Looking for Free Windows OS? ReactOS is here.

Some rights reserved by Plum Lady

I keep looking for free stuff available online. In the early days when my searches were only limited to torrents, keygens, patches etc, didn't get much of a exposure to free legal stuff. FOSS came for rescue and then many different things lined up. Thanks to Ubuntu!!! Its been more than 3 years that i quit windows for daily use... But what haunts me at times is the when there is some software that i need to use desperately and its setup is only available for Windows. Wine helps many a times but not always. At times i felt, if Windows could be free too ... :(

Then on one fine day i wanted to make a doc. I use Libre generally. But this one needed to be highly compatible since i was suppose to send it to some windows user. I got Office 2007 installed in Wine. I used it for quite sometime and then it started throwing some weird error and got closed time and again. At this instance the first thing is googled is Free and open source windows like OS. While there were many linux pages pulled up that i already knew about, this one caught my attention. "Free and Open Source Windows like OS - ReactOS ".

So, what is ReactOS? Its an effort to provide Free and Open Source alternative to Windows. The term "React" also comes from a reaction of dissatisfaction of Microsoft's monopolistic position(source Wikipedia).

ReactOS is an Open Source implementation of NT family of windows. A part of the implementation has been assisted from Wine. The OS is still in its alpha stage and has been selected as a best project from Forge Magazine.

Many alternatives for the set up are available i.e VM images, iso images etc for everyone to have maximum access. The site has all kind of download options available. If in case you happen to find some issue in the installation, you can always report it to the team in their JIRA. The installations are both automated and manual for testing purpose.

You can even contribute to the community as a Dev, QA, Release or Tech Writer. Wishing to get this one released soon. :) 

Free and Open Source Alternatives for most of the paid softwares on Windows Machine

 Some rights reserved by opensource.com

I have recently been using windows more than usual for official use. Being an Ubuntu user i am not much used to either use a trial version of any paid software or pay for any software. I googled a lot for my daily use softwares to make my life comfortable and found that almost for every paid software there was an alternative in the Free and Open Source World. Here is what i found:

• Operating System : Widows (Paid) -> ReactOS (Alternative) I have a different blog written for this.
• Office Utility : Microsoft Office (Paid) -> Libre Office, Open Office(Alternative). For years i only knew about Open Office as an open source alternative. However after going through the threads on Ubuntu forums as to why was Libre Office considered over Open Office as a default Office utility for the OS i came to know that Libre Office development was far too faster than that of Open Office. I even saw the results myself to verify this fact. I would recommend Libre Office for the same reason.
• Video/Music Player : Windows Media Player (Most Probably Paid - I have hardly heard of Microsoft ever releasing anything free of cost :D) -> VLC media Player, Media Player Classic(Alternative).
• Remote File Sharing : WinSCP, FileZilla, Putty
• IDE for C# Programming : Microsoft Visual Studio (Paid) -> Sharp Develop (Alternative) (Although i was looking for Command line utility as i am only used to VIM as such, but found this one and made a note of it.
• File Compression : WinRAR, WinZIP(Paid) -> 7zip(Alternative)
• PDF Reader : Adobe Acrobat Reader(Freeware+Commercial) -> Foxit(Alternative)
• Email Client : Outlook(Paid) -> Thunderbird(Alternative)
• VM : VMWare(Paid) -> VirtualBox(Alternative)
• Reference Management : Zotero (Zotero is another good add-on cum software for Reference Management. You can save your websites and URL/PDF preferences online so that whenever you clean your cache on browsers and you desperately needed some link and you cleared your cache and reinstalled new browser. You can check your Zotero and get URL/PDF back as all these preferences are stored online in your separate account.)
• Cloud Storage : GoogleDrive/Dropbox

Second Place Story : Server ghouls haunt bulk ingestion

Some rights reserved by Julie Rybarczyk

I recently shared one of my stories while monitoring an Ingestion Server with AppFirst for one of the Halloween contest they conducted. Thankfully, won 2nd prize in the same. Sharing the same story here along with the link to visit.

Second Place Story

Server ghouls haunt bulk ingestion
Company: Roshvert
I was suppose to monitor an Ingestion Server that was performing a bulk ingestion through an EC2 instance with around 200 GB of data to be ingested to another server.
Since it was a huge amount of data and the ingestion would take another day to complete, I kept the ingestion going and the logs were performing well. I decided then that I’d log in early tomorrow morning to check the ingestion status. During this time, the log files were supposed to be created automatically through the ingestion and the name of the log file for any particular day should be log_dd-mm-yyyy.txt with date of that day mentioned. It was a staging server and the code was supposed to be supplied for UAT in a day or two.
I logged in early the next morning to check the ingestion status. I was totally puzzled as I couldn’t make out what was happening:

• The log file for the previous day log_27-08-2013.txt was showing everything went well until 11pm midnight and no logs thereafter.
• The log file for today log_28-08-2013.txt got created with no data in it.
• The ingestion process was running with no errors.
• The server logs showed no errors.
• The system never went down.
• Nearly 150 GB of data was still to be ingested and was not progressing at all.
• None of the logs showed any updates as to why the ingestion was not progressing.

Since the delivery was urgent, I stopped the ingestion on the instance and restarted it. To my horror, the ingestion was not progressing at all. I tried running ingestion on other instances, and it worked fine.
Then something hit me, and I went back to check the logs of ingestion. The ingestion logs still showed nothing with 0 kb space used by the logs. Wait!!! Space? 0kb? 150 GB data still remaining?
I immediately checked the disk space and found zero space available. Whoaa!!!
What actually happened is while performing the ingestion, the server created a duplicate copy of the data on the same instance, and until the entire ingestion completes, this data used to remain there. Around 250 GB of disk space was used by ingestion by midnight and the disk was full. I immediately attached a bigger volume to the instance and restarted the ingestion. Thankfully it was complete in a few hours and that saved me from a big trouble!!!