When idiocy meets idiocy, here’s what you get, right in Slackware 13.0:
Please read the CHANGES AND HINTS text file on the Slackware CD. This is about HAL, you will have to copy a hal policy file to /etc and modify it to use the Spanish keyboard layout. xorg.conf should not be necessary, you should remove the keyboard line AFAIK if you use the HAL file.
Linux. HAL. X.Org. Etc. Etc. Making the IT Worse, Every Day™.
Suppose you’re from Egypt. You’re now back to winter time, but does your OS know about that? If not, and if you “fix” the wrong hour the wrong way, it’s like you’re on the wrong timezone, and this will affect your communication (e.g. e-mail). Heck, we’re in a globalized world!
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided the updated tzdata-2009k on August 17. Scientific Linux provided it the next day and, surprisingly, CentOS was this time even faster!
How about other major names? How about Debian, known for only pushing tzdata updates in debian-volatile? Well… we’re now 3 days after the timezone change in Egypt and the corresponding update, tzdata_2009l, is not in debian-volatile, but only in Debian testing and unstable! So no, Debian Lenny and Etch don’t have it, not even as a “volatile” update.
Slackware missed it too, in both 12.2 and current. Too bad.
Oh, did I mention how Ubuntu Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty and Karmic got the Egypt timezone change with tzdata_2009i, and they now have even newer timezone files, to incorporate some more fixes?
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…as comment #153 in the latest DWW:
Yeah, unfortunately moving a hard disk with a Linux distribution on it to a completely different computer doesn’t work as well as it used to. Back before 2003 or so it used to work pretty flawlessly in most cases. The big culprit these days is custom initrd: most distributions build the initrd for your system dynamically at the time the kernel package is installed, using mkinitrd, and it only contains the drivers for the hardware in your system (particularly for critical bits like drive controllers). Move the disk to a machine with a different drive controller, and bing — it won’t boot up.
Fedora’s switching to dracut rather than mkinitrd/nash with Fedora 12. Among other things this will result in a return to a generic initrd image with all common drivers in it, so you should be able to move an installed system to a different machine and have it work, again.
Oh, then they will switch to something else with Fedora 13 (14?), and so on. Reliability, thy name is Linux… not!
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Egypt starts winter time on August 21.
I could say that this is a tzdata update which will be missed by most of the mainstream Linux distros (and Debian will only put it in debian-volatile, whereas Gentoo will ignore it altogether), but apart from that, isn’t it funny? Winter time to start in August!
Hmm. I am personally more interested in xfce4-timer-plugin, which is plain ugly. Nothing can beat KTeaTime!
Of course, PC-BSD is still FreeBSD — which has committers who called me a moron and it also has a questionable USB support —, but PC-BSD 7.1.1 looks reasonably interesting… for a KDE 4.2.4 thing. And I notice they even have a DVD version.
Unfortunately, they don’t have a LiveCD/LiveDVD to play with, and… it looks like they include the screwed Intel video driver too! Pfff…
From Null pointers, one month later:
Red Hat has not, as of this writing, issued an update for this vulnerability. That is unfortunate because most RHEL systems are vulnerable as the result of a policy choice made by Red Hat. RHEL systems, by default, allow “unconfined” users to map low addresses addresses. Red Hat’s Dan Walsh explains: “We are not planning on changing the default in RHEL5, to maintain backwards compatibility.” So, because compatibility trumps security, RHEL systems (and those running distributions based on RHEL) remain vulnerable to a trivial local root problem with exploit code easily available and in use. Not good.
Normally, I am bored to be reminded obvious facts I can’t change, and common-sense issues, so I’ve simply skipped Schneider’s Crypto-Gram Newsletter in the last couple of months. I gave the latest one a thoough reading though, and I’m glad I did: it was a good one.
No, this is not Debian-specific: it’s Linux-specific. All the distros do that: they “fix” some small issues in a package by simply discontinuing it! The story «Debian: contempt for “end user” values has to stop!» is about what you lose when upgrading from Etch to Lenny, not what you lose when upgrading from XP to Vista. Think about that.
I forgot to mention this when I first read it: Germany’s Bright Idea is actually the worst idea that could have occurred to someone in a so-called civilized country. And no, Dörentrup is not in Cuba, nor in Romania in the 80s. There is definitely a regression in the common-sense and in other functions of the human brain, and it’s only sad that this idiocy happens in Germany, not in (say) Japan.
They say that «Microblogging has become too important for one company to rule the field.», and consequently… To Live, Twitter Must Die. In full cynicism, couldn’t all the Twitter users die the same day Twitter dies? (Except my nephew, of course.) This should lead to a better world. Then, there is another article on Slate about… The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and texting. Read it.
As a casual reading, Time-Traveling for Dummies proved to be surprisingly pleasant. That’s because it was written by a physicist. It’s old news that you can’t kill your own grandfather (unless in a poorly-constructed sci-fi story), and more generally you can’t change the history (which should make the time-travelling utterly boring and useless), but the cute one is that… you can’t visit any time before your time machine was built. And «The Time Traveler’s Wife very nearly gets it right: Since Henry is the time machine, he can’t visit any time before he was born.»
I didn’t bother to check this thoroughly, but is this the same kernel vulnerability that was described a month ago as «A vulnerability which, when viewed at the source level, is unexploitable! But which, thanks to gcc optimizations, becomes exploitable :)», or is it a new one? Anyway…
What’s another term for «false sense of security»? SELinux?
Possible temporary workarounds found on the main SL mailing list: here and here.
I am so bored by the plethora of so-called “news” (and “advancements”) in the Linux distroland… Say, Pardus 2009 receives warm praises, but it also means that there is no way back to KDE 3.5, the graphical package manager still doesn’t have an option to show ALL the packages (installed or not), and apparently removing a package doesn’t remove the dependencies, leaving orphans. Oh my…
Then, I don’t understand what’s the fuss about what default desktop environment is openSUSE going to have: it’s only natural for it to be KDE4 (SuSE has always been a pro-KDE distro)! What matters is what will SLED have as defaults, but SLED11 is still fresh, and by the time SLED12 is born, all kind of things can happen…
I am personally puzzled about the future of GNOME (they recently showed signs of a particular form of idiocy), and now that Mutter is Metacity3, I expect its quality and stability to decrease. Will it have some kind of plasmoids too?
Of course, there is no risk for RHEL6 to include a really broken GNOME… should it release some day. The problem I see with RHEL6 is that it should include KDE4 by default (all the KDE/Qt-related spec files from Fedora/EPEL show that intention, i.e. “kde” is KDE4 and “kde3″ is legacy for RHEL6), but KDE4 is still not enterprise-grade. What’s going to be included with RHEL6, and why is the release date for its first Beta such a well-kept secret?!
KDE4 gradually improves, but it’s still something clumsy (I can’t get used with the plasmoids), incomplete, and it still crashes the same way KDE3 crashed years ago. I thought KDE4 was totally rewritten in such a way that SIGSEGV wouldn’t happen. After all, Windows Vista is “bad” (maybe it really is so, I can’t tell as I am not using it), but at least its components don’t crash! Eh?!
Don’t tell me that XFCE 4.6.1 is the path to the future. I am not buying it… nor would I buy a Mac! (FreeBSD, PC-BSD and OpenSolaris are even less likely to gain momentum in the foreseeable future.)
DWW Issue 315 includes in the comment #27 something that summarize the reasons for I despise whatever I despise: «The recent Intel graphics issue has made it a pain to find a good distro that works…».
So, faute de mieux, my “free Windows XP” is the choice of EL clones: CentOS 5.3 and Scientific Linux 5.3.
But I still suspect that Windows 7 will sell quite well, actually. Sigh. Could the Linux crowd be responsible in part for this situation? Constantly broken X drivers, constantly inferior wireless support, stupid KDE4, stupid GNOME3 in sight, mediocre XFCE, etc. etc.
Rant over.
I noticed for some time that tiny fonts seem to be fashionable, no matter they put a supplementary stress on your eyes in times when reading a computer screen for too many hours a day is the norm. If it’s not in openSUSE’s installer to find them, then you’ve certainly noticed strangely tiny fonts in KDE4 in several distros, either in KMenu, or in some areas of some applications’ main window.
Now I see that the tiny fonts are to be found even in the Pardus 2009 GUI package manager.
What copulatory or excretory organ is used for thinking by the people who designed such software to use such tiny fonts?
Huge, glossy icons, and tiny, petty fonts. That’s smart. And usually that’s KDE4.
I am afraid coffee can not replace a good sleep (that’s why everybody wants to be a cat), but I have to deal with what I have…
Actually, this self-shooting in the foot is amusing. Banshee UI to be in Moonlight. Then Banshee is going to be in the photos business, and F-Spot will be re-based on top of Banshee. They’re out of their minds, right? Maybe we should already think of GNOME4, which I suggest to be based on Adobe AIR. Because it’s nice-looking, modern and all.
The only hope for the best is that Moonlight is banned in Fedora. So maybe the GNOME users of Fedora will be able to reverse the trend, so that GNOME would keep a relative sanity, without depending by default on Mono, Moonlight and whatnot.
Or maybe aseigo will be eventually replaced by some guy able to make KDE4 a more reasonable desktop environment. I still have hopes that something like KDE 4.6.0 must be usable some day.
P.S.: By the way, I very much doubt there will be a RHEL 7 usable on the desktop, given the current status of the desktop environments. Should the arrogant management of Red Hat be not that much focussed on virtualization, the clould and all the buzzwords meant to sell servers, they would realize it’s high time to responsibly adopt a desktop environment and give it a direction. If GNOME is too big for them, why not going for XFCE? Because, you know, KDE4 now de facto belongs to Novell…
We all know that Oo.o is stupid, even if we don’t all care of a 7 and half years bug with destroying hidden lines, but really, what’s the alternative to Microsoft Office?
Cool. Read about Kontact 1.4.2. It made my day.
For some unknown reason, Ole Andre Rodlie seems to have decided that KDE3 is more interesting than XFCE for a desktop OS, and — unannounced! — he is building beta versions of «Draco K3 Desktop Enviroment 1.0», which is otherwise based on Draco GNU/Linux 0.3.1.
I discovered this by accident, while looking into dracolinux.org/pub/images. The current build is draco-k3-1.0b2.iso (Beta 2) from June 25 — screenshot — text description.
It looks like it currently lacks a Live installer, and that it will eventually also have an update manager.
I have used (on the old HP Omnibook) an installed version of Draco Linux (with XFCE) more than one year ago.
…but some Debianers are sheeple too! Just take a look at this Debian forum thread. Yuck.
I bet we can find similar levels of aggressive idiocy with crowds of fans of other distros too. So no, it’s not Windows who made people stupid, I’m afraid it’s “Linux for the masses and its Holy War” the one who managed to do that. Cute, eh?
I wonder how manages DWW to ban my IP from commenting, no matter where I am writing from?! How much of Romania’s range of IP addresses is still unbanned? Ladislav must be a complete asshole (hopefully he’s constipated). Oh well… UPDATE: I can now post again comments on DWW… and I have not changed my IP! RE-UPDATE July 15: I am banned again by IP, although I have not posted anything!
OK, when will someone notice that Kongoni is a binary-only distro, with no sources available?
“Chrome OS”: are they serious about that? I mean: are they really nuts? (I never trusted Google…)
BTW: Google Chrome OS and the Lesson of Munich. The problem with the failed Munich’s migration to Linux is that they have chosen to derive their own distro from Debian Sarge, and they were so slow in doing everything, that the included software is now terribly obsolete for a desktop usage!
And indeed, Caitlyn forgot to mention the once-famous Libranet. And, why not, the more recently discontinued Ultima Linux.
Leaving the Ladislav Reich: I can’t read the greenish Tuxmachines.org either. Why did Susan have to change the theme?!
I noticed here a nice installation of Hudson, «an extensible continuous integration engine». I took a quick look at Meet Hudson, then to a long French article about it, and I still don’t get it: how to practically use it to trigger builds of packages on a Linux system?! Everything seems to be about the marvellous Java thing that Hudson is, but how to really make something useful out of it? Yet another interesting project that lacks a practical HowTo…
Since everyone’s so extatic, I can’t ignore it: it is happening! Microsoft makes C# patent promise to unblock Mono:
Microsoft have announced that the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Infrastructure will now come under the Microsoft Community Promise, a legally binding promise not to assert any patents or other rights related to the implementation of those standards. This means that the controversial issue of Mono, which at its core is an implementation of ECMA 334 and ECMA 335, should be clear of patent issues related to those standards.
Señor de Icaza is jubilating, fedora-mono is calling Boycott Novell names, plenty of people are optimistic, y compris on OSNews.com.
I am more than skeptical and cautious. First of all, only the ECMA-covered parts are “guaranteed not to bite”. That’s C# and CLI.
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Before going down to whatever Linux issues might have affected my mind, here’s a Windows one, simply because I’ve experienced this stupid situation on a laptop while still in Utah:
The idea is that forced updates should not happen when the user has selected one of the following two options… yet they happen at times:
Quote:
I am not retracing Tocqueville’s steps, I am retracing my own steps. And this is not America, but only a very small spot of it, a vertical strip between Interstate 15 and State Street, somewhere south of Salt Lake City.
72 hours since I am here, and I dare to say that I’ve almost adjusted the timezone. I am nevertheless tired, because I normally hate the meetings, but now I have to go through 7 days and half of meetings and group discussions. After only two full days, I realize that meetings are nice… unless you’re part of them.
This piece of America hasn’t changed much since May 2004, the first time I’ve met it–except maybe for a relatively successful Walmart that has been replaced by two other stores with fewer visitors.
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Here it is, 
