Random thoughts, tips & tricks about Slackware-Linux, Lego and Star Wars

Archive for 2010

March 13th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , , |

A new version of sdltrs, the TRS-80 emulator (originally based on xtrs) was released recently.
It adds the new "turbo mode", that can be switched on and off with the F11 key and reorganizes the disk numbering.
I submitted the new SlackBuild script to SlackBuilds.org and pre-built packages (Slackware 32 & 64-bits + ARMedslack) are available from [...]

March 11th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , |

Today version 3.07 of Hercules, the System/370, ESA/390, and z/Architecture Emulator for Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, was released.
Since I use Hercules on an almost daily basis, I quickly downloaded the latest sources and prepared the new Slackware packages and SlackBuild script. The script is already in the "pending" queue, and the packages are being [...]

March 6th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , |

Already a few weeks ago the Geeqie team released the first stable version of this image viewer, a fork from gqview, included in many Linux distributions.
The original gqview program had some bugs, but development had stalled some time ago. But lucky for us, some guys picked up this project and created a new program that [...]

February 23rd, 2010 by Niels Horn in , ,

Today I received my new GSM Modem, a Nokia Internet Stick CS-10. It had the size of an overweight pen-drive and can connect (depending on your service-provider) at speeds up to 7.2Mbps (my contract only goes to 2Mbps).
Here is a picture of the modem, taken from the Nokia site:

As was to be expected, it comes [...]

February 16th, 2010 by Niels Horn in |

Imagine yourself in the following situation:
You have a "headless" (this means: without a monitor attached) server that boots nicely, starts all the services you configured, like dns, ntp, nfs, samba, httpd, mysql, etc. But - since it has processing power left and stays on 24×7, you decide that it could do something extra that you [...]

February 15th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , , , ,

Since I was doing some tests with Slackware running on different platforms (Slack/390, Slack/390x, ArmedSlack on Qemu, etc.) I wanted to compare the performance of the different setups.
I used a (quite old) utility called nbench that was originally written in 1995 but still is a simple way to compare how processors perform, emulated or real. [...]

February 15th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , ,

In preparation for a future project, I built Hercules on ArmedSlack, running in Qemu. The idea was to test the concept of running the mainframe emulator on the Arm processor.
The result was quite usable, at least for the older mainframe operating systems like MVS.
Here are some screenshots:
Starting Hercules on ArmedSlack:

The 3270 terminal connecting to the [...]

February 14th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , , , |

Today Carnival started her in Brazil. Well, I'm Dutch so I don't care too much about all the festivities (it is a nice party though).
So what better to do than finally test the 64-bits version of Slack/390?
I wrote an 11-part post about installing Slack/390 on Hercules more than a year ago, and it [...]

February 12th, 2010 by Niels Horn in |

Whoever has an ISP that regularly changes your IP address, knows the difficulties of accessing your computer at home from remote locations. If the IP address changes all the time, how can you access your home system through a browser, ssh, etc.
There are actually several solutions for this, like DynDNS, where you can register a [...]

February 6th, 2010 by Niels Horn in , ,

Wireshark is a very nice network protocol analyzer / sniffer, that is very complete and totally free and open source. It is the standard for examining network packets, used by many professionals and home users. I've been using wireshark since the days when it was still called Ethereal, some years ago.
The last few days I [...]