Archive for December 2005

Christmas bliss

Merry belated Christmas. As usual, I threw one of my annual Christmas lunches, which was well received. Before that, caught the Chronicles of Narnia – good show. Also caught Along Came Polly on cable. Leave has enabled me to do other things – catching up on reading as well as getting up to scratch with various things. Oh, and photography – plenty during the holiday in Penang it would seem.

Before the holidays started, I did get the R51 back to a sane OS; I then setup a Xen/Qemu based virtualization environment, and the first guinea pig was Ubuntu 5.10. Pleased to say it installed well, and runs just fine. Feeling a bit of slowness on a Pentium-M 1.5GHz, but it’ll be fine. Fedora has had 1.7GB of updates since the time FC-4 has been released – thats an amazingly large number! And remember to get the ipw2100 firmware or wireless won’t work…

Mandriva shipping Skype

Looking thru the tabs, I found an article from LWN, titled Mandriva to ship Skype. This is a really smart option, as VoIP on the Linux desktop makes sense. Calling a Linux user just got easier.

However, Skype isn’t open source. But it does have market share – Mac and Windows users. In terms of numbers, the Gizmo Project doesn’t come close. And from a business perspective, there’s greatness as folk will see how SkypeOut (and SkypeIn) work, and further add dollars (okay, euros) to the deal.

Ubuntu seems to be behind the open source project Shtoom. I believe a similar idea was abound – let every Ubuntu user call one another. Looks like Mandrake beat them to the punch.

Which becomes more useful? I’m going with the Skype option, even though Mandriva’s user base might not be as large as Ubuntu’s. Its all about being cross-platform. Especially with the platforms that have the greater market share (aren’t we still fighting a 90% Windows marketplace?).

Got to keep a watch on Google and Gtalk. They seem to be standardizing on the Jabber protocol.

I see 2006 being an interesting VoIP year.

Arjen Lentz: King Kong and MySQL…

Arjen Lentz: King Kong and MySQL…:

Arjen mentions that Weta Digital in New Zealand uses MySQL. For further mention, these folk use Fedora Core for their OS. I have an appointment to talk to their press people sometime in mid-January to discuss their Fedora use; I guess now I’ll aim to find out more about both.

Oh, and Halo, that popular Xbox/Microsoft game, is to be a movie. Powered by Fedora and MySQL :)

Lacking sha1sum?

So, I need my Fedora fix on x86. But I also wanted to verify disc 3 badly, seeing that I had to download it over many segments. Come OpenSSL to the rescue.

openssl dgst -sha1 FC4-i386-disc{1,2,3,4).iso

That magic command gave me the right sha1sum’s, to match with the SHA1SUM that is provided. man openssl and man dgst clearly helped!


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