PC-BSD 9.0 - Isotope Edition - Released

PC-BSD 9.0 (Isotope edition) has been released. PC-BSD is a FreeBSD variant operating system that is targeted specifically at desktop users / end users. One of the uniqueness of PC-BSD is its PBIs or Push Button Installers that allow you to install and uninstall applications just like you are used to in Windows.

Netcat, nc command

Netcat - also known as nc is considered the Swiss army knife of system administrators. In its most basic usage, netcat acts as a simple utility which reads and writes data across network connections, using TCP or UDP transport protocols. But this simple tool finds diverse uses for system administrators (Unix & Linux alike). Hence the name Swiss army knife.

Awesome timeline of Unix, Linux and Mac OSX

A beautifully constructed timeline of Unix which includes modern day Unix descendants such as Solaris and Mac OSX as well as Linux. This timeline is not very much unlike the mind map of Linux I had created a long time back. But this timeline also provides the year when the Unix/Linux flavor was born. [Via: Zwahlen Design blog]

Fig: Unix - Linux timeline

Migrating and Moving Unix Filesystems

My hard disk fills up at a rapid pace. When that happens, I usually create more space by deleting unwanted / less important files & folders from the hard disk. But for me, this is a problem I have to grapple on a regular basis.

Lots of knowledgeable people prefer using Logical Volumes over traditional partitions to store their data for this very reason. Using logical volumes, it is quite easy to shrink or grow a volume by adding or removing devices from the volume using the LVM tools commonly found in all main stream Linux distributions.

Using LVM will ensure that you can change the size of your volume on the fly without any data loss.

UWIN - Unix for Windows

UWIN is a UNIX to Windows Integration Toolkit that gives you almost all the features of a traditional UNIX operating system on Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows ME, and Windows 95/98.

The latest version of UWIN as of this writing is version 5.0. UWIN is released under an open license which includes parts released under Eclipse Public License version 1.0, BSD license, MIT license, and GPL.