Posted on 5/6/2004, 4:46 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
There are plenty of migration guides that serve for Windows users wanting to move to Linux. I think there might even be one from our favourite company in Redmond, written for UNIX users migrating to Windows. But we hardly ever get Mac OS X to Linux migration guides do we?
Gave my talk to the Mac user group, AUSOM about running Linux on beloved Mac hardware! Yay to Linux PPC. Surprisingly filled with interest about open source, and the fact that Apple too make use of a lot of underlying OSS tools, made a few heads turn. A lot look like they’re going to try out Fedora Core 2, and some have interests in Linux-based GIS applications too. GNOME looks like a clear winner as well (2.6; I had the 2.4 on the Debian unstable laptop and they were like “eew, Windows Explorer!”). Yay, yay. Talk uploaded at the usual talks location.
Pity I can’t drive the Radeon’s to give me dual-head yet. I tried, but I won’t give up; just that I needed sleep and to write my talk. I’m convinced the Radeon Mobility 9200 on the iBook G4 and the Radeon Mobility 7500 on the G3 will work with dual head – but all I’m getting is the OFBoot screen. Sigh
Posted on 3/6/2004, 4:36 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Good meeting – introduction to FC2, and picking the right repositories went well, just a little longer than expected, but that means there was discussion, and thats always a good thing. LILO is gone, and the latest post on fedora-list by davej seems to say there are about 40 kernel patches at most (I said 30, based on older information) – since the patch related question came up.
Russell Coker gave a brief talk about SELinux, how FC2 will have it “just work” and I’d encourage anyone in the Melbourne area to come to the SELinux SIG on the 8th of June, again at Red Hat Melbourne’s offices, as there will be a meeting with the main agenda of installing FC2 in enforcing mode, using it, and chit chat later – start time is after 5.30pm, I’m told.
Mike MacCana went on with QEmu, and this seems to be mighty interesting. He even demo’ed RHEL AS 2.1 running in QEmu, as well as Windows 2000, with full network access and so on. His host system was a RHEL 3 box. It’s not exactly fast, even with half-a-gig-of-RAM, but I’m still tempted to give it a go.
And a warm welcome (and thank you) to Tung U for hosting this months meeting in Richard’s absence.
Posted on 2/6/2004, 4:13 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Tridge came over for the LUV meeting this month, and it was definitely a fun time listening to him speak for over two hours. He was giving us a status update on Samba4, with demos and the like (its cool, really!), and a bit of information as to what he thinks is happening with the future of filesystems. I took some notes down, at Samba4 Status – Andrew Tridgell (sorry, OpenOffice.org’s HTML export is pretty sucky – nested bullets aren’t supported it seems…), he has a presentation up on his website somewhere, and well, it was good. Talked about ldb (and how hackers are encouraged to join), streams and why we need them in the UNIX world, and so on. New pizza place even, this month.
Posted on 1/6/2004, 7:06 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Usual discussion came up about why’d governments should pick the BSD styled licensing scheme, over the GPL. I’m going with the GPL/LGPL, as the BSD styled licensing allows folk to take away code, make it proprietary, and probably never push updates out again – bad, bad. If Linksys didn’t use the GPL, we won’t have disruptive technology – a lot more of these devices exist, nowadays with phones, and more. Some interesting picks:
- Opinion: License to FUD – “While using the GPL won’t prevent competitors from using the code, it does keep them from making proprietary extensions.” Later on, when they talk about MS’s Kerberos implementation, its a valid point that gave the Samba team grief.
- GPL or BSD? Yes LG #75 – “GPL promotes freedom for the end-user; BSD promotes freedom for the programmer.” I like that it makes certain there’s no “better” license; also point to note that why would you work so hard to make someone else a millionaire? (Look at Microsoft’s stealing of the BSD TCP/IP stack). Kerberos is mentioned, in greater detail here.
- Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else. – good reading in general, to tell you why you’d use a GPL-compatible based license.
- The Role of Community in Free Software – “Developers who use the GPL are saying, in the clearest possible way, that their motives are not selfish, that they can be trusted to participate in the community without holding something back for themselves.”
- Social aspects of the BSD vs. GPL debate – a must read. Plenty of resources, great for the bookmarks on this topic.
Yes, the freedom of the community is a lot more important, I would think. Weak licensing doesn’t propogate the access regime.
