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Tatiana Apandi Interviews Dru Lavigne Publish Date: Sep. 7, 2007
Tatiana Apandi asks Dru Lavigne if gender has had any effect on her career and how open source can help more women get involved.
Inside PC-BSD 1.3 Publish Date: Jan. 25, 2007
iXsystems' recent acquisition of PC-BSD hasn't slowed the development of the desktop-capable FreeBSD distribution. Version 1.3 is out and available. Dru Lavigne talks with PC-BSD developers about the new release and their plans to continue to make an effective, efficient, and usable free desktop operating systems.
Fun with Xorg Publish Date: Dec. 7, 2006
Xorg includes several useful utilities and features that almost no one knows about. You can accelerate your display, nest one X server in another, distribute your session across multiple monitors on different machines, and watch a session on another machine. Dru Lavigne explains.
Why iXsystems Bought PC-BSD Publish Date: Oct. 23, 2006
PC-BSD is a distribution of FreeBSD intended to make installing and maintaining a poweful and free Unix system easy. iXsystems is a vendor of powerful computer systems built on free Unix systems. The latter recently acquired the former. In an interview with BSD guru Dru Lavigne, the principals of both groups explain why the new collaboration makes a lot of sense.
Sharing Internet Connections Publish Date: Oct. 5, 2006
Protecting your computer when you're online is good. If you have multiple computers in your home or small business, protecting all of them is also good--especially if you can share your internet connection. Dru Lavigne demonstrates how to allow other computers to use the network safely with a FreeBSD or similar Unix system and fwbuilder.
Building a Desktop Firewall Publish Date: Aug. 3, 2006
By now, many internet users know that they need a firewall to protect their computers while they're online. Knowing that doesn't convey the knowledge of how to create and maintain a firewall. A nice GUI firewall builder called fwbuilder makes it possible to set up a working firewall in ten minutes--on Linux, *BSD, and Mac OS X. Dru Lavigne shows how it works on FreeBSD.
Using DesktopBSD Publish Date: Jul. 13, 2006
A few user-friendly distributions of FreeBSD have appeared lately. DesktopBSD is a user-friendly variant of FreeBSD 5.5 that is suitable even for Unix novices. Dru Lavigne walks through the installation and use of DesktopBSD to provide a modern, powerful workstation.
Using PC-BSD Publish Date: May. 11, 2006
A few user-friendly distributions of FreeBSD have appeared lately. PC-BSD is one suitable for the corporate and home desktops, even those of users unfamiliar with Unix. Dru Lavigne walks through the installation and configuration of PC-BSD to provide a modern, powerful workstation.
Building Binary PC-BSD Packages Publish Date: Jan. 5, 2006
Several BSD-based distributions have emerged recently--and a few are relevant to and accessible by end users. One such is PC-BSD, whose innovations include a binary package installation system. Of course, that requires people to build binary packages for it. Fortunately, as Dru Lavigne demonstrates, doing so is both easy and addictively fun.
Using Software RAID-1 with FreeBSD Publish Date: Nov. 10, 2005
Disk space is cheap, and putting multiple disks in a computer is relatively cheap. Taking advantage of redundant disks to protect against hardware failure is invaluable. Though some RAID solutions require special hardware, FreeBSD 5.0 and later support software RAID. Dru Lavigne shows how to configure and enable disk mirroring.
Using FreeBSD's ACLs Publish Date: Sep. 22, 2005
The standard Unix permissions scheme works fine if you have simple needs, but juggling groups and users can grow unwieldy very quickly. FreeBSD's Access Control Lists give you more control over who can access files and directories. Dru Lavigne explains how to enable, understand, and use them appropriately.
Accessing Secure Subversion Servers Publish Date: Aug. 11, 2005
In the previous FreeBSD Basics column, Dru walked through installing and configuring a secure Subversion server for sharing documents. This time, Dru explains how to teach users to use the server, first from the command line and then from the RapidSVN GUI tool.
Setting up a Secure Subversion Server Publish Date: May. 12, 2005
You've finally persuaded your users to stop emailing documents back and forth when they need to collaborate, but you've had to recover three overridden versions on the shared network drive this week. Dru Lavigne has an answer; this month's FreeBSD Basics column demonstrates how to allow users to collaborate on documents with safe and secure version control provided by Subversion.
make for Nonprogrammers Publish Date: Mar. 24, 2005
If you're a typical FreeBSD user, you may never have compiled C source code on your own. Yet if you've ever issued a make command, it's compiled code for you. How does it do that? What does it do, anyway? And what else can it do? Dru Lavigne answers all of these questions.
FreeBSD Tips and Tricks for 2005 Publish Date: Feb. 17, 2005
The nice thing about F/OSS is that it grows too fast for anyone to keep track of everything new. In her second annual exploration of new things she missed the first time around, Dru Lavigne discovers installed FreeBSD logos, CLI dialog boxes, rescue utilities, more articles, a run-level GUI, saved ports options, and RSS readers.
