Category: Linux

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Perhaps you’ve heard of electoral-vote.com. Over the past few months, the site’s author has been collecting data from various polls and trying to predict which candidate is likely to carry each state. Each state’s support is classified as strong, weak, or barely there, or a straight tie, making it a more useful gauge than a simple red/blue map.

Yesterday’s data showed a strong win for Kerry, 298 electoral votes to 231. This morning it shows a virtual tie: 262 for Kerry, 261 for Bush.

This morning the “votemaster” also writes about dealing with a simultaneous denial-of-service attack and Slashdotting (or “flash crowd” as he prefers to call it), and he talked about his previous Slashdotting experience… with a rebuttal to claims that Linux was stolen from Minix.

Yes, the “votemaster” is none other than Andrew Tanenbaum, author of the MINIX operating system, one-time teacher of Linus Torvalds, and an interviewee for Samizdat, the Microsoft-funded study that attempted to prove that Linux couldn’t possibly have been developed honestly. Tanenbaum was disturbed by the leading questions, and incensed when his responses were taken out of context and used to support a position he categorically refuted. He and others posted rebuttals before the book even saw print, and by the time it was actually published, it was essentially a nonissue.

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This morning I upgraded the mail servers at work. They were down for maybe two seconds each. I doubt anyone even noticed.

If you’re used to installing software on Windows, you probably think I’m kidding. Didn’t I have to shut the service down before installing the upgrade? Didn’t I have to reboot when it was done? Nope!

The reason you have to go through all that trouble when you install something on Windows is that it won’t let you change files that are in use. So you can’t install the new Exchange without closing down the old one. And some files aren’t completely closed until you shut down Windows.

On Linux (and possibly all Unix-like systems), if you delete or replace an open file, the system hangs onto it until the program using it is done. So if you need to upgrade Sendmail, you can go through the entire process while the old Sendmail is still running, then tell it to restart the service once it’s ready.

It’s not quite zero, but it’s close!

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All the Linux desktop action these days is in KDE and GNOME, but on older hardware, servers, or anything else where you need to squeeze every last ounce of performance from the box, something lighter is needed.

[Screenshot of a WindowMaker desktop] My Linux box at work — a 300 MHz Pentium II — runs WindowMaker. It’s familiar, it stays out of the way, and it doesn’t tie up the memory or CPU that a modern version of KDE or Gnome (or Windows, for that matter) would. But you need to add applets like a clock or a desktop pager. You can find them easily enough — I ended up using the aptly-named wmclock and wmpager – but there’s a significant problem with both. WindowMaker lets you change the size of the dock icons, but when I shrank the dock to get more space I discovered that both applets have a hard-coded size of 64×64 pixels.

[Pair of WM Applets, first at default 64x64 size (they look fine), then at 48x48 (they don't adjust and edges get cut off)] As you can see, a 64×64 applet just doesn’t work in a 48×48 space. It surprised me, though, since these dockapps are designed specifically for WindowMaker, and it’s WindowMaker itself that lets you change the size. You open up Preferences, change the size, and restart WM. Just menus and buttons. No config files, no registry, no third-party add-on. This isn’t an esoteric hack that takes serious effort to find, it’s a basic feature. You might as well design a Mac program that assumes the Dock is on the bottom of the screen. For most people it will be, but it’s not rocket science to move it.

In my ICS classes, they always discouraged us from using “magic numbers” — just throwing a number in the code without identifying or abstracting it. There are two very good reasons for this. The first is that you might forget what this 64 is doing. The second is that you might decide to change it later on, and it’s much easier to change one SIZE=64 definition than to track down every 64 and hope you’ve neither missed any you need to change nor changed any you need to leave alone.

Those dock applets are stuck at 64×64 pixels because the programmers were thinking in terms of the pixel grid, not in terms of actual display size. Continue reading →

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Groklaw has posted an affidavit in the SCO vs. Daimler Chrysler case.

Essentially, SCO sent DC a letter saying “as per your license terms, send us a list of all the computers you’re using UNIX on.”

DC wrote back saying, “We haven’t used UNIX in seven years, so there is no list.”

And SCO sued them for not providing the list.

I’m not making this up, folks – this comes out of SCO’s own deposition!

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OK, I haven’t written much on the SCO vs. Linux debacle in a while, mainly because others have done so much better and in much more detail than I possibly could, so here’s a summary of the situation as I see it.

SCO: Linux stole from us!
Linux: Uh, no. What did we steal?
SCO: Linux stole from us!
Linux: No, we didn’t. What are we supposed to have stolen!
SCO: Linux stole from us! They’re un-American commie terrorists!
Linux: Dude, what the heck? Tell us what we stole or stop accusing us!
SCO: Linux stole XYZ from us.
Linux: No, we got that legally from so-and-so.
SCO: Uh, never mind. We meant to say Linux stole ABC.
Linux: No, we got that legally from such-and-such.
SCO: No, we mean JFS and NUMA!
IBM: Hey, we invented those ourselves.
SCO: We have proof! We have millions of lines that Linux stole!
Linux: Such as?
* crickets *
SCO: We have millions of lines! Millions of them!
Linux: Shyeah, right.
SCO: But don’t worry, for a mere $699, you can assure yourself that we won’t sue you for this chunk of Linux that we haven’t actually proved we own yet!
Linux: $699? For a small piece of something you won’t even prove you own? What’s next, charging Windows users an extra $700 for Notepad because they can write code with it? [Looks up definition of “protection racket”]
SCO: Did I mention we own BSD, MacOS, and Windows too? They’re next! (Well, except Windows, ’cause Microsoft gave us money. For something else, I mean.)
BSD: You’re kidding, right? We went through this in court a decade ago.
SCO: Wait, we never said anything about BSD.
BSD: But in this interview right here —
SCO: Linux is evil! The GPL is unconstitutional! If you let people use software for free, then the terrorists have won!
Linux: What are you people smoking?

Then there are the lawsuits:
Continue reading →

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A long-standing challenge for advocates of Free and Open Source Software (a.k.a. FOSS) has been explaining just what the term Free Software means, because in English,* the word “free” has several unrelated meanings. The classic explanation has been to compare “free speech” and “free beer.”

You see, when the average person hears the phrase “free software,” they generally assume it means the same kind of thing as “free beer.” But it’s really about the software being unencumbered – it’s about your ability to use, study, learn from, and improve the software. It’s not about the price tag.

The problem with the “free speech” label is that the phrase has its own very specific meaning and political overtones. As a result, people tend to focus on the ideas inherent in freedom of speech, dealing with software as a form of expression and focusing on issues like censorship. These are valid issues, but not the heart of what “free software” means.

Today I read a post on Groklaw describing it in terms of “free as in coffee” vs. “free as in liberty” – primarily because he didn’t like the association with beer – but I liked the use of liberty (edit: or just freedom if you want to keep the phrasing consistent) rather than speech, because it conveys the meaning without bringing in other issues.

(Ironically, the FSF page explaining the phrase links to a list of confusing words and phrases that are worth avoiding… that doesn’t include “free!” Update: These days it lists “for free,” “freely available” and “freeware”…but that still doesn’t solve the confusion of “free.”)

*In other languages, the meanings are more distinct. There’s no confusion between software libre and software gratis.

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