Marvellous news. It is often those in trouble who innovate (just look at EMI), but I really hope this works. Michael Dell runs Ubuntu at home, which must have been some help for the distro in being chosen.
Archive for the 'Linux' Category
As anyone who knows me will probably know, I’ve not run Windows for anything other than gaming, ever, virtually. I had a Windows laptop when i worked at the BBC, that i used only for Outlook. Before then I had a Windows desktop at work, but spent most of my time in xterms. Since then I’ve had Linux or Solaris desktops.
In that time desktop Linux has gone from being an unbelievable pain in the arse to being a pretty good experience. We run only Ubuntu desktops here at work, and it’s a very liberating experience. Free as in beer and works fantastically well for us.
It’s getting good enough now, that I think I’d recommend it for everyone in fact. If you are interested, there is [an excellent article](http://consumer.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTI5OCwxLCxoY29uc3VtZXI=) at HardOCP about one person’s experience of the transition. It’s not a simple matter of Good/Bad and the article goes into it in some depth.
Seriously, give it a shot. Don’t suck the corporate teat any more than you have to 
The scene: a gaol, somewhere in the mid-west. With apologies to Jim Dodge.
> I’m standing in a cell, when the cell block door opens and the Sergeant, fat, red and sweating enters dragging a screaming Microsoft user. He hauls him to the end of the line of cells and throws him into it. The Microsoft user’s name is Joe. The Sergeant’s name is Bill.
> Joe screams “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!” I hear the Sergeant kick him in the stomach. The Sergeant walks out, locking the cell behind him. He leaves the cell block.
> Silence. The other prisoners are quiet too, listening. We can hear Joe sobbing.
> Ten minutes later, Joe takes a huge breath and we hear him scream again “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”. This repeats once every ten minutes or so. “Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!”.
> After a few hours of this, the cell block door opens. The Sergeant walks in, tapping his blackjack on his thigh. He walks to Joe’s cell, and opens the door. We hear the sudden thud of the blackjack striking Joe’s head, and he hits the floor with a thump.
> “Too much noise. I’ll give you something to block up that mouth of yours, kid” says the Sergeant.
> “On your knees”.
> There’s another thump as he strikes Joe again.
> “That’s right, good. Now you know what to do.”
> We hear a moan and a gag from Joe. Everyone else in the block is silent, as we hear the panting of the Sergeant. Then, with a crescendo, it stops. Joe gags and pukes.
> “You better remember that, kid.”
> The sergeant slowly leaves the block, looking even more florid than before. We hear Joe gag and puke.
That’s what it’s like to be a Linux user right now, seeing all the rest of you being abused by your software vendors.
I see Microsoft, Apple and other users of big corporate manufacturers being slowly imprisoned by their own software. As more and more [DRM](ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRM) is added to the things we own, the less freedom we have from it.
This post isn’t about the dangers of DRM, or indeed why it’s so harmful. That much is obvious. This is a gaze into the crystal ball to see where this might go.
Microsoft are attempting perhaps the largest land grab in the history of entertainment and communication. What has happened so far with record sales is *nothing* compared to the prize of Internet Television (IPTV). That big box in the corner of your room is not long for this world in it’s current form. Microsoft want everyone to have a Microsoft television, running Microsoft Windows, and taking content mediated and managed by Microsoft.
To become both the monopoly supplier of IPTV and the [monopsony](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony) buyer of content from the TV and film companies, Microsoft need to conduct a major land grab right *now* to get their platform and their standards accepted. Selling it to their users is difficult, since there is no benefit to them. Selling it to the film and tv companies is easier, since right now it costs them little and has some significant temptations to them.
This answers the conundrum I posed [the other week](http://adju.st/2006/12/vista_drm.html) — why are Microsoft building such horrendous DRM into Vista? If they can get the content suppliers on side now, they have a real possibility of tying up the platform. But I don’t think they’ll succeed, and in the process they may ruin their business. And the reason they’ll fail is because of Linux.
Vista is going to be a nightmare when it rolls out, but right now Microsoft couldn’t give two hoots. It’s going to be slow unstable crap, because of all this DRM, but right now as far as they are concerned their users have *no choices*.
It would seem in fact as if Microsoft have this all sewn up. If they can provide a viable platform for IPTV that limits users right sufficiently that content producers can maximise their profits, what could stop them? After all, if you want your content, where else are you going to go?
RIght now, the answer would be the various P2P networks. They are cheap and easy, and you can get pretty much anything. These aren’t going to work for Vista users though, oh no. Anything with DRM will be unplayable on Vista, even if you can download it from these sites. So, you have to suck your content from the Microsoft pipe, or nothing.
Apple would be viable competition, but they are going down exactly the same road. They are basically happy with their computer market share, and Microsoft are willing to cede this to them. If Apple lost much more market share, in fact, Microsoft would probably once again fund them, just to make sure they weren’t legally a monopoly. Some weak competition is very valuable to them. I’d be willing to bet that Apple buy into the same DRM strategy as Microsoft, especially if Microsoft find it in their hearts to fund the development.
So, all you Windows users, if you want to play a movie without paying a fee for every view, or a fee for time shifting, or without the 5 minute rant about copyright theft at the beginning, what do you do? You run Linux, that’s what you do. You will shortly have no choice and this, I suspect, is going to be the greatest encouragement to the growth of Linux ever.
I can see some corporates buying this argument too. Vista is going to be buggy as hell, and I reckon it’ll take much longer to become stable than 2000 or XP needed. When corporate networks start failing, this might provide the final urge to a lot of companies to move to Linux on the desktop. The product is very nearly there now, and with a tech support team to roll it out, a Linux corporate desktop is a real option now.
The availability of the Linux desktop *on it’s own* is enough to cripple Microsoft’s strategy. If enough people run a Linux desktop, or soon a Linux TV, it defeats Microsoft’s strategy. As Firefox has shown, you don’t need a major market share to be a disruptive influence. Just 20% of people using non Microsoft/Apple software should be enough to stop the monopoly/monopsony strategy.
And where there is competition their lock-in strategy fails. In ten years when you are still running Windows, and you’ve got your Microsoft-powered TV, but your content isn’t priced per minute, or person watching, or whatever, then be thankful for those Linux users who kept the market open.
A [great post](http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/56) by Mark Shuttleworth, on how he thinks of Debian and it’s relationship with Ubuntu. I wish I was as coherent a writer - he manages to stretch the “altitude” analogy so far it nearly snaps, but not quite 
Where I think Shuttleworth is perhaps wrong is his belief that the bickering results purely from conflicting goals. Although debian-devel can be pretty shocking, the worst I have ever seen for vicious ad hominem attacks is the various [OpenBSD](http://www.openbsd.org) lists. [Theo de Raadt](http://www.theos.com/) is, unapologetically, a complete bastard on those lists, and will happily berate those who annoy him, and bystanders, pretty nastily.
Theo takes it too far, but he has a point in his unapologeticness, which he has explained sometimes. Quality is vital in an OS distribution, and a lot of the work is very difficult to check. The level of understanding you need to complete a piece of work is immense. Having seen what is required to do this properly, it’s amazing anyone does it for fun. To package a significant piece of software can take weeks or months of research, to completely understand the package. Then you have to understand all of the common use cases, and then you have to understand the whole packaging and distribution system, and the implications of all of the above combined.
There is so much involved, that often there is (after the research) only a single person in the world qualified to check the work - and that’s the person doing it. So, how do you, as an organisation, ensure the quality of the work?
You can have intense vetting procedures, of course, but these only take you so far. Even a quality individual can be careless sometimes. You can perform audits — but you probably aren’t qualified to do them. If you are paying people, or have contracts with them, you can threaten horrendous consequences if they fail to do the work well enough — but these are volunteer organisations.
The only way these organisations can enforce quality is culturally - by having a balance of *cultural* rewards and sanctions that encourage individual quality. At 11.30pm you’ve cut the 33rd version of this release and you could just push the button to release it - but no, you go through the manual checks just once more. You write just one more test case that’s been nagging at you, you do one more test release on some weirdass architecture, just to make absolutely sure it works.
Why? Well part of that, surely, has to be a fear of ridicule, of being found wanting. Nobody rewards you for doing the same good job day in day out, that’s just life, and personal commitment to quality, no matter how strong, only takes you so far.
I hope that Shuttleworth has a community strong enough to encourage that sort of quality even without the viciousness, but it’s possible that by removing the combativeness of the lists he is castrating some of what makes Debian so remarkably good.
For google’s sake - if you try to publish from blogger by sftp to an openssh server, make sure PasswordAuthentication is on in your sshd_config.
A client has a stroppy email admin who says Exchange can’t receive email for multiple domains. It can, but there’s not much we can do about the admin. So he asked me to set up a forward, with rewriting, on one domain to send all email to the other.
This means that if you send email to quux@foo.com it will be delivered to quux@bar.com. You also have to rewrite all the headers and the envelope, to ensure the receiving mailserver actually receives them (if it was happy receiving mail for foo.com you could just set the MX records to point to it yourself, after all).
There are lots of ways to do this, but I don’t really want a separate process (a la ‘vacation’) and I’d like the config to be neatly encapsulated to minimize the chance of me breaking it inadvertently.
So, for google’s sake, here’s the Exim config. First, in your rewrite section, add a rewrite rule:
*@foo.com $1@bar.com E
Then add a new router:
foo: verify = false domains = foo.com driver = redirect data = $local_part@bar.com no_more
And that’s it.
I found it very difficult to get wifi cards compatible with linux. I used to get Prism II chipset cards, which worked beautifully. The Prism chipset (formerly Orinoco) is ancient, and so drivers have been around for a long time.
Unfortunately most manufacturers who used to use Prism chips now use one of the more recent chipsets that are unsupported in Linux - generally because the manufacturers are unwilling to publish any details about how the chips work, presumably because they are very badly built.
So, I was pleased to discover that the Atheros chipset is supported with the dubiously named MadWifi drivers.
Although they’ve still not cut a proper release, the CVS version works very nicely, even on my still quite bleeding edge 64-bit Athlon system. Some issues around WEP, but with some experimentation it works very well with 802.11b and g. I haven’t tried the 802.11a support yet in Linux though.
The MadWifi drivers have a closed-source component which is a real pain - it means the drivers will never be accepted into the mainline kernel (although the closed-source HAL might be loadable somehow). The excuse given is pretty garbled, and it doesn’t really make sense.
Apparently:
- Some regulatory agencies wouldn’t like it
- Some unspecified naughty people might be naughty
What precisely these regulatory agencies would do if the source were published I am not sure (perhaps they’d switch off the Internet to stop people discovering this secret-that-must-not-be-known?). Similarly, exactly why I should care about some people who might do bad things is beyond me.
These are just the kinds of feeble excuses that have always been used for keeping things secret, and they are just as wrong.
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