Nice one folks, the new look of Planet Linux Australia is really nice!
In other news, I seem to have just been spidered by the Internet Archive crawler on behalf of the National Library of Australia’s project called PANDORA, which is expanding from archiving just Australian periodicals online to a selection of Australian web domains. Pretty cool..
Finally had time to backup all my old data (well, hopefully all) and trash my old Mandrake 9.0 install that I’ve not been able to touch because of it being our mail and web server (now hived off onto the VIA Eden box).
Initially I was thinking about upgrading it to Gentoo as I use that on my desktop at work at the moment, but in the meantime I’ve upgraded my laptop from an oldish Mandrake Cooker install to KUbuntu, a version of Ubuntu Linux that uses KDE rather than Ubuntus usual GNOME desktop.
The fact that Ubuntu chose to go with Gnome rather than KDE is the one thing that’s put me off using it, I’d switched from FVWM2 to Gnome back in 1997/8 and found it incredibly unstable, so I started to use KDE and found that it just worked. I’ve never been tempted to go back, especially having given Ubuntu a go on another system and found it a bit of a straightjacket. Anyway, I digress..
The fact that KUbuntu had a build of KDE 3.4.1 available when the official release came out was great, Gentoo still don’t have 3.4 marked as stable yet (probably for good reasons) and trying to mark 3.4 as unstable and keep the rest of the box stable was too much hard work, so I gave KUbuntu a go.
Well I’m impressed. It’s not faultless, but the installer is great and creating a completely LVM2 system is dead easy (and to my mind is the only sane way to build a system these days). The only major headache was my monitor was configured to run at 1024×768 rather than 1280×1024, but simply adding the “1280×1024” line to the start of the config for 24-bit depth fixed that.
Adding a few extra repositories in meant I’ve now got access to KDE3.4.1, KOffice 1.4 (which again had Kubuntu builds out within a day or so of the official release), all the usual media codecs that you’ll need for browsing badly designed websites (flash, etc) and even Java (ugh).
The thing that most impressed me is that it detected my DVB-T card I brought from the UK and KDE’s Kaffeine media player can auto-detect channels and play them seamlessly. It will also do timed recordings.. 🙂
If you do use KUbuntu then don’t forget to add this repository which gives you updates to KUbuntu that wouldn’t be in the mainline Ubuntu. I’m suprised this isn’t in by default, and it corrects a nasty bug in Kaffeine that causes you to get a crash when exiting.
deb http://kubuntu.org/ hoary-updates main
You can read on to see my entire /etc/apt/sources file.
Continue reading
Found the reason why my MD5 sums didn’t match anyone elses! I stupidly had written down the MD5 checksum for the file containing the MD5 checksum for the key signing list, and not the MD5 for the file I wanted to!
The actual MD5 checksums were correct.. ENOCAFFEINE!
Well today we’re off to Linux.Conf.Au 2005, and Monday 4:10pm I’m going to be presenting at the Clustering Mini-Conference with a talk called:
Herding Cats – Clustering with Linux at VPAC
The Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing (VPAC) is Victoria’s
peak HPC organisation, and Linux based clustering has become the mainstay
of our HPC facilities.
As VPAC’s Deputy System’s Manager I will be taking you on a tour of the
clustering technologies we use and how Linux and Free/Open Source software
helps us meet the needs of our users (and where it doesn’t). Finally,
we will take a peek at what promise future technologies may hold for
our organisation.
Wish me luck!
Ian Wienand has an interesting take on the whole Linus/Bitkeeper badness that happened recently, including this interesting email from Linus.
One of the things that SCO keeps bringing up is how IBM did nasty things to them on Project Monterey. Thing is that Linux actually ran on one of the target architectures of Project Monterey, Intel’s Itanium (aka Merced, IA-64), 8 months prior to Monterey and the people who did this were not IBM, but HP!
When Monterey first booted on IA-64 in September 1999 HP
had already
had the
Linux kernel running in native 64-bit mode on the platform
according to this
technical report from HP, (direct link to PDF here).
There is also a paper
(PDF here)
& slides
(PDF here)
that David Mosberger from HP presented at Linux Expo ’99
documenting their work that includes a
very
interesting timeline that shows that they first got the
kernel to successfully boot and run Hello World on the 20th
January 1999, and they had that with CERNs glibc for IA64
running by the 9th April 1999.
So, if Linux was running on IA-64 8 months *before*
Monterey, could
we claim that they copied from Linux using SCO’s bent
logic ? 😉
Congratulations to the NFSv4 team who have seen their code pass the fsstress NFS stress testing and is reported to be stable. This was announced on the NFSv4 list yesterday.
Caveat: This is only the core functionality of NFS, and it’s not (yet) in the mainline kernel!
There is more on the Linux NFSv4 testing effort over at OSDL.
Here’s an interesting turn up for the books. SCO, who started the lawsuit and who’s lawyers created their side of the documents, apparently have been been ripping off the scans of legal documents from the cases done by Tuxrocks and Groklaw and putting them up on their new “IP” website, without any credit to the original source.
Ironic, isn’t it ?
Frank Sorenson is quoted on Groklaw as writing:
For example, compare SCO’s #156 with the copy from my site. Note (using pdfinfo) that they were both scanned with “AXIS 700 Scan Server” (the scanner/copier at my office), they were both scanned at the same identical time (“Fri May 28 16:51:21 2004”), and that they both have the sme size (85387 bytes). Also note that they both have the same md5sum (3c1064ecedb19073e2194cd88507c349).Another example is the Declaration of Ira Kistenberg (compare with the copy I obtained, scanned, and posted). In the upper right-hand corner of the page, you can see my handwriting where I noted which particular document this one was (236-G) so that I could remember when I got home from making copies at the courthouse.
There is a new SCO SEC 8-K Current Report filing which reveals that SCO’s first quarter report (10Q) is now “delinquent”, along with their annual report (10K) and that the NASDAQ has noticed it and is going to take that into its deliberations about whether to remove SCOXE from the NASDAQ Small Caps market.
Here’s a good thing, those nice Gentoo folks are going to create ebuilds for the various components of KDE, migrating away from the monolithic, all-or-nothing ebuilds for kdebase and kdepim to packages for things like kdebase-kioslaves and kopete. The monolithic ebuilds will be maintained for 3.4, but for KDE 4.0 and later there will only be the split ones.
For the details see the Gentoo KDE Split Ebuilds HOWTO.