'Til All Are One

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.