brainwagon

San Jose Mercury News - Google unveils mobile-phone software strategy

the big news is that Google has gone generic, offering free software to anyone who wants it under the relaxed terms of an open-source license, which will allow developers to view the source code for that software. This also means there will not be a “gPhone,” or any sort of phone with the Google brand on it.

“Today’s announcement is more ambitious than any single ‘Google Phone’ that the press has been speculating about,” Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement. “Our vision is that the powerful platform we’re unveiling will power thousands of different phone models.”

How did I miss this? Minix, the small OS designed by professor Andrew Tanenbaum to teach operating systems concets, is now in its 3.0 revision. From their webpage:

MINIX 1 and 2 were intended as teaching tools; MINIX 3 adds the new goal of being usable as a serious system on resource-limited and embedded computers and for applications requiring high reliability.

Neat. I’ll have to check it out.

Get your red hot torrent downloads here.

Previously I’ve mentioned my appreciation for both Knoppix and Damn Small Linux, both fairly cute LiveCD versions of Linux. The problem is that Damn Small Linux can be just a little bit too small, and Knoppix can be a bit slow to boot, and can seem a bit bloated. Enter SLAX, a LiveCD which is designed to fit on those little 8cm CD blanks that can hold around 185 megabytes. I tried it out this weekend, and it seemed great: slick, fast to boot, has all the stuff I needed except for one: it doesn’t seem to detect any wireless card that I have for my laptop.

I currently have:

• A Belkin F5D7010 802.11g card
• A Belkin F5D6020 802.11b card
• A Dell Truemobile 1150 802.11b card

Neither Belkin card autodetects. For some reason, when the Dell card is inserted, it locks up my machine (all three cards work just fine in Windows). Anyone have any clue what the deal is for setting up wireless in Slax?

Oh, and my laptop seems to run significantly hotter when running Linux. Any clues as to what I could do ACPI wise to make it run cooler?

GCC 4.0 is now released, try checking out the release notes on gnu.org.

Over on the Register, there is an article on the ongoing row between Linus Torvalds, Andrew Tridgell, author of the Samba software you’ll find as part of many operating system distributions, and Larry McVoy, CEO of Bitkeeper software, the proprietary revision control software which is used to help maintain order in the Linux kernel source tree.

It’s turning into quite a tiff, and Bruce Perens has weighed in and asking for cooler heads to prevail.

The problem is as far as I can tell, entirely Linus’ fault. He made what must be viewed as an incredibly short sighted decision: to use a propietary product as a key element in open source development. It’s a bad idea, for a number of reasons.

First of all, proprietary software is managed by commercial entities. They are allowed to sign NDAs, they can purchase and sublicense proprietary technology and they go out of business. When such a company goes out of business, there is no guarantee that the software which you are using will continue to be available. Putting the long term viability of your open source project at risk in this way is wreckless.

Secondly, if your goal is to promote open source software promote open source software by sleeping in the bed you’ve made. If the open source alternatives aren’t as good as the proprietary ones, then through your weight behind new or existing projects to improve by using them. Linus wrote:

“So I think open source tends to become technically better over time (but it does take time), but I don’t think it’s a moral imperative.” he writes.

The real issue is of course not whether it is a moral imperative, but rather do most people who would work on such a project view it as better to use and improve open source tools which can be made available to all, or to simply use the best tool available, despite it being against the principles which supposedly you began writing open source software to espouse?

Lastly, Linus simply didn’t take the feelings of a large subset of kernel developers into account. For projects which rely on volunteer labor, that’s just dumb.

I’ve used cvs for years, and spearheaded its use within a couple of different organizations. It’s got its flaws, but it is open, and available, and I’m willing to wait until other open source code revision systems have features which make it profitable for me to change. In my career I’ve used SCCS, RCS, CVS, Perforce and subversion, and will probably use some more before it’s all over. For my own personal work, work that I care about, I’ll choose open alternatives every single time.

VIA Technologies, Inc. has made code for their ProSavage, ProSavage DDR and Unichrome drivers available over at viaarena.com.

Of particular interest to the growing number of Linux enthusiasts and customers utilizing VIA EPIA mainboards, is the source for the S3 Graphics UniChrome family display driver for version 2.6.x kernels. The UniChrome family display driver supports the VIA CLE266 and the new VIA CN400 Digital Media chipsets featured on the popular VIA EPIA M series and VIA EPIA SP series mainboards respectively, and will provide developers with the flexibility to autonomously incorporate support for latest applications based on VIA hardware.

Perhaps my Ubuntu machine will at long last be able to play DVDs at a reasonable speed.

Internetnews.com ran an interesting article about the synergy and tension beween Ubuntu Linux and classic . Ian Murdoch had this to say…

Sarge vs. The Hoary Hedgehog?

But Ian Murdoch, Debian’s founding father, does not believe Ubuntu’s popularity bodes well for Debian-based distros.

“If anything, Ubuntu’s popularity is a net negative for Debian,” Murdoch told internetnews.com. “It’s diverged so far from Sarge that packages built for Ubuntu often don’t work on Sarge. And given the momentum behind Ubuntu, more and more packages are being built like this. The result is a potential compatibility nightmare.”

Murdoch argues that if Ubuntu were truly compatible with Debian, all of the energy going into it could be directed at Sarge and toward getting it released, which is what would really benefit the Debian developer ecosystem as a whole.

“I understand what the Ubuntu folks are trying to do, and they’re doing lots of good work that will eventually find its way into Debian,” Murdoch said. “But what we really need right now as a community is for Sarge to be released.

“In that respect, Ubuntu’s popularity is more harmful than helpful.”

Ian, you are missing the point. I suppose that isn’t really surprising, since the reason that Ubuntu exists at all is because Debian has lost its way.

The reason that Ubuntu exists is actually pretty simple: no existing distribution had the features that people wanted. Among things that people want but have not received are:

• regular releases
• modern updates to windowing software and applications
• excitement! A sense that things are really moving.

Yes, the guys behind Ubuntu could have tried to work within Debian. But they would be forced to participate in what seems like an incredibly bloated, lethargic, unresponsive behemoth. Sarge has been years in the making, and is still at least months away from being ready to ship. The current “stable” release of Debian was first released in January of 2002 for pity’s sake.

And another pet peeve of mine: installation. Debian has the most quirky, oddball install of any popular distribution I’ve found. With Ubuntu, you download an iso, burn it, boot it, answer a couple of questions, and you are done.

Ubuntu should hurt Debian. Debian has seemingly worked at dispersing excitement and enthusiasm rather than generating it. It seems always to be looking backwards, rather than forwards. Some people think that is important, but for a project that relies upon the enthusiasm and excitement of volunteers, it doesn’t seem like a viable strategy.

The 5.04 version of Ubuntu Linux is freshly released, and is now running on my test machine. I must admit, I am really, really impressed by how quickly Ubuntu has become a mature and useful operating system. Things that are most impressive to me:

• It only takes up one ordinary CD blank. Yes, one. Yes, it doesn’t include everything in the universe, but it does include a very nice Gnome based desktop, and all the applications that get installed by default look like they are part of one seamless distribution.
• The Synaptic/apt package manager stuff works simply. Almost childishly so. It would be very easy for almost anyone to keep an Ubuntu system up to date.
• Ubuntu is committed to be free. Not just open, but actually free.
• Ubuntu is dedicated to providing high quality multi-lingual support. As an American, I know it’s unfashionable for me to say so, but that’s pretty cool.

There are a couple of small caveats: my system has a Savage chipset videocard (actually, built onto the motherboard) and the DRI stuff that makes playback of dvds and the like fast is not yet ported into this release, so it doesn’t as yet make the best DVD player. But I’m really happy with it. If you are bored with your older, staler distributions, think about giving Ubuntu a try.

Addendum: There is a review of the new Ubuntu release on forevergeek.com.

Addendum^2: Don’t like Gnome? Prefer KDE? Then what you are looking for is Kubuntu.

I’ve got a very simple LiveCD of FreeBSD booting off of CDROM. If you are brave, you can surf over to itsyBSD.org and download the iso image, burn it to CD and give it a try. It doesn’t install anything to any hard disks, so nothing can be hurt by giving it a try, but as usual, no warranties are granted. Try it at your own risk.

It’s got a number of problems, but I should iron them out over the next few days.

Well, I’ve decided on a name for my tiny FreeBSD LiveCD project: itsyBSD, pronouced “itsybitsy”. I haven’t got any files to download yet, but if you click the link you’ll end up at a wiki which will hold my documentation for the project. Hopefully in the next week I’ll have an iso you can download.

A giant list of LiveCD projects.

Hopefully I’ll have one joining the list soon.

Well, I’ve bit the bullet. I’ve decided that I have a couple of projects that could benefit from my own ability to produce a customized version of Unix that can boot from a CD (or alternatively, a flash memory device), so I’ve embarked upon trying to follow the path of others who have gone before and produce one.

I’ve thought about using Linux and following in the fine tradition of DSL or Knoppix, but I really am more comfortable with FreeBSD, so I thought I would give it a go. I went into /usr/ports/sysutils/freesbie and installed the scripts there, and then tried to figure out what they were all about. They put a bunch of files in /usr/local/share/freesbie including a directory called miniBSD. Ahah! I’ve seen mention of this project before, where someone produced a small version of BSD ready to run on some small Soekris boxes. I thought I might start there.

Well, there are a few problems. The kernel config file that it uses (MINIBSD.5) isn’t really set up for booting from CD, so if you use their scripts to build an ISO and burn it on a CD, it really won’t work. I know, because I made four coasters playing with it last night before I stumbled upon the idea of using a system emulator. I compiled the one I knew about, bochs, but it died while running the emulated boot loader in a way that my real system wasn’t. Now I’ve got qemu compiled and running, and it gets through the boot all the way to running init, which it thinks dies with a signal 6. That’s just what the real CD does currently, so I’m happy I won’t need to make so many coasters to debug this thing.

After that, I had to go to bed.

I’ll keep you posted when I get it to work. This .iso image won’t be much bigger than a typical podcast.

While investigating the creation of my own Knoppix distribution, I encountered a reference to the FreeSBIE project, which is a LiveCD version of my personal favorite OS, FreeBSD. With minor digging, it appeared that FreeSBIE takes a similar approach to Knoppix, and uses a compressed ISO image. This requires using 5.X and the new GEOM disk subsystem, and the details are here. Nifty! Basically, you can mount a compressed ISO file system just like any other device using the geom_ugz kernel module.

OSNews reports that Fedora Core 4 Test 1 has been released. New goodies:

• gcc 4.0
• Gnome 2.10
• Eclipse IDE
• lots of Java goodness

If you need to keep up with the penguin crowd, give it a try.