mark mazurek

This laptop runs Fedora Rawhide. Since I have to have Flash, I have to run a 32-bit Firefox. Which works great, our compatibility is excellent, except that we still do not ship XULrunner, and thus I have to run 32-bit Liferea too. This means that every time I run “yum update”, it fails because it attempts to install a 64-bit Liferea and since that does not replace the 32-bit Liferea, the transaction check finds file conflicts. This is a good thing, actually, because I would hate to de-tangle the result if yum succeeded. The standard procedure which I developed was to upgrade firefox and liferea by hand (with curl(1) and rpm(1)), then run “yum update”.

Recently though (a couple of weeks or so), someone made libgnomeui to depend on yelp (what for?!), and this threw a wrench in the works. If I attempt to switch to a 32-bit yelp, it pulls tons of stuff from the 32-bit side of the house. It’s doable, but upgrading the whole hodge-podge manually upon every rebuild gets old real quick. For now, I just do “rpm -e –nodeps yelp” and hope that SWFdec brings a relief.

Needless to say, it’s all Adobe’s fault for not providing a 64-bit Flash plugin. To be sure, I need Java plugin for remote console access, and gcjwebplugin only handles IBM Bladecenter, but not HP iLO (never tried Sun’s ILO, because it appeared after I switched from gcjwebplugin to 32-bit JRE). It’s not bug-for-bug compatible with Sun’s implementation. But this is a minor problem, and Sun did the right thing by open-sourcing JDK, so I don’t hate them.

It was quite interesting to see how Ted of Phalleo. He is right of course, this odd contraption is not very useful in its ostensibly target market. Since it cannot be the success Palm wants it to be, it is destined to fail. Read what Christiansen wrote about Apple and Newton, you can see the writing on the wall.

But when I was impressed by it, I meant something different. Suppose for a moment that Palm delivers on open documentation. Then, Foleo can become a useful ARM based platform for our times, replacing Netwinder (which is as dead as Amiga). Random folks keep trying to revive Fedora on ARM… And what good does it do if you cannot run your packages on anything? But now it’s different.

To summarize, a retarded pseudo-laptop is a non-event for suit users. They’d think the same about OLPC XO if it were available commercially. But as far as Free Software is concerned, it’s great. Or it would be, if Palm opened it.

While Palm is geting their act together, I’m thinking if it’s ok to run a swap in jffs2. The built-in flash is just big enough to create /boot and place /boot/SWAP into it, with the rest of the distro by necessity residing on SD card. Hmm.

I just ran across another to Linus’ talk today. For some reason that presentation irritates me. I already know that and I knew it long before . So, nothing new here. And on top of that, Linus is just awful and takes an hour to transmit 10 minutes of knowledge.

The best git presentation that I ever attended was jejb’s talk at in 2007. No, I do not think I was hypnotized by the bow-tie. He explained a few “mindset” things about git which were not obvious from the docs, especially about the way merge happens. Someone filmed the talk, but I don’t see a clip online anywhere.

Dan Berrange, the virtual framebuffer guy, gets . Through a tunnel, of course. I had the same setup for years, first with HE’s experimental tunnel, and later with BTexact (HE was glorious. It was near and fast… when it worked). The only question is “why”? After the demise of lkml.org’s IPv6 connection a year or two ago, the most travelled IPv6 website in the world, which does not belong to a peddler of IPv6, is . But it is also available over IPv4, so where is the need? Dan explains it thus:

One of the great things about being rid of NAT is that I can directly SSH into any machine at home from outside my network - no need for VPNs, or special reverse proxy rules through the NAT gateway.

That would be awesome if any other place aside from my home LAN had IPv6, like rdu.redhat.com perhaps.

The Palm’s non-laptop with suggestive name looks very good indeed. The booth people sworn that the “absolutely/really/totally full” source is coming (except some userland parts which I do not care about, like “cellphone pim” (witw is a pim anyway — seems like some kind of file synchronization plug-in)). They could not assure me that the SD controller driver is coming specifically, but it “should be there too”. The blasted nipple irritates, but oh well. If nothing unexpectedly bad happens, I’ll be getting one by December 25th.

BTW, I saw the Intel’s Classmate PC. It’s even worse in person than I thought. It’s thick, and it has a fan. Please tell me it was some kind of joke. This would normally be a place where I rant about XO not being available in commercial channel, but, god willing, Palm to the rescue. Certainly, XO’s display is far superior to Faleo’s, but the latter at least allows me to retire my 486 laptop (my NEC Versa V/75 has 3 hour battery life with Fedora Core 3 and is fanless). I am tired of 640×480 display and 8 bit graphics, I really am. I can live without the outdoor-compatible display if that’s what it takes to obtain a fanless laptop at last.

The oddest exhibit was Rackable Systems Concentro(tm) Modular Data Center, which comes in “secure, nondescript, weather-tight ISO shipping container”.

Polywell sells nice fanless PCs not only to OEMs, yay. But they forgot to print on their collateral. Heh.

MKit from seems like an ideal platform for an Internet Radio receiver, which I wanted to build a couple of years ago. But it’s still pricey, and the Internet Radio in America is being killed by RIAA, so I pass. Thank you Hillary Rosen, you just saved me $500.

A company called Tresys sells consulting for SELinux. This might be a sign that SELinux is a complex piece of code… Powerful, too. But complex.

VirtualLogix is yet another proprietary virtualization solution. They seem to prey on confusion in minds of developers at least in part. I captured their leaflet which says, “Isolate proprietary IP from open source GPL requirements”. Should not it be obvious to everyone that the concept of derived works and the virtualization are orthogonal?

From the Qlogics booth I snatched a leaflet for a 4 Gbit Fibre Channel card with PCI-X 2.0 266MHz DDR interface. First, the FC. People still use that stuff? And second, PCI-X with double-clocked data. I thought everyone went to PCIe now, but I guess not?

Almost forgot, I saw an OpenMoko phone. As a cellular network technology, CDMA is fundamentally “better” than GSM (e.g. better sound, less drops, etc.) But it became clear to me that its advantages are moot now, because CDMA providers a) settled on to the exploitive, anti-consumer service model and b) have the power to enforce it (I want to download pictures taken with my phone.). With GSM, only (a) is true in America, but OpenMoko allows users to take the control back. Verizon can suck it now. Anyway, maybe it’s a rant for another blog post. Now I just wish Harald didn’t overwork himself…