Computer Tips -Tech Info

So, I’ve spent a bit of time talking about flightgear. Here are a couple extra resources that I want to “bookmark” here. There is a Good unofficial how-to here. (Mostly linux flightgear oriented. Also, the flightgear scenery is available here. The link is to a grid covered world map. Clicking on a grid quadrant downloads […]

Ok – I was thinking I might have been a bit too dismissive of flightgear. So, I took a second look (and a third and fourth.) In fact, I found a source rpm of the 0.99 version and rebuilt it for Mandriva 2006 and installed. And went in search of scenery for the local area. […]

I remember back when I was running Windows as my primary OS, one of my favorite diversions was Microsoft Flight Simulator (2000?) In fact, I clearly remember circumnavigating the globe in a Cessna in that program (landing at a small strip in Icelend, the old Hong Kong International airport and some airstrip in the Himalayas […]

There’s a joke that many people bring out when new Windows viruses hit big…. it goes along the lines of, “download a fix here” and the link points to a knoppix linux livecd download, or a Mandriva download disk, fedora/etc… Some say linux isn’t affected by as many viruses because it lacks market share, I […]

We know that for Windows systems especially antivirus is a must. Up to date antivirus is the MOST important though. So how do the different vendors do in responsiveness and quick antivirus definition updates…? The SecurityFix has an article on just that today. The comparison is courtesy of av-test.org.    Send article as PDF   

I just happened across The Qemu site and found that qemu v. 0.8.0 has been released *(yesterday). I haven’t had a chance to download and try myself, but it looks like the open source virtualization software has had quite a few improvements. Among the most interesting I see are initial USB support and virtual networking […]

The first maintenance release for Openoffice.org 2 has been released sometime today according to Betanews.com. It’s mainly a bugfix release. I didn’t see an official announcement on their main site, but there is a link to some of the details that have been fixed. (The link is for one of the release candidates.)    Send […]

A few things to catch up on this afternoon, but first up is a Serious vulnerability in Symantec Antivirus. (It’s always serious when security software has a vulnerability.) The securityfix is reporting that a vulnerability has been discovered in the way Symantec deals with rar archived files. A specially made rar archive could make a […]

The news is that Nero has announced NeroLinux a version of their cd burning software that will run under the linux operating system. The software is available in either rpm or deb binary (for either debian based or red-hat based package managed systems.) I’ve noticed that Nero install under wine with no real problems. I’ve […]

In what will undoubtedly make Vista a more stable release of Windows… Microsoft will be moving display drivers outside the main kernel and run them in “userland”. Display adapter/driver problems have been one of the greatest source of instability and crashes for some time. That should make for a noticable improvement.    Send article as […]