Fortiter Et Recte
Congratulations to the Ksplice team which has just been awarded the Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Award in Security/Privacy for 2009!
Ksplice is technology which can apply patches to the Linux kernel on the fly, without needing a reboot. Also see my interview with Waseem Daher, one of the founding members of the team.
How hard is it to use Linux or Windows? I’ve said it before, something is not easy just because you already know how to use it. Most people find Windows easy because that’s all they’ve ever used.
This excellent little article takes a look at this very thing and compares the ease of playing a video on Windows and Linux.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has posted a status update for drivers in the 2.6.32 kernel. This in particular, was rather funny:
hv (Microsoft Hyper-V) drivers. Over 200 patches make up the
massive cleanup effort needed to just get this code into a
semi-sane kernel coding style (someone owes me a bit bottle of
rum for that work!) Unfortunately the Microsoft developers
seem to have disappeared, and no one is answering my emails.
If they do not show back up to claim this driver soon, it will
be removed in the 2.6.33 release. So sad…
After all his work to get the patches in, Microsoft no longer gives a crap? Perhaps they did just do it because they were forced to after violating the GPL.
Yes there’s another Ubuntu derivative on the way, Lubuntu – Ubuntu with the LXDE desktop. Initial tests show that it is indeed very lightweight and finally makes a worthwhile Ubuntu option for low end machines.
Only just noticed that Dell is selling the Latitude 2100 10″ netbook with Ubuntu 9.04 in Australia. None of the Mini series appear to come with the option of Linux, even though my friendly Dell representative told me that they do.
The Linux option is $60 cheaper than Windows XP, however it does not have the option of a built in camera. They both have the option of a touch screen, but the Linux model does not let you change the bezel, which means the configuration is broken. Perhaps this can be resolved on the phone, but the web interface presents a rather limited number of options. That’s disappointing.
Still, if you like Dell and are after an atom based netbook which comes pre-installed with Linux, perhaps the 2100 is for you.
I love Internode and finally have Naked ADSL2+, yay. My mobile phone is with Three however, and they have been bought by Vodafone. I strongly dislike Vodafone and want to switch.
Thinking about switching, I wish I could go with Internode.. So how about it Simon? You’ve got 3G wireless now so it can’t be that hard, right? Hell, I don’t care if you piggyback off Optus and charge more for it.
-c
When running a yum command (such as yum check-update) it doesn’t always seem to capture the CTRL+C signal in order to terminate the process. This means it sits there for ages while it tries to access the internet.
So, to kill yum I simply background it with CTRL+Z and then run kill %1, which will kills the first in the jobs queue. Problem solved!
-c
Slackware is one of the first Linux distributions ever and the oldest surviving. With the recent release of version 13.0, the project has announced official support for 64-bit systems. I talked with Eric Hameleers, the man behind the port, about what motivated him to create it and what Slackware has to offer you.
Just discovered how I can install grouped packages in Fedora using Yum.
First, you can list the groups which are available in your repositories with:
yum grouplist
This will contact the online repositories to retrieve the lists and dump it to your terminal.
I wanted to install KDE 4.3.x (yes, Fedora has updated to the latest version from 4.2.x, which was impressive) so to do this I ran:
yum grouplist |grep -i kde
This returned two results, the desktop itself and a development group for KDE. Naturally I want the first one, so I then installed KDE via:
yum groupinstall "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"
It’s quite a nice easy way to install groups of packages, rather than figuring them all out individually.
I’m sure this will create some issues but presumably I can remove the group with:
yum groupremove "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"
Indeed, running this wants to remove only 65 of the just installed 127 packages.. d’oh.
Running the same command with –remove-leaves now wants to remove 143 packages. I still don’t get removing packages with Yum. Nevertheless, group install is handy.