Archive for February 2004

Kernel source

Well, well, Brian McGroar got into trouble with Microsoft it seems – after his torrent titled “kernel source” was asked to be shut down. Effectively knocking off his DSL line. He posted his experience at the linux-elitists list. Kuro5hin.org has an interesting read with source code snippets that won’t harm your eyes.

Kernel 2.6.3 for PowerPC doesn’t require you to rsync benh’s source tree any longer! A standard kernel.org kernel will do just fine now. Well, my updated Linux on an iBook2.2 guide now features my .config for 2.6.2-ben1.

Fedora News Updates #6

It’s out… Read it at http://fedoranews.org/colin/fnu/issue6.shtml.

Covering Fedora Core 2 test1, and tips with regards to its usage (I think that’s got to be a regular). Want to roll your own ISO? Or one of the most FAQs includes “why does Fedora use up all my available RAM?” – for good measure folks…. Lots of software stuff included.

Anyone want to do Mike’s dishes? Seriously though, cut the man some slack.

Xcode from Apple

Was at Equatorial Hotel for a presentation by Apple – Xcode, Interface Builder and some of their other developer tools that come with 10.3 (Panther). Impressive stuff, I’d say – a monkey can build a web browser.

Installed the Java SDK from the Apple Developer site, since 1.4.2 has been released. Started building cws_srx645_ooo111fix3 on OS X. Making OS X understand my commands like “Switch to Terminal” and so on is cool too – we need this sort of assistive technology on Linux to work real well.

Spending lots of time sending out e-mails to module maintainers for the upcoming GNOME 2.6 release. And getting responses quite quickly too might I add. Rock on!

The OSS Solution the right one?

Spent a good portion of the morning at VI, our little “adopted” school. Watched some of the teaching being done, I’m proud one of my “students” is now teaching school children OpenOffice.org; but I’ve found errors in the way teaching is performed. This being the first time I’ve sat in a class in a public school, I was a little shocked at the redundancy and time wastage – I’m sure we’ll overcome this soon.

Reading on why the Internode Mirror switched from FreeBSD to Linux are are just marginally happy, makes me think (in fact, it should make all you OSS proponents think hard). These people even have Greg Lehey to help (when they were FreeBSD’ing). How do we address what the commercial market needs? How are we convincing hardware manufacturers that stuff needs to be supported? Can you run a business on open source software?

Russell Jones cruft on Open Source being Fertile Ground for Foul Play is complete FUD. Surely some nasty bastard will insert code for that open source taxation software and not share it.

On other notes, XP-Lite is Redmond’s new offering to compete in Asia. If Thailand told them to go away, I hope the rest of Asia’s just as clueful. Munich’s migration not going as planned? I’m sure the bugs will get ironed out, as it serves as a great test case for other governments; like the French government with Project ADELE.

From an OpenOffice.org solution standpoint, why is IBM eyeing Office for Linux? Nasty digs at Sun with being “too small”, and Lotus Notes making an apperance on the Linux desktop. With the Mac OS X port still being finalised, Evermore Integrated Office seems to have sprung up, at a cost, from a Chinese company. They think the Mac OS market will look towards them; they’re right, we really need to make a release soon. But their idea of an integrated “word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software” all in one package screams OpenOffice.org to me!

Open source policy

Time and again, the question of a general HOWTO, a proper roadmap, and so on, with regards to how open source policy should take off. Be it in corporates, the governments of the world want it too. How would you migrate? How would you start from scratch? We need this kind of information if we’re going to sell FLOSS to regular human beings.

Some sources of information I was pointed to: Bellanet, Sun’s Desktop Architecture Selection Guide, the European IDA, A Legacy Windows wrap-up (at least on how to move to another version of that OS, but applicable information). With government funds, Imran’s policy archive is rather handy, albeit could use a few updates.

Shared source?

Everyone’s talking about it. Microsoft admits their source code has been released. There’s code for Windows 2000 and NT 4.0 out there, and available via your favourite file sharing application, pretty much for all to see. It came from Microsoft, possibly through MainWin, created by Mainsoft, a company set out to porting Windows applications to run on Linux systems! Tying in how MainWin works with the need for source, sure makes it all the more interesting.

CNN is reporting there was profanity in the code as well. All this thanks to Microsoft’s shared source initiative. It seems that the NT4 code looks quite complete at 28 million lines of code (versus 13.5 million lines for Windows 2000). I can see this helping the Samba team out. Heck, even the Linux NTFS team will benefit. But don’t look at the source.

Let’s not taint Linux. Let’s not let Microsoft pull a SCO on us. Besides, Microsoft is worried how others will now “hack” into Microsoft-based systems. Let’s get real and wake up – the open source model promotes having code out there for peer review and for anyone to find bugs; we don’t see millions of machines being cracked into, do we?

Of course, this means Microsoft has to release much less sloppy code. And people may find bugs out there… And folk may fix bugs for Microsoft, who take rather long to get patches out. Microsoft users, beware; beware not because the source is out, but beware because you hope Microsoft becomes a more active proponent in a better security model.


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