Jump to Navigation

Chef Marcel at your service!Food, Wine, and Linux may seem like a strange combination, but combining three passions can be a wonderful thing. I'm Marcel Gagné. Those of you who read Cooking with Linux, the multi-award-winning column that appeared monthly in Linux Journal magazine for 10 years, likely agree. With the help of my faithful waiter, François, Restaurant Chez Marcel serves up the finest in Linux and open source software paired with exceptional wines.

In that same spirit, this site features great Linux and Open Source software, ongoing wine tasting reports, recipes, and the occasional restaurant review. If you came here looking to read past Cooking with Linux columns, you'll find newer releases on the front page, a comprehensive list here and under the "CWL, The Column" menu link to the left. A votre santé! Bon appétit!

charm's blog

SSH the easy way

Sun, 04/19/2009 - 17:24 — charm

Introduction

Secure SHell is a wonderful tool for remotely logging in to a system and doing work. Because of it's command-line nature SSH can be a bit intimidating, but it doesn't have to be: some of the graphics tools you might already know and love can be used in conjunction with SSH to make life easier.

Connecting to SSH with gftp

Tags: 
SSH

RPMing the night away!

Sat, 07/26/2008 - 14:57 — charm

In my previous post I covered some tips about using apt and dpkg, Debian-based package tools. Red Hat/Fedora-based distributions also have useful sets of command line tools for package management, namely rpm and yum. Some of the tools work in a similar fashion, some have other features. I'm just going to cover the ones I've found handy.

Querying if a package is installed

Apt and Dpkg Tips

Sat, 07/26/2008 - 01:48 — charm

My first PC was an IBM XT clone that had 640KB of RAM and a 42MB hard drive that ran MS-DOS. I learned a bit about MS-DOS before graphical user interfaces came on the scene, so I've always had a soft spot for text-based tools. I've also found that when faced with over 200 updates (new machine install) it's often much faster to use apt to update a system. If you run a Debian-based distribution such as Ubuntu, Xandros, Morphix, you should be able to use these tips.

SCO owes Novell $2M, has no money, etc.

Fri, 07/18/2008 - 11:59 — charm

So I just read that SCO owes Novell just over $2,000,000, a small victory for Novell. Of course Novell doesn't really expect to see any money, SCO has after all filed for bankruptcy. SCO apparently has no money and the bankruptcy court is "bending over backwards" to help SCO. Indications from the Groklaw article seem to indicate that SCO still has enough resources to continue in court. It's to the point of ridiculousness now.

Vista Business - boring

Tue, 04/29/2008 - 07:41 — charm

Last night I went to a presentation/pitch for Vista deployment in the enterprise (there's a Star-Trek joke in there somewhere). It's not that I'm dissatisfied with Linux, but I like to know what's going on with Windows, especially since we do deploy Windows machines at work. At some level I always want to learn something new. What I learned was more pitch than enlightenment.

Digital Picture Frame - Part #2

Sat, 04/26/2008 - 11:59 — charm

Parts for the digital picture framePrompted by your good chef in IRC here's the second part to my effort to create a digital picture frame. In the first part I mainly described a couple of "gotchas" I ran into with respect to using software, and things I'd recommend doing before putting the notebook in the frame. In this part I want to stress how important pre-planning is with respect to the entire project. I took the project right through to the end - with a working digital picture frame as an end result, but I learned some things about what frame to choose, matting and other non-geek aspects that would make building a digital picture frame simpler.

Using Linux to install Windows XP on a Vista Notebook

Fri, 04/11/2008 - 01:21 — charm
Bright and early this morning some guys came into our shop with a newish notebook (Dual-Core 1.8GHz, 160GB SATA hard drive) with a major problem: they'd killed Vista and their rescue partition. They came armed with a legitimate Windows XP Home CD and key but said they weren't able to get XP on the notebook. It seemed odd, so we looked into it a bit further and discovered that the problem was a "driver issue." Basically Windows XP Home (2002) doesn't support SATA out of the box. It's possible to press F6 and load a driver from a floppy, but the notebook didn't have a floppy, it was too new!

First Kitchener/Waterloo Drupal user group meeting

Sat, 04/05/2008 - 02:00 — charm
Tonight (April 4th, 2008) was the inaugural meeting of the Kitchener/Waterloo Drupal users group (there's a DRug reference in there - DRupal Users Group). The meeting was small, but interesting, with a diverse range of interests. No one was completely new to Drupal (except someone who stopped in for a little bit to learn more) so it made for an interesting first meeting. We went over some of the basics of the Drupal content management system, checked out a wide range of sites using Drupal in interesting and different ways, from putting books online to simple ecommerce sites.

Digital Picture Frame - Part #1

Fri, 04/04/2008 - 13:35 — charm

Last year I bought both of the Linux Toys books. One of the projects inside that caught my eye was the digital picture frame. I'd just been in an unnamed large department store where I saw a picture frame that would be perfect for this kind of a project - the catch was I didn't have the "spare" notebook required by the project. Well, I finally got a suitable notebook and hunkered down last night to work on the project.

Tales from the computer crypt - Part #1

Fri, 04/04/2008 - 12:09 — charm
A few days ago an individual brought in a couple of computer systems into our shop complaining that they were slow and noisy. We noticed that the power supply fan was clogged with dust, so we opened the case in order to clean the computer completely. Much to our surprise we found cobwebs and dead bugs inside the system (we were tempted to joke with the customer about spiderman gumming up his system, but thought better of it).
Subscribe to RSS - charm's blog


Main menu 2

by Dr. Radut.