Tag: Operating System

Fixing Octave's Plot on the Windows 3.2.4 Release

Out of the box a lot of us Windows users who added all of the Octave-Forge packages are disappointed to find that the plot function produces an invisible window.
Here is the problem and solution:

Realistic solution at this moment, do not install the oct2mat package when you install octave with octave-forge packages if you do not use this package. One one of different solutions is to execute
pkg rebuild -noauto oct2mat
at the octave prompt and then restart octave. The operation results in the oct2mat package not to be auto-loaded in startup. When you want to use oct2mat, execute “pkg load oct2mat” command.

(via octave-forge, via octave-bugs)

Windows XP RunAs feature is horribly broken

Switching back to Windows XP from the Mac has been educational. Along with learning a lot more about Cygin than I had ever known before, I’m discovering new features-to-be-avoided in Windows XP. Here is a biggie: “Run As”.
Windows allows you to execute programs with another user’s credentials. You are probability thinking “Simple right?”. Well, it isn’t. Using this feature seems to consistently corrupt the RunAs-ed user’s profile. Corrupted profiles seem to be a mysterious thing with little to no way to fix them; creating a new profile is basically the only solution. In my case I restored from a nightly backup (because I know stuff like this is bound to happen on Windows). My takeaway:
Disable RunAs on Windows!
Here is how.

Coyotos and Genode OS

Coyotos and Genode are two operating systems about which I had never heard that were mentioned in an Ikarus Users mailing list thread that doesn’t seem to have been mirrored online.
Coyotos:

Coyotos is a secure, microkernel-based operating system that builds on the ideas and experiences of the EROS project.

Genode:

We understand the complexity of code and policy as the most fundamental security problem shared by modern general-purpose operating systems. Because of high functional demands and dynamic workloads, however, this complexity cannot be avoided. But it can be organized. Genode is a novel OS architecture that is able to master complexity by applying a strict organizational structure to all software components including device drivers, system services, and applications. The Genode OS framework is the effort to advance the Genode OS architecture as a community-driven open-source project.

GoboLinux

GoboLinux is a modular Linux distribution: it organizes the programs in your system in a new, logical way. Instead of having parts of a program thrown at /usr/bin, other parts at /etc and yet more parts thrown at /usr/share/something/or/another, each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that’s installed in the system and which files belong to which programs in a simple and obvious way.

Gobo looks like it might be a nice Linux to try out!
(via Carl’s REBOL Blog)