There has been a lot of debate lately about the issue of binary drivers in Linux. Most of these discussions centre around the nVidia graphics driver. What many of these debates under-emphasise or even overlook is the importance of the Nouveau project. Nouveau is an effort intended to go beyond the 2D capabilities exposed by the nv driver, by providing full support for 3D. The end result will be a 100% free driver on Linux-based systems for nVidia graphics hardware. This is all without the assistance of nVidia, so much work needs to be done to interpret how the hardware behaves and write the required supporting code.
To support these valiant efforts, a pledge has been established to raise at least $10000 USD towards Nouveau’s development. This target has been successfully met with a month to spare, but don’t let that stop you from contributing. Even if you would like to see nVidia’s driver included in GNU/Linux distributions, I’m sure that most of you will agree that it is preferable for us as a community to have our own free driver. All it costs to play a part is a meagre $10 USD. How much is your freedom worth?
LotD: LCA2007 presenters should consider incorporating Gems into their presentations.
The penguins are on the march in India. It’s wonderful to see the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu taking their future development seriously by adopting free software on a wide scale. My parents are from Tamil Nadu, and most of their families still live there. Some of them have been involved quite considerably in educational and computing projects, which have unfortunately been based around Windows. This doesn’t help anyone in the long term (apart from the vendors controlling the lock-in), so it is terrific to see them working towards some autonomy and freedom.
P.S. As of today, I am a quarter of a century old. Howzat?!
Update: On the converse, we have absolutely appalling conduct in the so-called ‘developed’ world. How can a democracy function when the mechanisms of government are hidden behind proprietary data constructs? Is it truly wise to hand the keys to public information over to corporations that have zero accountability to the populace? Even their so-called ‘open’ formats aren’t really open at all.
Lucas Nussbaum has posed an eerily familiar question: what is the best way to maintain a single and constant IRC presence, accessible from multiple locations? After some experimentation with different solutions (including Irssi + Irssi-Proxy), I finally settled upon a combination of Bip IRC Proxy, an SSH tunnel and my favourite GUI IRC client. I was planning to write a guide, but I came across an excellent one which explains the whole process. Managing the SSH tunnel is easy with gSTM.
Now I can use the same nick from multiple sites at once. It is completely transparent to other people, so it doesn’t matter where in the world I am provided that I have an Internet connection with an SSH and IRC client. I am not forced to use a particular IRC client, and I don’t have to give up a GUI. I can even stay logged in at both home and work at the same time.
My primary feature request would be for Bip to have the capability to set myself as Away when I have no IRC clients connected. At present, it only provides the option to change my nick in this circumstance, which is too heavy-handed and pollutes the channel with announcements.
Jonathan Oxer, President of Linux Australia, is making a valiant effort to better organise the often chaotic passtime known as a key signing party. If you are attending LCA2007, head over to the page for instructions on what to do with your key. So far, there have only been nineteen keys submitted. That’s more of a minor gathering than a party, and I definitely know that we can do better than this considering that we are expecting 500+ people at the conference. Submit your key and we’ll build a web of trust that even Spider-Man can’t match. Entries end on 2007-01-10 18:00:00 AEDST.
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