Archive for June 2004

iChat AV

At 35,000 feet, video-conferencing seems joyous. When are we, in the open source world going to be able to do the same? (with ease)

Tabs #2

iPod

Whoote… and the iPod arrives. With a remote control. Pity its all Firewire based, and the current Fedora kernel has that in a state of limbo. It says its “Windows compatible”, but yeah, it comes with a silly dongle that’s still Firewire, but PC-styled. USB dongles are additional costs. In the excitement (I have an exam in a couple of hours), I just let OS X handle things, so soon, I’ll have to rely on HFS+ read/write works well on Linux too :)

Sleep not functioning well

Massive rawhide rebuild (nearly 900 packages), against gcc 3.4. Do not upgrade your PPC boxes just yet. Running 2.6.6-1.435, and my sleep on the iBook 2.2 (G3) is super-flaky. Well, it sleeps well, its just waking up that sucks. Problem has boiled down to either waking up the network (eth0/eth1) or loading sound drivers. No joy even with a 2.6.7 kernel from kernels.org. Definitely more debugging to come… as I’m depending on this PPC box for regular daily use for the next entire month.

pmud does not like the “-d” option in /etc/sysconfig/power. It will break during boot. Fedora.us Firefox 0.9 (#1617) builds on PPC just fine.

Building stock kernel.org kernels are very simple these days too. After running make oldconfig, I just make rpm. Install the RPM, run mkinitrd (mkinitrd /boot/initrd-2.6.7.img 2.6.7 where 2.6.7 or something must be in /lib/modules), and edit /etc/yaboot.conf to point to the new kernel.

Industry Groups

First discussion of the Malaysian Open Source Industry Group, have meeting minutes online. There will definitely be interest in this, so far there’s really only OSIA here in Australia. This can only mean good things, as Microsoft is scared. There’s also going to be a national OSS policy (make that two, competing ones) soon, so yeah, watch Malaysia folk.

Update: Planet MYOSS has updates from attendees.

Switch

At one of Microsoft’s recent Get the Facts campaigns, some interesting tid-bits came out, in a report by Izwan Ismail, titled a Different view on open source (google cache).

Dr. Ewe Hong Tat, a dean of IT at the Multimedia University mentions folks get confused with open source software as being freeware/shareware, citing that the “distribution, support and services for users are not free”. Excuse me, with freeware/shareware, was this the case? No. Software like RHEL and SuSE Enterprise Linux are paid-for because you’re going to get support thats on par, if it doesn’t exceed Microsoft’s support options. With RHEL3, you’re going to be guaranteed a product life cycle of five years, and thats a long time to support software. Who says you can’t get support with the other “free” Linux’es out there, like Debian, Fedora, and so on? There are local support joints that will always do this for you.

“Soon, they will realise there’s nothing free in this world.” Yes, Red Hat Linux and SuSE have always realised that there’s nothing free in this world, and always had paid support options for their packages. They’d give it away free to some varying degree, but support was always charged for (I remember this back to the Red Hat 4.x days). Look at Progeny, they support a version of Debian, and have never been shy to say so.

Then we have the venerable Butt Wai Choon. He says “commercial software is basically more reliable than that of the open source” – funny, that Netcraft’s web server survey lists Apache as having just above 67% market share right? Or that around 55% of mail servers out there are using three of the largest open source packages out there (Sendmail/Postfix/Exim)? The numbers speak for themselves, Butt.

Open source companies are constantly driven to innovate too. Just look at where we stand today? The GNOME Desktop enviornment wouldn’t be what it is without big players like Red Hat, Novell and Sun in the picture. And yes, occasionally they do patent new things too – only so that a commercial giant doesn’t patent the technology against them; but look at Red Hat’s promise on software patents. Can Microsoft ever attest to something like that?

“Commercial software are stable, tested and get regular updates on bugs or security holes.” Sure, they are (Blue screen of death jokes aside). Open source software is generally stable too, if not rock solid (the above server numbers speak for themselves), it is very well tested, have open QA policies, and always have regular updates for new features. If security holes come out, they don’t wait for “service pack releases”, but generally release a fix in under-48-hours.

So a different view on open source, or just a plain lack of understanding from Mr. Butt & Mr. Ewe? If you’re ever at one of these events, ZDNet has a good list of pointers on How to talk to Microsoft about Linux; I’d definitely suggest that as a read if you’re going in to fight the good fight. Don’t forget all the recent virus issues – us Linux users just have to delete the e-mail from our inbox (or get it cleverly filtered).


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