Open Source Society

Remote Desktop for Linux

Yeah, you’re thinking “Been there, done that.  VNC is horrible”.  You’re right, and VNC is difficult to setup, and if you can get it to function similar to remote desktop on Windows, its highly unsecure, and only allows one session at a time.

Which is why I’m not going to tell you how to setup VNC to manage your computer or server remotely with a graphical environment.  I’m going to show you how to setup true remote desktop a la Windows, that is secure, allows for multiple concurrent sessions, and uses the standard remote desktop client found on Windows, Linux, and Mac.

What makes all this possible is an incredible program called Xrdp.  You can find it here. It’s a daemon that runs on the remote machine, and allows you to connect to it using, you guessed it, remote desktop.  Installation is a breeze, you simply unzip the file like so:

tar -xvzf xrdp-0.4.0.tar.gz

This will create a folder called “xrdp-0.4.0″.  To install it, simply cd into the directory and run the following commands:

make

make install

That’s it!  To start the daemon the commands are:

/usr/share/xrdp/sesman

/usr/share/xrdp/xrdp

The daemon will now run quietly in the background and answer RDP requests.  I have not written an init script to start the daemon automatically on bootup, so you may have to shell in and restart the program if your computer reboots.

This program is extremely useful, especially if you have a server that needs to be managed by people who are not used to a command line environment, or if you are a home user with Linux on your desktops that you want to manage graphically.  This can make it easier if you are transitioning from a graphically managed system like windows, to a Linux-based system.

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Information Infrastructure for the Open-Minded Business Part 1

One of the most important components of a medium to large business is its email and collaboration system. Being able to easily and quickly share contacts, calendars, tasks, and ancillary information is critical to keeping productivity at a maximum. The industry standard for this for many years now has been system based largely upon Microsoft’s Exchange Server and Sharepoint software. It provides a centrally managed and secure platform for email, contacts, calendars, tasks, and intranet information that is easy to use and practical to maintain for the small business to the large corporation.

The downside is that there is a significant initial investment to get the system up and running, and once invested you are limited to using Microsoft’s proprietary client applications if you want to enjoy the full benefits and capabilities of the system. Naturally this means that any growth in staff means investing more money in additional software licenses on top of any expenditures for new hardware. These costs can and do add up quickly.

What if there were a way to create an internal information infrastructure (say that three times fast) that was cheap to deploy, and even cheaper to scale up? Well there is!

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Posted in General, Howtos, Linux, My Favorite Open-Source Apps, Windows | No Comments »

South Carolina Linux Users Association

I am pleased to announce the birth of a new organization aimed at promoting the use of open source software and assisting the everyday users “on the ground” as they adjust to a safer, freer, and much less expensive alternative to the traditional computer operating system.  The SCLUA is a collection of local level Linux user groups (or “LUGs”).  Their eventual goal is to host a yearly meeting of LUGs across South Carolina to talk about Linux and open source, have a little fun, and look at ways that South Carolina can be promoted as a place where technology can grow and open source in particular can thrive.

The SCLUA site is still a work in progress, but a wiki style has been chosen so the site will never be formally “complete”.  There is already a lot of information and links to other useful sites there (including this one!).  We have also agreed to let SCLUA use our Listserv to provide email-based discussion lists free of charge to local user groups who need one.   SCLUA also provides webspace on their wiki to user groups who may or may not already have a website of their own.

I’m excited to see where SCLUA goes in the future.  I think it’s a great idea that has a potential to provide a number of benefits to Linux users and regular computer users alike in South Carolina, and other groups may be inspired to pop up as a result of seeing this model.

Visit the SCLUA’s website here.

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Aspirin for AWStats

It’s been a while since my last post folks, work has been keeping me busy lately, and I haven’t had much time to write about new things going on in the open source world. Hopefully the usefulness of this post will make up for my absence.

Something I spend a significant amount of time dealing with in my line of work is website statistics. Eventually every website owner wants to know who is visiting their site and how often. It’s a gauge to some extent of how popular your site is, and therefore a measure of your ability to create something people will be attracted to, and in some cases buy from. The problem is that web statistics are a tricky beast. No two stats packages are going to give the same results, and no matter how perfect the setup, you are never going to get a completely accurate picture of your website traffic. At best, you’re going to get an educated guestimate of how many people have viewed your site.

There are dozens of different statistics applications out in the wild. By far the most common and most popular is AWStats. Of all the different choices, I would say AWStats provides the most complete and accurate picture you could get short of reading the raw logs yourself. But several problems can crop up if things aren’t just so with your server. I’ve especially seen problems on Windows servers where permissions don’t seem to work the way you expect them to. Perhaps this is part of my own lack of knowledge, but regardless one problem in particular has vexated me for years.

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Better Clones and Hard Drives

The 100GB hard drive seemed more than enough when I first bought my laptop, but as time and music collections go on, I’ve begun to run out of space. The solution, of course, is to purchase a bigger hard drive. But do I want to go through the headache of completely reinstalling my system, remembering all the settings and patches I’ve applied, remembering all my passwords, and moving all 70GB of music and personal files to the new drive? This could literally take days, and I don’t have that kind of time. So what is the better solution? Clone the hard drive.

Some of you may already be familiar with commercial cloning programs like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. These programs are okay, but they lack a few features I think are essential to quickly and safely duplicating a drive. For starters, it’s usually an educated guessing game with either of these programs as to which drive should be the source and which should be the destination. Guess wrong, and you end up sending all of your data into the ether forever. If you’re motivated enough, you can yank both drives and track down their device IDs, but even then you don’t always have the ability to view the device IDs in the previously mentioned applications. If you happen to be cloning one drive to another one of identical size and manufacturer, which does happen in cases of system migration or failure recovery, you are taking a shot in the dark as to which drive is which.

Enter dd, a very small, unassuming application which comes as part of the core utilities on any Unix or Linux system. Dd’s primary role in life is copy files bit for bit from one place to another, which sounds useless until you recall that Linux can treat a partition or even a whole storage device (like a hard drive for instance?) as a pseudo-file. This means we can take an input file (the original hard drive), and copy it bit for bit to the output file (the new hard drive). Since this is a command line tool, we have all the other command line tools at our disposal to verify that the devices we’re working with are the correct ones.

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Posted in Hardware, Howtos, Linux, My Favorite Open-Source Apps | No Comments »

PJSIP: Command-Line VoIP Client for Linux

Some time ago, I was tasked at work with finding an IP telephony client that used the SIP protocol, ran on linux, and did everything from the command line. The goal was to have a program that could be deployed at remote networks to test the quality and performance of VoIP calls between the remote site and our central Asterisk VoIP server. I thought this would be an easy task, but it turned out to be far more difficult to find a client that had all of the necessary features. There are a few command-line SIP clients for linux, and most of them are designed for testing, but paradoxically this means that their feature sets have been limited to simply making a call and playing some sort of wav file or reading text from a file. This was handy for sure, but we needed something that would for all intents and purposes be a full-fledged SIP phone that we could control remotely either with a web script or through SSH.

Yesterday I finally stumbled across a program that fit the bill. More than just a program with a static set of features, PJSIP contains a complete library of functions so that you can build your own programs based on the SIP protocol in practically any language you like. However, it does come with several example applications you can build and use on multiple platforms. The primary application is called pjsua, and contains a fully-featured, menu-based interface for the command line. This program alone did everything we needed and more.

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Posted in Linux, My Favorite Open-Source Apps, Reviews | 1 Comment »

The Future of Music: with Jay Cassano of Fall of the West Records

One of the things that has always interested me is music and how it’s produced. I got the opportunity to talk with Jay Cassano, a volunteer with Fall of the West Records in Amherst, Massachusetts. I asked him how his indie label was any different from the thousands of small labels that abound across the world, and what he told me was astounding. While it may not have been a conscious decision on their part, what Jay and his friends have done is to create a open-source model of recording, producing, and selling records.

Doing this has made it possible for them to pursue a passion, while making it easier for new bands to get themselves heard. They have also pioneered an on-demand production model which keeps their costs extremely low while still producing as many CDs as the bands want or need. This mean less waste, more profit for the bands, and low overhead for the recording company. Fall of the West is a not-for-profit company, but this model could be applied with little modification for a group who did want to do this for a living. In short, anyone who owns or wants to own a small business can learn some incredibly useful things from what Fall of the West has done.

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Posted in Get Involved!, Interviews | 1 Comment »

The Future of Collaboration: with Wikimedia’s Deputy Director Erik Moeller

I recently had the rare pleasure of corresponding with Mr. ErikMoeller, the Deputy Director of the WikiMedia Foundation. I asked him about the roots of projects like Wikipedia, how these collaborative projects have impacted both technology and society, and where these projects are headed in the future. The key that I came away with from this interview is what I read between the lines. Mr Moeller exudes a passion not just for the Foundation and the projects it sponsors, but for a vision of a cooperative future for both society and technology that many in the free and open-source movement share. He demonstrates it isn’t always about making things available for free, but also about giving people the freedom, the tools, and the knowledge to use these things to increase their own potential as human beings and members of a society.

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OSS List Server Now Online

I’m proud to announce that Open Source Society Dot Org now has its very own email discussion list server.  Our first list is for the Charleston, SC Linux User Group.  It won’t stop there, however, as we intend to host an email discussion list for any group of Linux enthusiasts, users, developers, etc, or any other groups interested in free and open-source software and its uses.  If you would like to apply to have your list hosted by OSS, please send an email to hosting@opensourcesociety.org with your name, the name of your group, why you want a discussion list and what the primary topic of discussion will be.

If you would like more information about the Charleston Area Linux User Group or to subscribe to the discussion, visit the list’s homepage here.  And keep an eye out for the official Open Source Society discussion group coming soon!

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Build Your Own PC

Hi folks. It’s been a while since we had an update. I’ve been pretty busy trying to line up interviews with interesting people and researching new things to help users get acquainted with open-source software. I’ve got quite a few things coming down the pike I think you’ll enjoy, but for now read on for the skinny on how to put together your own computer and save a ton of cash doing it.

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Posted in Hardware, Howtos | No Comments »