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(Up­date: in ret­ro­spect, I have re­al­ized that this ar­ti­cle is per­haps not so well writ­ten. Ex­pect some­thing more use­ful and co­her­ent soon!)

Lin­ux seems like the per­fect so­lu­tion for the new brand of portable PCs, net­books. It’s ef­fi­cient, re­quires few re­sources, and can run most if not all of the pro­grams one usu­al­ly runs on such small com­put­ers - word pro­cess­ing, email, web brows­ing, and so on. Large, com­plex soft­ware pack­ages that re­quire Win­dows to run per­form abysmal­ly on low-pow­er com­put­ers like net­books, so ef­fec­tive­ly the need to run Win­dows is nul­li­fied.

Why, then, do con­sumers (and re­view­ers!) choose Win­dows over Lin­ux for net­books? Read more…

Here is the up­dat­ed ver­sion of my pre­vi­ous au­then­ti­cat­ing/for­ward­ing Squid 3 con­fig. It adds some things and fix­es some things. In par­tic­u­lar, the peer ex­clu­sion rules from the pre­vi­ous con­fig were not work­ing - this one should cor­rect­ly not use the par­ent prox­ies when query­ing “lo­cal ad­dress­es”. As be­fore, the con­fig­u­ra­tion file con­tains two proxy servers for load bal­anc­ing; it can be ex­tend­ed easi­ly to in­clude more. Read more…

Down­load Re­moveDu­pli­cates.py

One of the prob­lems with us­ing hy­brid Win­dows and Lin­ux en­vi­ron­ments is that one needs to watch close­ly for filesys­tem and file anoma­lies and in­con­sis­ten­cies. Dif­fer­ing end-of-line mark­ers, for ex­am­ple, cause many prob­lems when shar­ing files be­tween the two op­er­at­ing sys­tems. One par­tic­u­lar prob­lem I’ve run in­to is that of hav­ing du­pli­cate files, or in other words, mul­ti­ple files with the same file­name. This can hap­pen if, say, you copy a di­rec­to­ry some­where in Win­dows, then switch to Lin­ux and use a tool such as rsync to copy that same di­rec­to­ry over again. If the cap­i­tal­iza­tion is dif­fer­ent, Lin­ux will not re­place the old files, be­cause Lin­ux, un­like Win­dows, is case-sen­si­tive. This will even hap­pen, and is tech­ni­cal­ly ac­cept­able, on NTFS filesys­tems.

The so­lu­tion I’ve come up with is this sim­ple script, called Re­moveDu­pli­cates.py. Ob­vi­ous­ly, you need Python in­stalled to run it, but it has no ad­di­tion­al de­pen­den­cies. Sim­ply run it in the di­rec­to­ry you wish to clean, and it should do the rest. Note that you shouldn’t use this for en­tire filesys­tems (yet), be­cause it will use ridicu­lous amounts of mem­o­ry if it is given a high num­ber of files. Down­load it here!

P.S. Al­so, I can­not guar­an­tee that this tool will work as in­tend­ed or will be bug-free. Use wise­ly.