Wintivity ™

Every once in a while I clarify to clients that the Open Source community has provided excellent tools and components to accomplish work in the Windows Enterprise.

Big name companies and their projects earn a lot of the business press, like Sun with Open Solaris and Novell with SuSE. However, you can download Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, and install powerful and free Open Source software and still get the job done in working together with Windows while retaining your presense (and preference) for Linux.

These are resources I often suggest to our clients. Please try them out. They’re open source, high quality code and completely free.

Linux distros

Any quality GNOME Desktop distribution of Linux

• view popular Linux distros here

Web Browser

• Firefox
• view Mozilla’s statement of direction

eMail Client - Microsoft Exchange capable

• Evolution
  
• view Evolution manual and FAQ
• Evolution provides integrated mail, addressbook and calendaring functionality to users of the GNOME desktop

Terminal Services Remote Desktop Protocol Client

• rdesktop
• view info at SourceForge about the rdesktop project

Office Suite

• OpenOffice
• OpenOffice.org’s Mission Statement is…
  To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format

File Systems tools for interoperability between Windows, Apple Macintosh, and Linux

Useful free tools (and good reading) for use in a heterogeneous [ Windows / Mac / Linux ] File System environment

Windows File System tools serving Mac

Services For Macintosh (SFM)

SFM was an effort by Microsoft supporting Mac integration into the Windows Network. SFM is available in Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2003 Server (but has been dropped from Windows 2008 Server). Services For Mac includes these three key Server services:

• File Server for Mac - checklist
• Print Server for Mac - checklist
• AppleTalk networking and routing - checklist

File Server for Mac - KB147438

File Server for Macintosh (FSM), which is part of SFM, allows Windows and Macintosh clients to create and open files on the same share by presenting the files to the clients with the naming conventions used by their operating systems.

Macintosh and Windows Server Integration - TechFAQ

The folks at TechFAQ have written an excellent article on Mac and Windows Server Integration. The article includes detail walkthroughs about activiting and administering verious Services For Macintosh features.

Also, here are genrally helpful tips on Performance Tuning Guidelines for Microsoft Services for Network File System

File System Tools from the Open Source Community

NTFS-3G

An NTFS driver for Mac OS X and Linux is NTFS-3G - ( also read the NTFS-3G FAQ )

The NTFS-3G driver is a freely and commercially available and supported read/write NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Solaris, Haiku, and other operating systems. It provides safe and fast handling of the Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000 and Windows Vista file systems. POSIX file system operations are supported, and full file ownership and permission support is available as well.

Mac File System software serving Windows

• HFSExplorer - by Erik Larsson - erik82 [at] kth (dot) se
• Mac OS X: About file system journaling - Apple Support

Linux File System software serving Windows and Apple Macintosh

• Explore2fs - Explore2fs for Windows is a WIN32 explorer for Linux ext2fs partitions. Full URL here http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs
• Ext2fxc - Ext2fxc for Apple Macintosh is an implementation of the Ext2 (Linux) file system for Mac OS X. Full URL here http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsx/

User Space File System software

• Linux - FUSE -  http://fuse.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/OperatingSystems
• Mac - MacFUSE - http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/
• Windows - WinFUSE - http://www.suchwerk.net/sodcms_FUSE_for_WINDOWS.htm
• Windows - UniversalFUSE - http://www.eldos.com/cbfs/

Experiment with these File System resources in your heterogeneous environments. Please comment if you have more, better, or mo-better solutions.

Thanks.

This is a growing list of keyboard shortcuts to accomplish typical Windows tasks on a MacBook keyboard (running Windows with BootCamp installed).

Windows Print Screen on MacBook

There are two potential methods using BootCamp to capture a screen image using the MacBook keyboard

IF your function keys control the MacBook hardware then use:
Shft+fn+F11 (Full screen)
Alt+Shft+Fn+F11 (Current Window)

IF your function keys behave as normal function keys
Shft+F11 (Full screen)
Alt+Shft+F11 (Current Window)

Windows Right Click using MacBook Penryn

The MacBook Penryn models have a multi-touch touchpad. Right licking is accomplished by:

Hold TWO fingers down on the touchpad
Click the MacBook single-button

more to follow…

Windows Live Messenger fails to connect in Windows Vista

Quoting: http://michitsch.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!24F6FD85048B600D!107.entry

Michitsch

And here is a solution, that worked perfectly for me, and several of my clients clients.

Drop to a command prompt and run: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

If the command returns this response, “Set global command failed on IPv4 The requested operation requires elevation”, then you need to do this: Click start (windows symbol), Accessories, right click on “Command Prompt”, then choose “Run as Administrator”, then try the netsh command (above) again.

Because this command failed when I was logged on as Administrator, I say again…

If the command returns this response, “Set global command failed on IPv4 The requested operation requires elevation”, then you need to do this: Click start (windows symbol), Accessories, right click on “Command Prompt”, then choose “Run as Administrator”, then try the netsh command (above) again.

EXPLANATION:

The Microsoft Windows Vista OS enables the TCP Window Scaling option by default (previous Windows OSes had this option disabled). The TCP Window Scaling option is described in RFC 1323 (TCP Extensions for High Performance), and allows for the device to advertise a receive window larger than 65 K than TCP originally specified. This is useful in the higher speed networks of today, where more data can be outstanding on the wire before it is acknowledged. This slow performance, or dropped TCP connections is caused by some versions of Cisco IOS® Firewall software not supporting the TCP Window Scaling option. This causes it to have a much smaller TCP window than the endpoints actually have. This causes the Cisco IOS router that runs the IOS Firewall feature set to drop packets that it believes are outside the TCP window, but which really are not.

So, through many firewalls, many protocals fall apart.