Laptop Diaries XIII, Open Solaris

I went to Sun’s Lintlithgow Enterprise Business Centre launch last week, and I saw a demo’d copy of an opensolaris VM which looked really cool, and then a colleague, Jingesh Shah, published a blog about an open source ERP package, called “openbravo” running on Open Solaris. This has to be done. I got Open Solaris running in a VM. …

Multi-Player Diablo

Now its working. Make sure both systems are on fixed local tcp/ip addresses, enable port forwarding on the gateway for ports 4000, 6112-6119 to the games host. Make sure both games are patched up, although you only need one CD. Join the game using the gateway’s internet address. I need to write a program to report this to the screen, currently I login into the gateway to get this.

Further notes and hints on my Diablo page on my wiki. …

Laptop Diaries

Just building up a new laptop for the family, but this one’s MS Vista. I bought a copy of Norton, of course, but had a couple of problems installing MS Office and transferring data. Most of these seeem to be firewall problems, but it does seem that Vista/XP networking might not be as easy as it should. It would seem that Norton (and Microsoft) now have a new version of ‘Secure by Default’, which borrows from the good old security guru’s axiom, ‘if no-one can use it, no one can abuse it.’

On a more serious note, when adopting W95, Microsoft left the 3.11 program explorer interface in place, with XP you have ‘classic’ look and feel themes, I can’t find the retro interface on Vista and I found trying to get it to ‘see’ the exported devices on my home network exceptionally frustrating, and I still don’t know how we got it to work.

For more, see New Laptop, Studio 15 on my wiki. …