming.

The IMPORTANT thing is, the hulk came with a 40GB Western Digital PATA drive and a 80GB Hitachi PATA drive.

My OpenBSD server is running off an old Office Desktop PC (cica 1998/1999) and only has an old 8GB Maxtor PATA drive. The BIOS also has a known problem that it can only address up to about 33GB of disk, any more would be wasted.

Guess what… OpenBSD can use the entire drive !!!!!

I installed the 80GB HDD and hooked it up to the (E)IDE cable and power thingy and checked the BIOS to see the setup, I could see that the 8GB root disk was Primary Master, 80GB drive as Primary Slave, and the CD-ROM drive as Secondary Master.

I didn’t really learn much about the innards of Computers by looking it up. I learned most of what I know by pulling a PC apart and putting it back together again.

I tried to mount the disk but could not, even with the mount_ntfs program. Probably because of no disklabel. I booted off my Knoppix Live CD to see if it was working. Sure enough, Linux found a ~75GB /dev/hdb1 and was able to mount it as NTFS. I reformatted it FAT32 and booted back to OpenBSD.

To set up the hard drive for usage, I fdisk’d it

fdisk -i wd1

I gave it a yes to updating and moved on to labeling the disk.

disklabel -E wd1

I used the g d command in disklabel to tell it to use the disks geometry and not the BIOS. I setup a 4.2BSD Partition (wd1a) for the full size of the disk and wrote the label out.

Next I formated it with the UFS file system used in OpenBSD.

newfs wd1a

and mounted it to a temporary mount point

mount /dev/wd1a /mnt

And volia it worked !!! I moved every thing from /usr/local/* to /mnt/ and edited /etc/fstab with instructions to auto-mount the new 80GB drive in it’s place.

Terry@vectra-$ cat /etc/fstab
/dev/wd0a / ffs rw 1 1
/dev/wd0h /home ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
/dev/wd0d /tmp ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
/dev/wd0g /usr ffs rw,nodev 1 2
/dev/wd0e /var ffs rw,nodev,nosuid 1 2
# 80GB Primary Slave, PATA drive.
/dev/wd1a       /usr/local      ffs     rw,nodev        1       2
Terry@vectra-$

Now I have good solid storage… No more trying to cram network shares and LAN backups onto a small ~7GB /usr partition.

Terry@vectra-$ df -h
Filesystem     Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/wd0a      147M   31.3M    109M    22%    /
/dev/wd0h      393M    378K    373M     0%    /home
/dev/wd0d     98.3M    2.0K   93.4M     0%    /tmp
/dev/wd0g      6.7G    398M    6.0G     6%    /usr
/dev/wd0e      148M    8.3M    132M     6%    /var
/dev/wd1a     73.3G    2.5G   67.2G     4%    /usr/local
Terry@vectra-$

I love BSD !!!

Flock

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Testing a new web browser…..

Dang this thing is interesting ! Now if it could hold up better then Firefox 3.0a on my laptop… We’ve got a nice match hehehe.

Blogged with Flock

PC-BSD v1.4 da Vinci released !

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I was pleased to see the brain new website this afternoon and 1.4 released. I’m also very happy to see that the new website is LYNX COMPATIBLE !!!! It works and looks nice in modern browsers like Firefox. Yet it still presents a nice clean page to Lynx users.

I downloaded both CD-ROM’s, checked the MD5 Checksums, burned them and got a Quick & Dirty backup of my home directory and config files while I waited.

I think I did some thing like:

tar -czf backups.tgz /boot /etc /root
cd /home
tar -cf - Terry | gzip -9 > /usr/Terry_Home_Backup.tgz

Basically, I made a gzip’d tarball of my old kernel, drivers, and boot-config (/boot), system configuration (/etc) and roots home directory (/root). Then I tar’d and compressed my home directory with gzip. I also made a tarball afterwards of my vim installation in case there was any custom files in it.

Normally when I want to archive a file in a hurry, I use tar’s -z option to archive it (tar, tape archive) and compress it gzip (-z). But since I don’t know how if there is even a way to change the gzip/bzip2 compression level with bsd’s tar implementation. When I want to store some thing big in a hurry however. I usually make use of a pipe and redirection, namely tar -cf – archives the list of files to the standard output rather then a normal file. Which is in turn piped | into gzip who is instructed to use maximum compression on it’s input. And the final data, is redirected > to a file of my choice. Some times I will use bzip2 (higher compression) but I generally favor gzip. As normal, I keep a copy of the backup on this machine and my file server just in case.

My laptop was running PC-BSD v1.4BETA so I was not sure if the upgrade would work correct but it seems to have. The update went smoothly and I was allowed to reselect optional packages from disk 2. I elected for kdeedu, kdesdk, koffice, kdegames, and the FreeBSD source code. All installed fine except for the Source Code !!! My /usr/src is empty, as it was each time I installed 1.4BETA. Oh well, csup will get me newer sources…

Before logging in as my normal user, I had to drop to the console and log in as root in order to change my user accounts log in shell from zsh to one installed (sh, csh, tcsh, bash – I chose sh). Other wise it is impossible to log in from KDM. Of course once I made sure my laptop booted into KDE. I went and installed zsh and changed it back. — I never change roots shell but I do change mine unless I’m sticky. My OpenBSD server still only uses the default (hacked pd)korn shell it came with.

I found 1.4 Release to be much like the Beta but with a new loading screen. I noted that most of the (many) screen savers were removed and one could now specify the rates of the monitor when asked to set up the Xorg config file. It was also nice to see my rc.conf.local file preserved well enough. Although the onboard Winmodem and Winfi don’t work, the ethernet card is now detected by the msk driver as mskc0; I don’t know if it works since I use a Atheros based Wifi card now. It was very nice to see MPlayer back in the install. It was removed from 1.4BETA along with the GTK GUI, in 1.4 Release we have MPlayer and the KMPlayer front end. Although Flash7 seems to have been lost now. Oh well, I’d rather skip compling MPlayer then use Flash ^_^

Since the upgrade process basically nukes all installed software. I had to reinstall most every thing I’ve added. Since I’ve stopped using PBI, that has made this take a little lower. I tend to use ports and a few packages.

My hit list

 codecs   # Hand installed from MPlayerHQ
 cscope   # code browser, I've been meaning to learn how to use it.
 elinks   # Web Browser, text/gui
 exuberant ctags  # What I use to generate my system tags file in ~/.vim/tags
 gmake   # Needed for GTK/QT development and building Vim with GTK support
 konversation   # The worlds greatest IRC Client
 kscope   # GUI front end for cscope, might be worth toying with.
 lynx-current   # Web brower, text; If it supported decent html layout it'd be my default.
 mg   # Micro GNU Emacs based editor maintained by OpenBSD people.
 portaudit   # Was in 1.3 but removed in PC-BSD v1.4
 portupgrade   # Was in 1.3 but removed in PC-BSD 
 prboom and files   # Doom I/II updated to *RUN* on modern hardware.
 psearch   # port searching, I wonder why no one wrote a GUI for this dandy script.
 rtags   # CTags like program for Ruby written in Ruby file, works with vi/emacs
 ruby-doc-stdlib   # Docs of Rubies standard library
 ruby-gems   # Ruby package manager for extra Ruby code
 ruby-usersguide   # Duh
 rubygem-rake   # make done Ruby style
 scheme48   # Scheme, a Lisp like language.
 supertux   # Hey Super Mario, ehhh Super Tux !
 vim   # Compiled from source as per my norm
 xemacs   # Last time I used GNU Emacs, now I'll return to my old emacsen (I prefer Vim)
 xpdf   # Useful tool

I also need to install a decent web browser (gui) and JRE/JDK. I might bite it and use PBI’s for the JRE/JDK but not for any thing else. I’ve found Firefox 3.0 Alpha and Netscape 9 to slow for my tastes (my laptop is only a sempron-m 3300+ and 512mb ddr). Konqueror I’ve found tends to lock up on some websites, maybe it’s the Javascript engine I can’t really tell.

Ether way, I need to find a decent browser I can *live* with that works on most OSes I’m likely to use. Or one that uses the same bookmark format as Konqueror any way xD. Lynx is still the best browser I’ve ever used though, even if it lays out web pages in Text Only and crappy.

My laptop is basically my workstation. So it has a lot of stuff in it, paramount in it is my current home directory. Most important being ~/{Documents,Pictures,Music,.vim,vimrc} and 

Terry@Dixie$ /bin/ls -1 ~/Programming                                      6:53
Ada
Assembly
C
C++
GTK
HTML
Java
NCURSES
PHP
Perl
Python
QT
Ruby
Scheme
Shell
Style
templets

I should probably restructure that directory, make it neater.

Future todos, clean my home directory up again.

reorganise files.

clean up my bookmarks file in prep for a new browser.

Make new XMMS and Blackbox PBI’s.

Pass out… Work in 6 hours…

Emacs pinky

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Beware of attractive Blondes in tight cloths…. lol

On a lighter note, I’ve had emacs on the brain lately. Which is some one strange as I’m Vi man with a strong liking for VIM.

Generally GNU Emacs is the emacsen by which I compare emacsen. I first learned the basics of using emacs day to day using XEmacs on a Windows machine. Nice editor although i’ve never cared much for the Meta key. Generally I found emacs key bindings to be the kind, that if you could remember what type of key sequence it was you could figure it out. Generally things are some what consistent, Control + D, deletes the next character (right of the point). While Meta + D deletes the next word. Basically as I remember it for regular commands. A Control+Key combo does a smaller action while a Meta+Same Key combo does a larger action. Like if Control+Key works on words, Meta+Key works on lines e.t.c. And classes of commands I think generally had a consistent prefix. Control+X+Control+F Open/Find files, Control+X+Control+S Save current file, Control+X+Control+C exit editor, e.t.c Most of the mutli-file Editor related commands I recall focused on a Control+X prefix arrangement, like Contorl+X+2 to open a second buffer, Control+X+O to switch to the other e.t.c

I’ve tried a number of emacsen but never found one I really like enough to use a lot. GNU Emacs I don’t’ care much for but respect it among emacsen. I find it to fat and slow to be effective. On my desktop it’s no problem to run it, theres a lot of RAM and a fast CPU. On my laptop theres a budget CPU and moderate RAM so it’s slow as nails to get it’s motor warmed up. Not being much of a GNU Emacs man, I usually keep a fairly out of the box installation.

I haven’t tried XEmacs on my laptop but I don’t expect it to be faster then GNU Emacs. I think I would prefer XEmacs though.

MicroEMACS 4.0 and variants I’ve used and enjoyed, you could say MicroEMACS is my favorite. I like MicroEMACS in that it is small yet extensible. With just enough features to be useful Some what like Vi but with perks. Most of my issues with the editor would be solved by learning more about emacs ways of doing things and the marco language. I remember poking around a Traditional C style code base as well.

The only emacsen I find my self using often when I do actually use one. Is mg, a Micro GNU Emacs like editor maintained by OpenBSD. It’s a pretty bare bone emacs but it gets the job done nicely. Since I’m to stuborn to install Vim on my file server (OpenBSD) and would _NEVER_ dream of installing GNU Emacs on it. I’ll usually use mg when I need to edit multiple files. Although I could probably use Window and multiple instances of nVi for the same purpose.

I’ve tried Jove but never cared for it. An intermediate between the GNU Emacs/XEmacs variants and MicroEMACS variants I’d say.

I generally have preferences but I do believe in knowing a lot of things when possible. While I don’t remember most of the commands I learned in XEmacs, and prefer the Vi style of doing things more to my taste. Especially to my wrists and fingers liking !! (Escape Meta Alt Control Shiftritis). I can use Emacs fine but generally prefer not to. I generally prefer a light and fast emacsen to most other editors if I can’t have a Vi based one.

Reading Raider

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A nice trip to the library…

C in a Nutshell -> Nice book, finished it in about 2-3 hours.

A Book on C -> I’m interested in some of the algorithms.

Learning Perl -> I have mixed feelings about working in Perl, but hey it’s a nice book.

PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Websites -> I really can use this… lol

Maximum Security: A Hacker’s Guide to Protecting Your Internet Site and Network -> So fat I’ll have to be restrictive in what I read of it. But a very interesting find indeed.

I know C, like I know English: I’m not terribly skilled at some of it but I know it well enough to use it. So I don’t really need to read most of the C books but theres some common algorithms discussed. That I’m interested in reading their implementations of; not to mention a brush up on Function Pointers, Variable-length arrays, and Unions -> I don’t think I’ve ever actually used a Union :/

Perl, I was learning at some point but gave up on it as boring. I like Perl for it’s syntactical style, it’s closer to what I’m used to. But I’ve rarely seen Perl at any great length. Feel beautify to me, it’s effective yes. Pretty, not often… but heck if it works use it!

If it’s some thing I’m not likely to use again or it’s a quickly on the CLI. I’ll usually not care if it’s understandable or well written. But when I do write a script; I kind of like to make it hard to foul up, easy to understand, and function well.

Ippimail

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www.ippimail.com offers a free webmail service, the catch?

You get a few advertisements in the webmail interface, to be honest I barely notice them unless I’m looking for them. Many peoples sig-blocks on internet forums are more obtrusive. A single line appended to out going E-Mails as well. Just a sig-block consisting of a one or two lines of message I think.

--

 Email and shopping with the feelgood factor!
 55% of income to good causes. http://www.ippimail.com

Compared to some mail I’ve received with a yahoo html ad a page long at the end of the E-Mail!! This is no problem for me.

The money they get from it, goes to them and a good portion of it to several charities which is a very good thing IMHO. Plus like 10% to supporting Open Source Projects, a very nice thing considering that they use a lot of FOSS.

The Webmail is essentially a Squirrel Mail setup with a number of plug ins and customizations. Including a theme thats much nicer then any of the ones I’ve seen come with Ippimail, which are not provided ^_^. The usual set of style sheets and features of course.

I’ve come to enjoy using Squirrel Mail and when I learned about Ippimail it was from reading about Squirrel Mail on Wikipedia, so I knew I’d probably get a good Web mail interface. What I was worried about was the ads and possibility of spam. I remember when I had registered for a free Hotmail account some years back, it was like being placed in the worlds biggest Please_Spam_Me_List loool.

With ippimail I registered for the account and filled out even the extra questionnaire, which is for targeting the ads better and what not. So far I have gotten _0_ spam E-Mails !!! Heck, I get more then that from my ISP’s account. The data involved not really a major security risk ether. The Terms of Use and Privacy Policy is compatible with my views, and I can be quite pissy about agreeing to such things too.

I’ve only had two issues with Ippimail and I’ve found excellent service if thats what you want to call it. The average response time has been within 24 hours. And very friendly support for issues, unlike a call to an ISP. No need to call 3 freaking times to get some one competent, an issue on ippimail gets some ones attention, that actually can tell the difference between a file and a folder. I’ve been very satisfied with Ippimail in every thing I’ve seen and I’m a rather picky bastard :/


Maybe that’s the difference between the people at Ippimail and those at an ISP, they ain’t doing it just for $$$$.

One thing that I really love about the Squirrel Mail software they chose for the actual webmail interface. Is because it’s output is all HTML (with Javascript optional) and the people creating it had a nice brain. You can customize a lot of the User Interface, a very nice feature for people like me (Yes I am a KDE user not a Gnome user :-P).

We have the ability to have mail forwarded to another account, e.g. Ippimail to your Primary E-Mail. To have Ippimail fetch messages from another account (via POP3) and to set up Mail and Spam filters. It can filter messages into different folders based on the filter rules. And even provides a Spam/Anti-virus filter option. I’ve never needed them but my Ippimail account is basically my personal E-Mail address, so I’m not prone to signing up for accounts with it (I use my ISP’s SpamMeAlot address for that).

The address book used while composing mail is crappy IMHO but if one enables the Javascript version you get a quite nice one. It’s also never tripped my popup blocker or slowed down my browser ether. If Konquerors (annoying) Javascript engine can handle it fine I’d be even happier with it. Unfortunately while Ippimail seems to use the import/export address book plugin (hooah!). It can only handle CVS files, one thing I like about this; especially since you can customise the output. Is it means it’s not to hard to use other tools (sed, awk, perl, e.t.c) to process the file into a format more suitable for other things of Unix nature. But it means no real support for Outlook Express or Thunderbird address books 🙁

E-Mail storage is roughly 250MB right now, not as big as some (like gmail) but it’s more then enough for most people I think. Unless you’re prone to storing a lot of junk mail with attachments :/ Even with a real mother load of messages piling up, I’ve never surpassed 30-50mb before. If I really wanted to keep a few 100MB of mail in storage, I’d download it and archive+compress it %_%

The UI is fairly intruitive as any you’ll find and easy to change in options. It’s also very easy on the eyes, in addition to a simple E-Mail system. It comes with fairly simple Calendar, To-do list, and notes system. They even will provide a Blog with the account if wanted. Since I use Live Journal, I’ve never investigated it. I rarly use it for more then E-Mail but I’m interested in the To-Do and Notes plugins they have installed.

As a Web based Mail User Agent of sorts, I’ve found Squirrel Mail top notch and Ippimail to be a great provider. I’ve used many programs but never really been happy with any for E-Mail. Especially for dealing with mail in _volume_ and from multiple PC’s. So far, ippimails usage of squirrel mail has proven to be one arrangement I really like.

The website is quite compact and down to business, I like it even if it’s not very flashy. Theres links for site news, blogs, shopping, and google-searching. The thing Ippimail does best is E-Mail and thats what I use it most for 🙂

I almost went with a gmail account but didn’t quite like Googles policy, when I found out about ippimail I probed for awhile and thought about it. Then I dove in head first and I’m glad I did. I don’t like software that gets in my way, I like software that helps me get my work done, efficiently!

Things I would pay for….

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Being an extraordinarily stingy bastard, I’m generally only willing to pay for what I need or want a lot. An example would be The Regiment, I want the game… So I’d be willing to buy it. I don’t need an IDE so why would I buy Microsoft Visual Studio??? And to be honest I’d rather make a charitable donation because of how much I love and use Vim then pay for MS Visual Studio $_$

I’m used to not having a lot of money, so needless to say while I don’t have problems spending a lot of money. When I do spend my money it is often as carefully Analyzed and as wisely as I can.

Products and services I would pay for if I could afford to:

  1. Strongspace
    • Strongspace would save me so much trouble. Not only would it make things easier then having to set stuff up on my lan and configure every thing (clients/servers) and deal with Winsucks | Nix relations… Namely that Windows my options. My server lacks a good sized hard drive so I can’t even make use of a similar solution with my own hardware. Even the cheapest plan on strongspace could probably hold my entire home directory! 5GB storage for $15/month is not bad. The medium plan costs more (25GB Storage for $50/month) but it could hold all of my personal data on the network. Geeze my laptop doesn’t even have 25GB of data on its 80GB disk. And my server has less free-space then strongspaces startup plan offers :/. If I could afford strongspace I would definitely go for it fast

  2. Live Journal
    • While I wasn’t sure if I would like it at first, nore blogs at all. Since I started using Live Journal I’ve come to like it quite a lot. If I had the spare money I’d go for a paid account. While my account at this time is basic and I do occasionally experiment with setting it to Plus (ad supported), feature wise I’ve found Basic (free, no advertisements) to be more then enough. A paid account would probably be more helpful to LJ then useful for me. I like Live Journal so I think it would be worth while even if I don’t need the extras;-)

  3. Ippimail
    • Webmail with a heart, they use Squirrel Mail with several plug ins and a custom theme. It looks very nice and provides a lot of features for a free service. Most of there setup is using Open Source Software and a portion of their profits goes to charities and supporting OSS Projects. The ads on the webmail are basically what pay them. The advertisements on the webmail are very on-obtrusive and dispite having filled out the surveys to the fullest, I have _NEVER_ gotten an ounce of spam from ippimail. I wish I could say the same about my ISP !!! Ippimail has saved my mail… Since I can’t afford a new UFD and mailx+lynx on my server would be a bitch. I’ve all ready tried mutt+lynx, I liked it but not when people sent me HTML mail ! I’m glad ippimail is free, because I probably wouldn’t be able to use it other wise 🙁 but it is a service I would pay for if I could + had to.

  4. DX For Nix
    • Some way to play any game on Linux and BSD and an assurance that any game would work. Would be worth a small fortune to me. The closest thing to it only works for Linux based systems but not on BSD using the Linux ABI. I don’t use GNU/Linux very often. Although I’d rather run a GNU/Linux Distro on my desktop then Windows XP hehe.

  5. Vim
    • If I ever win the lotto, oh boy is there going to be a donation sent this way 🙂