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According to a Reuters scoop, Oracle wants to deliver a "full stack", i.e. an operating system and the applications in a buldle, just like Microsoft. Linux is a natural choice for an Oracle database grid/cluster/whatever platform. That would make a lot of sense, why not? The story mentions that Oracle is thinking about buying Novell, which would mean that new Oracle systems would be built on the SUSE Enterprise Server.

Oh well, the news, especially business news is full of stories like this. Perhaps I should just go and read some real news now.

Update: Oracle has confirmed the OS plans.

WordPress.com had a long, unscheduled downtime yesterday, during which users could not view blogs, nor post anything. I was able to document my valuable thoughts with no interruption because of Drivel, the wonderful offline blogging tool for GNOME. So this morning, i simply post yesterday’s batch of drivel for your drooling pleasure.

People at work tossed a little Fujitsu laptop to me for some reason. It had Windows XP but I promptly replaced it with a real operating system and now it runs Ubuntu Dapper. I named it oskar, after the little hero in Grass’s The Tin Drum. Its internal network card is broken but I can replace it with a little USB LAN dongle (tested under Windows and it worked). The installation was totally uneventful, everything Just Works as advertised.

Samba printing, however, is currently broken. Because there is a Windows box on my home network, I use Samba for all networking. Samba on my Dapper server works well and the Windows box can print to it, but the Dapper laptop could not. On the Ubuntu Forums, other people seemed to be having problems with printing from Dapper to Windows servers, so i went on to examine relevant bug reports on Dapper. Looks like the problem has appeared quite recently (sometime around April 12th), and is on the client side. Sure enough reverting the smbspool binary to an older version indeed fixed the problem. Hopefully we’ll soon see this bug fixed and smbclient updated!

Otherwise, Dapper currently works very well, and the new GNOME is awesome.

Warning: Easter Egg spoilers ahead!

Celebrating Easter, Jonathan has gone egg hunting. He first exposes a known liar, aptitude. We all know of APT’s Super Cow Powers because they’re documented (type “apt-get” with no arguments and hit ENTER), but aptitude keeps its powers hidden. The key to finding aptitude’s Super Cow Powers is endurance and liberal use of the -v switch.

Firefox’s secret message from the Book of Mozilla is well known as well, but the really great OpenOffice.org Easter Egg that Jonathan unveils was news to me. Of course, Jonathan sees such an elaborate Easter Egg as “proof that OpenOffice.org is bloated”. Not that we would need further proof of that! :) I didn’t know about the funny release names in the Ubuntu kernel documentation either.

Here are a couple of GNOME eggs I’m aware of. Open the “Run” dialog (press alt+F2). Type “gegls from outer space” as the command. You get to play a game that “will change the way you think of your desktop forever.” It features GEGLs (Genetically Engineered Goat, Large). GEGL is a mythical creature in GIMP and GNOME lore, and the unofficial secret logo of the GNOME project.

The other GNOME egg i know about features Wanda, the fortune telling fish from the Fish Applet. Type “free the fish” into the Run dialog and Wanda will swim around your desktop occasionally. (You can accomplish the same thing by hitting the ‘f’ key three times after opening the “About” box of a panel.) If you click it with your mouse, it will flee, only to return later. You cannot kill this process because it’s hidden in the gnome-panel process (or one of its children – killiing gnome-panel does help).

Of course, Easter Eggs in free software have given rise to some complaints as well. An OpenOffice.org user argues that a piece of free software should work as advertised and only in that manner. There are bug reports demanding the removal of Easter Eggs from OO.o, or at least an easy method for sysadmins to disable them. Issue 61685 has extensively discursive comments for and against eggs.

In his ZDNet blog, Richard Stiennon shows maps of system calls that occur when a Web server serves a single HTML page containing a single image. He cites the thread chaos on the Windows server as proof of the operating system’s insecurity. It’s true that complicated systems offer more opportunities for crackers to utilize buffer overflow vulnerabilities compared to simpler ones. Although the images don’t really show just Windows and Linux systems but combinations of LInux/Apache and Windows/IIS, the sheer visual difference in the system call maps is stunning.

EDIT July 3, 2006
I lost comments in migration from wordpress to dotclear, so I’m reproducing the author’s comment here:

I minor symantec correction Juha. These images are not "proof" they are an explanation of why Windows is harder to secure than the open source solutions. It is way more complicated therefore much harder to QA and avoid vulnerabilities.
Thanks for noticing!

My reply:

Yes you’re right Richard, all you really claim about these images in your blog is that one system is way more complex than the other, and therefore harder to QA.

New GNOME versions are always first introduced to the development versions of Ubuntu (well, Foresight gives them a run for their money), so 2.14 has been in Dapper since almost day one. The GNOME project tends to release a point release pretty soon after a major release, to fix obvious bugs and stabilize the desktop for production use. I can now pronounce my GNOME deskop not only “awesome”, but also very very stable. This is clearly the best GNOME ever. I haven’t been this happy about GNOME since 1.4 or so (not that I would be very happy with 1.4 today :)

This is also a major step feature-wise: the searchable GNOME. I can have even less widgets, dangles, bells, whistles, and “stuff” on my desktop because I can very intuitively find anything without the interface getting in the way too much. Well, that’s not entirely true, but MORE true than ever before on any desktop I’ve tried. Under the hood, the GNOME hackers have really put a lot of work into making GNOME less resource hungry, so that maybe I don’t have to buy another set of hardware just because I have a new version of the software. It’s the other way around! Try telling that to Microsoft.

I couldn’t agree more with koke. Apparently Mexico is celebrating their youngest killer. Bullfighting might be an established tradition in some countries, but that doesn’t make it right. I find praising 9 year old children for their kills particularly repulsive.

For years, when newbies asked me which graphics card they should get when building a Linux box, the answer was easy. Unless you need bleeding-edge 3D support for, say, playing Doom 3, buy a Matrox card. I was always very happy with my Millenium G550 card’s 2D performance, which is what really counts on a serious workstation, and I always got enough DRI support to play simple 3D games and graphics hacks. Matrox used to support new versions of X with their binary drivers, which were incorporated into XFree and X.org sources pretty soon afterwards.

Now that Ubuntu Dapper uses the new X.org 7.0, i naturally wanted to play with cool and useful effects that the bleeding-edge XGL extension supports, so I needed DRI. Direct renedering was apparently not supported with the free mga drivers in X.org, so I readed for the Matrox website for drivers. Turns out Matrox had no driver for X.org later than version 6.8.1, and judging from the responses by Matrox representatives on their support forums, we shoudln’t even expect them any time soon. Perhaps the Matrox hackers have assumed the stagnated state of mind of the old XFree team and got scared of the brand new modular X that the 7.0 release represents, or perhaps the company policy has changed, I don’t know. No explanation there, beyond “no ETA at this point” for the drivers. Daunted, I went on to do other stuff.

This morning I returned to the support forums, only to find that the Linux forum was locked, no new posts could be submitted. Apparently Matrox had grown weary of the Rants of the Linux users (who had been spoiled with quick delivery of drivers in the past), and decided to simply shut off this channel of critique. Daunted, and this time very pissed too, I turned to Google for a last search for a solution.

Lo, Google directed me to Arch Linux Wiki, where somebody had indeed come up with a fix involving a simple change in the xorg.conf file and the free mga driver in X.org. I quickly applied the fix (edit xorg.conf, add

Option “OldDmaInit” “true”

to your “Device section), tested and saw that it was good.

So now I have DRI, but I have no graphics chip maker to recommend to newbies. I never guessed Matrox could afford to lose the strong support they’ve had from Linux/X users over the years now that they’re losing the game to NVidia and ATI already. Now all I can say is, ATI is the worst one because their proprietary drivers are constantly broken. Matrox is close to the bottom, since they have no binary drivers at all, and we don’t know how much they are interested in giving the X community’s free drivers. NVidia has very good proprietary drivers for linux in case you don’t mind using them.

One of the best things about Linux has been that you almost never needed to hunt down and install drivers for your hardware, as Windows users are accustomed to do. If things continue to decline, we will always need to find the correct drivers (non-free drivers no less!) to get decent graphics support.

Woe is me. Please tell me I’m wrong and Matrox cards will work out of the box like they used to Real Soon.

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