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Green Warrior shot the food!
FSF Campaign on Secure/Restricted Boot
Mon, 17 Oct 2011 23:19:12 GMT
Another important campaign over at the Free Software Foundation, a new security feature that Microsoft are pushing for PCs marked as Windows 8 compatible could lock you out from installing any alternative OS.
Alternatives including GNU/Linux distros like Debian, Slackware or Ubuntu and really really alternative OS choices like Haiku, ReactOS and FreeDOS. All projects I have a special love for.
Implemented correctly this doesn't have to screw people over, so the FSF are rallying people to raise awareness of the issue and make the community voice heard by the hardware manufacturers.
Please take the time to have a read of the link below, and if you give a fuck, please sign.
Debian 6.0, Squeeze released
Thu, 10 Feb 2011 09:44:29 GMT
Over the weekend Debian 6.0, codename Squeeze was released.
Thanks and congratulations to Debian, next stop Wheezy.
Audio Production on Linux
Fri, 07 Aug 2009 13:50:06 GMT
Some info that could be handy to Ian and Olly, an interesting article on audio production on Ubuntu.
Linux Music Workflow: Switching from Mac OS X to Ubuntu with Kim Cascone
Doom (and other classics) on modern machines
Mon, 11 May 2009 06:17:08 GMT
This should be my last post for a while on computer games and is in part a thank you to Id software and 3D Realms, who release old versions of their game engines as Free software. This has allowed clever folks to port old DOS and Windows games to modern platforms.
If the rumours are true, 3D Realms recently went out of business, so we may never see Duke Nukem Forever, but thanks to the company's foresight, we will always be able to play the classic Duke Nukem 3D however future games machines evolve.
All these classic games have had their game engine code released to the public as Free software, communities of coders have sprung up around these releases and created new versions of the engines for new platforms and added new touches to improve the look and feel.
These are game engines, you'll still need a copy of either the original game, or often the shareware version to play. Shareware copies of the games are all over the place to download. Check the Id software and 3D Realms sites.
Here is the original Doom II for DOS running in DOSBox:
And here is the same game running in PrBoom, running natively on Linux and using OpenGL to create more realistic lighting and smooth out the textures.
You can grab PrBoom, the current front runner in the Doom engine world here:
Likewise you can find modernised versions of these games:
ioquake3 (Quake III)
Q2 LNX (Quake II)
Duke 3D (Duke Nukem 3D
WolfGL (Wolfenstein 3D)
Much of this is made possible by SDL, a Free and cross platform alternative to DirectX.
If you write software for DirectX, it's Windows only.
If you write for SDL you can recompile for Linux, Windows, Windows CE, BeOS, MacOS, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, QNX, AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, AIX, OSF/Tru64, RISC OS, SymbianOS, and OS/2
SDL code for Windows and BeOS also works with ReactOS and Haiku.
Slackware 12.2 Released
Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:21:46 GMT
An updated version of Slackware was released yesterday, Slackware 12.2.
The UNIX-y, Subgenius Linux Distro continues to do things the simple way.
Atheros HAL becomes Free
Sun, 30 Nov 2008 11:42:38 GMT
Good news for Linux WiFi users, the source code to the Atheros HAL has been released to a Free (GPL compatible) licence, the ICS Licence.
This means the hardware secrets are now in the public eye and we should get improved drivers for devices like the EeePC and David's Sony laptop soon.
Special for David, how to build a driver for your WiFi
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:15:49 GMT
David's laptop has WiFi based on a recent Atheros chip set, not supported out of the box on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), so building a driver from the source is required.
Make sure the default Atheros driver, that doesn't support this hardware, is disabled first. From the menus choose System > Administration > Hardware Drivers and untick the Atheros drivers there.
Download the latest source of the required driver, madwifi, here:
MadWifi subversion snapshot archive
Just find the latest version of madwifi-hal, download it, untar it and issue the commands make then sudo make install in the extracted directory. Reboot and it's done.
A better driver built into the kernel is coming soon, so you won't have to keep building your own driver for long.
Powered By Ubuntu Stickers
Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:20:16 GMT
Thanks to a tip on the Ubuntu UK mailing list for this one.
You can get a strip of four "Powered By Ubuntu" computer case stickers for free. Here in the UK they are available from The Linux Emporium in Birmingham.
The Linux Emporium is also a good place to get Linux compatible networking gear, which can be a problem with some suppliers as they don't specify which chips are used in their wireless hardware.
Conky Theme
Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:32:05 GMT
The fancy transparent system monitor dodah that has replaced a few old dockapps for me, Conky is itself an updated decedent of Torsmo.
I've recently updated my theme/config with more information and colours to match my other themes.
Remember to edit the conkyrc file to point to your own mail spool (or just) delete that line, it's currently set to /var/spool/mail/gav .
The volume detection requires two simple scripts, save these in your ~/bin or wherever you like to store scripts.
vol-now-mas
vol-now-pcm
Conky Theme
Thu, 16 Oct 2008 09:23:53 GMT
An updated confihg file for my favouries system monitor, Conky.
More WiFi information added, email checking, system temp and volume settings now displayed.
Also updated the look to fit in with my other system themes.
To use this theme, either download the file conkyrc and save it as .conkyrc in your home directory to use this exact setup, or open the file and copy the parts you like to your own conkyrc.
A Quarter Century of GNU
Tue, 02 Sep 2008 11:09:01 GMT
Thanks to RMS and the Free Software movement, GNU, the stuff that makes computers go, is 25 years old this month.
GNU software can be found in most modern Operating Systems. All Linux distros, Solaris and even MacOS X use GNU code.
To celebrate, Stephen Fry has recorded a dreadfully cheesy message to tell us all about GNU.
Maybe it would have been better to let Mr Fry write his own material?
Stephen Fry's Blog: Happy birthday to GNU
GNU.org: Stephen Fry — Happy birthday to GNU
Broadcom bcm4311 WiFi and Linux
Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:09:06 GMT
The Open Source driver now works well for me, NDISwrapper is no longer needed.
I switched from Debian Etch to Sid on my laptop a few weeks ago, struggled to get NDISwrapper working again and decided to give the Free driver another go, this had changed from the old and very poorly performing bcm43xx, to the new b43.
It's up to full speed for me now, something I could get only under NDISwrapper before, while crapping out less.
If you're using a 2.6.24 or later kernel it's well worth a try.
Midori, a WebKit based browser in GTK+
Fri, 23 May 2008 16:43:42 GMT
While it's still very much a work in progress, the Midori web browser is a great way to test pages for WebKit, that is Apple Safari, without having to go and find a Mac.
While still a bit crashy (that said I'm using the build in Ubuntu Hardy, not a current snapshot) it's very fast and looking good.
HTML Validator now working on Hardy
Thu, 22 May 2008 14:40:52 GMT
Another unbork for Ubuntu Hardy, this time getting the HTML Validator extension for Firefox working.
This was initially double borked in Hardy, once because of the move from Firefox 2 to a beta version of Firefox 3, then again by moving from libstdc++ 5 to libstdc++ 6.
After some fiddling, updating to the latest version from the extension's home page, then installing the following packages sorts out the problem:
sudo aptitude install libstdc++5 libxul-dev
Still two problems to sort out:
- Liferea, the feed reader spins up 100% of the spare CPU time at random.
- Can't receive files using bluetooth
Slackware 12.1 released
Sat, 03 May 2008 10:17:15 GMT
A new version of Slack is out now, Slackware 12.1.
I'm downloading now for a looksee.
slackware-12.1-install-dvd.torrent
I first tried out Slackware in 1999, loved it and stayed with it as my main OS until last year.
Currently I use Ubuntu on my laptop and Debian on the desktop, that doubles up as LAN file server and webserver.
On Slackware vs Debian
Slackware is cleaner and simpler to understand, but Debian has apt/aptitude and those huge repositories of packaged software.
Either way both distros are an excellent choice.
Unborking Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy
Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:25:45 GMT
Well, after a few days of finding things not working in Hardy, I've been and sorted a few out.
Hardy has been a real pain. It was temping to just say bollocks to it and install Debian, but I decided to push on and see if I could sort these problems out.
Broadcom WiFi was slow and unreliable
This was down to defaulting to the Open Source Broadcom driver, which is cripplingly slow and seemed to
just plain stop in the middle of transfers. Hopefully this will get better in future, but it's no use
to me at the moment.
Simple solution was to disable the Free driver, then reinstall NDISwrapper. Speeds climbed back from 60kB/s to 700kB/s on FTPs about the LAN. Much better.
Useful info on stopping the OSS driver and re-enabling NDISwrapper here:
NDISwrapper In Hardy Heron
MPlayer plug-in for Firefox 3
Well, after upgrading to Hardy, it didn't work. I tried disabling the totem plugins using the nice
new plugins interface in Firefox 3, via Tools > Add-ons then click Plugins, but no luck.
The new hiding place for mozilla plugins on Hardy is /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/plugins so I backed up and removed the Totem plugins and restarted Firefox, worked like magic.
Open a terminal and enter these commands:
$ cd /usr/lib/xulrunner-addons/ $ sudo mkdir plugins-disabled $ sudo mv plugins/libtotem-* plugins-disabled/
Running anything with sudo will ask for your password the first time, this is normal, don't worry about it.
Restart Firefox and all is well.
Liferea uses up all available CPU time
Well, still not found a satisfactory fix for this one. Restarting the app seems to fix it. It only goes
ape on startup and then not every time.
If it goes loopy on startup, shut it down and restart it.
Updated to Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy"
Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:36 GMT
Well, Saturday I had some clear headed time and decided to try to update my laptop from Gusty to Hardy. For anyone not familiar with the Ubuntu Linux version scheme, it's alphabetical, so version G to H. The numbers are the release date, 8 for 2008 and 04 for April.
The update was fairly smooth, it knocked out my WiFi card and I had to download a new driver, which was quick and painless to fix.
Also it's borked my feed reader, Liferea, which now spins away using over 90% of the CPU time. A pain in the arse.
I've not found any great new features yet, so it's not much in the way of an upgrade. The good feature of this release is it's listed for Long Term Support. So I should be able to go for quite some time now with regular security updates and no need to upgrade the whole distro.
Also they swapped the stable Firefox 2 for a beta version of Firefox 3. This seems like a bad idea to ship beta software as one of the core apps. Hopefully this will be updated to a final version as soon as one becomes available.
A strange combination of this new browser and some lib changes to Hardy (Debian has this also) means that my favourite HTML Validator extension no longer works, which is a real pain in the arse.
So two strikes down for Hardy, I've lost two of my most commonly used tools and gained nothing much in return.
My advice is to wait until they shake the last few bugs out of Hardy before you upgrade.
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