Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 29, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

KDE 4.1 still isn’t for me

A new version of one of the two major Linux desktops, KDE and GNOME, came out today: KDE 4.1 While I don’t hate it, I don’t see myself switching over from KDE 3.5.9 either.

That said, I will say KDE 4.1 is an improvement over the last 4.x version. I hated 4.04. I disliked it so much that I suggested that it might be best to fork KDE into wherever it was that KDE 4 was going and restart major development work on the KDE 3.5 branch.

After working with KDE 4.1, the release candidate, for the last few days, I’m ready to eat some of my words, but not all of them. I gave the new KDE a trial run on my main Linux desktop. This is an HP A6040N Pavilion Desktop PC with its 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E6320 dual-core processor and 2GB of RAM and 320 GB of SATA hard drive with openSUSE 11. I also tried it on my Gateway 503GR. This system has a 3GHz Pentium IV CPU, 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 250 graphics card, and a 300GB SATA hard drive. On this system, I was running Kubuntu 8.04.

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July 28, 2008
by sjvn01
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Could Microsoft actually be getting an open-source clue?

I couldn’t make it to OSCON last week in Portland, OR, but I have read the announcements that Sam Ramji, the director of Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab, made at this open-source software show. They were the friendliest things I’ve ever seen come out of Microsoft towards open source.

The first announcement, that Microsoft was contributing a patch to ADOdb, a PHP database access interface, wasn’t that big a deal. It is, after all, self-serving. Microsoft’s contribution will enable people to use its own SQL Server instead of MySQL or PostgreSQL with PHP programs. Yawn. Nothing new here.

The second announcement, that Microsoft was placing its Communications Protocol Program under its Open Specification Promise, and clarified that developer could use the communication protocols to build open-source software for commercial use, sounded much more important than it really is. You see the European Union courts ordered Microsoft to open those protocols up. Samba and the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) hammered out an agreement late last year that spelled out how the protocols could be used while avoiding Microsoft patents.

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July 27, 2008
by sjvn01
15 Comments

Atheros makes friends with Linux

Linux overcame most of its former driver woes years ago except for one noticeable exception: Wi-Fi drivers. While many Wi-Fi cards and chipsets were Linux friendly, two major Wi-Fi chipset vendors, Atheros and Broadcom, kept their drivers proprietary. Now, things are changing. Atheros has released a true open-source driver for its latest 802.11n chipsets.

Madwifi.org, an open-source developer group that has long worked on open-source drivers for Atheros WI-Ffi chipsets, announced that Atheros released the new driver, ath9k, underneath the liberal ISC license. Moreover, according to the Madwifi programmers, “This driver is aimed at inclusion to the Linux kernel and supports all Atheros IEEE 802.11n devices. This represents a major shift in terms of support from Atheros with respect to Linux.”

While Atheros had long offered some support for Linux, it has always insisted on keeping its HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) code proprietary. Last year, an open-source alternative, OpenHAL, became available, but it wasn’t completely compatible with the newer chipsets.

This change by Atheros isn’t too much of a surprise because the company just hired two of Madwifi’s top developers: Luis Rodriguez and Jouni Malinen.

According to Madwifi, Atheros also plans to add Linux access point support to ath9k with the aid of its two new open-source engineers.

There are many Wi-Fi devices already on the market using the ath9k-supported chipsets. These include Belkin’s N1 Wireless Notebook Card; D-Link’s RangerBooster N and Extreme N lines; Linksys’ WPC and WMP N lines; NEC’s WL300NC; and Netgear’s WNHDE111 Video Bridge and WN711.

July 26, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Steve Jobs is healthy

Jobs is basically healthy. That’s good news.

After weeks of rumors about his health going downhill or perhaps a reoccurrence of cancer, Jobs took the unusual step of calling a New York Times reporter to tell him ‘off the record’ that “While his health problems amounted to a good deal more than ‘a common bug,’ they weren’t life-threatening and he doesn’t have a recurrence of cancer.”

While I’m glad to hear that Jobs is relatively healthy, it does bother to get this news in such a roundabout way.

The reporter spends far more time on Jobs former health problems, an encounter with a rare, curable, form of pancreatic cancer, and whether or not his health should be a public issue at all than he does on the news.

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

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July 25, 2008
by sjvn01
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Is OpenSolaris in hot water?

Here’s how it works: Novell owns Unix’s IP (intellectual property). SCO sold Unix’s IP to Sun. Sun then included some Unix IP into Solaris. Finally, Sun open sourced Solaris as OpenSolaris. Sounds like trouble, doesn’t it?

While Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps described the line of logic above as “sheer speculation,” others see a major potential legal problem for Sun. However, analysts, lawyers and open source leaders also agreed that it’s unlikely Novell would ever choose to make trouble for Sun. Novell, however, has not commented on its intentions despite several attempts to get the Linux company’s take on the issue.

Thomas Carey, chairman of the business practice group at the Boston-based Bromberg & Sunstein IP law firm, describes the legal details like this: “As to Sun, SCO released Sun from a confidentiality obligation with respect to SVRX (System V Release X Unix) code when its contract with Novell did not permit it to do so without Novell’s permission. SCO did not seek or obtain that permission. This proceeding does not involve Sun as a party, only SCO and Novell. As between these parties, the court views the genie (the confidential information) to be out of the bottle, and the court can’t put it back in. It can, however, hold SCO liable to Novell for breach of contract (and/or breach of fiduciary duty), and it did so and found the damages for this breach to be $2.5-million.”

What does this mean for Sun? Carey says, “In theory, Novell could sue Sun directly, but its chances of success would be slim. Furthermore, Novell is not interested in pursuing/developing SVRX, and is more interested in its reputation in the open source community. Its lawsuit against SCO was political — it got to wear the white hat. If it went after Sun because of OpenSolaris, it would wear the black hat. It is not likely to change hats now.”

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July 25, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

How Dell is making Ubuntu more attractive

Dell was the first of the major computer manufacturers to support pre-installed Linux, but it’s not just pre-installing Linux. The Austin, Tex. company is also adding functionality to Ubuntu Linux on its desktops and laptops.

Dell began adding extra features last December when it added DVD-playback to its systems shipping with Ubuntu 7.10. Ordinary Linux can only play DVDs if they’re not burdened with DRM (Digital Rights Management) malware. By including InterVideo’s closed-source LinDVD DVD playback software users are able to legally play DRM encrypted DVD movies.

With the recent release of Dell PCs with Ubuntu 8.04, Dell has added other goodies to the basic Ubuntu Linux distribution. As John Hull, Dell’s manager of Linux engineering, describes in Dell’s Direct2Dell blog, Dell is now including “Fluendo GStreamer codices for mp3, wma (Windows Media Audio), and wmv (Windows Media Video) playback” in its latest Ubuntu-powered desktops and laptops.

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