Tag Archives | Linux

What’s in your kernel?

By Ted Roche on August 5, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

OSNews points in turn to a DevX article, Study: Linux Code Grows as Defects Decline. “Between December 2004 and July 2005, the “defect density” in the Linux kernel has fallen from 0.17 to 0.16 and all serious defects have been corrected, a new report out from code analysis firm Coverity asserts. Defect density declined by 2.2 percent.”

How many defects are in the OS kernel you’re using? Has the defect density gone up or down over time? Cars have satisfaction surveys. Consumer Reports lists pluses and minuses. Why don’t we have a similar test for operating systems.

Audience Participation Night at DLSLUG

By Ted Roche on August 4, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

Bill McGonigle, Chapter Coordinator for the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group posts:

Date: Thursday, August 4th, 7:00-9:00PM
Place: Dartmouth College, Carson Hall Room L02
Presenter: The Membership (that means you!)
Topic: Nifties!
“It’s Audience Participation Night at DLSLUG – time for you to get up and do something. We’ll each take a turn at the projector showing something Neat or Nifty. It doesn’t matter if it takes 2 minutes or 20 minutes to explain, just get up there and show us something. We all know something Nifty that’s worth showing. We’ll have a linux laptop to use, or connect remotely to your own. The meeting will run until we run out of Nifties, or we run out of time.”

“It can be anything from a utility you just discovered to a neat piece of hardware we should know about to a worthwhile service on the ‘net or maybe something you wrote that saves you hours of time. If you’re new to Linux that doesn’t matter – there must be something Nifty about it that got your interested – what is that? Found a good Linux/Unix book lately? Linux is about sharing, and this month it’s your turn.”

Hope to see you there.

Novell: SCO owns no copyright, and we ought to get all their licensing money

By Ted Roche on July 30, 2005 in Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

OSNews points to a Groklaw article: Novell Files Countersuit Against SCO. “Today, Novell has answered SCO’s complaint alledging Novell slandered SCO’s ownership of the Unix copyrights. Novell claims that SCO approached Novell in 2003 to try and pursuade them to go along with the Linux Licensing Scheme. When Novell refused, SCO attempted to talk Novell into transfering the Unix Copyrights to SCO, which Novell also refused to do. Novell has also filed four counterclaims against SCO, one of them being Slander of Title (for SCO slandering Novell’s ownership of the Unix Copyrights).”

Delicious. If accepted, Novell should earn all the monies SCO got from “licensing” rights to software it didn’t own, plus penalties. Looking forward to the next step.

Boot Fedora Faster

By Ted Roche on July 26, 2005 in OpenSource

OSNews points to an article that tells you how to Boot Fedora Linux Faster. “Everyone wants a quick boot time, from the beginner user to the advanced user, this is a issue that bothers us all. As Linux has advanced it has increasingly become slower to boot. So I decided to look into reducing the time it takes to boot my current setup, which is Fedora 4. In doing so I was able to reduce the boot time of my Fedora 4 installation to less than 25 seconds.”

You can never have too much RAM, too slim a laptop or too fast a boot-up sequence!

Roadmap comparison

By Ted Roche on July 21, 2005 in Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Interesting juxtaposition here. The Open Source Development Lab, a small group located in the Northwest US, posted a roadmap titled “OSDL’s Linux Initiatives.”

Nearly simultaneously, Information Week carries a 9 page story “Microsoft Lays Out Enterprise Roadmap,” where the lead paragraph reads:

Microsoft is making big promises about Longhorn and other product development, but will it deliver? We spoke with company execs about initiatives in security, server operating systems, storage, convergence and more.

OSDL is just one small group, advancing their own agenda of tools and utilities, with an obvious focus on making the platform more reliable, appealing and robust for a variety of vendors to deploy upon. Microsoft, in contrast, strikes me as withdrawing within a fortress of their own making tying together their tools ever more tightly. The Information Week interviews a number of high-placed Microsofties and each seems to have their own agenda, plans and acronyms (and titles, too!). Don’t miss the last two pages of the Information Week piece with some surprising survey results sure to delight partisans on both sides of the debate.

Too Many Choices! I can’t decide!

By Ted Roche on July 17, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

Slashdot carries a discussion that starts Time for a Linux Consolidation?. An anonymous reader writes “Are there too many Linux distributions currently available?” As always, with Slashdot, there’s a tradeoff between how long you want to read the answers and how much you trust their system of peer ratings. I like a threshold of 4, myself.

This is an interesting syndrome I’ve seen happen a number of times. Folks who perceive themselves to be trapped in the “One Microsoft Way” choice of operating systems, office products, PIMs and development tools long for the “freedom” of choosing other packages, ignoring the fact that they are implicitly choosing Microsoft over WordPerfect, SmartSuite, Delphi, BASIC, PostgreSQL and dozens of other choices. But when faced with the actual choice — Red Hat Enterprise or SuSE? Mandrake? Connectiva? Debian or Ubuntu? — they complain that there are “too many choices.” Utter nonsense. People chose to create yet another PIM for a reason. They may not have liked the options available, they may not have gotten along with the developers, they may wanted one specific feature or they may just have been ignorant of what was available. It’s up to the discerning consumer to figure out their optimal choice. Me, I think there’s too much shelf space devoted to high-frutose corn syrup and colored water, but bottlers seem to keep “innovating.”

SCO knew Linux was clean before lawsuit

By Ted Roche on July 15, 2005 in OpenSource

Slashdot and OSNews point the The Register which in turn points to Groklaw with the newsflash: SCO Knew Linux Doesn’t Infringe – Memo. “SCO’s CEO Darl McBride was told that the Linux kernel contained no SCO copyright code six months before the company issued its first lawsuit, a memo reveals. An outside consultant Bob Swartz conducted the audit, and on August 13 2002 Caldera’s Michael Davidson reported the results.”

Slashdot points to Unsealed SCO Email Reveals Linux Code is Clean. rm69990 writes “In a recently unsealed email in the SCO vs. IBM case, it appears that an outside consultant, hired by SCO in 2002, failed to find copyright violations in the Linux Kernel. This was right around the time Darl McBride, who has before been hired by litigious companies as CEO, was hired. It appears that before SCO even began its investigation, they were hoping to find a smoking gun, not believing that Linux could possibly not contain Unix code. Apparently, they ignored the advice of this consultant.”

So, SCO’s own study couldn’t find infringing Linux code.

Upgrading OS/2? Try Linux!

By Ted Roche on July 15, 2005 in OpenSource

IBM Officially Kills OS/2. boarder8925 writes “‘Big Blue has hammered the final nails into OS/2’s coffin. It said that all sales of OS/2 will end on the 23rd of December this year, and support for the pre-emptive multitasking operating system will end on the 31st December 2006.’ IBM has posted a migration page to help OS/2 users easily switch to Linux.” [Slashdot]

Asa Dotzler: Linux not ready for the desktop

By Ted Roche on July 14, 2005 in Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Asa Dotzler opines that Linux not ready for the desktop, surely not the first to have that opinion, but he identified four areas where he felt improvement was necessary:

1. Migration: Asa suggests that Linux install side-by-side on a Windows machine and read all the settings and preferences and set the same on the Linux side. While this sounds like a killer feature, I’ve found most people haven’t even set much beyond the defaults, and those who have are comfortable enough with the concept to customize their software again. Switching from Windows to Linux (or Mac) is also not a one-for-one match and new capabilities in the software need to be discovered, too. A “Migration Wizard” could be a killer app for the Aunt Tillies of the world, who’d like it to just work for them, but for corporate environments where much is pre-set for the user, IT should be able to script a similar though perhaps not as thorough effect.

2. Stability: by stability, Asa is referring to what Windows users call DLL Hell: the problems with library dependency conflicts between different software installs. This is a universal problem with computers, and Linux is no further along a solution than Microsoft is. The simple answer is to stay within the lines and only install the software that your distribution’s installer has to offer. That’s a pretty frustrating answer, but the major distros do supply a vast array of software these days.

3. Complexity: Asa seems to be complaining that there are too many configuration choices. Freedom to configure the software the way you want is an advantage, but the difficulty of supporting clients who have tinkered with their settings is a counterbalance. Again, this is a universal challenge: have you taken a look at many tabs in Tools|Options in Word lately? Too many choices! Unless they don’t have the one you want…

4. Comfort: “The final major issue is comfort. Linux must feel comfortable to Windows users.” I have to respectfully disagree. People can learn to adjust, and most do. Witness the radical and sometimes trivially silly differences in UI between Windows 3.1, 95, 98, 2000 and XP. The world didn’t end because Microsoft installed a Teletubbies background on top of a Candyland theme, and hid common options five layers down behind difficult-to-navigate cascading menus and modal dialogs. People can learn to adjust, and that needs to be factored in to the transition process, along with a patient teacher and helpful support available. To duplicate the UI that Microsoft rolled out (and which version?) may aid in muscle-memory exercises, but it doesn’t open up the minds to new possibilities. Apple argues you should “Think Different” and the effect on many switchers — the It Just Works Effect – argues they have done a better job of the Computer-Human Interaction design than Microsoft did.

Monadnock Linux User Group tonight: Ira Krakow on Wine

By Ted Roche on July 14, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be this Thursday, July 14th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough. Google map here.

This is a combined meeting with CentraLUG (of the Concord area) and will feature guest speaker Ira Krakow, discussing WINE and running Windows applications on Linux. Ira will present an overview of Wine, which enables Windows applications to run in Linux, and Winelib, which enables Windows application sources to compile and run on Linux. Ira discusses Wine and Winelib, which make it possible to run some Windows applications on Linux, and to more easily port applications that were originally written for a Windows platform.

He’ll also touch on other projects that can help an enterprise overcome its Windows dependencies, such as ReactOS (the open source port of Windows NT), MinGW (the port of GCC for Windows programs), and Mono (essentially, Wine for .NET and C#). Ira is currently co- authoring a book for Prentice-Hall, on Wine and Winelib; his co- author is Brian Vincent.

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