March 9, 2007
by sjvn01
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Spring forward; Fall back,” That’s the way the saying goes. Some years I get it backwards, but I eventually catch on. I’ve never had to worry about my PCs getting it wrong before, though. Now, with the recent changes in the Daylight Savings Time (DST) rules, I do.
Fortunately, there are ways to make sure that both my Linux computers and I get the new rules right.
Continue Reading →
March 5, 2007
by sjvn01
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Many would-be Linux users don’t make the leap because there are one or two Windows applications they just can’t live without. That doesn’t have to hold them back anymore.
Thanks to Wine (Wine is not an emulator), an open-source implementation of the Windows API (application programming interface), you can run many of the most popular Windows programs on Linux. That includes games like World of Warcraft and Diablo II as well as business applications like Microsoft Office 2003, Quicken, and Internet Explorer.
The easiest way to use Wine to run Windows applications is to set them up with CodeWeavers’s CrossOver Linux 6.0, the new version of its CrossOver Office. I’ve been using CrossOver for years, and it works just fine.
With CrossOver, I’ve been running IE 6, along with the core fonts and Windows Media Player 6.4, since IE (Internet Explorer) 6 started showing up on a wide variety of Linuxes. Now I install these two plus Office XP on almost all of my Linux workstations. None of them are my first choice of programs in their category. (For instance, Firefox has it all over IE in my book.) Still, every now and again, I run into Web sites or file formats that require Microsoft software; so it’s pretty darned handy having them available.
Thanks to Wine, these three Windows programs ran flawlessly with Linux in any distribution I tried. Other programs worked smoothly on some versions of Linux, but needed some tweaking on others. For example, iTunes played perfectly on MEPIS; but I had to play with its configuration on the SUSE family before it would play properly.
I also use CrossOver to run some of the Windows programs I like better, such as iTunes, QuickTime Player, and Quicken 2005, on my Linux boxes. I’ve been able to run all of these combos — including the unholy trio above — successfully on openSUSE 10.2, SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10, SimplyMEPIS 6.01, and Ubuntu 6.06. You can find a list of all the Windows programs that have been tested for operation on Linux via CrossOver, here.
At $39.95, CrossOver Linux 6.0 Standard isn’t going to break you. CrossOver Linux 6.0 Professional, the enterprise version of the product, is priced at $69.95, with optional volume discounts. The Professional version comes with a higher level of support and enables system administrators to bundle a CrossOver-Linux install, as well as any Windows applications installed under CrossOver, as an RPM package. You can then use this RPM to deploy CrossOver and Windows applications to Linux workstations across your network.
Of course, you don’t have to use CrossOver — you could install Wine and certain Windows applications by hand. One thing you can’t do on your own, though, is install the Windows OS on top of Linux. For that, you need a virtualization program like KVM (kernel-based virtual machine for Linux), Xen, or the just released Parallels Desktop.
However, only a real Linux expert would want to install and configure Wine and Windows programs by hand. If you want to give it a try, you’ll find handy pointers in the Wine support section. Frank’s Corner, a site devoted to installing and using Wine, can also be a big help.
To get an idea of how beneficial automated Wine installs can be, you can try CrossOver Linux for free; but there are free alternatives, too. These tend to be script programs that automate installing Wine and some Windows applications.
One alternative, WineXS, has done well for me on SUSE-based distributions. WineTools is a little rough around the edges; but it lets you install more Windows programs than with WineXS does.
Finally, there’s IEs4Linux. This program does one thing, and (after some teething problems in earlier versions) it does it very well: it installs Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, and 6. You don’t get the Media Player or any of the other trimmings thrown in, though. IEs4Linux just gives you the browsers themselves so you can test Web site designs and make use of IE-specific Web sites. It comes with simple command line instructions on how to install the program and any of those three versions of Explorer on Debian, the Ubuntu family, SUSE, Fedora, and Gentoo.
So the next time you think, “I’d love to move to Linux, but I need to run this one Windows program,” check out some of these options. You might find that you can have your cake and eat it, too, as long as you have it with Wine.
February 26, 2007
by sjvn01
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Forget about HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray, the future of television is the Internet. BitTorrent, the company behind the world’s most popular peer-to-peer protocol around gets that. What it doesn’t get is that restricting its rental and purchasable videos to Windows Media compatible formats is downright foolish.
First, here’s what BitTorrent is doing. It’s made a deal with a host of movie and television companies to make some of their content legally available over the net by the BitTorrent protocol. Its partners include: 20th Century Fox, Lions Gate, MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios.
BitTorrent claims that its network includes “The most comprehensive catalog of on-demand movies, TV shows, Music, and Games on the Internet, with over 5,000 titles (more than 10x what iTunes has to offer), over 40 hours of HD programming, first run films that will be available before they are released on DVD, and unique editorial content that won’t be found anywhere else.” New movies available from the service include Little Miss Sunshine, An Inconvenient Truth, Superman Returns, and The Poseidon Adventure.
February 25, 2007
by sjvn01
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Along the lines of early efforts to derail SCO’s claims that Linux infringes Unix copyrights, a gentleman going by the moniker, “digduality” has decided to fight recent claims by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer that Linux infringes on Microsoft patents, by launching ShowUsTheCode.com.
As you might guess from its name, the website’s theme is: “since you, Microsoft, claim to be so sure of yourself: Show Us the Code.”
In the few days since its Feb. 23 launch, the website has gained a great deal of attention on such sites as Digg, Linux Today, and Slashdot. Most of the people who have weighed in with comments on the issue have strongly voiced their support. They too want Microsoft to show “the public the code within Linux that violates their intellectual property by May 1st, 2007.”
It sounds like a good idea; but unfortunately, it misses the point.
In Microsoft’s latest FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) campaign — make no mistake, that’s exactly what this is — Ballmer is not claiming that Linux contains any kind of Microsoft copyright violations. That was, at one time, SCO’s claim, not Microsoft’s.
In this assault on Linux, Ballmer is broadly hinting that Linux is infringing on Microsoft’s enormous patent portfolio. And, when it comes to patents, there is no “code” to be shown.
That is part of the diabolic evil, as I see it, of the American patent system. With many, perhaps most, software patents there is no specific language, no hard code, but only descriptions of general processes that can be implemented in multiple ways.
As Bradley M. Kuhn, executive director of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) told me a few years back, it’s “difficult today to write any software program — be it free software or proprietary — from scratch that does not exercise the teachings of some existing software patent in the U.S.A.”
Back when Ballmer first started taking talking about Linux patents in 2004, Dan Ravicher, an attorney and executive director of PUBPAT (the Public Patent Foundation) said, “There is no reason to believe that GNU/Linux has any greater risk of infringing patents than Windows, Unix-based or any other functionally similar operating system. Why? Because patents are infringed by specific structures that accomplish specific functionality.”
The issue has come up again because of the Microsoft/Novell agreement‘s patent collaboration agreement. Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian said of that agreement that it “is in no way an acknowledgment that Linux infringes upon any Microsoft intellectual property. To claim otherwise is to further sow fear, uncertainty and doubt, and does not offer a fair basis for competition.”
Microsoft, then and now, says simply that “Microsoft and Novell have agreed to disagree on whether certain open source offerings infringe Microsoft patents and whether certain Microsoft offerings infringe Novell patents.” And, Ballmer continues his FUD.
I’m sorry to say that the “show the code” campaign won’t stop this. It won’t impede the patent FUD at all.
What we really need is a complete revision of the U.S. patent system. Software patents should be done away with — it’s that simple, in theory. In practice, we’re stuck with this mess.
Ironically enough, Microsoft would agree. On Feb. 22, Microsoft was socked with a $1.52 billion patent judgment in favor of Alcatel-Lucent. The judgment was about one-third of what Alcatel-Lucent had asked for, and it was still the largest patent award in history. Perhaps Ballmer will be a little less inclined to threaten with the patent sword now. After all, the companies that support Linux, such as IBM, Oracle, Red Hat, and many others, have patent holdings that dwarf even Microsoft’s own. Does Microsoft really want to play a game of mutually-assured destruction by software patents? I doubt it.
The patent system is truly dysfunctional, both for proprietary and open source software companies. Behind Ballmer’s bluster, I think he knows that too. That won’t stop him, mind you. After all, it scares corporate customers into sticking with Microsoft, and protecting and growing Microsoft’s bottom line is what he gets paid the big bucks for.
So, since we’re stuck with this FUD, you may want to consider giving your support to PUBPAT, the Linux Foundation’s patent commons, and the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) for their work against software patents and for SFLC.
February 21, 2007
by sjvn01
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At one time, Fedora was “the” free Linux distribution. Over the last year though, Ubuntu and openSUSE have consistently outpaced Fedora on DistroWatch’s tracking charts. Well-known, open source leader Eric S. Raymond is fed-up with Fedora, and explained why in a note to Fedora and Red Hat officials.
“Over the last five years, I’ve watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what was at one time a near-unassailable lead in technical prowess, market share and community prestige.” wrote Raymond. “The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels.”
What brought him to this point, was when, “after thirteen years as a loyal Red Hat and Fedora user, … an attempt to upgrade one (1) package pitched me into a four-hour marathon of dependency chasing, at the end of which an attempt to get around a trivial file conflict rendered my system unusable.” Thus, Raymond reached his “limit with Fedora.”
He elaborates: “The proximate causes of this failure were (1) incompetent repository maintenance, making any nontrivial upgrade certain to founder on a failed dependency, and (2) the fact that rpm is not statically linked — so it’s possible to inadvertently remove a shared library it depends on and be unrecoverably screwed.”
This technical snafu, however, from his viewpoint, isn’t Fedora’s real trouble. Rather, “The underlying problems run much deeper.” Raymond lists out Fedora’s problems as:
* “Chronic governance problems.
* Persistent failure to maintain key repositories in a sane, consistent state from which upgrades might actually be possible.
* A murky, poorly-documented, over-complex submission process.
* Allowing RPM [The Red Hat package management system] development to drift and stagnate — then adding another layer of complexity, bugs, and wretched performance with yum (http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum) [A wrapper for rpm that automatically retrieves packages from remote package feeds]
* Effectively abandoning the struggle for desktop market share.
* Failure to address the problem of proprietary multimedia formats with any attitude other than blank denial.”
“In retrospect,” Raymond continued, “[I] should probably have cut my losses years ago. But I had so much history with Red-Hat/Fedora, and had invested so much effort in trying to fix the problems, that it was hard to even imagine breaking away.”
“If I thought the state of Fedora were actually improving, I might hang in there. But it isn’t,” he added.
Fedora’s plans to bring Fedora Core and Extras into a single common program repository starting with Fedora 7 don’t address the issues that concern Raymond.
Raymond continued, “I’ve been on the fedora-devel list for years, and the trend is clear. The culture of the project’s core group has become steadily more unhealthy, more inward-looking, more insistent on narrow ‘free software’ ideological purity, and more disconnected from the technical and evangelical challenges that must be met to make Linux a world-changing success that liberates a majority of computer users.”
I have watched Ubuntu rise to these challenges as Fedora fell away from them. Canonical’s recent deal with Linspire [story], which will give Linux users legal access to WMF (Windows Media Format) and other key proprietary codecs, is precisely the sort of thing Red-Hat/Fedora could and should have taken the lead in. Not having done so bespeaks a failure of vision which I now believe will condemn Fedora to a shrinking niche in the future.”
Over the last year, Raymond has staked out a position that for Linux — especially desktop Linux — to be successful, it must be able to work with proprietary hardware and software. Thus, Raymond is certain that Linux must, support popular proprietary software at least on the level of ‘user-space’ applications. “If that means paying licensing fees to the Microsofts of the world so that people can watch Windows media files, then so be it” said Raymond in an interview last August. Afterwards, Raymond joined Linspire’s board. Linspire, with its Freespire distribution, has lead the way in mixing open-source programs and proprietary drivers in a Linux distribution.
It’s more than that, though. Raymond also just finds Ubuntu much easier to use. “This afternoon, I installed Edgy Eft on my main development machine — from one CD, not five. In less than three hours’ work I was able to recreate the key features of my day-to-day toolkit. The after-installation mass upgrade to current packages, always a frightening prospect under Fedora, went off without a hitch.”
“I’m not expecting Ubuntu to be perfect, but I am now certain it will be enough better to compensate me for the fact that I need to learn a new set of administration tools,” said Raymond.
He then concluded, “Fedora, you had every advantage, and you had my loyalty, and you blew it. And that is a damn, dirty shame.”
The only response, so far, from Red Hat and Fedora came from Alan Cox, the prominent Linux kernel and Red Hat developer. Cox spoke specifically to Raymond’s claims that Linux must work with proprietary software. “That would be because we believe in Free Software and doing the right thing (a practice you appear to have given up on). Maybe it is time the term ‘open source’ also did the decent thing and died out with you.”
February 15, 2007
by sjvn01
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CEO Darl McBride said that his company’s primary attorneys, Boies, Schiller & Flexner, are indeed trying to serve a subpoena for a deposition on Pamela Jones, the editor of, Groklaw, the legal IT news site.
McBride said that the idea for serving Jones came from the law-firm. “It’s my understanding that she has some material of importance to our slander of title case with Novell. I don’t know the exact details.”
This case sprang from Novell’s contention that it, and not SCO, owns Unix’s IP (intellectual property) rights. Novell claims that neither the APA (asset purchase agreement) of Sept. 19, 1995, which transferred Unix and UnixWare to Santa Cruz Operations, nor Amendment 2 to the APA gave SCO any copyrights to Unix. If Novell wins this point in Federal Court, then SCO’s case against IBM for placing Unix IP code into Linux falls apart like a house of cards with the bottom card knocked out.
SCO responded to Novell’s attack with a “slander of title” suit. SCO can’t simply claim that Novell is in breech of contract. That’s because today’s SCO isn’t the same company that bought Unix from Novell in the APA (asset purchase agreement).
To put it in layman’s terms, SCO is claiming that it should have gotten the IP rights — the title, as it were — to the Unix car, but SCO tacitly admits that it has never gotten the “ownership on paper” or “instrument of conveyance.” Therefore, SCO wants the court to order Novell to give it the title, the ownership of Unix’s IP rights.
McBride was not able to say what information Jones might have about the slander of title case. Jones has always posted all of her SCO case materials to her Groklaw site.
McBride remains not entirely convinced that Jones is a real person. He asked several times about the author’s meetings with her, and whether he believed that this person was indeed Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw.
He went on to say that he hopes that the process servers will soon be able to serve the subpoena on Jones. He added, “We’ve subpoenaed hundreds of people for our cases. This is just another one.”
McBride concluded, “Pamela, if you read this, please, give me a call. We just want to chat.”
A version of this story was first published in Linux-Watch.