No Podcast This Week

Hello readers,

Just thought I'd do a quick post to let you all know that there will not be an episode this week due to all of us having commitments. You can stop staring eagerly at your computer monitor waiting for the podcast. We will be back (I hope) next week with episode 9.

Happy Halloween from all of us at GuysOnFOSS!

A Quick Primer to SSH

A quick guide to SSH:

Have you been at work and think "Hey I can do this so much faster with x on my computer at home!" Well, SSH will solve your problem. SSH - Secure SHell - is a protocol for calling a remote system and controlling it via the shell. Designed in 1995, it has been put through the tests of time and now in version 2 it is one of the best ways of remote shell access.


"Wait. I want to use Firefox (or any other graphical program). This only gives me shell"

SSH offers x forwarding, enabling you to use programs with GUI.


"The Internet says that remote control is insecure"

SSH is secured by a public key system with a choice of another symmetric cipher (invoked by -c)


"Ok, it seems cool, how do I use it?"

Setting up the client is easy. For Linux and Mac users this is already built in. For Windows users, there are many clients available such as PuTTY, KiTTY, etc.

Linux/Mac:

0. Make sure that you have an account on a remote system with SSHd running.
1. Open a shell session.
2. Type: ssh user@ip
(replace user with your username on the remote system and ip with remote ip)
3. It will prompt for a password, type it in
4. Use normally, but remember, you are in the remote system.


Windows:

0. Get PuTTY
1. Type in your credentials
2. Login!


For more info, use man ssh

The Eighth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

Inerg and The Thoth fly solo... For about 8 minutes. The show is shorter this week due to audio problems, hopefully these will be fixed by next week. Enjoy the 8th episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast!

News:

Gene Simmons gets ddos'd

Pirate Bay Going to Space?

Google Chrome 7

Radon 6800 series

Officer Bubbles

Officer Bubbles Original Video

Laptop Thief Returns Data

WD 3 Terabyte hardrive

Restraining Order Served Over Facebook

NASA 100 Year Spaceship Program

Topics:

Learn how to use man

MenuetOS

Program For The TI-8x Series Calculators

Novell For Sale

Troll Physics - Just for fun

Try it For A Week: Peppermint

Due to audio problems, Inerg will be publishing his 'Try it for a week' on a separate occasion.

Music credit: 'Killing Time' and 'Enter The Party' by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The Seventh Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

Join The Thoth, Inerg and Mekapaedia on a roller coaster ride of a show. This week learn about what Mekapaedia knows about China, what The Thoth knows about AROS, what Inerg knows about geography and what the pope knows about technology. All this and more on the seventh episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast.

News

Google tests driver-less car

Pope warns about illusions vs reality

Polynomial - Space of The Music

Skydive from space canceled

People are not choosing effective passwords

London stock exchange runs Linux

USA is most bot infected country... In The World

Topics

Make your own dropbox-like backup service

Free Public Wifi?

Try it for a week: AROS

-Part 1

-Part 2

-Part 3

Music credit: 'Killing Time' and 'Enter The Party' by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Try It For A Week: AROS Part 3

Alright, so here is the third part I promised.

AROS was originally called the Amiga Research Operating System. This was later changed to the recursive name AROS Research Operating System. It is based around AmigaOS, which was originally developed by Commodore in the mid 80's for the Amiga computer. However, the Amiga was not doing well, and rather than lose it entirely a open project began. This is where AROS came in with the goals:

1. Is as compatible as possible with AmigaOS 3.1.
2. Can be ported to different kinds of hardware architectures and processors, such as x86, PowerPC, Alpha, Sparc, HPPA and other.
3. Should be binary compatible on Amiga and source compatible on any other hardware.
4. Can run as a standalone version which boots directly from hard disk and as an emulation which opens a window on an existing OS to develop software and run Amiga and native applications at the same time.MorphOS
5. Improves upon the functionality of AmigaOS.

-From aros.sourceforge.net

In fact, software that is designed for AmigaOS usually compiles and runs fine on AROS. This was important as AROS was supposed a parallel to AmigaOS. Even though AmigaOS is still around, and on version 4, many people prefer AROS due to the convenience of having it run on any system you want.

AROS is not the only company cloning AmigaOS, there is another. It is called MorphOS, and it contains several key differences between AROS. For example, it only runs on Powerpc architecture and contains proprietary software as well as some open software. Some of the open code in MorphOS actually came from AROS.

This image represents the development of AmigaOS

Final Thoughts

Well, I tried it for a week and I must say I am impressed. Although I had problems at the beginning of the week, the important thing is that I was able to resolve them. AROS would function as a desktop OS if it weren't for the same problems that all 'alternative' OS's have and that is compatibility with standards like windows. I can't wait to see how far AROS will progress in a few years.

Remember to check out the website at aros.sourceforge.net, and give AROS a try.

Try It For A Week: AROS Part 2

I spoke too soon:

As you can see Icaros is working just fine. For some reason, even after I got it to boot properly by disabling DMA, I was still having problems. Every time I tried to start my browser (OWB) it hung while it was "generating font cache"

I tried re-installing it with the full image instead of the Lite image and I got it going. It looks good. I will do a couple more tests and try some of the included apps so I can do at least one more post on this interesting OS. Stay tuned.

Try It For A Week: AROS Part 1

Hello Readers!
I hope you have been enjoying our podcasts as much as we have enjoyed creating them. If you have been listening to them you will know that we recently kicked off our new segment 'Try It For A Week'. If you haven't been listening, I am not talking to you.

For my 'Try It For A Week' I chose AROS. Things have not gone well thus far. I though I'd have no trouble with this, but I am. The distribution I have been trying out is called Icaros and can be found here. Booting the live cd was no problem on both Virtualbox and later Qemu. The problem came after installation when I tried to boot into AROS for the first time. I got GRUB but no OS.

That is all I can really do for you for the time being. I will continue working on getting it to boot correctly as time allows. Until then, stay tuned for an AROS history lesson.

Interesting find in google maps

As I was wasting time going through Google street view I found a tank. While this is a a tech blog I thought I would share this interesting find since its related to Google's street view. Here's a direct link if you prefer.


View Larger Map

The Sixth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

On this week's show Inerg and Mekapaedia join me, The Thoth, for our sixth excursion into the land of podcasting. Remember, you have one more week to enter our contest to win a free beta key for Starcraft 2 or Plain Sight. We introduce our new segment - 'Try it for a week' - listen for more details. Join us for this and so much more on The GuysOnFOSS Podcast.

Errors: I don't know who was pronouncing Maemo correctly, but there seems to be a bit of confusion about it on the Maemo forums. If you know how it is pronounced, let us know. Also, The Thoth said that Moblin turned into Maemo. This is false, Moblin and Maemo merged, making MeeGo (Try saying that 5 times fast!)


News:
IE Browser Share Drops Below 50%
Toshiba 3D TV
US Army Testing PIPBoys
Firefox 4 Beta Released for Maemo and Android
Nixie Pixel Wins Logitech 'Host with the most'

Topics
AROS
Toybox
Microsoft Expression Encoder

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

The Fifth Episode of The GuysOnFOSS Podcast

On this episode of the podcast... The Thoth, Inerg, Mekapaedia and Crazy2be discuss their favorite distros and why they like them. Also, a new segment is introduced called 'Try it for a week'. Remember to enter our contest to win a Starcraft 2 Beta key, or Plain Sight. All you have to do is send an email to Guysonfoss@gmail.com telling us you want to be entered. Keep in mind, if you want your voice to heard on the show, send us an audio clip of you saying what you want to say and we'll probably play it on the show. Another note, we are now on itunes so if you have one of those newfangled ipods, you can download our lovely voices directly onto your device. Show Errors: Meakapaedia accidentally said Fujita instead of Fujitsu; XGA instead of XFX and Pacman -Syu instead of Pacman -Sy.


News
Netflix comes to Canada
Sidux is Sidux no more 
Google Turns 12
They're rooting everybody out here
Mandriva forks
LibreOffice
Go-OO 

Topics
Peppermint
Moblin
Chromium-OS
Mint
OpenBSD
Arch Linux
Gentoo
Plan 9
Mandriva
Windicators

Music credit: Killing Time by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

House cleaning

If you've been following our twitter account, or our facebook page (@guysonfoss and Guys on FOSS respectively) you might have noticed the massive torrent of updates suddenly appearing.

Do not panic.

We're merely updating our tagging system, which was lacking. It varied from none (inerg) to excessive (Thoth) to irrelevant (Me). It's been overhauled, and rules are now in place. Hopefully, searching for posts in the future should be greatly optimized.

Podcast tomorrow! It's been hailed our best one yet.