linux

Putting fuel in my truck was the last place I expected to get into a confrontation.

Especially concerning Free Open Source Software. I mean, come on...

It was one of "those vans".

You know, the brightly colored ones that promises to propel a computer tech or two as it goes down the road? The one that pulls up in front of houses with people who have broken their computers?

...

I could now see through the windshield of the van at the pump and there was another person sitting in the passenger seat...a person I had not seen earlier. The guy I talked to was behind the steering wheel and he rotated between jabbing his finger in my direction and then turning his head sharply back toward the other person in the van as he spoke. It did not seem to be a tranquil conversation. As I came within ten steps of my Rodeo, the driver got out of his van and approached me.

It wasn't a friendly approach.

We made contact just under the edge of the canopy. I say "we" made contact...the initial contact was his right index finger stabbing into my chest.

"It's _____ ________ hippy freaks like you that are costing us our jobs. You got any idea how many people are getting pink slips because of your b_________? Every time you put that ____ on someone's computer, some guy trying to feed his family has to go home and tell his wife that he lost his job. How about I snatch that silly little ponytail and give you a tour of the parking lot?"

The veins in his temples were at critical mass and he physically spit as he screamed at me in front of his van. This is where the narrative is going to stop, and it's going to stop for two reasons. First, there's no good way to tell the rest of the story. Second, it's because that's when any verbal communication between him and I stopped. He made first hostile contact and I didn't do anything but react. In the end it was no big deal...but of the two of us...

I am the only one of the two that did not involuntarily leave his feet that day.

Besides, that "silly little ponytail" represents all the hair I have left. Just protectin' the real estate.

The guy in the passenger seat came streaking out of the van with a laptop in one hand and a cell phone in the other. A small crowd had semi-gathered to watch the show but it was over as quickly as it began.

As I spoke with the other guy, it turned out that he was the crew chief of that team and a salaried member of that company's Field Management. The driver had used the truck laptop to go to our website and blog. It didn't take him long to figure out I am an Open Source/Linux Advocate. From talking with the supervisor, I found out that their store location had taken a beating from November of last year until the present. "Memos" had been circulated amongst the management teams, giving advice and training on how best to deal with the "Open Source Threat."

And are you curious as to the machine that is creaming their laptop AND desktop sales?

The Dell Mini 9. It's killin' 'em.

Also I didn't know, the fewer machines they sell with Windows, the fewer positions in the field they can justify. And he said it so I didn't have to.

"We schedule a technician visit for six months in the future with every home visit. Both they and we know their registries and computers will be messed up again by then."

That I did not know.

So what I learned is that "Microsoft Technicians" from this company actually help the particular store project sales and profit in six month blocks, for their "call-out" business that is.

Interesting.

That lead me to think about an entire nation of computer techs. Do they "project" their profits based on the duality between the customer's computer ignorance and the product's inherent insecurity and instability? Do they project their frustration and anger at self-serve gas stations? Geez...how many of them do you imagine there are?

I use suPHP for security reasons where applicable. Today, I ran into a situation where my Linux distro's package manager installed a php script, but did so in /usr/share/something, which is fine because a quick symlink of ln -s /usr/share/something /home/sitenamedotcom/web/something took care of the issue. (Yes, I keep my sites in /home/sitenamedotcom.) But this won't work at all since this is /usr/share/anything is way outside the docroot that suPHP is configured with.

But wait, suPHP supports multiple docroots as of the December 2008 suPHP 0.7.0 release, awesome. But none of that matters since my distro doesn't have this version. Sure, they will soon, since they're aware of the issue, but given I tend to jump from their long term support releases which come out every two years (as to avoid getting sucked into a six month cycle where it feels like all I do is update operating systems and spend time fixing the configuration that broke) it looks like I'm stuck without this for about 18 months.

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand why things are done the way they are. But switching to a packaged program as opposed to subscribing to yet another security list and keeping things up to date myself was supposed to make my life easier. Sigh.

Oh and if you're going to go ahead with this anyhow, the default suPHP configuration has check_vhost_docroot set to true. You'll need to set that to false or your error.log will be littered with lots of foo is not in document root of Vhost of bar errors.

PEOPLE encountering Ubuntu for the first time will find it very similar to Windows. The operating system has a slick graphical interface, familiar menus and all the common desktop software: a Web browser, an e-mail program, instant-messaging software and a free suite of programs for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

While relatively easy to use for the technologically savvy, Ubuntu -- and all other versions of Linux -- can challenge the average user. Linux cannot run many applications created for Windows, including some of the most popular games and tax software, for example. And updates to Linux can send ripples of problems through the system, causing something as basic as a computer's display or sound system to malfunction.

And computer idiots running Windows have no problems, no flaky hardware drivers, no BSODs, no viruses, trojans or spyware and a clean format fixes everything right away? I reformat at least a dozen computers a year that run Windows and every time I need to deal with pain in the neck drivers that I have to hunt for.

In many ways, OpenMoko's platform strategy mirrors the diversity of the Linux desktop software ecosystem. There are a multitude of parallel options with many layers and varying degrees of overlap. This provides end users with an enormous amount of flexibility, but it also creates a lot of complexity. The choices are difficult to navigate, and the lack of a cohesive direction contributes to fragmentation and redundancy. OpenMoko's potential for success will be heavily predicated on the ability to turn choice and diversity into an asset rather than an impediment.

Openmoko, developer of the first open mobile computing platform today announced that on Friday, July 4, it will open the online store for purchase of the Openmoko Neo FreeRunner, a mobile device that the company says will help to enable ubiquitous computing for the 21st century. Shipping to customers will commence on July 7, 2008.

The Openmoko Neo FreeRunner utilizes GNU/Linux and comes with core software for dialing, SMS and recording contacts. Openmoko will supplement these features with periodic downloads beginning with a software suite that takes full advantage of the phone's hardware platform. The new software, debuting at Linux World in August, will provide exciting new location based applications.

Several people have noticed that Linux has a bad tendency of killing floppy drives. These failures remained completely mysterious, until somebody noticed that they were due to huge layers of dust accumulating in the floppy drives. This cannot happen under Messy Dos, because this excuse for an operating system is so unstable that it crashes roughly every 20 minutes (actually less if you are running Windows). When rebooting, the BIOS seeks the drive, and by doing this, it shakes the dust out of the drive mechanism. CWdiskseekd simulates this effect by seeking the drive periodically. If it is called as CWdiskseek, the drive is seeked only once.

You might be surprised to learn that Microsoft licenses are nearly twice as expensive in Brazil in absolute terms. I imagine Microsoft charges about the same and Brazil's brutal tax burden makes up the rest (the taxes are built into the price). But the interesting result is the relative price of licenses in each society, captured as % of GNI per capita. As a proportion of national incomes, business licenses are nineteen times more expensive to Brazilian society and home licenses are fifteen times more expensive. While GNI per capita is not a perfect figure, it reflects the incomes people make, how much they spend to live, and how much they pay in taxes. It is a crucial number when it comes to public policy; it's not hard to understand why rational policies must dodge licensing costs when possible. If there's any hope of widespread computer access, then surely we can't expect people to spend 7.8% of their annual income on Microsoft software licenses alone. The burden on small businesses is also prohibitive. This order-of-magnitude difference is a fundamental problem that can't be solved by piecemeal license giveaways. Suppose Microsoft gave out Windows and Office wholesale to all schools. Then what happens if those kids need a computer at home or in their parents' business? License costs are simply out of whack with respect to most of society. Using Linux in public schools, rarely attended by richer kids, seems inescapable.

Asus has an Eee with a 9" screen running at 1024x600, which was the only thing stopping me from getting one and running either Ubuntu and xfce or maybe even OS x.

But as it turns out, even though some are being unboxed now, the Eee launches on May 12 and the Atom version is rumored to launch in June. I'm too damn impatient.

But there's been another competitor, HP's Mini-Note 2133, and reviews love it. Did I mention is has a 1280x768 screen? And is only slightly larger?

How slightly? I made papercraft versions of each machine given their dimensions so I could look at them next to each other and found the small difference in volume to not matter. Little did I know, someone already took pictures of the Eee and Mini-note side by side.

Unboxings of the Mini-note are popping up, the only other information I've seen on this now-shipping machine is one very unhappy user.

Given the Mini-note's larger resolution display and the fact that it is available now, I'm probably going to snatch that up. Why Asus would go with a lower resolution screen is beyond me.

The script checks out Drupal, sets up a database and settings.php, adds a single record for the admin user with a preset password (admin/potrzebie) and generates some content using Jeff Eaton's patched generate-content.php for devel.module.

The script must be edited for a couple of important values before being run. A future version will probably be smart and check.

Anyway, execute it from the command line as php -e install-drupal.php

http://turmoil.logrus.com/files/test-installer.tar.gz

Next steps:
Installing a patch file.
Installing simpletest.
Running a very simple test.
Extracting patches from project issues.
Auto posting followups to project module.

After that:
Xen! If Boris says it, I'm Right There.

There's also some talk of virtualization in there. I think it is a great idea.

I'm doing something similar locally because I want to get into the swing of participating in the Drupal community after spending so many years on the sidelines. I'm sick of OS X and have a virtualized Linux instance and now I'm looking to automate by way of a shell script that installs Drupal (with the option of specifying versions), installs whatever modules are needed (in case I want to work on a contrib patch), applies the patch and generates some content. After that, I'd play with the site, make sure it worked as it should and then I'd be done. In the event I had to modify anything, a second script to generate an updated patch would be called. Afterwhich, I'd run another script to run a cleanup.

I should even throw in the simpletest things that are mentioned above.

I've given up on trying to get a MAMP stack on my local Mac Pro. As beefy as machine as it is, it's not Linux. First, apache didn't work out of the box on OS X. Then, while working on image module, I found out that OS X's PHP doesn't come with GD. (I won't even mention my issues with ruby.)

So I'm going to spend more money on proprietary software (VirtualBox didn't work), most likely VMWare's Fusion so I can run a virtualized instance (or three) of Linux locally. It will take less time, behave the way I expect it to and be a breeze to update, thanks to apt.