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Those are choices!

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: June 28, 2007 at 11:30 am

Sorry for the double post, but low and behold this just came across Akregator.

With the recent news of several Linux vendors entering into partnership agreements with Microsoft (Novell, Linspire, Xandros), there has been much debate recently about two factions of Linux forming. Saying that Linux is going to be torn in two, makes for good press and lively debates, but this is certainly nothing new for Linux. There are far more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs RPM, KDE vs GNOME, Distro A vs Distro B, and so on. These divisions are quite material, and dilute significant energy and efforts across competing standards. However, we accept this as the price we pay for freedom of choice.

Note theThere are for more material splits today in the Linux world, such as Debian vs RPM, KDE vs GNOME, Distro A vs Distro B, and so on. THOSE ARE CHOICES, NOT SPLITS!.

You have made your bed, lie in it. Don’t sit here and try to make excuses now and try and point the finger at other distributions. You talk about thisMoral High Ground that some distributions are standing upon and then claim that some of these same distributions also link to tools that allowillegal installation of codecs and drivers. Bah humbug! I am willing to bet you are speaking of Automatix, in which not many developers I know like it, use it, advocate it, support it, and the list goes on. I know that Ubuntu, Debian, and Red Hat don’t link to it at all, and if there was a moral high ground, these 3 are standing proudly on top of it.

Quit defending you decision, or trying to, and then spewing opinions and not facts about the situation. You said you are fine with us disagreeing with your deal, yet you defend it every chance you get.

NOTE 1:I do understand there is a demand for the proprietary codecs and drivers, however I don’t feel we should sign a deal with the devil in order to provide them. And what does signing a deal with Microsoft have to do with proprietary codecs and drivers? Microsoft doesn’t create any of these items that are in demand.

NOTE 2:GPLv3 to be released in 24 hours!

Posted in Linux | 11 Comments

spyGoogle wareDesktop

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: June 28, 2007 at 10:39 am

First, I will start off with some praises. Google Desktop “LOOKS” promising, it does index quite fast, very small CPU footprint when running.

Now, it is time I let you have it a little. And if you do happen upon this post, don’t email me or comment with excuses. Excuses and opinions are like assholes, everybody has one.

First off you admit that this new release contains “some” of the features that the first release for Windows did. Seems kind of odd that you would releases something that isn’t even as feature rich as your first Windows release, but hey, you did release one, so I am going to somewhat give you the benefit of the doubt.

Secondly, where is the source? You claim that you support open source and preach it, yes you Chris, yet I don’t see the source. I even addeddeb-src to mysources.list hoping there was a chance I could see your source package. Nope, 404 baby! OK, I can give you that one, so hey, let me check your link to the Google code page, and look for the source there. Nope, not there, but oddly enough you mirror real free software and open source packages. GCC and OpenSSL to name a couple. Granted some people don’t care to see the source, but then again there are some who do, me being one of them.

Thirdly, what the hell are you thinking with your freakin’ menu setup? Who told you that we want Google Desktop as a top level menu? One word, oh should I say link? FREEDESKTOP.ORG! And if your Debian packagers at Google were as good as I have heard, they would know about menus.

Fourthly, a man page would be nice, but hey who uses the command line anyways?

Fifthly, I understand why no source now. I click on preferences and instead of popping up a local preference dialog, I am taken to a ~~google.com web page~~ webpage that looks like google.com for my preferences. And look at that, there is my directory structure listed smack dab at the top. And also when I set preferences or index, tcp ports are opened to google.com. So, that makes me wonder. No source code, preferences are web based, leading me to believe that a) you are doing more snooping than you should be, or b) refer to a.

So Google, are you the first Spy Ware application for Linux? I think you are! Now get off my damn system and shoo fly!

Linux users around the world that may not know, but Linux already has what Google is attempting, and guess what? It is free and open. I am talking about Beagle and Strigi. Beagle is the prettiest, and Strigi is the fastest. Both are available in the Ubuntu repositories, and more than likely, in every distributions repositories.

UPDATE: I apologize for booging the“Fithly”. I stated I was taken to a google.com webpage when I wasn’t. What I meant to say was that setting preferences and even indexing,netstat -a shows google.com tcp connections. I have added and edited the correctness into the post above.

Posted in Personal | 36 Comments

IPv6 and Python question

By Richard A. Johnson on Published: June 27, 2007 at 12:26 pm

OK my lazywebbers with IPv6 and Python experience, this goes out to you!

I am creating an application right now, with Python of course, and I need to set an environment variable to be always on when a user logs in. I have messed with theos.environ and theos.putenv and what not, but it doesn’t work permanently. This application doesn’t do anything more than a few tests and then sets the environment variable if the tests return true. Is there an easy way to write to~/.bashrc or~/.bash_profile to enable the variable, and then later on if the user wants they can disable the variable which would either remove the variable all together or would set it to False?

Another question I have is with IPv6. Is there an easy way to test and see if your network is an IPv6 network or an IPv4 network? Right now I am grepping/var/log/syslog for ‘no IPv6 router present’ and printing the ‘no’. If it is ‘no’ then the network is IPv4, and if it returns 0, then it is an IPv6 network. This is rather hackish I feel, but it does work. Just wondering if there is a better method to do this simple task.

Thanks everyone!