Fortiter Et Recte
My latest article for Linux Magazine is about Ksplice, the awesome new technology which lets you apply kernel patches without needing a reboot!
I first came across Ksplice at Linux.conf.au earlier this year when Co-Founder Jeff Arnold gave a presentation. It’s great to see it maturing to the point where you can install a client on your Ubuntu Jaunty machine. Sweeeet.
If you dig it, then digg it! 
-c
Big free software wig, Richard Stallman, has weighed in on the Mono issue in Linux, saying why we shouldn’t depend on applications written in C#.
He writes:
The problem is not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn’t make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.
If you haven’t already, have a read of my creative commons article on Mono.
Most modern computers use ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface) to control things like, well device and power management.
It has been alive for some 12 years now, but does anyone yet fully understand it?
Now Intel has announced they are creating a new more simple system that even has the word “simple” in the name – Simple Firmware Interface. It looks like Linux will get support for SFI in 2.6.32 but I wonder if Linus is happy this time round.
Here’s what he had to say about ACPI:
Modern PCs are horrible. ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we’re kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce.
So here’s hoping that SFI will be a sane spec that everyone will understand!
Update: I’ve tried to post my results back to Seth’s thread but it won’t work, so I’ve emailed him instead.
In response to my article comparing Yum and Apt (at least I think it was my article, might have been someone else’s I guess), lead developer of Yum, Seth Vidal, wrote his own test script and performed some Yum benchmarks of his own.
He wrote:
Always a fun comparison. It’d be even more fun if any of the numbers seemed accurate.
His ran his test and concluded that Yum is “pretty good” and offers for others to run the test and post their results. So I did, on the same computer I used for the my article. I also compared the results to Ubuntu, as that’s really what my article was talking about
So what did I find?
This week I decided to write a comparative article between Yum and Apt (the package managers). Using Fedora 11 and Ubuntu 9.04, I performed various tests and benchmarked both the time and CPU usage they took. But why? Let me explain.
I really like the Fedora project. Really. I like their stance on proprietary drivers and codecs (and of course free software) and these days they seem to be pushing the technological envelope more than others. Sure Red Hat drives the direction of the project somewhat, but I don’t mind Red Hat either.
In fact, I wish I could use Fedora as my main distro! But every time I try it I just get so frustrated with Yum. Sure it’s better than up2date, but it’s so damn slow and annoying. That’s a problem for someone like me who manually updates his package database first thing every morning and checks to see what packages are available and updates the system by hand. Why do I do that? Cause I like to.
But every time I’ve tried to get into Fedora that damn package manager has stopped me. I get frustrated after a day or so. I think the longest I’ve had it on was 2 days before I switched.
Recently I installed Fedora 10 and 11 to see if there was any performance increase. Actually, to tell you the truth I was completely surprised by Yum’s agility and speed. The old Fedora I remember was not to be seen.. or so it felt like anyway.
Hence, I thought it might be good to run some tests to see.
Of course as the article points out, does any of this matter? Do we really need a fast a nimble package manager? Well for me it matters. It matters a great deal. For most users though they probably won’t care, as they just let the package manager do its thing in the background.
Still, it makes for some interesting thoughts. I think.
I mentioned that I thought it would be a great idea to have a cut down, lightweight (if that’s possible) version of KDE4 for netbooks.
I’d really like to build a super light-weight KDE4 desktop without all that extra cruft like akonadi and nepomuk. I think that would be great for a netbook to compete with Windows 7, when it comes out.
Now it looks like the idea is under way, which I think would be really awesome
I still hold highest hopes for Moblin, which with it’s custom OS and user interface holds a lot of potential out in the market. Time will tell I guess, but I still really like the idea of KDE4 on a netbook
-c
Mike just sent me a link to an article in The Age about a move by the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia to up the royalties paid by cafes and restaurants for playing music which is still under copyright.
The move appears to have been successful, which a huge hike in fees should restaurants choose to comply.
Buoyed by the nightclub ruling, the PPCA is now targeting eateries. It wants to increase licensing fees in a 120-seat restaurant to $19,344 a year — up from $125. Small cafes would be slugged with a 4729 per cent yearly increase from $124 to $5860.
Why am I writing this? I think this is a great opportunity for those free culture type people to come together and create and/or gather some creative commons compilations of music for use at these establishments. It might be a great way for local bands and musicians to get their music out into the public spotlight.
The way I see it working would be either physical material, or a website where anyone could download the music. I know that lots of these online places already exist, but perhaps a more targeted website would be helpful. Such a site might simply include information about the change, what it means to them, and how they can use CC music royalty free.
Information could be distributed to all cafes and restaurants in the ACT and indeed right across Australia.
Anyway, just a thought.
-c
Matt will attest the fact that I eagerly download each and every new Fedora release, hoping that this release will be one I could see myself using long term. Fedora 11 Leonidas is out and one of the marked improvements is the release of RPM 4.7.0, which has much better memory management. I wanted to see if this translates into performance gains in every day computing and have written an article for Linux Magazine with my findings.
-c
Looks like Novell’s Mono/.NET Linux Terminal Server Project graphical configuration tool, Easy-LSTP, is being re-written from C# into Python. The reason? It hasn’t been adopted on other distributions as Novell was hoping.
Easy-LTSP was designed to work on any distribution, but unfortunately it is not integrated anywhere other than openSUSE, discussing with the upstream LTSP developers suggested the slight reservation could be due to it being written in C#.. as it is anyway being written from scratch why not use something like Python which would be easier to attract more contributors and increase possibility that users of all distributions running LTSP server can benefit from it inclusion in their prefered distro.
Why not indeed.
I’ve just finished my second article for Linux Magazine, on whether KDE 4 is complete enough or not. Feed back welcome.
-c
