'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.

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.

The fol­low­ing is an e-​​mail that I pos­ted to the SLUG mail­ing list:

Sub­ject: [SLUG] Main­tain­ing a con­stant IRC pres­ence
Date: Sunday 03 Septem­ber 2006 13:07
From: Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan
To: SLUG list

I am in a situ­ation that I’m sure a lot of SLUG mem­bers are in. I am a
pro­lific user of IRC, using it from one of three machines depend­ing on where
I am. I have three main problems:

  (1) main­tain­ing a single and con­stant online pres­ence
  (2) main­tain­ing eas­ily access­ible chat logs, even when not at the machine
  (3) being noti­fied of mes­sages that suit spe­cific criteria

I cur­rently use Xchat, which means that I am logged in at least two places at
once. Being a fat cli­ent, it can beep when I have a mes­sage. If I leave it
con­nec­ted, it keeps logs (I only need the last 1000 lines or so). I can’t do
this with my laptop, though (I need to dis­con­nect when trav­el­ling). Also, it
forces me to have a sep­ar­ate login for each machine (and hence each Xchat
ses­sion) connected.

Issues (1) and (3) can be addressed by some­thing like irssi-proxy[1], since it
would allow me to use local cli­ents with a single login. I could ssh into a
single sys­tem run­ning irssi, which would alle­vi­ate both (1) and (2).

I under­stand that there are plug-​​ins for irssi that per­form a noti­fic­a­tion
ser­vice or run com­mands on cer­tain cues. If irssi was run­ning loc­ally, I
could do all kinds of things with such a fea­ture. If run­ning remotely,
how­ever, I believe that I am lim­ited to noti­fic­a­tions inside the irssi win­dow
itself. This would force me to manu­ally check the win­dow on a fre­quent basis,
which will either become annoy­ing or be for­got­ten. I would like to have
audio/​visual cues to let me know that my atten­tion is required.

[1] http://​www​.garion​.org/​i​r​s​s​i​/​i​r​s​s​i​-​p​r​o​x​y​.​php

In Janu­ary, dur­ing Steve Jobs’ Mac­world key­note speech announ­cing the new Intel Macin­toshes, Microsoft made a “com­mit­ment” to con­tinue to develop for and sup­port the Apple Macin­tosh plat­form. In true Microsoft style, they con­veni­ently didn’t explain how deeply that com­mit­ment went. Now we know.

Microsoft have decided to kill their Vir­tual PC product, remov­ing a vir­tu­al­isa­tion option from Mac OS at the same time that sim­ilar func­tion­al­ity is being fol­ded into Win­dows Vista. They are aware that vir­tu­al­isa­tion is quickly becom­ing a killer fea­ture, and they’ll be damned if they allow any­one else to have it. For­tu­nately (and prob­ably prefer­ably), VMware will be made avail­able for the Apple Intel plat­form. There’s also Par­al­lels, but they still do not have any server-​​oriented products.

In addi­tion, Microsoft will also be remov­ing Visual Basic sup­port from Office for Mac. If you can’t stop sup­port­ing some­thing, why not cripple it instead? Many busi­nesses are depend­ent upon VB script­ing, or exchange files with people/​organisations that make use of it, so this is a major blow indeed for Apple. Such a defi­ciency will be subtle: people will pur­chase Office for Mac expect­ing it to work with files cre­ated in its Win­dows coun­ter­part (or vice versa), and will be sorely dis­ap­poin­ted. This has already been occur­ring for a num­ber of years, but the prob­lem is becom­ing increas­ingly acute.

Ulti­mately, the best solu­tion is to remove our depend­ency on pro­pri­et­ary formats and lan­guages, for they are the root cause of this mess. Open​Of​fice​.org already does what most people require, and in some cases it does it bet­ter. It even has grow­ing sup­port for Visual Basic for Applic­a­tions. Open­Of­fice is truly look­ing like a bet­ter Office than MS Office. The Open­Of­fice file fil­ter­ing sup­port developers work hard to sup­port all the MS Office formats they can find (people have coun­ted over 20 dif­fer­ent ver­sions of the Word .DOC format alone), which is more than I can say about the MS Office pro­gram­mers, who are notori­ous for break­ing com­pat­ib­ilty with older ver­sions. Using the Open­Doc­u­ment formats (which are now an ISO stand­ard) assures that your data will be access­ible on many dif­fer­ent plat­forms for many years to come.

The main stum­bling block to Open­Of­fice adop­tion on Mac OS is the Windows-​​like inter­face and its reli­ance on X11 for dis­play. There is work being done on a nat­ive Aqua ver­sion, but in the mean­while there is NeoOf­fice.

Last month’s SLUG meet­ing (Fri­day 28 July) was an inter­est­ing one for me. The SLUG­lets topic was Web browsers, so I decided to volun­teer my ser­vices to give a demon­stra­tion of my favour­ite, Galeon. Its philo­sophy of “The Web, only the Web” felt extremely refresh­ing back in 2000 when the world was dom­in­ated by Web browsers that were either integ­rated into some form of soft­ware suite or even into the oper­at­ing sys­tem itself. Its pos­i­tion as a top-​​dog Web browser has since been usurped by its off­spring, Epi­phany, and its par­ent, Fire­fox, both of which have been clearly inspired by Galeon. Nev­er­the­less, the slick­ness and func­tion­al­ity of Galeon has left it cemen­ted as my Web browser of choice.

One thing I was not pre­pared for was a fair num­ber of my co-​​workers to be present. That in itself was no sur­prise, given the SLUG-​​friendliness of my work­place. The effect of their heck­ling was another mat­ter. Their light-​​hearted dis­trac­tions may have dimin­ished the qual­ity of my talk, but they also made it much more enjoy­able for every­one, includ­ing myself. This inform­al­ity is a clear defin­ing char­ac­ter­istic of SLUG­lets as opposed to the Spe­cial Interest Talks, which are nor­mally quite ser­i­ous and intellectual.

I had also offered to give a “Privoxy in Under Five Minutes” talk as well, but unfor­tu­nately we ran out of time. Per­haps another time.

All in all, I am mostly happy with how things went. Sure, my talk could have been slicker, but nobody expects a pro­fes­sional present­a­tion in SLUG­lets. The fact that I was try­ing to demon­strate a Web browser without Inter­net access didn’t help either, nor did the time con­straint. This was the first time I have done some­thing like this, so I couldn’t have expec­ted it to be flawless.

On the rare occa­sion, I find myself in front of a Macin­tosh. In its default state, the OS feels rather bar­ren. The default set of applic­a­tions is quite sparse, and you have to put some work into installing the soft­ware you need to get going. As a GNU/​Linux user, I’m accus­tomed to installing an oper­at­ing sys­tem and get­ting a full suite of applic­a­tions without put­ting in any extra work. Mind you, OS X is not nearly as bad as oper­at­ing sys­tems from a cer­tain other vendor.

Here is a list of soft­ware that I recom­mend to Mac users. Most of these apps are free soft­ware and also work on GNU/​Linux (or a suit­able ana­logue exists), so switch­ing between the two oper­at­ing sys­tems is easy.

Desktop nav­ig­a­tion:

• Quick­sil­ver
• Desktop Man­ager

Audio/​Video playback:

• VLC Media Player
• MPlayer OS X

Web brows­ing (like Safari or Inter­net Explorer):

• Fire­fox
• Cam­ino (which is based on Fire­fox; you can find exten­sions for Cam­ino here)

Office suite (like Microsoft Office):

• Open­Of­fice (get the Mac ver­sion here)
• NeoOf­fice (which is based on OpenOffice)

Desktop pub­lish­ing (like Adobe InDesign):

• Scribus

Draw­ing (like Adobe Illustrator):

• Ink­s­cape

Painting/​Photo edit­ing (like Adobe Photoshop):

• The GIMP (get the Mac ver­sion here)
• Sea­shore (which is based on The GIMP)

Printer drivers:

• Gimp-​​Print/​Gutenprint

Get more free applications:

• The Fink Project

Win­dows compatability:

• Boot Camp
• Par­al­lels 

I am a heavy user of the Galeon Web browser. IMHO, it is far and away the best browser avail­able for any plat­form. Tabs and ses­sion sup­port with crash recov­ery are bril­liant fea­tures. Not only has Galeon had them for longer than most other browsers, it imple­ments them in a super­ior way. Not only that, it is quite fast and stable as well. I keep Galeon open all the time with mul­tiple win­dows open (presently I have 7 open win­dows, which allow me to ‘cat­egor­ise’ my tabs), and each win­dow has many tabs (For example, I’ve got over 30 tabs in my ‘main’ win­dow, and over 50 in another). I like my tabs to run down the left side of my win­dow (AFAIK some­thing only Galeon can do), so that more can fit on the screen and I don’t have to scroll through them. It may sound nuts, but I like it that way. And yes, I also use book­marks: my book­mark col­lec­tion is extens­ive. If Galeon crashes (a rare occur­rance), or if I want to close it for some reason (another rare occur­rance), I can get all my win­dows and tabs back when I restart it.

As you can see, I am very attached to Galeon’s unique fea­ture set, which makes switch­ing to a new browser dif­fi­cult to say the least. Before I moved whole­sale to Galeon, I would sim­ul­tan­eously run Kon­queror and Opera, and some­times Nets­cape 4 as well. This was so I could lever­age the strengths of each indi­vidual browser.

I have been eye­ing Galeon2 for a while now, and I finally decided to try it out. If it’s good enough to be included in Man­drake Linux 9.1, then maybe it’s good enough for me. Galeon2 is still under­go­ing heavy devel­op­ment, so I wasn’t expect­ing too much. Since the Galeon team is pretty-​​much rewrit­ing the whole thing from scratch to take advant­age of the GNOME2 plat­form, it would be under­stand­able for it to take a while to reach matur­ity. My ver­dict? It is very close to meet­ing my needs. There are many extra set­tings hid­den in Gconf, and after tweak­ing these I was able to cre­ate a sim­ilar setup to what I had in Galeon1. How­ever, some things don’t work yet and a couple are missing.

I had a chat with some Galeon developers a few weeks ago, and they said that they are try­ing to reach a sim­ilar fea­ture set to Galeon1, the dif­fer­ence being that this time they are cod­ing for GNOME2 and its Human Inter­face Guidelines. Unlike the Galeon splinter pro­ject Epi­phany, they are not try­ing to cut out fea­tures on a sig­ni­fic­ant scale. A while ago there was much con­flict in the Galeon mail­ing lists (to which I am a sub­scriber) over whether Galeon should sim­plify its fea­ture set or con­tinue on its cur­rent course. The Galeon founder and main­tainer, Marco Pesenti Gritti, left the pro­ject, forked the code and used it to cre­ate Epi­phany. I per­son­ally like this dual-​​pronged approach from the GNOME folks. Most people don’t like unne­ces­sary com­plex­ity, and so Epi­phany gives a simple, Safari–like inter­face and exper­i­ence. For power-​​users such as myself, Galeon fits the bill brilliantly.

There are some pros to Galeon2 over Galeon1. For one thing, the UI is faster and more respons­ive. My favour­ite, though, is the default book­marks. There aren’t very many, but the ones that are there are great. In the GNU /​ Linux -> News sec­tion, for instance, there are only four entries:

• Desktop Linux
• OSNews
• Pclinuxon­line
• Slash­dot

Notice any­thing spe­cial in there? Of the four GNU/​Linux news sites chosen by the Galeon team, PCLinuxOn­line is one of them!

I for­got to men­tion one of my other favour­ite fea­tures in Galeon (1 and 2): smart book­marks. I like them so much that in early April I volun­teered to take charge of main­tain­ing the offi­cial smart book­mark dir­ect­ory. The Trans­late to Eng­lish smart bookmark/​bookmarklet in the default Galeon2 book­marks was made by myself. There are many other book­marks in the dir­ect­ory which I wrote myself, includ­ing some to search PCLinuxOn­line (in the News cat­egory). I know it’s not much but it’s nice to hear that oth­ers appre­ci­ate and use your work

… well, sort of, any­way. Allow me to explain.

Today, we had a news sub­mis­sion about the BSA’s new scheme to teach chil­dren about the ‘evils’ of soft­ware pir­acy. To make this ‘learn­ing’ (or should I say ‘indoc­trin­a­tion’) more fun for the kid­dies, they got a mas­cot. Take a good look at it, what do you think it is?

It’s a fer­ret… supposedly.

When I first read that the BSA was using a fer­ret, I thought that we should call it a rat instead, since BSA is filled with dirty low-​​life rats. Then I hopped over to the site and had a look at it for myself. I swear, it looks like a weasel! A drugged-​​up homie weasel!

On a whim, I fired off an e-​​mail to Mike Magee at my favour­ite IT news site The Inquirer. If you’re not famil­iar with The Inq, think of it as The Register without the hubris. Indeed, Mike was the founder of The Reg, and he told me that he still owns 23% of it. Here’s part of the e-​​mail I sent to Mike:

The Busi­ness Soft­ware Alli­ance has received US Justice Depart­ment fund­ing of $200,000 to ‘edu­cate’ chil­dren about soft­ware pir­acy. More info at

http://​www​.wash​ing​ton​post​.com/​w​p​-​d​y​n​/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​s​/​A​1​9​6​7​7​-​2​0​0​3​M​a​y​6​.​h​tml

What I’m won­der­ing is why this organ­isa­tion, which boasts some of the richest com­pan­ies in the world as its mem­bers, is receiv­ing US gov­ern­ment funding?

Another point of interest is the mas­cot of this new Play​itcy​ber​safe​.com ini­ti­at­ive. It is _​supposed_​ to be a fer­ret. To me it looks like a weasel. A ser­i­ously drugged-​​out, homie weasel. A weasel may be the per­fect choice for the BSA, but is a drugged-​​out homie char­ac­ter really the best choice to encour­age chil­dren not to steal? I would say it does the exact oppos­ite. You can see this weasel at

http://​www​.play​itcy​ber​safe​.com/​i​m​a​g​e​s​/​k​i​d​s​h​o​m​e​_​f​e​r​r​e​t​.​gif

And here’s part of Mike’s response:

Many thanks for the nice let­ter. And for the tip. The BSA is up to all sorts of tricks and we’ll cer­tainly cover this one.

A few hours later… BANG! Weasel Watch is born! Some excerpts:

HEAVILY SUBSIDED TRADE organ­isa­tion the Busi­ness Soft­ware Alli­ance (BSA) has received $200,000 fund­ing from the US gov­ern­ment to pro­mote a soft­ware pir­acy scheme aimed at children.

But that has raised ques­tions about why the Justice Depart­ment has chipped into the scheme, see­ing as the BSA is already sub­sid­ised, in fact paid for, to the tune of mil­lions, by some of the richest IT com­pan­ies in the world.

and

In fact the BSA Weasel, pic­tured above, looks like it’s either drugged up or it’s about to bite someone’s ankle, don’t you think?

SCORE!!!

Yeah, so I ripped the title off Star Wars, so what? 

About three weeks ago (I think… I lose track of dates eas­ily) on a Sat­urday I got a rather frantic call from my old friend Reaper. Here’s the Hol­ly­wood ver­sion (for your read­ing pleasure):

Reaper: “Aaargh! I’ve screwed up my hard drive and my com­puter is now use­less! I have an appoint­ment to have cable Inter­net installed on Tues­day and I need a work­ing sys­tem so that the tech­ni­cian can install everything. Can I bring my com­puter to your house so you can take a look at it? Help me Yama, you’re my only hope.”
Me: “You may, my min­ion. I know all. You may bow and kiss my ring.”
Reaper: “Yes, my Liege! Thank you, Lord!”

*ahem* Well it went some­thing like that, anyway.

About an hour later, Reaper shows up at my house with com­puter in tow. He some­how man­aged to kill his par­ti­tion table, and after much fid­dling I finally man­aged to fix it using gpart and (GNU/​Linux) fdisk. He needed a copy of Win­dows installed for the cable guy, so I chucked on Win2K (which sadly/​humorously is the best MS product since OS/​2). To bal­ance this out, I installed Man­drake 9.0.

Reaper is a Win­dows user, so I tried to make his Win­dows exper­i­ence as non-​​MS (for both secur­ity and eth­ical reas­ons) as pos­sible. Open​Of​fice​.org and Moz­illa are not only very cap­able applic­a­tions (and IMHO are bettter than their MS coun­ter­parts), they also have dir­ect equi­val­ents in GNU/​Linux. So the only thing keep­ing him in Win­dows is Win­dows itself. Reaper is a games player, but I think WineX can fill that void nicely. Of course, KDE is great for Win­dows converts.

I think a Win­dows to GNU/​Linux trans­ition is best achieved in two stages (to sim­plify the pro­cess). In the first stage, the user weans himself/​herself off pro­pri­et­ary (par­tic­u­larly Microsoft) applic­a­tions. In their place, open altern­at­ives like Moz­illa and Open​Of​fice​.org are adop­ted. Once the user has grown accus­tomed to those pro­grammes, they can make a trans­ition to GNU/​Linux (or BSD, Mac OS X, etc.). The apps stay the same, and only the OS changes. The whole pro­cess can take place over a pro­longed period, and the user is free to switch back and forth (dual-​​boot) between oper­at­ing systems.

Reaper, I know you’ll read this sooner or later, so tell us what you think. Am I talk­ing junk or am I talk­ing junk?

Update: Reaper messed up his hard drive when using Par­ti­tion Magic 8. Yet another reason not to trust pro­pri­et­ary soft­ware, I guess.