Carla Schroder from Linux Today repeats a question that I’ve heard asked many times:

“Here we go with another round of Linux Today reader comments. Let’s start off with an issue that has been on my mind: Vendors who boast of the their Linux-based devices, but they only support Windows and Mac clients. It’s a step in the right direction, but would supporting Linux clients be so difficult?”

There are two major mistakes that are often made in considering this question:

• that all “Linux” systems are the same
• that by using Linux in one place, it only makes sense that you support other “Linux” systems

We need to remember that the only thing most of these devices share with a desktop “Linux” system (or even with each other) is the kernel (i.e. the precise definition of “Linux”). The userland is different, and there’s a lot of their own proprietary stuff on it too. Even the hardware (such as CPU architecture) is often wildly different. I think people have grown to think it’s all the same since we call it all “Linux”, but it’s not.

Because of this practical conundrum (as totally distinct from any philosophical or other arguments), I have some sympathy for those who prefer to call the system we use on our desktop and server systems “GNU/Linux”.

Argue all you want about its accuracy, but the fact is that it is far more accurate than merely using the kernel name as nomenclature for the entire OS. It specifies a userland that with the kernel comprises a workable operating system. Come up with a better name if that makes you feel more comfortable.

This opens up a whole can of worms. If I’m an applications or device developer and I announce “Linux support”, what do I mean? Will it work on my mobile phone? On my television? Probably not. Chances are it refers to particular versions of particular distributions for a particular architecture.

If I produce a device that is based on “Linux”, what relation does that have to other “Linux” systems? None. It’s not just devices: another major culprit is Web services. Linux runs most of the Internet, but many online services are not compatible with desktop Linux systems.

The reasons for this are simple:

• correlation does not imply causation
• the small market size of desktop Linux users

The first point relates to what I said earlier, that there’s no connection between the use of Linux on servers and devices versus its use on desktop computers. The usefulness of Linux on servers and devices is firmly recognised in many sectors.

The same cannot be said for desktop systems, despite what we may wish. If it costs a developer more to support a tiny market, they are probably not going to do it. That’s just business. Companies that choose to support desktop Linux often do so for other reasons, such as to foster a developer/fan base or tap into a very specific set of users.

So everyone, I share your frustrations that many so-called “Linux”-based devices/services don’t interface with my computers, but I keep in mind the points made above.

LotD: NSW Police: Don’t use Windows for internet banking (iTnews)

I’m not usually one for blog memes, but what the hell

A downside of vrms is that it can only look at packages installed via the OS packaging system. I know I have the Adobe Flash Plug-in installed (manually) as well. Nevertheless, the result isn’t too bad, and I think I could do without all of those proprietary packages if I wanted.

On my main workstation at home

yama@unicron:~$ vrms
              Non-free packages installed on unicron

fglrx-modaliases          Identifiers supported by the ATI graphics driver
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.28 modules helper script
nvidia-173-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-180-kernel-source  NVIDIA binary kernel module source
nvidia-180-libvdpau       Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix
nvidia-180-modaliases     Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-71-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-96-modaliases      Modaliases for the NVIDIA binary X.Org driver
nvidia-glx-180            NVIDIA binary Xorg driver
rar                       Archiver for .rar files
sun-java6-bin             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
sun-java6-jre             Sun Java(TM) Runtime Environment (JRE) 6 (architecture
tangerine-icon-theme      Tangerine Icon theme
unrar                     Unarchiver for .rar files (non-free version)
  Reason: Modifications problematic

   Non-free packages with status other than installed on unicron

nvidia-glx-177            ( dei)  NVIDIA binary Xorg driver

               Contrib packages installed on unicron

msttcorefonts             transitional dummy package
nvidia-common             Find obsolete NVIDIA drivers
nvidia-settings           Tool of configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
ttf-mscorefonts-installer Installer for Microsoft TrueType core fonts

  15 non-free packages, 0.7% of 2039 installed packages.
  4 contrib packages, 0.2% of 2039 installed packages.

On my home server

yama@ark:~$ vrms
                Non-free packages installed on ark

human-icon-theme          Human Icon theme
linux-generic             Complete Generic Linux kernel
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules helper script
linux-restricted-modules- Restricted Linux modules for generic kernels
tangerine-icon-theme      Tangerine Icon theme
tango-icon-theme          Tango Icon theme
  Reason: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License

     Non-free packages with status other than installed on ark

linux-restricted-modules- ( dei)  Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64
linux-restricted-modules- ( dei)  Non-free Linux 2.6.24 modules on x86/x86_64

  15 non-free packages, 1.1% of 1350 installed packages.

An intriguing offer came through to the SLUG-chat mailing list a few weeks ago: an Australian version of Beauty and the Geek is in the works, and they’re looking for geeks.

I’ll be honest and admit that I’m a fan of the US version of the show. The ‘geeks’ feel like humorous caricatures of some of my own traits, and I suppose I find bimbo stupidity funny in a way (although at other times I just roll my eyes).

However, I dislike that the outcome of each series is that the geeks bend over backwards to learn to be ‘cool’ while the bimbos simply ‘learn’ to tolerate the geeks. On the episodes that visit the contestants a few months after their tenure at ‘the mansion’, the geeks have clearly changed themselves but the bimbos have mostly reverted to their previous state.

I’m probably biased, but it seems lop-sided. It reinforces the view (at least in Western cultures) that it’s okay to be an idiot but conversely it is unacceptable to be socially awkward.

We see this position pushed across popular media. The other prime offender at the moment that I can think of is the sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. In that show, a bimbo with loose values is portrayed as ‘normal’ while a group of intelligent males are openly ridiculed.

Again, I’ll admit that I watch that show from time to time, and I do find it entertaining. I have the capacity to laugh at myself and traits that I can identify with. At the same time, it still irks me that this is what people are being fed, not just by this programme but by the mass media in general.

What does the FOSS community think?

I was having a discussion at work, and it occurred to us that a simple way of improving our data security is to turn machines off (or suspend, hibernate, etc.) when they aren’t required. Now this isn’t exactly rocket science, but what I found most interesting is how this ties into our energy conservation plans. Obviously, it means we save money on electricity. However, it also means that in reducing our network footprint we also reduce our environmental footprint.

Convincing a company to save energy can be difficult, but knowing that this also enhances security can be a winning argument.

The OpenJDK plug-in that comes with modern distros is usually very good at handling Java in Web pages, but some applets are just stubborn. Thankfully, Sun have finally (after over six years!) released a plug-in for x86_64 Web browsers.

I managed to get the JDK version working on Fedora 11 and CentOS 5.3. Here’s the process.

1. Firstly, download the JRE or JDK from Sun. You’ll need to get version 1.6 Update 12 or above. I got the RPM version.
2. Run the install script to extract the bundle. On the RPM version, this automatically installs it to your system if you run the script as root.
3. Execute this in a terminal:

   # ln -s /usr/java/default/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins

   This part took me a while to work out, as I was looking for a file called libjavaplugin_oji.so, the name of the x86_32 version.

4. Restart Firefox and type about:plugins in the location bar to check if the new plug-in has been accepted.
5. Enable the plug-in: Edit ? Preferences ? Content tab ? tick Enable Java
6. You can test your plug-in at java.com and javatester.org

Apologies for pimping my employer, but I became the subject of the inaugural ‘Meet the Team’ portion of the BizCubed newsletter.

It’s a good feeling knowing that you work for a company that actually cares about open source and open standards. For example, we sponsored the Government 2.0 event in Canberra last week.

For the sake of posterity, I’ll reproduce the interview here:

Meet The Team — Sridhar Dhanapalan

We are more than a consulting company - we are a great team! In this section we will be introducing one member of our team in each newsletter.

What do you do at BizCubed?

I make sure that our Support subscribers are receiving legendary service. We like to be an open company, and so knowledge sharing is important to us. I write a lot of documentation on our wiki for the benefit of the Pentaho community.

Internally, I ensure that our team is properly enabled with any information or infrastructure that they need. I take care of our servers and deployments. I also do the occasional development of BI solutions. It’s a varied role — I never have a reason to be bored!

What attracts you to open source BI?

It seems incongruous that while we demand transparency from, for instance, our political systems and financial institutions, they rely on software that is opaque.

Processes and organisations cannot be thoroughly audited if the software that drives them is closed. I also believe that in using open source and open standards, you are showing respect for your users and customers. Your users can see what you see; touch what you touch. They can inspect and interrogate to their heart’s content, and even make their own modifications if they so wish. They may not opt to exercise those rights, but ultimately it’s their choice and not their vendor’s.

What were you doing before joining BizCubed?

I’ve been using computers since the early 1980s, and I discovered open source just over ten years ago. I’ve been fortunate enough to make a career out of it. I have a background in network engineering, satellite communications, systems administration and good ol’ fashioned tech support.

I completed university with a Science degree majoring in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, which I feel gave me an appreciation for the intersection of technology and society. I think there should be more attention paid to this in ICT, and it’s an area I often encounter in the field of BI.

Do you work with any projects other than Pentaho?

I’ve been very active in the open source community over the past ten years. For the first half of this decade, I was an administrator, editor and author at what was at the time the largest Mandrake (now Mandriva) Linux community Web site.

I’m currently the president of the Sydney Linux Users Group and also on the Linux Australia Council. Through those, I organise and co-ordinate meetings and events for the Australian Linux community. Other than that, I’m involved in the Ubuntu community, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), the Grameen Foundation and a few other projects.

What do you do in your spare time?

My open source contributions take up the bulk of my non-work hours. I read a lot of news and current affairs, and I’ve been known to go on Wikipedia binges. Other than that, I spend time with family and friends.

I live in a country where even buildings less than 100 years old can be protected as ‘heritage’. Yet in India they can demolish a 700-year-old mosque without even batting an eyelid!

The ABC have a piece from National Library of Australia web archiving manager Paul Koerbin, about the importance of digital records preservation.

Of equal importance, how can we be sure that we can actually read those archives in the future? Literacy of Egyptian Hieroglyphs was long-gone by the 18th century, and it took the discovery of the Rosetta Stone for them to start making sense again.

It’s difficult enough deciphering human language. Understanding machine language is another thing entirely.

I’ve written about this in the past, contrasting the thousand-year-old Domesday Book (which is still legible) with the BBC Domesday Project (which was rendered virtually unreadable a mere sixteen years after production).

The means of preserving our culture for digital preservation is to use open standards. If the means for ‘reading’ the information is widely documented and understood, without any encumbrances, we stand a much greater chance of being able to interpret it in a couple of hundred years.

I’ve got essays from school written only ten years ago, and I can’t read them any more as they’re stored in a proprietary file format that is no longer supported.

Imagine you ran a company that had important and valuable written records stretching back for decades. Storing vast libraries of paper is expensive and inefficient, so you decide to digitise them all. That’s great — you now have a system that is easy to manage and search. Ten years later, you want to migrate your now-ageing data management system to something more modern. Only, you can’t — it’s all stored in a proprietary format that cannot be accessed by anything else.

If you had kept those paper records, you would have still had access to that information. Your choices now are to continue with your old, obsolete system for all eternity, or hire some clever hacker to decipher the file format. With no equivalent of a Rosetta Stone, that’s no mean task. After spending buckets of money on this avoidable problem, and losing even more due to inefficiencies and competitive disadvantage from the old system, you’d be wise to make sure it cannot happen again.

This is a very common kind of scenario. If our information can’t even last ten years, how can it last a thousand?

From a business perspective, open standards protect the independence of a company. It means no vendor lock-in, so you are not stuck paying monopoly prices. Through the creation of a free market surrounding a method/technology, open standards give you the freedom to select the vendors, products, methods and technologies that suit your requirements best, or you can even create your own. They are the ultimate in risk mitigation, and through their flexibility can also open avenues for competitive advantage. They just make good business sense.

LotD: Vioxx maker Merck and Co drew up doctor hit list and Merck Makes Phony Peer-Review Journal

The ability to run in a completely 64-bit environment is a major benefit of Linux over the competition. With everything open source, the community can port and compile applications to new architectures with ease.

On Windows, you have to suffer from the fact that just about everything is proprietary. If there’s no 64-bit version of your application, you’re forced to run it in a degraded (compared to the rest of the OS) 32-bit mode. Even worse, if there’s no 64-bit driver for your hardware then you can’t use it at all. You’re at the mercy of the vendor, and if the hardware is no longer being sold then there really is no economic incentive for them to write a new driver for you. Once Windows 7 comes out, you’ll probably be back to square one (since most drivers are OS version-specific).

What happens when you have a proprietary piece of software on Linux? Fortunately there are very few of these worth using. For the ones that are, the situation isn’t too different than on Windows.

Take Adobe Flash, for example. Adobe (and before them, Macromedia) have claimed that porting the code base to x86_64 is no walk in the park. On Linux, the means of dealing with this has been to use nspluginwrapper to coax the 32-bit Flash plug-in to work inside a 64-bit Web browser. Simultaneously, there’s been development on free runtimes for Flash media, like gnash and swfdec. The ‘solution’ on Windows and Mac OS X is truly suboptimal: run a 32-bit Web browser. If you’ve ever used Windows 64-bit, you’ll notice that Microsoft bundle both 32- and 64-bit versions of some of their software, with most icons pointing to the 32-bit variants. On the plus side, the user generally is none the wiser.

Adobe have made available a pre-release version of their x86_64 Flash 10 plug-in for Linux (still no luck for other operating systems, AFAIK). I haven’t had any trouble with it, and from what I’ve read it’s been well received in the community.

Here are the steps to install it for Firefox:

1. Uninstall any existing Flash packages that you may have installed. Package names include flashplugin-installer, flashplugin-nonfree, adobe-flash, mozilla-plugin-gnash and swfdec-mozilla.
2. Download the tarball (the link is at the bottom of that page).
3. There’s only one file inside, libflashplayer.so. Extract it to $HOME/.mozilla/plugins/ (create that directory if it doesn’t exist).
4. If Firefox is running, restart it.
5. In Firefox, go to the about:plugins page.
6. Look for the entry called Shockwave Flash to confirm it has been installed.

Warning: You are manually installing a pre-release version of a proprietary Web browser plug-in. This can have security implications. Because it is not managed by the operating system’s package manager, you need to manually make sure that you stay up-to-date to avoid security vulnerabilities.

Adobe Reader does not have an x86_64 variant for Linux, so you’ll have to install the 32-bit version.

1. Download the latest DEB packaged from the Adobe FTP server.
2. To install from the command-line, you’ll need to tell dpkg to ignore the architecture of the package:
   

   $ sudo dpkg -i --force-architecture AdbeRdr9.1.0-1_i386linux_enu.deb

3. Launch it from the Applications > Office desktop menu.

Warning: Just as with the Flash-plug-in, be aware that you are installing software from outside of the operating system’s repositories, and that you are responsible to keep this package up-to-date.

You’re probably wondering why you would need to do this when there are several great, free PDF readers out there. I almost always use Evince, but there are a couple of reasons why I like to keep Adobe Reader around:

• some PDF files don’t work properly in the free readers
• most Windows users use Adobe Reader, so it’s good for testing (just as it’s useful to keep a Windows VM around to test Web sites against Internet Explorer)

LotD: autonomo.us - Towards Free Network Services

This is the most clever thing I have seen in a long time. The equation is simple:

There’s an image of the final result over here.

Attributes include:

• costs just $US 5 to produce
• amazingly simple to create
• completely solar powered: no need for fuel
• no greenhouse gas emissions in usage (can prevent two tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per family per year)

As an advocate of appropriate technology, I find this invention to be very exciting. The ability to easily create clean drinking water and cook food can in one fell swoop eliminate many of the problems and points of conflict in the developing world.

Of course, reality is much more complex than that, but I am hopeful. One thing that remains to be seen is whether this idea actually takes off. I’ve seen a number of good ideas fail to take hold, often due to interference or lack of interest from political or corporate entities. The bane of these low-tech solutions is the perceived lack of any profit motive. Companies find it difficult to make any money off it, but they can make a killing from selling their Machine That Goes Ping at $999.99 a pop (of which, only $5 will go towards producing and improving the product, and the rest goes to marketing and legal).