Kong Kong de World

If you have ever connected to your cooperate network using VPN you may understand the complexity of the tools and configurations IT engineers must deal with. In Windows world, it's true. To do anything that looks complicated there's always some software available, to make simple tasks over complicated. Say if you want to access your home Linux machine from your office. Both are behind firewall and use NAT. You don't have permission to change firewall settings. We see this a very common scenario in today's world. We don't need VPN or any software to connect to home machine (A). What we need is a machine (B) at middle and through B we can connect to A with ssh connection from the machine (C) you are working on. This is the easiest solution I found so far. No need for VPN, expensive software, configuration, ... all you need is ssh. ssh has a very useful parameter -R. This tells ssh server at remote (B) will forward the given port number to itself (A). For more deta...

It looks nice now. Linux is quite robust. I didn't re-install for more than a year now. It's unbelievable when I was running Windows. Even with the promising Windows 7 I don't believe a heavy user like me don't need to re-install for over a year. The music player is Audacious, nice to render non-unicode characters. Also when use Dust theme and 50% gray background, turn on minimal visual effects it rocks.

No. Today I tried some of my devices I don't expect to work under Ubuntu: an unknown usb bluetooth dongle and a Logitech webcam. Since I don't use them for long time the last memory with them were in Vista which asks for drivers of these devices. Some could be found online, some not. I can't remember precisely but Ubuntu definitely work out of box. I just installed additional software to provide GUI to use the devices - apt-get install cheese for webcam image/video recording, bluetooth file transfer under Gnome to transfer files to bluetooth devices. I must say that Ubuntu/Linux may support more hardware than Vista.