In When Do You Trade in Your Gibbon for a Heron?, I mentioned that I’m considering upgrading my System76 laptop from Gutsy Gibbon to Hardy Heron. A commenter named Scummy suggested that a similarly configured Dell system is cheaper:

Dude - you just paid a $350 ‘Linux Tax’ by NOT going mainstream in your hardware…

Maybe so, but I think not. It depends on what you value.

My main computer these days is a laptop from System76. I was very happy to support a vendor willing to ship and support a laptop without the Microsoft or Apple tax, and very pleased to have hardware supported by a Linux distribution.

That was a couple of Ubuntu releases ago. Now that Hardy Heron is out, I feel the urge to run through the upgrade. Improved battery life is one big draw, but getting updates for all sorts of software I rely on is nice. (New Wine, new Valgrind, new Firefox, new GCC….)

Upgrades are never 100% perfect, though. There’s always a risk of mishap that’ll take me a few days to straighten out. I don’t have any talks to give or books due in the next several weeks, so the timing seems good, but perhaps I should wait a few days more for the early adopters to expose any bugs that I’m happy not to fix?

I know plenty of people like Jim Zemlin who were very happy to run pre-release versions of Hardy Heron, but he had Greg K-H to help him out.

How do you decide to upgrade?

10 days ago the Linux Loop blog had a post titled “Linux Eee PC Far Faster Than Windows Version”. I’m sure many Linux users nodded and had assumed as much. The author compared the times of three tasks: boot up, loading Firefox, and shutting down. That’s hardly a comprehensive set of tests. Some people commented to dismiss these metrics as “meaningless”. They aren’t meaningless but they certainly aren’t the whole story. Others pointed out that IE on Windows was faster than Firefox on Linux and that MS Works was faster than OpenOffice. Some then responded that Works isn’t the equivalent of OO and that MS Office would be a better comparison. It all got a little shrill with those who believe that Linux is faster than Windows and those who say it isn’t so talking past each other and resolving nothing.

I’m going to try and sift through the morass and say what I think the numbers really mean and what they don’t mean. Those with an agenda, either agenda, will, I’m sure, attack what I have to say. I think anyone who really tries to look at things objectively probably won’t. I’m just not sure that very many people are truly objective.

In the interest of fairness let me disclose where I am coming from: Yes, I tend to have a pro-Linux bias. I also have a bias against hype and B.S. When it comes to my professional life I’m an IT mercenary. If someone wants me to support Windows systems along with Linux or UNIX systems I will gladly take their money and do the work. I also won’t evangelize on behalf of Linux. Why not? In business everything comes down to a cost vs. benefits analysis and there are situations in the real world where a change of OS is far too costly to justify any perceived benefits. There are many situations where Windows or commercial, proprietary UNIX really and truly is the best fit. Back to those pesky metrics…

Last month distro-review ran an article titled 10 ways that Linux is outgrowing the stereotype and becoming the best OS. While I agreed with all 10 points in the article something just didn’t sit right with me. I bookmarked the article and gave it a good long think. My conclusion: the facts are correct but there are problems with both the premise and the goal of the article.

My problem with the premise is in the opening paragraph:

I’m occasionally asked “why do you bother with Linux?” by people who haven’t used it recently under the assumption that it’s difficult to use, counter intuitive, geeky, nerdy and any number of other adjectives.

I hear that too. People who tried Linux back in the ’90s often came to that conclusion and haven’t tried it since. Microsoft, Apple, and their supporters certainly do all they can to maintain that stereotype.

Having said that, the question I here far more often from non-technical people is “What’s Linux?” Outside technical circles a lot of people have never heard of Linux or if they have heard the name it simply didn’t register. Think about the recent Apple commercials. You know, the ones that start with “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC”. They make the assumption that PCs all run Windows and that Macs all run Mac OS X. So do most people.

In the next sentence the article states its goal:

However it is my intention to raise awareness that Linux is remarkably usable these days, so on that note let’s start looking at how Linux has outgrown that stereotype.

The article then details all the wonderful advances in Linux. It’s all accurate and spelled out in clear language. There’s only one problem: these points all assume you have Linux installed and running or, at the very least, that Linux installation is a no-brainer. The sad fact is that the average Joe or Jane user has never installed an operating system and probably never will. They use what comes on the computer. Changing operating systems is too much work to even consider. Why should they if they think their computer is working just fine for them? They need a reason to want to learn something new and do extra work that they think, rightly or wrongly, is difficult. What’s the incentive for them?

Instant Messaging for Introverts
This is an excellent article about the intrusiveness of modern “always on” communications tools, especially instant messaging. The author framed it as an introvert vs. extrovert problem, which I’m not sure is a correct assessment- to me it’s manners vs. rudeness. Some folks think because they have instant messaging it’s OK to be constantly interrupted, or to constantly interrupt other people for every trivial thing. Well, no, it’s not OK.

Matt Asay makes one crucial observation in Microsoft’s dilemma: The importance of the downstream:

To work within the open-source community… Microsoft must stop polluting the downstream with patent encumbrances.

(Emphasis in original.)

This is my problem with Microsoft’s patent pledge, with the Microsoft-Novell deal over codecs for Monopolight, and just about everything coming out of Redmond except for the pretty words of the open source interoperability lab.

Discriminatory distribution clauses are contrary to the four freedoms of software. Couching that discrimination in the language of business ($40 billion in annual revenue seems like a pretty fair return for $7 billion in annual research to me) and waving the tired old tatters of the flag of innovation doesn’t make that discrimination right, and it doesn’t hide it very well.

If Microsoft wants to interoperate with free software at the source level, it has plenty of source code — all of Microsoft’s own source code and all of the free software ever distributed.

If Microsoft wants to interoperate with free software at the business level, it could start by removing legal roadblocks to interoperability. The fact that the company continues not to do so leads me to believe that Microsoft doesn’t really want to interoperate with free software at a business level.

As long as the company offers only jingoistic pats on the head to us misguided little hackers laboring part time in our basements with no commercial aspirations, there’s little point in considering anything that comes out of Redmond as useful.

In eight months since Nat Torkington asked Bill Hilf What Will Change at Microsoft with Regard to Patents and F/OSS, nothing interesting has happened. OSCON’s four months away. Maybe Bill Hilf will have a big announcement then — maybe he’ll have set up mail filters. Don’t hold your breath for a sane patent strategy.

I am in the process of rewriting the work website to be all CSS-shiny, standards compliant, easy to update, all that jazz. During which I have been led to really wish that CSS had a “has child” selector. It is of course possible to fake it, but you have to do it in the markup (by using a “has-child” class) which is suboptimal. Thankfully it’s the navigation that needs this, for which I use server-side includes, so I only have to do it in one place; but it makes my nice tidy markup messy!

I went looking for whether CSS3 would feature this. Nothing on the CSS3 Roadmap (2001? Blimey, that’s old.) It does though mention that selectors will be extended. However, the most recent CSS3 selector document doesn’t give has-child as one of the selector extensions. So I guess that’s a no. A shame.

In other news:
Any Linux-using women out there who aren’t already aware of LinuxChix? Click and find out!

In a weblog on CNet, Don Reisinger asks Is Linus Torvalds even speaking for Linux anymore?

The question reminds me of a famous retort by Charles Babbage. I’m sure you can find it, and it’s immaterial. What Mr. Reisinger said is more important:

Because although Torvalds has his own belief about what Linux is and should be going forward, the vast majority of its users disagree. Let’s face it — if it were up to Torvalds, beauty and intuition would take a backseat to functionality. But when you look at distributions like Ubuntu or OpenSuse, it looks like no one is paying attention.

As a reminder, gentle reader, almost every time someone says “face it”, you can discount the paragraph as a whole. Still, it’s occasionally important to explore why an argument is wrong.

First, I doubt that Mr. Reisinger asked most Linux users what Linux is and should be. I’m not sure that he asked any. It’s awfully dangerous to put forth such a strong postulate without evidence.

Why am I so certain that Mr. Reisinger made up that figure? Particularly with regard to the use of Linux as part of free desktop operating systems, distributions such as Ubuntu and SUSE are the users.

The question then becomes “Do distributions pull the kernels they use from Linus’s tree?” If so, then it follows that they pay attention to Linus’s views on Linux.

While many distributions do apply patches to the vanilla kernel, I can think of few patches that aren’t at least likely to go into Linus’s tree at some point in the near future. (Many patches have historically been backports from a newer version of the tree.)

Now perhaps Mr. Reisinger wants to start a conversation about the entire free software desktop stack (or more properly, stacks). I’m not sure it’s possible to do that without a fuller understanding of what exactly encompasses the free desktop stack. As you might expect from Linus’s original comments, his view of what an operating system is and does is very, very different from the assumption of certain people who don’t know what exactly Linus works on and its place in a much larger ecosystem.

Like most people who do tech work of some sort or another for a living I love my toys. I’d love to have the latest and greatest gee whiz system and if I won the lottery I probably always would. Today’s best full-featured distros all have native 64-bit versions. One of my favorites, Vector Linux was a little late to the table but I’m pleased to report that the current release, Vector Linux 5.9 Standard, has a 64-bit version in beta right now. Good news.

Of course not everyone can afford the latest and greatest. In the developing world in particular people make do and sometimes manage to do wondrous things with what folks here in the United States would call obsolete. Even if hardware is new it is sometimes designed to be what would normally be considered a low spec system either to be energy efficient (green computing) or low cost. The laptop designed for OLPC is a great example. So are green systems and low cost systems designed for use in first world, developed countries, including systems based on Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX technologies. ASUS Eee PC, designed for ease of use, small size, and low cost is another great example that’s generated a lot of buzz. I know for most of you I’m preaching to the choir but I actually was criticized in a comment to my recent review of AliXe 0.11b for suggesting keeping old computers running is somehow a good idea.

Yes, there are a bunch of lightweight Linux distributions that meet this need nicely. Vector Linux started out as such a distro a decade ago but evolved into a full featured distro. The Vector Linux developers have returned to their roots, though, and now have Vector Linux Light in alpha. VL Light is an ultra light version of VL built with a current kernel and current applications but designed to run smoothly in just 64MB of RAM. I have Vector Linux successfully running on an old Liberty small footprint box with just a Pentium 133MMX processor and 32MB of RAM. That’s normally Damn Small Linux territory but it’s nice to be able to run something a bit more modern and a bit more capable on the old beast.

Kudos to the developers at Vector Linux for scaling down as well as scaling up. There’s nothing more friendly to the environment or the budget than keeping an old system going rather than building or buying a new one. So long as a computer can do what you need it to do it’s not obsolete. I’ll be following up my AliXe review with reviews of other lightweight and small footprint Linux distributions, including Vector Linux Light when it’s released.

Over the past year or two I’ve been drifting away from Fedora, Ubuntu, and Mandriva towards distros derived from Slackware for desktop use. The reason is simple: these distributions tend to have the best performance I’ve found, particularly on older or limited hardware. Slackware itself lacks some graphical tools and user friendly features that more popular distros have but is outstanding in terms of stability and reliability. A number of Slackware derived distros retain those benefits while offering the ease of use many of us have come to expect. AliXe is such a distro, albeit one designed to be small and compact, making it particularly suitable for older hardware. True to it’s Canadian heritage, AliXe also offers full support for both French and English despite it’s small size.

AliXe is designed to be run as a live CD. Those burdened with slow connections will be pleased to see that the iso image is less than 340MB in size. An optional installer (not included in the iso) is available for a conventional hard drive installation. The AliXe website warns that this is for “experts only”, in part due to an utter lack of documentation. AliXe also offers the option to run entirely cached in RAM provided you have enough memory. AliXe is built with the Linux Live scripts so a frugal install, similar to Damn Small Linux, where the iso image is installed directly to the hard drive and is booted read-only, is also possible. You are then effectively running the Live CD with the speed of a conventional hard drive.

The AliXe code base is a heavily modified version of Slax 6rc6, which in turn is based on Slackware 12. Unlike Slax, which uses KDE for the desktop environment, AliXe uses the smaller, lighter, but still powerful Xfce. In order to remain small AliXe offers just one of each type of application it provides, including the desktop. I tested AliXe on my five year old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204, which has a 1GHz Intel Celeron processor and 512MB of RAM.

As of this last Friday, December 7th Fedora Core 6 is no more. With it goes the last release the Fedora Project had seen the split between “Community” (Extras) and Red Hat sponsored (Core). Those not intimately involved in Fedora might be interested to learn that when the merge happened it was the core packages that ended up having to follow the former “Extras” packaging guidelines and not the other way around. Yet another testament to the power of community.

I apologize for going off on a half-baked rant at Ubuntu. Ubuntu is not perfect, but these kinds of flames generate more heat than light. I know better, and I’m sorry.

What I wish I had done was post something like this:

For all of the cool things that Ubuntu has done, their lack of quality control is astonishing and baffling. They’re better at innovating excuses than actually responding to bug reports. This is the latest fun example, “Bug #145805 in aumix, https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/aumix/+bug/145805 “. The binary Aumix package was built incorrectly for Gutsy, so it doesn’t work. Rebuilding it from sources fixes it. So does the crack Ubuntu team leap into action? Yes, but not to fix it….

**update**
Read here for an update:
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/12/ubuntu_linux_users_bugs_1.html
***

A while back the good folks behind Freespire, the free version of Linspire, sent me a CD with version 2.0 for me to review. I was very happy to look at it as Linspire has been a leader in getting preloaded Linux systems into retail and online outlets, something I believe is critical for mainstream Linux adoption.

I knew going in that Freespire was “free as in free beer”, not an OS that would be considered free by The Free Software Foundation or most free software advocates. For those of us who are not free software purists Freespire does have one compelling feature: Linspire’s settlement with Microsoft allows them to offer Win32 codecs for playing DVDs, MP3s, etc… at no cost to the end user. For those of us who use our Linux systems for both home and business, who use laptops in front of consulting customers, who simply wish to comply with the law of the land here in the U.S., namely DMCA, whether we agree with it or not, Freespire offers a real option.

Having said all that one of the first things you see when you boot a Freespire CD is their End User License Agreement (EULA), a mass of legalese reminiscent of the Windows EULA. I tried to read through it and it seems to me (and I may well be wrong about this) that if I use my system for both home and business then Freespire is NOT free for me as I can’t fall under both the “family license” or the “business license”. I can’t freely copy or redistribute the OS as a business user. I’m limited to “solely up to the number of Seats you have.” The EULA also says that I, as a business user:

“You may not (and shall not allow any member of Your Business or any other third party to): (i) copy, reproduce, distribute, relicense, sublicense, rent, lease or otherwise make available the Software or any portion or element thereof except as and to the extent expressly authorized herein by Licensor; (ii) translate, adapt, enhance, create derivative works of or otherwise modify the Software or any portion or element thereof; (iii) decompile, disassemble or reverse engineer (except as and to the extent permitted by applicable local law), or extract ideas, algorithms, procedures, workflows or hierarchies from, the Software or any portion or element thereof;…”

In The Optimistic Contributor’s review of Parted Magic on LWN, Robert R Boerner Jr mentions the disheartening fact that Parted Magic’s developer has decided to discontinue the project.

Yes, the source code is open and available, but that in and of itself is not always sufficient for success:

I can only wonder how many other projects in the free software world have met the same fate. What great application or idea is lying dormant in Google’s cache or the Internet Archive? I know what you are thinking, if we are dealing with open source software, why doesn’t someone else just pick up where the original developer left off? The simple answer may be that people with the time, skills or inclination to scratch the same itch that brought a project to fruition are few and far between. Quite frankly, why would someone want to, knowing that they might meet the same fate as Patrick Verner?

Boerner’s solution is, ultimately, the only solution that makes community-driven software work:

When I advocate the use of free software such as Linux, I always tend to think of the freedom to make changes, the freedom not to be locked in. What I forgot is the old adage that freedom is not free. Along with that freedom comes the responsibility of the community at large to do what they can to help.

This help can come in any form, whether it is writing documentation, helping to moderate a web forum, or just simply sending a thank you email to the developer(s).

There are no requirements in an OSD-compliant license to do any of these things to use the software. Nor are these requirements to redistribute or modify or modify and redistribute the software.

Yet if your business or work or privacy or freedom relies on such software, please do consider helping keep the ecosystem of free, community-developed software healthy and vibrant.

eWeek ran an article yesterday titled Linux Losing Market Share to Windows Server. The article quoted IDC sales figures. There is a real problem counting this way. Quoting from the article:

IDC analyst Al Gillen pointed out that the number of servers shipped does not perfectly equal the number of operating systems in the market. This is particularly the case with Linux where a substantial portion of the overall market opportunity comes from deployments aboard recycled servers, PCs and workstations deployed as servers, and Linux deployed as a guest operating system.

“This does not contradict any trending taking place on server hardware,” Gillen said.

He added: “But we do need to remember that the Linux software ecosystem does not track exactly the same as does x86 hardware shipments.”

I should note that eWeek often functions as a cheerleading section for Microsoft. Take, for example, the links to other articles with such catchy titles as:

• Windows Server Woos Linux Customers


• Is open source dying?


• Windows Server 2008 features address the Linux challenge.

Josef Spillner writes on the desperate need for a Freedom Grid system:

In the old days, vendor lock-in was on the radar of free software developers. Many systems based on Linux and BSD are used to host internet applications, so many that in fact the server side was considered safe and forces gathered to conquer the desktop. The real push towards a free desktop began 10 years ago - with KDE and GNOME being founded, bringing many powerful applications to the average users. But that’s still 10 years ago - and times have changed.

Today, many user use a free desktop to check their GMail, then tune in to some Shoutcast beats, and finally think of doing their daily backup by uploading some files to Amazon S3. At the end of the day, they did use some free client applications - but likewise they did leave precious data at proprietary service providers. When freedom and privacy are equally challenged, people should shout loudly and stop using those services. But instead, they spend their time developing more interfaces for them.

The Four Freedoms Applied to Software as a Service talks a lot about the value of data, but there are pragmatic questions about the use of a service hosted elsewhere as well. If your work or data depends on the good attitude of someone else’s server (think CDDB versus the truly-free replacement, FreeDB), are you truly free?

I’ve been enjoying Wade Olson’s KDE weblog posts, and especially his wonderful images. His latest image in the What Does KDE Mean to You? series is an effective description of the goal of community-driven free software development. It’s also a nice pun for OO programmers.

Russell Coker just posted Who Can Contribute to Free Software, building off of a theme by Pia Waugh. Using the words “hacker” and “coder” sometimes makes it sound as if the only (or most valuable) contributions to free software are code.

That’s not true. It’s also not true that everything else is unglamorous scut-work, like sifting through bug reports. You could run a web site, write a weblog, answer questions on mailing lists, set up smoke tests, file bugs, review documentation, recommend the project to people who need it, and more. It’s well-on time that people who make non-code contributions receive the full accolades and appreciation they deserve. (That’s why every time I praise a project in my “Thank You” series, I praise all contributors, not just developers.)

The Free Software Foundation has defined Four Freedoms related to software. These freedoms apply to users of software, not necessarily developers. In the view of the FSF, these freedoms are ethical in nature, so much so that they argue that software which violates these freedoms is unethical.

Like many other rights, the four freedoms are specific expressions of abstract freedoms in the context of software. They represent concrete examples of underlying notions of freedom. You can see this principle if you ask “Why should I be able to run my own printing press or weblog?”

I’ve argued before that I don’t care about Google’s source code, for example, but if those underlying principles exist, then it should be possible to identify them. It should also be possible to extrapolate concrete expressions of those principles in new contexts… such as software run by vendors to provide a service to users.

My friend Dave just built a machine to run CentOS. Last night he lamented that he didn’t like the video player. I cringed, “Is it well-known free software video player? I’ve not had much luck dealing with the developers and I recommend another well-known free software video player.”

Another friend, Jim, snickered. “This is what I hate about Linux. There’s just too much choice.”

I rolled my eyes. Today I realized why that’s a silly argument (sorry, Jim–but you don’t use Notepad.exe for text editing).

I am working on finding a way to enable developers working in a wide variety of languages to directly access computationally-intensive libraries written in C++, C, and Fortran. The libraries will have been multithreaded using Threading Building Blocks (TBB), the open source project for which I’m “community manager.” TBB is a C++ template library (like STL). I don’t expect to have much of a problem calling C and Fortran libraries from C++/TBB code. But, what’s the best path to enable someone writing in Perl or Python or Ruby or — whatever — to call these multithreaded libraries?

This search has led me to reinvestigate some techniques I’ve looked at in the past — for example, Perl’s XS — but the idea of having to create an interface for each individual calling language is unappealing. I looked at, and did some experimenting with, SWIG (Simplified Wrapper and Interface Generator). But before I got very far, Parrot was suggested to me by some people on the #tbb IRC channel (on FreeNode.net).

During my initial investigation of Parrot, I wrote a blog about my research. Parrot looked promising to me:

Hence, if we can wrap C++ libraries threaded using TBB, then the Parrot NCI should make it possible for all the languages that have Parrot support to call those libraries. Then, high level scripting languages such as Ruby, Python, and Perl will have convenient access to computationally-intensive libraries that have been threaded for optimal performance on multicore processors.

This post elicited an interesting response on another site: “Will Parrot Ever Truly Deliver?” The author acknowledges that “Parrot does sound like an interesting piece of technology”, but wonders “will it ever be a platform suitable for serious, production usage?” The author’s concerns include the length of time Parrot has been in existence (quite a long time), the instability of the code base (lots of significant changes), and the incompleteness of the support from other languages.

Does multicore change the Parrot equation?

Sometimes a technology is invented, and the time simply isn’t right, the need at the moment for solutions that apply that technology is nearly non-existent, though many people readily admit it’s a “wonderful” technology. I wonder if this might apply to a certain extent to Parrot prior to the age of many-core computing?

In a few years, inexpensive PCs will have 8, 16, or more processing cores. Some people doubt that the average home or office user is going to have any use for all these cores. I think that’s like saying “no one will ever need more than 640K of RAM.” Once it’s possible for the average home or office user to apply algorithms and image analysis and video processing and stock market simulators that were previously available only on high-end workstations in data centers, you cannot tell me they won’t want to do this.

It’s going to take programming techniques like Threading Building Blocks, OpenMP, perhaps new languages such as Erlang, or Transactional Memory applied in Haskell, to multithread these computationally-intensive libraries. I doubt that applying conventional low-level threads is going to be an efficient way to accomplish this in terms of programming time (I’ve worked at this level for a long time).

But on the other side: no one is going to want to convert the mass of existing software platforms/applications that could potentially apply these computation libraries, into C++ or C. A convenient means to enable a broad spectrum of languages to call multithreaded C++, C, and Fortran libraries is going to be needed. Otherwise, again we face enormous software development inefficiency, as a separate interface has to be constructed for each library for each calling language. That’s not a solution that is going to fly, in my opinion.

It seems to me that Parrot is an excellent candidate for addressing this problem. If this is the case, the Parrot team may soon find itself lent increasing support from independent developers, and possibly from companies who recognize the need for this capability with respect to their own applications.

I don’t think this need was really there when PC performance could be improved simply through ever-increasing clock speeds. Single-threaded software that did a few simple calculations was fine then. Multicore, however, changes everything. As highly-scalable multithreaded computation / simulation libraries become available, and people realize they want them, and developers realize they need to be able to call these libraries from every language platform, Parrot’s time may arrive.

Every time I write a review I get comments and e-mails asking me to review Puppy Linux. Puppy has lots of people who really seem to love and zealously support the distro. I invariably download a copy (most recently 2.17) and try and run it. I invariably give up on it very quickly. I Here’s what I recently shared by e-mail with someone on why I haven’t reviewed Puppy:

Lately I’ve been looking to pick up a new contract or even possibly move back into a long term corporate position. My resume (CV for those outside the United States) is, I think, fairly impressive. I am a competent systems administrator and security geek with over 27 years of experience in the industry. I’ve had lots of calls from recruiters: some quite good, some not so good, and some, well…

In the past couple of weeks I’ve had several calls like this. I’m pretty close to word for word on the most recent:

In the comments to the article I wrote about running the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on a Gateway MX7626, I added that my friend who owns the laptop had “upgraded” to Gutsy Gibbon Tribe 4 to try and fix a problem with intermittent sound under Feisty. The initial upgrade did work and her sound functioned properly. I talked to her again last night and she is giving up on running Ubuntu alpha software and is going back to Feisty.

The Free Software Foundation has defined Four Freedoms related to software. These freedoms apply to users of software, not necessarily developers. In the view of the FSF, these freedoms are ethical in nature, so much so that they argue that software which violates these freedoms is unethical.

Like many other rights, the four freedoms are specific expressions of abstract freedoms in the context of software. They represent concrete examples of underlying notions of freedom. You can see this principle if you ask “Why should I be able to run my own printing press or weblog?”

If those underlying principles exist, then it should be possible to identify them. It should also be possible to extrapolate concrete expressions of those principles in new contexts… such as hardware, not software.

Back in my January review of Vector Linux 5.8 Standard, the version with the Xfce desktop, I touted Vector Linux as the fastest distro with a reasonable feature set and selection of software that I had used at the time. It took a while but I finally found a distribution that’s at least Vector’s equal: Wolvix 1.1.0.

I’ve tested Wolvix on two laptops: a not quite two year old Gateway MX2676 (AMD Athlon 4000+ mobile processor, 1GB RAM) and a nearly five year old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 (1 GHz Celeron processor, 512MB RAM). The Gateway’s processor is 64-bit but Wolvix, at least so far, is only available for 32-bit x86 architecture. Performance was impressive on both machines but Wolvix truly shined on the older Toshiba.

Much like Ubuntu, Wolvix is provided as a single iso image of a Live CD with a graphical installer. Wolvix also offers the option to run entirely cached in RAM provided you have enough memory. Wolvix also offers a frugal install where the iso image is installed directly to the hard drive and is booted read-only. You are then effectively running the Live CD with the speed of a conventional hard drive. With four different ways it can be run Wolvix is a very flexible animal indeed, a distro which can be easily tailored to a number of specialized uses and yet is still brilliant as an ordinary distro installed to your hard drive.

Wolvix 1.1.0 is a user friendly distro based on Slackware. The code base appears to be a heavily updated Slackware 11 rather than the current Slackware 12. Previous versions were actually remasters of Slax, a small live CD built from Slackware with the Linux Live scripts, but with version 1.1.0 Wolvix has struck out on it’s own path and is no longer built from Slax. The improvements since version 1.0.5 are dramatic. While it’s still not perfect by any means the new version of Wolvix is relatively user friendly and easy to use.

This just keeps getting worse. Please tell me how anyone could think this is a good idea:

Tech Tips with Gnull and Voyd
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9452

“Howdy. My husband is Chester Gnull and I’m Laverta Voyd, and I’m the lady to light a way for all you sweethearts out there who do fancy stuff with Linux. Me and my husband’s gonna be bringing you tech tips just about every month now….I don’t know nothing about Linux. Chester, he’s the smart one…”

How many moronic stereotypes can you count in this? I thought the odious Mango Parfait http://www.tuxmagazine.com/node/1000131 in Tux Magazine was bad; somehow the fine folks at Linux Journal managed to exceed their previous Standard of Awfulness.

Here is a free suggestion for the fine folks at Linux Journal, though given the systemic awfulness of their perception of women it’s probably wasted: women don’t need husbands and boyfriends to do tech. We don’t need to be portrayed as cartoony stereotypes. We stand on our own merits as competent, skilled adults and tech professionals. Are you capable of understanding this? Why do you have an editorial policy of belittling and being disrespectful to women?

When are you going to issue a public, sincere apology? When are you going to get a clue and quit portraying women in such idiotic ways?

Part 1:
http://www.oreillynet.com/linux/blog/2007/08/linux_journal_the_last_idiots_1.html

Linux Journal contacts page: http://www.linuxjournal.com/xstatic/staff/index

Articles about Linux and mainstream Linux news tends to be dominated by the big Linux distributions, those with large corporate backing and/or large development teams. I’m primarily talking about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and it’s free clone CentOS, Novell/SuSe, and Ubuntu on enterprise servers and Ubuntu, Fedora, Linspire, and Mandriva on the desktop. Throw in two venerable and widely respected distributions, Debian and Slackware, and you’ve got about 90% of the industry chatter covered, maybe more.

These distributions also have something else in common: with the exception of Linspire/Freespire, which I haven’t tried, they have all frustrated me on one level or another. I’ve found recent Fedora, SuSe, Mandriva, and Ubuntu releases all to have more bugs than I would expect, often very annoying and obvious ones. All of the above mentioned distors except Slackware are unimpressive in terms of performance. Most tend to be bloated and full of all sorts of cruft that I don’t need that gets installed by default. The notable exceptions are Ubuntu and Mandriva One which both come on a single CD and install a stripped down, clean OS which you can then build on. However, in the case of both Ubuntu and Mandriva One they seem to get a whole lot less useful stuff on that single CD than some other distributions seem to manage.

In the past year a number of medium sized and small distros have leaped past the big players among Linux distributions, offering single CDs with lots of apps, excellent hardware support, speedy performance, and relatively few bugs. Some are also far more user friendly than distros like Ubuntu and Mandriva, often touted as the best place for a newcomer to Linux to start. When I say medium or small I’m referring to both the developer community and user community around each distro. In some cases the developer community is just one or two people.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been able to borrow a friend’s laptop: a Gateway Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been able to borrow a friend’s laptop: a Gateway MX7626, model W730-K8X (Athlon Mobile 4000+ processor, ATI X600 graphics, 1024 RAM). She has the 64-bit version of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn installed. I’ve installed and worked with 64-bit Linux on servers over the past couple of years, mainly running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, but this is my first chance to play with 64-bit Linux extensively on a laptop.

First, the machine is wonderfully fast at everything I’ve tried to do with it. 64-bit Ubuntu does have some minor quirks. The most noticeable one is that sometimes sound works and sometimes it doesn’t. If I don’t hear anything when GNOME starts then I won’t have sound until I reboot. She obviously has ALSA configured correctly since there is sound more often than not. I also noticed that some graphical apps don’t have .desktop files in /usr/share/applications and consequently don’t show up in the menu. When it comes to anything truly important, though, 64-bit Feisty does seem to work very well.

It appears that Vector Linux is moving to a faster release schedule. Vector Linux SOHO 5.8 is only a few months old but the first release candidate of Vector Linux SOHO 5.8.6 has been announced:

VectorLinux is pleased to announce the availability of the rc-1 release of 5.8.6 for the VectorLinux SOHO product. This RC release includes the following improvements: upgrade to Xorg-7.2 from the previous 6.9 series which adds many gui improvements and 3D enhancements: rebuilt many core packages so they install properly in new Xorg-7.2 file structure: rebuilt the core font subsystem to take advantage of the new Xorg release: Updated many packages such as pidgin (including spellcheck) and Xscreensaver…, general bug fixing and driver updates. Beryl is an installable option for those wishing the ultimate 3D desktop experience. There are many other enhancements to numerous to mention.

I think this is the first time they’ve had a release of the KDE-based SOHO without a Standard or Deluxe release. This appears to be part of a general change in direction for Vector that’s been happening for the last year. They seem to have moved well away from being a specialty distro for older hardware to being a full featured, general purpose distro. The recent move to begin selling commercial support echoes that transition as does their recent appeal for volunteer testers and developers for a future 64-bit version. I see this shift as entirely positive provided the lightweight Standard version continues to be developed and supported.

In recent comments to my review of Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO keyfitter wrote:

There is a reason why they are using Win 98 in 2007. I think it’s called, being cheap!.

I wonder if these people realize they can buy a brand new computer for $139. Granted the hardware is a bit dated by today’s standards but it’s probably light years ahead of what they are running Windows ‘98 on. Of course these computers come preloaded with Linux: Vector Linux 5.8 Standard to be precise. That’s fine. Without having to worry about installation or hardware compatibility someone who buys this system gets a nice, ready to go, user friendly Linux system with a warranty. The return policy is listed as “no matter what” short of physical abuse. What they don’t get are Windows virii and malware. They do, of course, have to learn a new OS.

Why not offer the same system with Windows? It would nearly double the price. People forget that they pay an average of around $100 for the privilege of having Windows on their new computer. Of course Windows Vista wouldn’t run on a 1.5GHZ system with only 256MB of RAM, would it? Vector Linux 5.8 Standard will run quite nicely, though. A memory upgrade wouldn’t hurt particularly if you’re interested in a lot of multimedia applications (an extra $39 for 512MB) but it isn’t strictly necessary.

At OSCON a few minutes ago, Nat Torkington asked Bill Hilf what will change in the future specifically with regard to Microsoft dealing with F/OSS projects regarding patents.

(The context is that Hilf had just said that Microsoft has made mistakes in certain areas.

Hilf’s response was… priceless. “I get a lot of e-mail.” “People like to subscribe me to crazy newsletters and spam.”

Uh, thanks.

Thanks to everyone who commented on The Dubious Benefits of Porting F/OSS to Windows. There are a lot of good points in the comments.

For example, Simon Hibbs responded that more users of a piece of software increased the value of that software. This is important for programs that follow open standards, such as Mozilla Firefox, or OpenOffice.org and Abiword. In one sense, I see the value of open standards and unfettered access to data as more important than the four software freedoms. If I had to choose one over the other, I’d choose open standards… but I think that’s a false dilemma.

Yet I still wonder. How many people have switched to free platforms after realizing that they already used or could switch to completely free software that did what they needed?

I’ve seen plenty of people switch from a free OS to a proprietary system which includes some free parts (let’s call it “Mac Something Something”… or how about “Something OS X” to protect the innocent), justifying that choice by saying “It can run all of the applications I love from Linux or *BSD, and look it’s shiny!”

I’m not sure that that case really helps the goal of spreading free software.

Again, I realize that not everyone shares that goal with me, and it’s fine. I’m also not saying that porting free software to proprietary platforms is bad, or wrong, or makes you an evil person. I’m sympathetic to the idea that plenty of people develop on non-free platforms and deploy to free platforms. In my last full-time development job, I would have gone crazy if not for Cygwin. (I ended up using its X server to connect to our GNU/Linux test machine just so I could use decent development tools.)

Yet still I wonder… is there concrete evidence that people do switch to free platforms after using primarily free software? Is there concrete evidence that open standards gain significant acceptance due to the presence of free software or software that otherwise promotes those standards effectively? (I’d like more than one case; it’s possible that Mozilla is an outlier.)

(I haven’t brought up the case of writing free software that supports only a proprietary standard, but that’s a different post altogether.)

A couple of weeks ago, the O’Reilly editors asked Is Microsoft Relevant in a Post-Rails World? Contrary to some reports, there are still desktop applications in the world besides a web browser–and there are plenty of desktop applications under serious development.

Many of them are F/OSS. Of those, plenty have ties to existing projects to produce fully-free desktop software. They run on top of free Unixes, take advantage of free APIs and libraries, and interoperate well with other free software.

There are very few technical reasons much of this software cannot run on non-free platforms, however. One of the first pieces of free software I used reliably was Emacs (though I quickly switched to Vim). This was on Windows NT 4. Perhaps the most successful free software desktop application is Mozilla Firefox.

I started using Debian in late 2002, today I am a Debian package maintainer and use it full time every day at my job as a Debian Sysadmin. On the flip side I’m also an Ubuntu enthusiast and now an official Member of the project, I use Xubuntu (XFCE version of Ubuntu) on my desktop, work extensively with the Ubuntu community, and attend and help organize events with the Ubuntu team here in Pennsylvania. My work with Debian trickles down into Ubuntu, as almost all of the work in Debian does, the packages I maintain end up in Ubuntu repositories, the tools developed for Debian are adopted by Ubuntu.

With the release of Debian Etch as stable a couple months ago there have been several articles circulating comparing these two distributions (such as: Debian as a desktop system: A good alternative to Ubuntu by Yousef Ourabi). I’ve also found myself in conversations with several people of various backgrounds about this, including Don Crowder, a hobbist who recently wrote Slowly Closing Old Windows (Living On The Etch).

The result of all this discussion has been pretty much as I expected.

Back in January I wrote a review of Vector Linux 5.8 Standard. The fact that as I write this, over five months later, that review is still in the O’Reillynet Blogs Hot 25 says a lot about just how much interest there is in this up and coming Canadian distribution, a user friendly derivative of Slackware. Back when I wrote that review I talked about the three different flavors of Vector Linux. Standard, with a default Xfce desktop, can be compared to Xubuntu in some ways while SOHO, it’s big brother with a default KDE desktop, is more directly comparable to Kubuntu. The implication is that the same code base is used in both. That was true for all versions prior to 5.8. This time, however, there was a really long gap, as in almost five full months, between the two releases and a lot of bugfixes and upgrades were put in. The new SOHO even sports a newer kernel under the hood: 2.6.20.3. Vector Linux SOHO resembles a next release rather than a different build of the same release. It probably should have been numbered 5.9 rather than 5.8 and it does deserve a separate review.

Generally I’d want to do a review of a distro with a KDE desktop on a fairly powerful machine. As I’ve written before KDE tends to be quite sluggish on my aging laptop, a four and a half year old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 (1 GHz Celeron processor, 512MB RAM). Heck, even GNOME is a bit slower than I’d like, hence my recent interest in Xfce as an alternate desktop environment. This has been true of Mandriva 2007, SuSe 10.2, Fedora Core 6, and Ubunutu/Kubuntu right up through Feisty. I have always assumed this is because KDE does consume more memory than GNOME or Xfce and because it always needs the dcop-server running in the background. Guess what? I was wrong. Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO proves that KDE can be built for speed. There is no sluggishness at all on the old Toshiba. If it’s fast on this old notebook it’ll positively scream on an up-to-date system.

There is a very interesting back-and-forth going on between Linux creator Linus Torvalds writing on the Linux kernel mailing list and Jonathan Schwartz, President and CEO of Sun Microsystems writing in his blog. Despite the different fora the two actually seem to be talking to each other as well as their respective audiences.

A year and a half ago Mr. Schwartz posted to his blog about possibly releasing Solaris under dual Open Source licenses, CDDL and GPL v3. Never mind that GPL v3 doesn’t exist yet and certainly wasn’t finalized a year and a half ago. This was one of Sun’s many pronouncements about their support for Open Source that seemed to have very little substance behind it.

Fast forward to yesterday and Linus’ post to the kernel mailing list in a discussion about the possibility of dual licensing the kernel under GPL v2 and v3. While Linus acknowledges positive contributions made by Sun he is very skeptical about their motives and about what, if anything, interesting they may release under any form of the GPL. While I share his skepticism I applaud his decision to be civil towards Sun and to say that he hopes he’s wrong. Read the whole post — it’s very interesting and informative.

Today Jonathan Schwartz responded. I must say he did nothing to allay my skepticism but… at least a discussion is taking place and a Sun commitment to Open Source and the GPL has been reiterated.

The third release of Xubuntu, the variant of Ubuntu with the lightweight Xfce desktop, appeared last month. Feisty Fawn (version 7.04) uses the final gold code of Xfce 4.4.0 rather than the release candidates in Edgy Eft (version 6.10) and Dapper Drake (version 6.06). I had very positive experiences with both Edgy and Dapper so I had very high expectations for Xubuntu Feisty Fawn. In some ways the new release does take a step forward but in some truly important areas it took a couple of steps backwards and has been something of a disappointment.

Once again my test bed for Xubuntu has been my four and a half year old Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 laptop which has a 1 GHz Celeron processor and 512MB of RAM. With this relatively slow processor KDE is sluggish. Xfce is also noticeably faster than a recent release of Gnome when doing significant work. Two Xfce based distributions, Xubuntu and Vector Linux, perform very well on this laptop. I really like Xfce 4.4.x. It strikes the right balance between brisk performance and features. I feel that Xubuntu is a good candidate for newer, more powerful systems as well. Having said that I’m not at all sure that upgrading from Edgy Eft to Feisty Fawn is a terribly good idea while Edgy is still well supported.

If you define the problem as “A product 100% binary, bug for bug, compatible with Excel that releases new versions at the same time as Excel” you kinda stop even the hope of migrating someday in the future, because that ain’t possible.

— jmorris2 on LWN’s “A think tank’s view of free software”

Proprietary software companies such as Microsoft have their own source code and they have unencumbered access to read any free software source code they wish—without incurring any legal obligation to distribute their source code. If they truly wanted interoperability, they could pursue it anytime.

“Why port Microsoft’s new own-the-web Silverlight to Linux” Miguel de Icaza replied to the question,”Why port Microsoft’s new own-the-web Silverlight to Linux”:

Bernard Golden riffs on an off-hand comment about Microsoft opening the Windows source code to relate how minimills ate the margins of huge steel mills. (Yes, that’s a Clayton Christensen story.)

It’s always interesting to watch low-margin (and presumably high-volume) products disappear as sources of business value in the mainstream, as well as watching previously high-margin products lose their value gradually. CD-burning software isn’t that interesting anymore. Media playback software is downright dull. When was the last time anyone made money off of disk compression software?

The rule of minimills applies beyond F/OSS projects edging out proprietary competitors; consider how bundled IE took over for Netscape Navigator and Communicator. If you were on the Internet in those days, did you ever actually pay for Netscape?

There’s lots of stuff out there about improving your workflow on Macs (lots of it based around Getting Things Done or similar ideas). I do have a Mac, and some of this I’ve found very useful (and some less so, admittedly).

But I’ve not seen much out there on similar tricks for Linux. Bash & vim (& prob emacs but I don’t use that ;) ) tricks, yes, but are there any other apps or tricks that you’ve found to make your working life easier on LInux?

For me, the two that spring to mind immediately:

• ClusterSSH, which I’ve blogged about before.
• Nostalgy Thunderbird extension, which provides keyboard shortcuts for moving messages & auto-completes folders. (seriously, this has made my email life much happier!)

Not that it’s anything new, I’m just grumpy that this sort of crap is so widespread and so tolerated:
Blog death threats spark debate
“Prominent blogger Kathy Sierra has called on the blogosphere to combat the culture of abuse online.”

“It follows a series of death threats which have forced her to cancel a public appearance and suspend her blog.”

Gee, a tiny bit of the rampant bullshit that’s directed at women online finally makes the news. Maybe now all those idiots who tell us it’s not a problem and we shouldn’t let it bother us with get a clue? Nah, probably not. Idiot reform is a hopeless cause. But dealing with this sort of junk on online forums and blogs isn’t rocket science- it’s called “admins, grow a spine and hit the delete key.”

Last month Eric S. Raymond made a public announcement on the Fedora developer’s list that he was giving up on Fedora Core and that from now on Ubuntu is his distribution of choice. Actually it was more of a rant than an announcement. ESR’s scatter shot attack on Fedora was wrong in more ways than I care to comment about here. Chromatic did a nice job of attacking the rant on several key points. He also pointed out quite correctly that ESR’s accomplishments as an Open Source activist didn’t make his changing distributions newsworthy.

The reason I’m not simply ignoring ESR is that he did point out a real problem with Fedora Core, one which I also noted in my review of Fedora Core 5 last year. When upgrading a system with yum or pup I ended up with upgrades that couldn’t be run because of dependency issues. ESR ran into a more serious example of the same problem: an automated upgrade breaking significant parts of his system due to similar dependency issues. While the Fedora team at Red Hat has generally been good about fixing such issues within a few days it’s really disappointing that they are still happening and, in fact, becoming more serious with time.

ESR blames rpm, which he believes to be buggy, and yum, which he believes to be overly complex. He is totally wrong on both counts. rpm is a stable, mature, and excellent package management system used by more Linux distributions than any other. yum is no more complex or difficult to use than Debian’s apt and has very similar functionality. Nope, the problem isn’t in the code. That’s the disturbing part of the story, the real piece of news, that everyone seems to be ignoring.

In my last article I cited the Vector Linux developers as an excellent example of the way Open Source developers respond to the user community. All of us who benefit from Linux and/or the myriad of Open Source applications out there are part of that community.

Tuomo Valkonen, who you may know as the author of the Ion window manager has a rant about the brokenness of the megafreeze development model, where a Linux distribution attempts to stabilize the entire system.

As an upstream contributor, I find it highly frustrating to release a new version of my software and have users contact me for about ancient versions I no longer want to support.

Perhaps if every project moved to a monthly stable release cycle then it would be easier to create an entire distribution that’s not all out of date. As it is, trying to wait until the stars and planets and comets and asteroids all align for one blessed week of complete stability… well, even I don’t believe in trying to herd those cats.

Alternately, stabilizing only the base operating system–the kernel and the core utilities necessary to install further software packages and bundles–might be sufficient. Perhaps the real problem behind this big problem is that the problem is just too big. Maybe a monolithic release is just too much to organize all at once.

I missed this in January, but as I look at Penguin.SWF and Adobe Flash Download Center, I see that the Linux versions now have the x86 label.

While it would be nice to have an open source Flash player (so that all platforms and architectures could use Flash–meanwhile Gnash continues), I do appreciate Adobe labeling the player appropriately. Saying “Linux player (x86)” makes it much clearer what Adobe currently supports.

Here’s a frightening quote from GNOME’s Bugzilla:

I think open source inherently creates a much more useful Novice/Expert barrier anyway. The real experts can do whatever they want, because they have the code, and can change it to their liking.

— comment #13 in configurable mouse click actions patches

Is it really better to encourage “experts” to maintain local code forks than to add configuration options? If the defaults aren’t right for you, you’d better hope you’re an expert and can change things to your way of working–just don’t expect to get that patch upstream so other people can benefit from it. If you’re a novice, you’re in trouble.

That’s… not exactly my understanding of the point of open and collaborative development. I hope it’s not a widely-held opinion.

In January I reviewed Vector Linux 5.8. While the review was mainly positive I did complain about what I saw as some faults in the distribution. The response from the developers of Vector Linux was almost immediate, both in the Vector Linux forum and in the comments under my reviews, and was incredibly positive. In the weeks since then a surprising number of changes and improvements have already been made, particularly in the area of internationalization and localization. A suggestion I made in the VL forum regarding compiling and building packages to insure that localization files (translations into various languages) are included was taken to heart by the developers. The result is that when an updated Xfce package was built after version 4.4.0 was released it included the additional language support. So… if you’re native language is Danish or Hebrew or any other language for which translations exist in Xfce you’ll find, for example, suitable menus for your desktop.

While this may sound like an exceptional example of accepting and acting on feedback from a user of a particular piece of Open Source software it is really, in my experience, something that happens all the time in the Free and Open Source Software community. This is why the pace of development of Windows or most commercial UNIX flavors seems glacial to Linux users and professionals. We’re used to a level of responsiveness from developers that most proprietary software vendors simply cannot match.

I’ve used both Windows and Mac OS X, and I don’t know how people manage to install software on them. Yes, I’m a fan of aptitude (and I’ve had good experiences with Yum).

It’s pretty clear to me that this software installation system has tremendous advantages over the traditional “download a random binary package from somewhere” approach common to Windows and Mac OS X, as long as the package you want is in the proper repository.

Apparently some guy switched from one Linux distribution to another, throws a fit, and this is news.

Hey, I’ve tried lots of distributions in the past ten years. Does anyone remember Caldera?

Anyway, the important thing in that guy’s rant may be if he raised important issues that Fedora needs to consider.

Not everyone in the world of free and open source software praised Greg Kroah-Hartman’s Free Linux Driver Development! offer (and see his later clarification in Free Linux Driver Development Questions and Answers!). Specifically, the OpenBSD project criticized the offer to work on free drivers under NDA.

Some years ago Linux creator Linus Torvalds famously compared changing operating systems to “performing brain surgery on yourself”. I’ve quoted him often because so many people seem to have unrealistic expectations when they pick up a Linux DVD or CD-ROM. I’ve recently received a couple of e-mails in response to my articles here on O’Reillynet that illustrate Linus’ point beautifully and demonstrate part of the problem Linux has faced in gaining greater acceptance on the desktop. OK, one of the e-mails was addressed to Cathy, whoever that is, but since it came to my inbox I’ll assume it was meant for me. Here are some excerpts:

Want some frustration? Buy a piece of hardware with “Linux support” and try to use it on anything besides x86 GNU/Linux. If you’re fortunate enough to choose a device for which there exists free drivers, you’ll have much more luck. Often, recompiling is all that’s necessary–and if you use a modern distribution, you may not even have to compile it yourself.

Otherwise, you may be in for days of fun trying to explain that the Linux kernel and almost any piece of software you can run on x86 works just fine on PPC, or that FreeBSD or OpenSolaris or all of the other open and stable free operating systems can do much the same.

It’s easy to make the argument that supporting multiple operating systems and hardware platforms with source code (or better, specifications) requires little work on the part of hardware vendors. I’ve made just that argument. Customers don’t pay for drivers–we pay for the hardware.

Some companies do release open drivers and, perhaps more importantly, open specifications for their hardware. These vendors deserve tremendous praise.

What about the other vendors? Let us assume that they are familar with the potential benefits of open source development models and that they appreciate the value of a larger market not tied to a single platform or OS vendor. Assuming this good faith from vendors, there must exist some compelling contrary reason not to provide open specifications or driver source code.

An oft-cited reason is the existence of nebulous “intellectual property concerns”. Yet as the Free Software Foundation points out, using the phrase intellectual property often confuses the issue.

Perhaps disentangling all of the possible types of “IP” will provide insight.

Carla’s rant in response to my review of Vector Linux is well taken if misplaced. Vector Linux has been around since the late ’90s. Her point, though, is very valid. There are literally hundreds of distributions out there if not more. Ryan Lortie made the same point, albeit less clearly, in his article in response to the Free Software Foundation’s Bad Vista Campaign which Chromatic lampooned.

An open letter to PETA, inspired by Ryan Lortie’s very silly My stance on Ubuntu and the Bad Vista campaign.

Once upon a time there was a small, lightweight distribution based on Slackware. It wasn’t all that different from any of a number of small, lightweight distros designed to work on older hardware though it seemed to be well thought out. That was Vector Linux 1.8 six years ago. Since then VL has grown into a full featured distribution available in several different configurations. The latest release, Vector Linux 5.8, appeared on December 18th and it is clearly the most mature yet, in many ways equaling or even surpassing more popular distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. If the developers manage to smooth out the few remaining rough edges they may find themselves with a distro that is as popular as any of those.

Vector Linux comes in four flavors: Standard, Deluxe, SOHO, and Live. SOHO, with KDE as the default desktop and all the most popular applications, is the full featured version. Standard is the descendant of the original Vector Linux and is designed to be fast and lightweight. It is based on the Xfce4 desktop and provides superior speed and performance especially on older hardware. Both are freely downloadable. Deluxe, available for purchase, is Standard plus a second CD with additional applications as well as Gnome and Enlightenment DR17, the latter packaged from a recent CVS build. Live, as the name implies, is a live CD version of Standard. So far only new Standard and Deluxe versions have been released.

Much like Xubuntu Edgy which I reviewed three weeks ago, Vector is built around the Xfce4 desktop and mostly uses applications that don’t have KDE or Gnome dependencies. The Standard version of Vector Linux is polished enough to be used almost anywhere, not just on older hardware, provided you get through some potential installation and configuration issues.

I’m not going to indulge in the shopworn habit of doing a year-end review or making predictions for the new year. Feh. Old mold and who cares. Instead, I am going to share my list of Most Wanted Computer Things.

The perpetual debate over the legality, practicality, and wisdom of using, distributing, producing, and supporting binary-only drivers flared up again recently, with a recent debate on the Linux Kernel Mailing List over the legality of binary-only drivers simmering down and Ubuntu company Canonical considering enabling binary drivers by default in the next release.

Neither of those address entirely whether end-users should use binary-only drivers.

Edgy Eft (version 6.10), the second release of Xubuntu, a variant of Ubuntu Linux built around the Xfce4 desktop and designed to be lightweight, was released in October. I’ve been using it since then and I’ve been impressed. The bugs and rough edges seen in the first release, Dapper Drake (6.06) are gone and the end result is a solid, reliable distribution that’s a pleasure to use. The introduction to the Xubuntu Desktop Guide says, in part:

Xubuntu generally uses GTK+ 2 apps that don’t have KDE and Gnome dependencies and, in general, performance is definitely improved compared to the heavier desktop environments. In my opinion Xubuntu is not just for older equipment that needs a more lightweight distribution. It’s polished enough for use anywhere.

Want to build a new generation of free software users? Support projects such as Edubuntu.

Last week I had an interview for a new consulting gig with three technical management type people. It turned into a 90 minute technical discussion on a variety of Linux and UNIX issues. That’s fine. I usually do well in that kind of interview. At one point the discussion turned to Open Source applications in the enterprise. One of the comments by one of my interviewers was that Open Source apps are usually “hero applications”, meaning that one system administrator knows about them and when that admin leaves nobody knows anything about them and support just isn’t there.

Is he right? Only to a point. Yes, I’ve seen many places where a given systems administrator is the sole source of knowledge on a given subject. That situation isn’t limited to Open Source software. Often the systems administrator is, at least in part, at fault. Either they aren’t good at sharing information and cross training or else they simply have no desire to do so. Some consciously try to build their own little fiefdom and make themselves indispensable to the organization.

It’s almost always management’s fault, again at least in part. Some technical managers do little to encourage or insist on cross training, particularly if it makes a valuable systems administrator unhappy. In other cases upper management has cut IT in general and systems administration in particular to the bone or even deep into the bone, to the point where the remaining staff simply hasn’t the time to properly maintain and patch the servers they have, let alone roll out new systems, write documentation, and to get training for themselves and train others.

Having said all that there is also a problem of the perception many managers who are accustomed to dealing with strictly commercial, proprietary software have when it comes to Open Source. The “hero applications” comment is a perfect example of how such managers misunderstand the community support model. Most even modestly popular Open Source projects have excellent support. It just may not be in the form of a corporate help desk owned by the company who produces the software.

Last month a new update of SIAG Office, version 3.6.1 was released. It’s a minor update, mainly bugfixes. Still, it was an update I was very glad to see since it had been nearly a year since the previous release.

Why is this release important? In addition to fixing a few bugs and unbundling antiword it showed that SIAG is still being maintained and developed. OK, so you’re probably asking why SIAG is important at all. It’s feature poor when compared to OpenOffice or even AbiWord and Gnumeric.

Where SIAG scores over it’s more capable competition is in size and speed. The SIAG spreadsheet is included in a number of lightweight Linux distributions including Damn Small Linux. Granted the support for Microsoft Excel spreadsheets is limited but for stand alone use it has a very decent feature set that includes the functions that are most used in popular spreadsheet software. The suite’s word processor, PW, short for Pathetic Writer, is anything but pathetic. It’s certainly has a nice interface and is at least as capable as other lightweight word processors like Ted and FLWriter. I haven’t used Egon Animator so I really can’t comment on that piece.

Lightweight apps aren’t just for the sort of Atticware (old systems) I’ve written about from time to time. Keeping things small is also critical for embedded devices. It’s important for systems using compact flash cards and other RAM devices in lieu of hard drives where it’s highly desirable to cache the OS and as much of the applications as possible in traditional RAM to reduce read-write I/O and extend the lifespan of the storage device. One company I consulted for wanted truly silent point of sale systems with no moving parts. They wanted the OS, lightweight apps including a word processor and spreadsheet, and store data all on a single CF card. At the time in 2005 the spec called for 512MB cards. SIAG Office is perfect for their application. Something huge like OpenOffice simply wouldn’t do.

SIAG Office clearly has a place. It’s fits a growing and increasingly important niche in the Linux world. Seeing it continue to improve is important. By unbundling antiword version 3.6.1 offers those deploying SIAG Office the possibility of an even smaller footprint. Thanks to Ulric Eriksson and anyone else involved in the development of SIAG Office for your ongoing work. It is appreciated.

Bruce Perens has posted an open letter to Novell regarding its patent agreement with Microsoft. I likewise find it troubling that Novell may lobby in favor of software patents while claiming to have the interests of the Linux and FOSS communities in mind.

Tis the season to be deluged with ads for all manner of crap for kids, including “educational” computer games. Yeah, right. Wouldn’t you rather give your kids something of value, and that will help them develop real skills? Instead of turning into nearsighted wheezing lardbutted obsessive-compulsive button-pushers?

I can’t find the original GNOME announcement from August 1997 in comp.os.linux.advocacy, but I did find an interesting thread on Desktop Options. My, the changes since then.

Update: As Jeff Waugh mentions in the comments, the GNOME project as a whole has not chosen to use Mono as the foundation for the project, nor is there any indication that they will. I just found it interesting to see how some things change yet other things don’t in nearly a decade.

Apparently Oracle wants to compete with Red Hat in the Big Serious Linux Distribution world. How does a distributor compete with the 799-pound gorilla of software? Bernard Golden suggests that it’s easy in Too Soon for Red Hat to Run Up the White Flag. In short, he believes that Red Hat is small enough to be nimble and has an established advantage, while Oracle won’t have much success trying to undercut its more profitable products.

Web developers never visit their own sites or surf the Web at all. If they did, we would not have so many pure suck Web sites. Readability, navigability, and persistent searchable archives are apparently Crimes Against L33t Web Development. Why do site owners spend zillions of dollars for poo?

My brother in law, a real to life cable-guy (but of course much more than such a small definition), came over to help me out with my new hdtv tv/hdpvr setup.

Once it was all sorted out we were in my “office” & he said.. “You have a mac.. I’m jealous”… or something like that.

What’s funny about this is that TV to HDTV is like Linux’s fonts/display to OSX’s.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad now has his very own blog. That’s fine. The content is entirely what you might expect with one notable exception. Several Israeli bloggers, including Yael K.’s Step By Step, which I read regularly, report that if you access the Ahmadenijad blog from an Israeli IP address the site sends you a little gift, a cyberattack in the form of a virus or trojan (reports vary) designed to exploit an Internet Explorer vulnerability.

To quote Yael:

Does Iran now use the Internet to harass Israeli citizens? To take advantage of the increasing Iranian-Israeli dialog online?

In a word: yep. The attack is smart enough to mostly ignore IP addresses from anywhere other than Israel, though it has been reported to have been triggered from Spain as well.

My one little piece of advice for friends and readers in Israel: Ehad Linux, an Israeli Linux distribution based on Mandriva 2006, is really quite easy to install and use. (Yes, I plan to write a review.) Those of us who run Linux have been blissfully immune to all the security nonsense which routinely plagues Windows users. Indeed, security has been one of the issues which has helped propel Linux adoption in corporate and government data centers in recent years.

No, installing Linux is not a security panacea. You still need to patch regularly and become educated about keeping your system secure. It is, however, a very good start.

Rick Moen’s LinuxMafia.com knowledgebase has some great information. I ran across a series of postings the other day that clarified the problem with loadable Linux kernel modules at the GPL.

I’ve been a big fan of Firefox since practically the beginning, back when it was called Phoenix or Firebird. I like the way Firefox does things. It’s feature rich and the UI is well thought out. Sadly, lately, for me Firefox has become unusable.

I’m currently running Firefox 1.5.0.4 on three Linux distributions: Vector Linux 5.1, Fedora Core 5, and Xubuntu Dapper 6.06. On all three the browser crashes frequently on all sorts of web sites seemingly at random. I’ve had it happen on a diverse variety of sites, generally fairly complex ones, ranging from eBay to the Israeli daily newspaper Yediot Ahranot. There is one website, one I use all the time, that will always cause Firefox to crash: Yahoo! Mail. Any attempt to read mail on the Yahoo! website generates a crash. Yes, the Mozilla Quality Feedback Agent pops up and yes, I dutifully send in my report. I’ve talked to friends who run Firefox on Windows and it’s stable on that platform, even on Yahoo! Mail. On Linux, however, it is totally unstable to the point of unusable. This wasn’t true of the 1.0.x releases but has been the case, and has seemingly gotten worse, with each 1.5.x release.

The net result is that I find myself using either Opera or Konqueror. They work just fine. Other browsers based on Mozilla’s gecko engine do not. Flock crashes the same way Firefox does while Epiphany and Seamonkey just hang. It’s frequent enough and annoying enough that I’ve all but abandoned all of these browsers.

So… what is going on? Is Mozilla working on this? Do they still care about us relatively few Linux folk or is a stable Windows platform good enough for them?

Open source and unencumbered drivers for 3D acceleration on Linux are lagging behind their proprietary counterparts. When 2D hardware goes away and everything requires 3D hardware, what options are there for people who use free software? Old hardware… unless something changes. Yes, I’m being deliberately provocative. No, I’m not really kidding.

It’s okay if you’re the pragmatic type, but it’s important to be aware of the limitations of mixing low-level proprietary software required for the proper operation of your computer with free operating systems. You don’t have to agree with me. That’s fine.

On 30 May 2006 TurboLinux announced the release of version 11, also called Fuji. While TurboLinux remains very popular in Asia, particularly Japan, this announcement generated little attention or enthusiasm in the United States or Europe. The fact that TurboLinux Fuji 11 Desktop is doing something revolutionary almost went unnoticed.

What has TurboLinux done? They’ve partnered with Cyberlink to offer a fully legal, licensed, DMCA compliant DVD player for Linux. OK, I can hear the open source zealots advocates groaning and gnashing their teeth from here. Yes, we’re talking closed source and proprietary. This is still revolutionary and still very important.

First, like it or not, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is the law of the land in the United States. There are a handful of other countries with similar laws. You can consider it unjust and stupid all you like but so far it has been thoroughly resistant to court challenges. You can break the law all you like and call it “civil disobedience” but you still leave yourself open to legal action if caught. I sure as heck am not going to walk into a client’s office proudly displaying illegal software on my desktop. Thanks, but no thanks.

The lack of legal multimedia software comparable to what is available for Windows users has been a major stumbling block to getting preloaded Linux systems on store shelves and taken seriously by consumers. Say all you will about the virtues of Open Source but the average Joe or Jane user isn’t interested and really doesn’t want to take the time to be educated. They want their computer to just work. Save them money, speed up their systems, make them more reliable, make them more secure… it’s all great but if the system doesn’t do what they want they won’t buy it. The average Joe or Jane user also can’t load their own OS: not Linux, not Windows, not anything.

In my inestimably valuable opinion, we need programmers (and related disciplines like QA, advanced math, and design) more than almost anything else. We’re in the very infancy of the computer age, and already we are intensively computerized, from toasters and refrigerators to inventory tags to vehicles to big ole factories.

On 1 June Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper Drake) was released. New versions of Kubuntu (Ubuntu with a KDE desktop) and Edubuntu (a version for young people) were also unveiled. Perhaps the most interesting release was the newest member of the Ubuntu family, Xubuntu, a derivative distro based on the forthcoming XFCE 4.4 desktop. In this review I am going to focus heavily on the desktop since that is really the only thing that sets Xubuntu apart from Ubuntu.

In the article where I renewed my complaints about Gnome I touted XFCE 4.4 as an up and coming challenger to both KDE and Gnome on the desktop. The 4.4 version includes a new file manager, Thunar, added panel functionality to rival what KDE and Gnome users are accustomed to, new applets, and greater configurability. The release of Xubuntu is actually built on a beta of the new XFCE, version 4.3.90.1. While I was originally a bit concerned about this it turns out that Xubuntu has relatively few bugs and a very polished look and feel.

One of the claims made on the Xubuntu web page is:

It’s lighter, and more efficient than Ubuntu with GNOME or KDE, since it uses the Xfce Desktop environment, which makes it ideal for old or low-end machines, as well as thin-client networks.

I decided to put this to the test, installing Xubunu onto a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204, a laptop with a 1 GHz Celeron processor and 512MB of RAM. This was one of the systems I used to evaluate and review Fedora Core 5. At the time I found FC5 to be substantially faster on this somewhat dated laptop that Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger). Over a roughly two month period I used this laptop running Fedora with an XFCE 4.2.3.2 desktop and my usual favorite applications so my comparison of Xubuntu 6.06 to Fedora 5 is apples-to-apples.

I think this video sums up the launch of Google Spreadsheet:

Which is Microsoft and which is Google?

On May 15th Mark Golden wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal titled Out The Window where he posed the question: “Can the ordinary user ditch Windows for Linux?” His conclusion, in most cases, is a resounding no. Sadly Mr. Golden’s methodology in trying out Linux for his article bears little resemblance to what an ordinary user trying out Linux would likely do. Indeed, his approach almost guaranteed his results.

Mr. Golden purchased a copy of Linux for Dummies, an excellent book which, as Mr. Golden correctly points out, included a DVD with six outdated versions of Linux distributions. Mr. Golden actually claims these are different “operating systems built around Linux technology” which is incorrect. Linux is Linux. The presentation and tools of different distributions may vary but the same underlying code is in all of them and the same software will work on all. Further, Mr. Golden correctly points out that he could have freely downloaded a current version of five of the included distributions but chose not to do so. Linux development proceeds at a much faster pace than Windows development. If Mr. Golden had worked with current versions some of the issues he ran into might have been avoided, particularly hardware detection of graphics and sound cards.

Mr. Golden asserts that “…getting some of the systems to work required more time and effort than I was willing to exert.” This is perfectly reasonable and is an attitude that would be shared by ordinary users. However the ordinary user would likely pick one distribution that was recommended to them rather than divide their time between six. I suspect had Mr. Golden chosen one popular distribution and stuck with it he could have had everything working. He himself conceded that solutions exist for virtually every problem he encountered.

The other flaw with Mr. Golden’s methodology was picking up a book and pretty much going it alone. When he did ask for help he called software manufacturers. That’s perhaps the correct way to do things in the Windows world and it might also make sense for a newcomer to Linux in a very rural part of Montana or Wyoming. For most of us who live in small, medium, and large cities there are a plethora of Linux Users Groups, or LUGs, that encourage and assist newcomers. Many have “install parties” where an ordinary user could have brought a laptop like the one Mr. Golden used and received knowledgeable assistance that would have gotten everything working in short order.

Last December I blogged about the uproar Linux creator Linus Torvalds had caused by posting on the gnome.org Usability list his extreme dislike for the direction the Gnome developers had taken with the UI. For those of you who may have missed his original post the high point follows:

Why rehash this now? A number of people have written to me about the wonders of Gnome 2.14. One reader of my review of Fedora Core 5 here on O’Reillynet went so far as to suggest that the performance improvements I was seeing were because of the wonderful new Gnome code. They aren’t. Carla Schroder, the author of the absolutely wonderful Linux Cookbook, was one of two people to praise the alacarte menu editor. Carla is usually right on about all things Linux so I tried it. Sadly, on my systems running Fedora it seems very broken. I really wanted to like the new Gnome. Honestly, I did. Gnome generally consumes less resources and memory than KDE and that, combined with excellent internationalization and localization, made it worth another long look. Sadly, I came away feeling every bit as frustrated with Gnome as I had been with previous versions.

The good news is that in Fedora Core 5 the performance improvements do result is a snappier, crisper KDE. On a modern system with significant resources I will repeat Linus’ sage advice: Just use KDE. For those of us dealing with embedded systems, nano-ITX technology, or older systems with limited resources, KDE may not be an option. The good news is that other alternatives just keep improving. Some are reaching the point where they are worth looking at even on a well equipped high end system. The idea that the “desktop wars” are strictly a Gnome vs. KDE battle may be a bit passé.

The Linspire Linux distribution gets a lot of attention for its so-called pragmatic view on device drivers. The idea seems to be that making an easy-to-install and easy-to-use Linux distribution and getting many people to use it will be good for Linux and open source and free software.

I do agree that the more people who use free software, the greater the argument for hardware manufacturers to provide drivers.

However, Linspire’s approach is a mistake, at least in part.

Last week I installed Fedora Core 5 on two aging but serviceable systems: my eMachines desktop (2GHz Celeron, 768MB RAM) and a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S204 notebook (1GHz Celeron, 512MB PC100 RAM). The desktop had previously run Fedora Core 4 while the laptop had been running Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy Badger) for a few months and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 Update 1 prior to that.

One of the claims made for Fedora Core 5 is that it was built to boot faster and run faster than the previous release. I’m very pleased to say that it’s true and the difference on my laptop is especially noticeable. Those of you who are running older, slower hardware or tend to heavily load you systems will definitely be happy with FC5. It is significantly crisper and more responsive than Ubuntu Breezy Badger and RHEL 4 as well.

I’ve never been happy with anaconda, the Red Hat installer. The new version of the graphical installation is certainly prettier but it still lacks the fine grained control of what software packages are to be installed that other distributions do offer as an option to experienced users. Also, as I quickly learned installing to my laptop, there is no “minimal” installation and, as with previous versions, no matter how much I strip down the installation anaconda will add cruft. Things that are not truly needed which I didn’t ask for do get installed. I still have to list my installed packages when I’m done and remove things. I know that corporate customers who build single purpose servers generally are unhappy about this and Red Hat may want to look at allowing a truly minimal build in the next release and/or in RHEL 5. The good news is that for the less experienced user building a typical desktop the anaconda installation is straightforward and downright easy. Hardware detection is certainly excellent and other than my printer (easily added) everything was correctly recognized and installed by anaconda.

The new Fedora offers two options for the desktop: Gnome and KDE. Gnome remains the default choice. The totally minimal twm is available as part of the X installation and you can just install that and then add other window managers or desktop environments from Fedora Extras after the initial installation. Note that anaconda will install significant parts of Gnome if you install any of the graphical system administration tools in any case, Choices in Extras are pretty limited too, but XFCE 4 and a handful of lightweight window managers are offered and will be recognized by gdm or kdm (the graphical login) session choices after they are installed.