Showing headlines posted by slacker_mike

Convention over configuration is an established paradigm, it even has a Wikipedia page! I like the idea of things working well out of the box. However, when it comes to Vim many people are attracted to it because they've heard how configurable it is. I think most of us are drawn to hackable things -- there's probably a strong correlation between Vim users, Arduino hackers and Android tinkerers. But the obsession with configuration has got to go.

The corporate data center is undergoing a major transformation the likes of which haven't been seen since Intel-based servers started replacing mainframes decades ago. It isn't just the server platform: the entire infrastructure from top to bottom is seeing major changes as applications migrate to private and public clouds, networks get faster, and virtualization becomes the norm.

Recently, at a rate of about once a day, a new article comes blaming Microsoft for being evil and using their Secure Boot thingie to monopolize the desktop and prevent Linux from taking over. On top of that, Microsoft notwithstanding, lots of people are blaming UEFI for not letting them boot various Linux distributions. I would like to use this opportunity to dispell myths and fears and pure, simple disinformation, as most of the articles written on this topic are nothing more than FUD designed to generate controversy, traffic and revenue. So let's see what gives, and why UEFI is all right, and why there is no problem whatsoever.

At some point over a decade ago I received my first real Unix account on Northeastern CCS’s computing infrastructure. I realized that my primary method of development — editing files in BBEdit and uploading them via FTP — wouldn’t scale for college-level projects, so I decided to learn how to efficiently edit files on a remote host. I used Pico for a while but became annoyed at its lack of syntax highlighting, so I used the only other editor I remembered bumping into: Vim.

No, LXDE will NOT use Qt. Don’t panic!! It’s just one of my side projects and was an experiment to test how good libfm and Qt are. Since the core library of PCManFM, libfm, is carefully separated from its Gtk+ UI code, theoratically it can be ported to other GUI toolkits. To give it a test, I played with Qt recently. The result is quite satisfactory and impressive. I must admit that working with Qt is quite pleasant.

Last time around, I had mentioned that I have been able to put down two research questions for my thesis project, where the first was to do a usability test for GNOME3. Moving forward on that direction, I decided on doing task analysis for the usability testing. The process given below is what I narrowed down to, with my rationale for doing so.

The Web is one of the most dramatic demonstrations of the power of openness, alongside free software, which not coincidentally runs most of it and the rest of the Internet. At the heart of that openness lies HTML, a completely open way of sharing information. So what would be a really stupid thing you could do to try to throttle that openness and innovation? Why, yes: adding DRM to HTML so that you can lock down Web page elements:

It happened faster than I had thought, considering the slow pace at which slackware-current has been evolving these past months. But there is a massive flurry of activity and Patrick Volkerding has pushed lots of updates to the development branch of Slackware lately. Quite interesting was the addition of the elilo and gnu-efi packages of course, which indicate future support in Slackware for UEFI-based hardware (UEFI being the sucessor to the good old BIOS). Slackware already supported GPT partition tables (successor of the good old MBR) so this looks promising for buyers of “Secure Boot” computers. Don’t forget to wipe that awful Windows 8 first! It would not make any sense to keep it on a computer if you can install Slackware on it in its place.

Fuduntu is a very strange distribution. It's based on Fedora, but tries to be more user-friendly, sort of like Ubuntu. Then, the big difference between Fuduntu and other RedHat-based distributions like CentOS and Scientific is that it aims specifically for the desktop crowd, bringing you the latest kernel technologies and apps.

My last experience with it was ok, but there were some problems in the overall integration, some visual glitches, a handful of unnecessary programs, plus some plugin quirks. All in all, it was okay. Now, there's a new version that I want to test, and it's labeled 2013.1. For those of you who like small-print, you will like the idea of Gnome 2, full functionality out of the box, a semi-rolling-release-like model, optimization for laptops, and a handful of highly popular mainstream programs bundled with the distribution. There, follow me.

I bricked a Samsung laptop today. Unlike most of the reported cases of Samsung laptops refusing to boot, I never booted Linux on it - all experimentation was performed under Windows. It seems that the bug we've been seeing is simultaneously simpler in some ways and more complicated in others than we'd previously realised.

Steam for Linux, the digital distribution platform developed by Valve, has just received an important update and gets a little closer to a stable release.

There's been a lot of information scattered around the internet about these topic recently, so here's my attempt to put them all in one place to (hopefully) settle things down and give my inbox a break. Last week I spent a number of days at the GNOME Developer Hackfest in Brussels, with the goal to help make the ability to distribute applications written for GNOME (and even more generally, Linux) in a better manner. A great summary of what happened there can be found in this H-Online article. Also please read Alexander Larsson's great summary of what we discussed and worked on for another view of this. Both of these articles allude to the fact that I'm working on putting the D-Bus protocol into the kernel, in order to help achieve these larger goals of proper IPC for applications. And I'd like to confirm that yes, this is true, but it's not going to be D-Bus like you know it today.

David Herrmann has provided an update on his ambitious initiative to kill of the Linux kernel console. Herrmann has long been working on making the Linux kernel CONFIG_VT option unnecessary for providing a Linux console by punting it off to user-space. The Linux kernel VT console hasn't been changed much in the past two decades and Herrmann is hoping to see it replaced with a user-space solution he's been developing that would allow for multi-seat support, a hardware-accelerated console, full internalization, and other features.

As promised, here is the Linux Foundation UEFI secure boot system. This was actually released to us by Microsoft on Wednesday 6 February, but with travel, conferences and meetings I didn’t really get time to validate it all until today. The files are here

Playing with ansible, its "ec2" module came to my attention: it is intended to manage virtual machines in Amazon's EC2 cloud. The idea is that you describe a system with the property "needs to run in Amazon's cloud", and ansible then starts the machine if it isn't there already. In order to get to the point where this can be played with, a working version of the euca2ools package was required first. Packaging was mostly a no-brainer, and a package is currently under review and will end up in pkgsrc eventually. The more interesting part was to verify if the pkg actually worked as expected. This proved tricky for two reasons: 1) my overall lack of how to use the Amazon AWS command line tools (ec2-ami-tools, ec2-api-tools), and 2) the fact that euca2ools is mostly written for the Eucalyptus Cloud infrastructure, which just happens to be compatible with Amazon AWS. To give future parties something to google, here are the steps that to fire up a NetBSD machine in the Amazon cloud.

There are more than a billion people around the globe living with some sort of disability today, yet software in general and operating systems in particular are just beginning to address their computing needs.

PCLinuxOS is an "old standard" Linux distribution. Although it doesn't seem to have been getting as much attention recently it still seems to have a significant number of very loyal followers.

The best Gnome 3 experience on BSD can be found where you'd least expect it. It is no secret that I am becoming quite fond of PC-BSD: it is stabilizing nicely and offers a feature-rich BSD at one end and an amazing selection of window managers at the other. One thing it's missing however is Gnome 3. Love it or hate it, Gnome 3 is boldly exploring "modern" desktop territory with the Gnome Shell which aggressively provides both elegant eye candy and swift navigation. Surprisingly, the best place to experience Gnome 3 on BSD is perhaps where you would least expect it: OpenBSD

I’ve been quiet for a while, so it’s time to give an update about what’s happening with the Linux Foundation secure boot loader (Especially as this has recently been presented at LCA2013 [slides]).

Despite overwhelmingly warm feedback from pretty much everyone to my first review of Bodhi Linux almost two years ago, which pretty much sealed the deal, I decided to give it another shot. My label as an idiot, so to speak, notwithstanding, Bodhi has changed quite a bit since version 0.15. Now at increment 2.2, it continues its mission as a minimalist distribution based on Ubuntu.