Category Archives: Computers

Miscellanious Computing

Old humour

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A long time ago (1993), in a land far far away (Aberystwyth) I was reading Usenet (which wasn’t quite all junk) and noticing that a posting had appeared on a bunch of security groups and alt.hackers. They’d completely missed the point of alt.hackers though, and so I posted a witty reply which got spotted by someone in Canada, and hence my only published work appeared, in the newsletter of DECUS Canada.

Anyway, over lunch today we were messing about talking about who would qualify for what belt of UNIX sysadmin (I got nominated for black belt 10th dan, but I personally I think I’d just scrape a mid range belt!) and this posting came back to me.

So read on for the original, rescued thanks to Google..
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Another Nail in the Coffin for SCO

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It’s amazing the sorts of things that happen when documents get unsealed in court.

Here is an extract from a SCO email from 2002 about searching for copyright violations in Linux:

At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever.


There is, indeed, a lot of code that is common between UNIX and Linux (all of the X Windows system, for example) but invariably it turned out that the common code was something that both we (SCO) and the Linux community had obtained (legitimately) from some third party.

So, SCO’s own UNIX expert said that Linux is clean in 2002..

This is part of an excellent Groklaw article, but if you read on here you’ll see the complete SCO email.

Groklaw has a PDF of the email (it was scanned & converted by Frank Sorenson from the a copy of the paper exhibit obtained from the court) if you want to go to the primary source.

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Trying KUbuntu

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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.
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New ADSL!

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In other news, we’ve just switched our ADSL provider from TPG to get a 1.5Mb/s connection for $10 more than TPG were charging us for a 512 package, and we’ve still got static IP and unlimited downloads..

Now my brain is fried after a 14 hour round trip to Sydney to do a talk there..