Zac Bowling’s Blog

Looks as if one of my favorite applications is starting to sway in its professionalism towards open source. CVSNT seems to be changing around a bit on their site. The first thing you see is a basicly an ad for support services for CVSNT. You can still get CVSNT still for free under the GPL but the Wiki has been changed to be more of an ad too with every other reference back to their ‘main site’ to purchase a support contract. I hate this. The best part of the open source movement is the integrity.

What every open source developer has learned is that people trust our products because they can trust our intentions. What makes our products so great is that we don’t write our application s with the main intention of making money, gainning power, or even atacking . We write them for other reasons. I’m not saying it isn’t right to make money with open source products, but we don’t intentionally do anything to be considered bad taste in mind of the open source community.

This is just bad tastes. http://www.cvsnt.org - ironicly it redirects to http://www.ntcvs.com to state, I’m assuming, their jump to being a commerical entity.

Sad Sad Day.

A better guide to help Windows users migrate and interpoliate with Linux needed to be written. Since everyone notice what I do, and soon Windows based system will drop off the face of the earth and down into the evil pit of propritary systems and insecurity it had sprang from. I could never really find anything that could really explain how you can make Windows conform to the Linux users way of working. Lots of Linux developers have really tried to be nice to Windows and make products to work with them, yet nothing really documented doing just the opposite by helping it work with Linux.

I’ve thrown a list of simple things you can install and do to help you understand the common products, services, and systems in Linux better and use the tools that Linux users use everyday. Maybe it might help you understand the glory of what Linux has to offer and make a complete switch. It can also make it easy just to work with other Linux people at your office. Who knows. Here is what you need to do:

STEP 1:

Download and install the following apps (*optional):

1. Cygwin is a full package of tools, applications, and compliable libraries that all work under windows using a unix emulation layer.
   http://www.cygwin.com/ - Free
2. Apache and PHP for your web server.
   http://httpd.apache.org/ - Free
   http://www.php.net/ - Free
3. ActivePerl, ActiveTcl, ( and maybe ActivePython)
   http://www.activestate.com/Products/Language_Distributions/ - Free
4. MinGW (maybe MSYS) for compiling those *NIX based apps.
   http://www.mingw.org/ - Free
5. *Windows Services for UNIX" from Microsoft is nice for the command line utilities and setting up a Windows based NFS server (but is hard to find at a good price)
   http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/ - $$$
6. *Mozilla Firefox or the regular mozilla are the best web browsers (not really needed but it can help with your window’s struggle)
   http://www.Mozilla.org/ - Free
7. *CVSNT for a great NT based CVS
   http://www.cvsnt.org/ - Free
8. *VNC for remote desktop.
   http://www.realvnc.com/ - Free
9. *Putty for SSH
   http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ - Free
10. *NMAP is great for scanning open ports (some virus scanners think this is a virus though)
    http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ - Free
11. *UCD-SNMP (or if you want to play with NET-SNMP, but its not as stable on windows) for SNMP
    http://www.net-snmp.org - Free
12. *Ethereal for packet sniffing
    http://www.ethereal.org/ - Free
13. *Gaim for instant messaging (Works with AIM, MSN, Yahoo, IRC, ICQ, Jabber, Novell Groupwise, Napster and more)
    http://gaim.sf.net/ - Free

STEP 2:

After you install Cygwin, make sure you add the X:\cygwin\bin to your path directive in Windows Control Panel -> System Settings -> Environment Variables -> Path. ActivePerl will do this for you for your perl libs.

STEP 3:

Enjoy! Don’t claw your face out if you have problems since it is to be expected when trying to do something that is almost impossible.