The Irish Penguin

Ahhh… Another day, another distro. The harddrive partitions around here are a bit like the Wizard of Oz; every day a new one joins the merry troupe. Todays turn was the KDE spin on Ubuntu Gutsy. So armed with the standard Kubuntu CD, which serves as a live distro and an install CD in one, we set on the path to enlightment (or should that be KDE - always good to end the week on a bad pun).

Generally, it seems to be recommended practice these days to install Ubunutu or its derivates off the ‘alternate’ CD when trying to set up an Inspiron to avoid things like incompatible versions of ALSA or wireless drivers working their way into the install. But the Penguin didn’t really feel like giving the whole GUI experience a miss. And so the live CD was fired up before you could say ‘Holy wireless drivers, Batman!’. A nice desktop link provided a pretty path to installation and within an hour Kubuntu was installed and ready to go.

First thing that was apparent was that the default Kubuntu appearance is quite bland. Especially when compared with something like OpenSuse’s nice crisp out-of-the-box KDE look (however nothing will ever get installed waiting around for YAST!). But the good news is that Kubuntu’s eye-candy vacuum can be fixed with a bit of tweaking. That wasn’t the initial major concern though. The lack of sound and wireless was!

The fix for the sound was easy, running ’sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic’ from the command line delivered sound after a reboot. The wireless was a lot more fiddly to get working - the strange thing is that NetworkManager was picking up all the secured networks and tantilisingly displaying them in its wireless list. But no way in the world was it going to connect to any of them. (BTW, the card is a Intel Pro Wireless 3945). However, the laptop in question is also running Ubuntu Studio out of another partition and it can connect through Gnome’s network-admin program without any probs. So there was definitely something fishy up.

Plan A at solving the problem was to install wlassistant (sudo apt-get install wlassistant) in order to try and put a different network program in the firing line. But alas still no connection. Then after a bit of head scratching we decided to install the whole bloody Gnome network admin and try and use that (sudo apt-get install gnome-system-tools) - which can be run via the ‘network-admin’ command. There was a time there when this was looking like a winning plan but no joy. Weird thing is, and the Irish Penguin has no explaination for this, is that rebooting and connecting via wlassistant did the job! Worked a charm! A lucky charm!!!

Final things on the list was to glam up that gaudy GUI. The install of Gnome’s networking stuff had left a few stray icons in the menu so they had to be wisked away as they weren’t working anyway. Then a few nice things to do are

* Right-click on the quicklauncher at left of the taskbar and configure it to have a fine big icon size - 28 looked good on the Inspiron. Big icons always look nice in KDE’s taskbar, otherwise where’s the fun?

* One of the best ways to brighten up the panel is to (right-click on the taskbar and configure) set ‘Enable background image’ for the panel and select a nice tile. This also puts a pretty sash down the left of the K-menu. Optionally choose ‘Colorize to match desktop theme’

* In the system settings keep the Style->Widget Style as ‘Polyster’ but change the Window Decoration to ‘Keramik’

* Change the window background to be a nice soft colour - a very light fawn is nice - and in keeping with the Ubuntu theme…

* And for God’s sake pic a nice desktop background!

Along the way, we flicked over to the proprietary NVidia drivers via the restricted driver management without problems. Although it did make all the fonts bigger for some reason - so they had to be tamed again using the following fix (note: changing font properties in System Settings isn’t enough to fix this). I used a dpi of 75 instead of 100 as the fix did. Another thing that was hard to track down was power management adjustment there’s no setting in System Settings - rather it can be found by right-clicking on the battery icon to the right of the task bar and selecting ‘Restore’ to bring up the dialog - of course!

So what’s the verdict after all the hard work is out of the way. Kubuntu is a fine desktop if you’re prepared to put in a little effort customising its look and feel. Because of the effort required in prettying it up - Kubuntu initially feels less polished than it’s sister Ubuntu. Package management in Adept isn’t as smooth as Synaptic. But there are some real pluses out of the K stable. Dolphin has replaced Konqueror as the default file browser and its two pane mode is great. Not quite sure why its taken so long for a two pane file manager to crop up in a modern OS but it’s not before time. All the usual great KDE apps from K3B to Amarok are in there. The Penguin’s final verdict is that it feels a little more ‘bright’ and ‘fun’ than Ubuntu which is more ‘finished’ but serious.

The Irish Penguin branches out to a new platform this week as Mono, the Linux-y version .NET of is tackled. What wonders await…

Well, thus far, we’re not actually sure, although early signs are promising. We pulled down the MonoDevelop codebase as well as it’s dependancies via Subversion and most things built without major problems (on Ubuntu Fiesty) and a little help from the fabulous monodevelop-list AT lists.ximian.com (just replace AT with @) #. Although the holy grail of having a happily built MonoDevelop environment is proving just a little elusive - a conflict between Cario from v1.0 mono libraries and Cairo from v2.0 libraries is a spanner in the works. This should be a straightforward one to iron out.

It will be interesting to compare the Form’s/Widget designer to the fabulous QT Designer and see if MonoDevelop provides a stable and first rate environment for doing GUIs. But of course, even more interesting will be the politics…

And so the biggest legal saga to face Linux over the last few years was that of SCO trying to sue people for copyright infringement, saying that it owned the rights to UNIX. This has dragged Novell, IBM and more into the courts to fight for the right to party. Well today that party was in full swing as the judge in the case, Dale Kimball, has ruled in Novell’s favour saying that it is Novell, and not SCO, who own the UNIX and Unixware rights.

Kudos to Novell! It’s hard to see that there is much, if anything, left in the SCO locker that they can accuse IBM of infringing. In fact, it looks like they’ll be busy trying to organise a whip-a-round to pay up to Novell who will now be due a big cheque from SCO for the UNIX rights that Microsoft and Sun had previously paid SCO for. Yes, that sentence is a bit long and confusing. Perhaps it would be better to allocate IP addresses to each note in the UNIX rights cash pile and use traceroute to track its hops from one accounting subnet to another!

Interesting it was Microsoft who were reported to have set the SCO ball rolling back in 2003 by paying them for the first UNIX licence . Here’s one of the article’s from back then when the news first broke and the world looked a bleaker place. Once details of a Microsoft-SCO association had been reported it prompted one analyst, Gordon Haff of Illuminata, to say “Microsoft should certainly be worried about even a little bit of SCO’s stench rubbing off.” Well the only stench today will be from rear end of the trousers of the SCO management as they nervously wonder where to go next from here.

Given that Microsoft stumped up the initial cash to set SCO off like a bull in a China shop, it is possibly fitting that such money will now likely pass on to Novell to fund Linux development. Mind you, it’s hard to keep track of the amount of Microsoft cash that the Novell management are rolling around in these days. Maybe the Redmond team should just give up on Windows and focus on their Linux development entirely. Let’s be honest, it’s much more fun!

Groklaw has been covering this tale from the start of the case and and PJ is in bouyant mood as she covers the details whilst downing some chocolates. Thanks for a great site PJ, to keep the great unwashed up to date on the legal rumblings over the last few years, and please continue to do so as this fish gets reeled in.

A couple of blog and news posts on the Internet this week seemed to make the headlines with death knells for Linux and Open Source for a multitude of reasons, both chronic (less anti-Microsoft sentiment about) and recent (GPL 3). But on reading, I couldn’t help but feel that both posts sounded wrong, utterly utterly wrong in fact. No disrespect intended to the authors of course.

The first post Open Source Is Dead, Long Live Open Patents? by David DeJean, which took a commonly cited angle on GPL3 hurting Open Source by fragmenting the community. But that is to not understand the community. Bare in mind one important fact about community-oriented Open Source developers, of which I am one - we write the software because we love to. For the vast majority of SMD’s (Small-to-Medium size project Developers, for want of a better term) we don’t really care whether our project is GPL2 or GPL3 - why? Because they are both effective Open Source licences and they will both serve our personal purposes fine as either licence would suit our pet projects. Of course, we’ll all still get our goat up as to whether Linux or the GNU Compiler Tools should be GPL 2 or 3 - but that’s a separate issue - it’s won’t stop us writing the software we love. It is naive for commentators to think that because a new licence comes out that it will hurt the amount of FOSS produced. As for businesses, if it made sense to switch to Linux before GPL 3, it will still make sense after GPL3 - irrespective of what or who adopts GPL 3. It technically affects Tivo (although they will be able to stick with Linux 2.4 kernel) - so what? Such cases only make up a small part of the econosphere. Plenty of business providers seem to be happy. Even embedded solution providers are saying that GPL 3 won’t turn customers off, with Jason Wacha of MontaVista saying “Our customers are used to working with licenses that are much more restrictive than the GPL. In my opinion, typical proprietary licenses are much more restrictive in pretty much all instances than the GPL.”

(more…)

Aha! Here’s one that caught me out for a while. I was writing a class that inherited from QDomDocument and was more than a bit puzzled when I got the error

moc_fdom.cpp:37: error: ‘staticMetaObject’ is not a member of ‘QDomDocument’
moc_fdom.cpp: In member function ‘virtual void*
JsDomDocument::qt_metacast(const char*)’:
moc_fdom.cpp:51: error: ‘qt_metacast’ is not a member of ‘QDomDocument’
moc_fdom.cpp: In member function ‘virtual int
JsDomDocument::qt_metacall(QMetaObject::Call, int, void**)’:
moc_fdom.cpp:56: error: ‘qt_metacall’ is not a member of ‘QDomDocument’
gmake[1]: *** [moc_fdom.o] Error 1
gmake: *** [sub-src-make_default] Error 2
*** Exited with status: 2 ***

Turns out QDomDocument isn’t a QObject so I was making the mistake of including the Q_OBJECT macro at the start of my class definition. D’oh!

class XDomDocument : public QDomDocument
{
Q_OBJECT //Don’t do this!!!
public:
XDomDocument();
}

A side effect of not being a QObject is that you cannot wire up signals and slots in the normal manner. Although googling around should bring up a few workarounds.

Good things come in small packages packages. But great things are scabable!

One such example is the Linux kernel - it can run on anything from a toaster to a supercomputer; how does it do it? The answer to this, and other interesting questions, can be found in the very readable guide to the Linux kernel by IBM Anatomy of the Linux kernel.

Recently, a new product has hit the market for those folks who would like to develop in .NET, and in particular Visual Studio, but prefer to run their application on Linux.

Although you could already code up .NET solutions in MonoDevelop - which itself has made great progress recently - most enterprises will only want to write .NET server and web apps in Visual Studio. Mainsoft has seen the gap in the market and filled it with a free plugin for Visual Studio, called Grasshopper, which lets you deploy to Linux. It achieves this by compiling the application to Java bytecode rather than the .NET intermediate language and also leverages work done in the Mono project, which has already done much work in bringing .NET to Linux.

In other news, Silverlight has been successfully ported to Linux through an incredible hackathon effort by Miguel de Icaza and his Mono team! Going under the name of Moonlight, the port was pretty much wrapped up in 21 days - so it’s amazing to think that with all this going on Miguel has any time to keep his blog updated!

Phew! After much fiddling and tweaking I finally managed to get my header image together for this site. All the while I had the song “The Irish Rover” bouncing round in my head - which probably didn’t help matters!

But I think the above header was worth it. Veronica, my glamorous girlfriend and graphic design mentor, didn’t like it much to start with. At least I managed to pacify her by throwing in a cute penguin pic, which I did up in the absolutely fabulous Inkscape. Inkscape has to be one of the best Free Software programs ever. It’s just so easy to use and yet things just always turn out good. It’s magic. And that’s just the kind of thing you’ll be hearing more about on this blog over the coming months along with other news and discussion from the filthy dirty world of Open Source.

Just a heads up for anyone trying to change their WordPress header image - make sure that you haven’t changed the header’s colours or anything previously in WordPress. If you have made changes then you should revert them - which can be done from the dashboard. Otherwise all the image uploading and CSS styling in the world won’t be enough to get that flamin’ header to change! Now there’s an hour of my life that I won’t get back! At least I had The Irish Rover playing away in the back of my head to keep me going…

Doo do doo…

Recently, I read some interesting commentary on the Microsoft-Novell pact in an Linux Insider article entitled GPLv3 Could Be Risky Business which concluded with the following statement.

“Regardless of the GPLv3 outcome, it should be noted that Microsoft and Novell are two large companies with plenty of attorneys — if they want to do business together over Linux and Microsoft products, it’s not hard to imagine that they’ll be able to find a way.”

This statement didn’t seem to ring true for me - it seemed to be wrong way to view what the Free Software Foundation is doing with GPL V3. Here’s why.

Nobody wants to ’stop’ Microsoft and Novell, or any other Open Source distributor, from doing business together. In fact, it would be desirable to see Microsoft produce more Open Source software - as they have with the projects such as the Web Service Software Factory - and collaborate with other players in the Open Source software field.

Rather the point of GPL V3 is to defend the rights of Free Software developers to produce software without the fear of litigation hanging over their head - by extending the patent covenant to all of the Free Software community - not just Novell customers. This fear of potential litigation has been raised more strongly than ever by recent Microsoft comments in Fortune magazine. However, it appears that by not having an expiry date on the Linux coupons that Microsoft is distributing, Microsoft itself will become a GPL V3 Linux distributor, and finally their patent covenant will extend to every corner of the Free Software communities. This will be genuinely good for software development, for the Open Source community and most of all for Microsoft - who has a lot to offer in the field of Open Source software.

They have a lot of bright developers and engineers and it is in everyone’s interests to see these people contribute greatly to the I.T. sector over the coming years. But it is important that the playing field is level and that instead of ‘innovative lock-ins’ and restrictive file formats we see a truly great Microsoft emerge that is founded on on true innovation, engineering excellence and co-operation. The first step on this path is to build a true bridge to the Free Software community and not seemingly pretend that this intellectual property bridge is any more than an attempt to scare companies into paying a high premium for ‘Microsoft-approved’ Linux of Novell - using patents instead of file formats as the lock-in.

In summary, it is important to note that the purpose of the latest version of the GNU Public Licence is not on preventing co-operation between Microsoft and Novell with their pact, rather it is to defend everyone else who is threatened by the it. To this end, GPL V3 looks like it will do it’s job very well - winning over many of those who doubted its necessity early on in its GPL 3 draft process. And the Software Freedom Law Centre and it’s ‘plenty of attorneys’ has another feather in its cap as it shows an interesting hand in the poker game of software licensing. And if this hand is not enough for now, ‘it’s not hard to imagine that they’ll be able to find a way’ to continue to keep software development a free and democratic process. If you weren’t sure why you needed GPL V3 yesterday, you probably know why today.

Under pressure arising from comments made by Microsoft’s Horacio Gutierrez and Brad Smith in an Fortune magazine article earlier this week saying that Open Source software contains 235 Micrsoft patents, the company has released a statement that it does not intend to resort to litigation in an effort to halt the growth of Open Source software. So why would they highlight an issue and then when asked to state specifically which are the patents in question they respond, “We’re not going to have a discussion publicly with that level of detail.”

The answer is simple. If they publish them it is likely that most of them will be thrown out by the U.S. courts as invalid. This became much easier recently, when the U.S. Supreme court made it easier to legally challenge individual patents and get them invalidated. This is because most software patents have been granted without due consideration and aren’t actually valid for many reasons. Patents have been grantly for things that are patently unpatenable.

Once this weeds out the likely majority of patents - Open Source developers will endevour to work around what patents, if any, remain.

So, back to the question, why would Microsoft highlight a meaningless question? Well, to bring up the issue in this manner creates a degree of uncertainty in the minds of certain business owners - however misplaced. Such people must weigh up risk every day and anything that they perceive adding risk to their business they will avoid. This will take two forms, one is to avoid Open Source software and stick with closed solutions. But this is becoming increasingly difficult as it is making more and more business sense to deploy Open Source solutions every day. The other is pay royalties to Microsoft for these (vaguely) alledged infringing patents. This is a sad situation because paying ‘money for nothing’ is money that you could otherwise use to grow your business.