Archive for the ‘Opinion Piece’ Category

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K-k-kubuntu 7.10 on a Dell Inspiron 1520

Thursday, November 22nd, 2007

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.

Posted in Geek, General Computers, Linux, Opinion Piece | 2 Comments »

Microsoft to Release Windows XP as Upgrade to Vista in 2010

Saturday, September 29th, 2007

An anonymous source at Microsoft’s Redmond headquarters revealed today how the software giant plans to release Windows XP as the successor to the ill-fated Vista operating system in the next decade.

“User’s want choice and Microsoft will offer customers the choice of a mandatory upgrade cycle which will deliver value to the end user and a greater end user experience. Part of that experience will include the launch of Windows XP as the next generation operating system in 2010 and will replace Windows Vista as our flagship product.”

“We have listened to customers that have told us that they would like a responsive GUI that can offer productivity gains over Windows Vista technology. In particular, usability tests have shown that Vista’s “preparing to copy – calculating” feature, which gave the users the option to go and make a cup of tea whilst the underlying OS took 5 minutes to decide how long it would take to copy those two 4 kilobyte text files, are not proving to be the win we expected. Instead we shall revert to our patented MS-DOS technology which can perform the same task in a fraction of the time. A patent which Linux infringes.”

“Additionally we will be removing the patented ‘99 OK Click’ security functionality security feature that Vista introduced as many users asked how security was improved by providing an OK click without requesting any password. We just saw some kind of similar feature when we visited our friends at Novell called ’su ‘and ’sudo’ and we thought our users would also like that. But we also knew that they wouldn’t like entering passwords. This was borne out through extensive usability testing with rabbits in our lab scenarios. The rabbits also suggested that they liked the idea of a ribbon when working with the office programs. We were determined to deliver such productivity gains and value, not only to these rabbits, but also sheep and other users of our products.”

“We found Windows XP to be the most efficient way to deliver these gains to our users through a familiar and proven user interface as well as harnessing our synergies across the Windows brand. The good news for users is that through our software assurance policy means that their subscription plan will cover the licencing cost for the XP upgrade – unless its release gets delayed like Windows Vista. Existing Windows XP licence holders will only have to pay the licence fee one more time in order to continue to use their product.”

Rumour also has it that Microsoft are already even planning the next OS release after Windows XP which will be in 2015. The provisional codename for it is to be “Long Horn, Short Memory” and it is expected that it will be built on the Windows 3.1 codebase that delivered such rich functionality through much of the nineties…


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Posted in Funny, General Computers, Opinion Piece, Spoof | 1 Comment »

The Quick European Fox Jumps Over the Lazy Dog

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

Breaking with the blogging tradition of incredibly obvious (and search engine indexable) article titles, I think it’s fitting to have a subtle, more European perhaps, heading for this post. To cut to the chase, it deals with the great transatlantic dog fight between possibly the world’s biggest monopoly and the Eurocrats – that is Microsoft vs European Competition Commission.

This has caused great entertainment for those browsing the net as, for some, this has broken down into a full scale Europe vs America battle. The ruling is Microsoft’s first court loss of significance that stands to have genuine legal ramifications as most other similar cases have been settled out of court by deep pockets and hamstrung prosecutions. Although it’s always hard to pick the legal meat off the bones in a lot of software related court cases, other articles have mentioned that the ruling means limited scope for MS to appeal, possible requirement of protocols disclosure and of course the small matter of hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Small change to a big fish perhaps but no one likes to throw away money.

Those who support the decision are proudly strutting the streets with their vin rouge in one hand and their petit pain in the other singing “Vive la Revolution” as they go. Some have changed to spelling color with a ‘u’ and prefer to organise their day than organize it. Those against, see the fleeting head of communism attacking capitalism’s finest hour. Cries of “Red! Reds! Under the beds” can be heard from those who shun the European Courts ruling. Particularly entertaining is the comments at the end of the article Microsoft’s Stunning Court Defeat. I don’t normally mange to keep chugging through the comments but I did find this little flame quite amusing.

So what does the future legal direction of this case hold? Well that’s anyone’s guess, but the interesting thing that FFII correctly pointed out in one of their recent press releases is that patents are where the battle is at. Whatever respect Europe can garner by being the first one to call a spade a spade – or an illegal monopoly an illegal monopoly – will be soon squandered if software patents are allowed in the back door. How anyone could be stupid enough to repeatedly bring software patents to the brink of legality in Europe is amazing. But that is what’s happened time and time again. Software lifecycles are measured in months (not decades like in big pharma) and innovation has always occurred by building on the ideas of others. But yet there are those who are scared that taking a stance against software patents means being anti-intellectual property – when the reverse is the case. Let’s hope that the next time software patents are on the European menu, that there will be enough intelligent people in the room to call the spade again.


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Posted in Digital Choice, Geek, Opinion Piece | 2 Comments »

Judge to SCO – You Don’t Own Unix!

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

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.

Posted in Funny, Linux, Opinion Piece, Rant | 2 Comments »

Momentumless Linux and the Death of Open Source – A Developer’s Response

Sunday, July 15th, 2007

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…)

Posted in Digital Choice, Geek, General Computers, Linux, Opinion Piece, Rant | 5 Comments »

Transformers – The Worst Movie Ever!

Sunday, July 8th, 2007

Robots in disguise? No. Michael Bay – film maker in disguise. He has taken a cult classic and turned it into a steaming pile of utter junk of the “Yeeh hawww! God bless America variety.” Certainly, he should never be allowed near a movie studio ever again. Here’s why…..

You would think that Transformers would be a film about robots. No, in fact the only time robots make it into the film is to appear in cabaret style slapstick sketches where they incompetently fall about the place. They are like extras from a pantomime, lacking any personality, led by incredibly boring Optimus Prime who comes across a sort of Treebeard, from Lord of the Rings, with a number plate strapped – he really is that bland in this film.

A massively disappointing thing in the film is that all the Transformers look the same – kind of like a couple of electricity pylons stuck together. It’s actually hard to tell Megatron, the ultimate baddie, from any of the robots because they all look the same. Poor Megatron doesn’t even have his trademark canon strapped on his arm??? And Optimus’ colour scheme makes him looks like he’s about to lead a gay pride Autobot march rather than go into battle. Worse again he has lips – no doubt this is to give the audience something ‘human’ to identify with. However the only thing this movie could be identified with is the type of thing that you flush down a toilet after a long night on the beer. Yes, it’s that bad.

And to top it off the film can’t resist rolling out the usual racial stereotypes

  • The black people in the film are portrayed as stupid and fat
  • The dialogue is peppered with things such as ‘Could the Iranians have invented this weapons system? No, they’re not smart enough. It must be the Chinese or the Russians…’ (not an exact quote as I’m trying to forget things about this film but close enough)
  • And whilst the autobots collapse clumsily around the place, the U.S. marines fly in to save the day. Wup dawg!

The Autobots and the Decepticons also never really get to have a good fight with each other. For example when Megatron and Optimus tee off they look more like a couple of fat wrestlers bumbling each other around that robots having a death match. You don’t really get to see much, just a blurry zoomed in camera on their shoulders as they tussle about like drunks thrown out after closing time. There are a few saving graces to this movie. The acting isn’t bad, there’s a few funny gags along the way, the lead female in the film – Megan Fox – does a very good job of looking hot, the small boom-box radio transformer at the start of the film is funny and has a bit of personality.

But the bottom line, if you want to watch a war film – along the lines of Armageddon or something – then this might pass the time for you. Think of this as Iraq with cabaret robots. If you, like me, grew up with Optimus and Co and were hoping for a strong appearance on the silver screen then this is two and half hours of your life that you’ll want back! But like the brilliance of the original series – you can’t have it!

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Posted in Opinion Piece, Rant | 15 Comments »

GPL V3 – Its True Purpose

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007

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.


Posted in Geek, General Computers, Linux, Opinion Piece | 2 Comments »

Microsoft Not So Sure on Taking on World…

Tuesday, May 15th, 2007

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.

Posted in Geek, General Computers, Linux, Opinion Piece, Rant, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Microsoft Vs The World

Monday, May 14th, 2007

Microsoft is allegedly preparing it’s army of lawyers (more than 800 strong according to one commentator) to issue an almighty patent onslaught on Open Source software. It lists 235 patents which it says are being violated by Open Source software projects. Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer says that it is in the “name of honour” that he must fight the Open Source community. The battle lines are being drawn in what could prove to be the ultimate shakeup of the U.S. software patent system. As Microsoft comes under increased pressure from Open Source software it is making lawyers, not software developers, the front-line soldiers in the fight to maintain the apparent monopoly. It looks like we’re entering interesting times.

On a lighter note, here’s a clip of Steve Balmer trying to rally the Redmond programmers in better days before lawyers led software development. I wonder does he exhibit the same passion today when he stands in front of his devs or does he prefer to go into the TV lounge and flick on an episode of Boston Legal…

Posted in Digital Choice, Geek, General Computers, Linux, Opinion Piece, Rant | No Comments »

Linux Community Must Help Dell Sell Linux

Tuesday, May 1st, 2007

The announcement that many people wanted to hear is imminent. Early rumours abound on various sites but possibly by the time you are reading this, Dell will have already made the official announcement that they are to ship Dell PC’s with the Linux operating system – Ubuntu. This is the major breakthrough that Linux as a desktop OS has been waiting for. Now all Linux communities -be it Open Source, Free Software, Linux for home or business that is your cup of tea – must help Dell sell this dream.

The most obvious way to help is for bloggers or people with websites to display a prominent ad for Dell Linux boxes. Let’s show Dell that by listening and embracing the Linux community that we can help them out. Each and everyone can be a partner to Dell and it is in everyone’s interest that Linux market share grows. A bigger pie means that more hardware vendors will support Linux and having the Open Source desktop OS in the limelight will mean more development work for Open Source programmers. For consumers, it brings choice like they’ve never had before – the modern day Linux OS thoroughly outshines it competitors. I do not make this comment lightly. But this week I got my first glimpse at the 3D accelerated desktop for Linux – it is incredible! It leaves Vista for dead. And comparing the two side-by-side there is only one winner.

So let’s help Dell sell Linux. I’m going to be emailing them after the official announcement to get my Dell Linux ad. Never has marketing been such a pleasure! And never has the Linux Desktop looked so good!

[digg=http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linux_Community_Must_Help_Dell_Sell_Linux ]

Posted in Digital Choice, Geek, General Computers, Linux, Opinion Piece | 1 Comment »

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