Yes, finally I am impressed with something. And yes, it’s the eBox Platform which I have been raving yesterday. I have finally downloaded it and had installed it on my spare PC. Well, I had some installation problems, it seems that eBox is very particular about the network card it uses, I tried 2 different types of NIC and both cannot be detected. I think the problem lies with Debian rather than the developers at eBox. Anyway, NICs are cheap nowadays, you can find a list of supported NICs from the Debian website and see whether you can find one that works in your local store. However, after I found one NIC which works, everything went fine for me. No other installation problems.

The web based interface is great as well. Very well organized and you can easily find what you need on their main page. If you have some experience with routers and administrating servers, this should be a breeze for you to handle. However, one thing about eBox, the user interface is a bit sluggish. I am using the interface through the local network and it feels rather sluggish. Even saving any configuration is slow. Not sure why that happens.

The best part about eBox is that it allows you to configure and add as many network interfaces as you want, through their web based interface. No longer is there a need to figure out how to edit whatever file to do that (like SME Server). You can even add virtual interfaces as well. So one NIC can have different IP addresses. But I don’t think it is recommended. And as I said, NICs are very cheap nowadays, you can add more network cards if you need. And setting up these new devices are a breeze, just go to the activate the interface (eth0, eth1 and so on). Of course, make sure that the NIC is supported first.

I am using the eBox Platform mainly for the mails function. Setup is pretty easy. Goto Mails, and enable the mail server. And if you need, activate the POP3 (and IMAP) as well. Then you will need to add users. eBox supports virtual domains, which allows you to have different domains on the same server. If you need to send mails from the eBox sever, you need to create something called objects which is actually an IP Address or IP Address range and then allow it to relay mails. So, this will be a problem for those roaming users. I am not sure how to set “allow all” to send/relay mails. You can of course go and find out all the IP Address ranges and allow that, but it’s very tedious and tme consuming.

eBox doesn’t have a webmail either. And there is no interface for users to access the eBox for changing of settings and configurations. This is kind of disapointing. Users cannot change their passwords themselves. Only the administrator has the ability to do that. If eBox adds a web-based email service, it would be perfect!

For it’s antivirus and antispam portion, it looks adequate enough. They have a variety of options for filtering spam and to configure spam assassin. You can add white or blacklist to your spam filter, pretty standard for an spam filter system. It looks like the version of freshclam installed by eBox (they use ClamAV) is old but it doesn’t seem to affect the antivirus system. Updates are downloaded as per normal.  It’s too bad they don’t have any option to configure how often the virus definitions are updated.

For those who are not interested in the mail functions, I think one of the things that will interest you is that it supported Load Balancing. So if you have two Internet connections, you can use this to “load” balance your WAN connection. I believe that it even supports more than 2 WAN interfaces! I have not tried it before, so I am not sure how effective it can be. All you need to do is to configure two of your network cards to external and setup the gateways and then configure the rules. Note that this doesn’t acually increase the speed of your Internet connection (it’s not like twice as fast or something), it provides a sort of QoS for your Internet needs.

eBox has pretty good documentation, but a lot of terms and jargon are used without much explanation. I am sure beginners will find it very difficult to understand. I think eBox would do a lot better if it improves on it’s documentation, and cater their documentation to beginners as I am sure a lot of eBox users will be beginners.

Have any of you guys wanted to setup a server where you could have everything included? Well, sure if it goes down, everything goes down but it’s going to be very convenient to administrate that server right? You have everything on one interface and it is going to save you lots of time and effort, rather than hoping around different servers and trying to remember which password is for which server. Sure you have. We are all lazy at heart.

So now I would introduce to you eBox! This open source beauty has features like NAT, Firewall, Transparent Proxy, Content Filter, Domain Controller, File Sharing, Printer Server, Mail Server, Jabber Server, DNS Server, Date and Time Server among others. Yes, it is a really full-fledged small business server with all the bells and whistles. And you get to administrate everything on a easy to use web interface. So just key in the URL in your browser and you are in control. What you need to do is to download the image file and burn to a CD. Then you just need to install the distro to a pretty high end PC. Everything comes with a easy to use interface, so if you have some experience with networking, it should be no problem. Oh, this distro is based on Debian so it should feel very familiar with Debian users. And if you already have Debian setup on your PC, you can just use their debian installer to install eBox. And if you are using Windows-based servers, it’s perhaps time for you to look at other alternatives. And eBox is a very decent competitor to Microsoft’s Small Business Server.

From the looks of the eBox community, this distro is very active and the eBox software is constantly being updated and developed. And the latest version v0.9.99 is out, perhaps this is just one more step to the final build? I can’t wait to download the image file and start playing around with eBox. I hope I will be impressed. Just that I downloading the image file takes very long. It’s downloading at 10kps from my side. Probably will take several hours to complete downloading.

If you are looking for other distros with around the same features, I would recommend you SME Server and Clarkconnect. I have been using SME Server for my webserver and my spare email server, it certainly looks very stable. The latest version adds a number of features and has increased support for RAID devices.

Just when you thought that I had enough of searching for open source alternatives for commercial software, I am at it again. This time it is for CD/DVD burning software. I will now introduce to you InfraRecorder, a feature rich CD and DVD recording software for Windows. And this one looks good. You can do nearly everything with it as with Nero. I normally just burn data and video (like VCD and DVD-Video) with my burning software and that’s about it. It’s good to see an open source that provides the basic functions plus some additional features like audio.

Well, looking from it’s official website, this software is supposed to be able to burn data, audio, video and disc images. However, it supports only iso and cue/bin image types. And it is also surprising that it doesn’t support conversion to VCD format from other video formats. However, I am sure that there are other open source software which can convert to VCD (or mpeg) image for you. InfraRecorder allows you to create a DVD-Video Disc though. But as with VCD, conversion is not supported. There is an open source called K3b for Linux which can do all those and more. Too bad, there isn’t a version for Windows.

However, if you are looking to create audio discs, then IrfanRecorder is for you. It allows you to convert to audio cd format from a variety of audio formats without much hassle. And the audio conversion is reasonably fast. But then I am not too particular with my audio anyway.

Oh, InfraRecorder comes with something called InfraRecorder Express. It is just like Nero Express, meant for beginners. So when you start InfraRecorder, it comes with a wizard, asking what you would like to do. Like create a data disc, audio disc, video disc and so on. Yes, so that you won’t be confused with you are faced with the “mind-boggling” number of options in the actual software. Thank god for Wizards, right?

I am currently on a roll in regards to open source software! I am here again to introduce to you yet another open source software called Scribus! People usually use this software to help them create professional looking publications and documents, just like Adobe InDesign (or Microsoft Publisher if you are not into geek language). So desktop publishers can rejoice when they ditch their crappy Microsoft Publisher. In fact, Scribus has almost all the features that the commerical software Microsoft Publisher has. But then who in the publishing industry really uses Microsoft Publisher anyway?

And if you have been using Microsoft Publisher, you will find that Scribus is a bit too complicated to use. Not as user-friendly as it claims to be but if you would like higher quality and more professional looking publications, you will see that using Scribus is the way. It makes use of GIMP (which I had touched on a little while back) to do graphic editing and Ghostscript for PDF conversion. Scribus recommends using high quality fonts (and not freeware/shareware fonts) to do your publishing. While I agree with them completely, it is surprisingly that Scribus, an open source developer recommends commercial fonts instead. Kind of ironic. But they do include some additional fonts in their installation. It’s too bad that they don’t have the fonts preview option, so that you can see how the fonts look like before you use it. Another feature which I like is the Story Editor, which allows you an interface to easily format your text but still doesn’t come with a text preview. Being a software which relies a lot on fonts, I find that rather weird not to have.

And I tried to do some photo editing on their software and found that it is rather difficult. I can’t properly resize my image into the image frame. I had to do the resize on another software (or you can do it with GIMP from Scribus itself) and then re-import it back. Well, from what I heard that is what the developers want (to ensure the quality of the image), but find of frustrating to know that anyone can just resize the image from another third party software and just re-import it back! Seriously, what’s the difference? Anyway, if you don’t often do a lot of desktop publishing (like me), it should be alright. And the results can be rather impressive.

This software has potential. If they would concentrate on making it more user-friendly, especially for the beginner, it would be great. Even most of the publishers don’t really need some of the features they have. I am guessing that’s not their aim. This software is more inclined to professional publishers. Not for us regular users. But they do have a very active community to help others on their problems with Scribus. So if you faced some problem with using Scribus, you can find help from their wiki, mailing lists and through IRC Chat.

If you are using Windows, you need to have Ghostscript installed first to do printing and PDF conversion.

GIMP which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program is a good open source alternative to the very expensive Photoshop. Yes, it’s free and it has some pretty impressive features. Most users use it to do touch-up on their photos, create special effects or just to edit their photos or images. I have been using Photoshop in my office for a while and I realize that it is very powerful. In fact, you can do almost anything on it. However, even for a company user, the price is quite out of the range for most. So I am here to introduce to you GIMP.

GIMP feels a lot like Photoshop. If you have been using Photoshop, you will find the switch to GIMP quite easy. However, the interface can be confusing at times because the GUI is very spartan and bare. Yes, it has to be get used to. But the incentive is that this software is free and you won’t need to fork out thousands for a copy. I often use this software to repair and improve my photos, like those unfocused photos, or those underexposed/overexposed photos and to remove the “red eye” effect without losing quality at all. And I often use this software to resize and sharpen my images. It comes with a full set of tools for painting, graphics manipulation, compression and so on. It easily converts from one graphic format to another. If you want to create animations with this software, you can! You can even add more features to it with plugins. And the possibilities are limitless!

And finally they have created a comprehensive manual for their users. But even without the manual, you can find a lot of resource (like tutorials, guides and walkthroughs) on the Internet on GIMP. It has become one of the most famous graphic manipulation software out there and it is constantly being updated. This software for available for Windows, Mac and Linux. And oh, if you find this software useful, please consider donating to their cause. It will help create a more powerful software for all of us to use.

I am pretty sure everyone here knows what is Norton Ghost right? Well, if you don’t know, I will tell you. It is used to “clone” or backup/copy your harddisk. What I mean is that this software creates a exact duplicate copy of your existing harddisk to another harddisk or to a file. Let’s say for example, you have 10 sets of identical PCs which you are going to setup. Instead of doing the tedious job of installing the Operating System and various drivers and software on 10 PCs, all you need to do is to install on 1 PC. Then using a cloning software, make duplicate copies on the rest of the PCs, saving you perhaps hours or even days of hard work. It is also very useful for IT guys to easily restore any harddisk from their backup. Cloning is just like copying, and so it will take less time to restore a clone than to install your entire Operating System and software from scratch.

There are numerous software out there to do that. The most famous is Norton Ghost, but it is a commercial software. Which means that you need to pay for using it. I mean, someone did all the hard work to write the software and test it, so it should be right that they are paid for it. But anyway, if you are a cheapskate or just plain poor, you can try an open source version. It works just as well, if not better. The software is brilliantly called Clonezilla. If you don’t know anything about Linux, not to worry, they have a LiveCD which you can boot from. No need to key in any commands! Hooray! And it comes with a little “graphical” interface for you to play around. you can backup your harddisk into a file (called an image) or to another harddisk. You can also restore an image back to the harddisk too. Another impressive feature is that Clonezilla allows you to copy through the network to a server. Overall, no bad for a freely available piece of software.

I believed that there are many other open source disk cloning software available out there. But I think the best are the ones which works, have ample features and is easy to use. Sure, a cloning software is more of a technical program for more advanced users, but still, why waste so much time trying to learn to use a software when you can better spend the time doing something more useful, like getting piss drunk?