Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

When installing a Linux computer, this is a question I’ve been asked/asked myself many times, and it shall keep on being asked because things are not static and newer operating systems need more and more room as the basic software collection that you expect to get out of the box gets larger.

And the answer? Well – it depends 🙂 Specifically here I’m going to tackle the issue of desktop installs (i.e. the workstation for a single user), and specifically for Fedora – though it shouldn’t be much different for other operating systems in the same class – such as Ubuntu or SuSE.

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המתכון הנ”ל מאוד פשוט אבל מאוד טעים, בעיקר עם אתם מהאנשים שאוהבים הרבה שום – אני בהחלט בקבוצה הזאת 🙂

הרעיון הוא ששיני השום מתבשלות בתנור ונמסות לתוך העוף וזה נותן לכל העוף טעם של שום – המממממ…

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As reported on Reuters and Techcrunch, Microsoft is claiming that the sale of bankrupt Nortel’s 6,000 patents to Google (or any other successful bidder) is unfair under the current sale terms that allow the buyer to not carry current licenses to the patents.

Microsoft is understandably concerned, as they currently hold a “perpetual, royalty-free” license to all patents (which means that if the buyer doesn’t get to re-license with existing license holders, then they won’t get any more money from Microsoft on these patents), but what I’m ranting about is not their legitimate concern, but their attempt to color this as “unfair” – quips Techcrunch:

Microsoft says that’s unfair. And while they don’t specifically mention Google, it seems pretty clear who they’re thinking about when they write that a termination of existing licensing agreements “would result in considerable disruption in the development and enhancement of various existing technologies and give the prospective purchaser an unfair competitive advantage”.

This may be unfair, but Microsoft has done this exact same thing in the past, including the very near past where immediately after buying Skype, and just a few days after Microsoft promised that Skype will continue to be offered on non-Microsoft platforms, the “Skype for Asterisk” product was terminated disallowing Digium to sell any more Skype integration module for their successful (and open source) VoIP solution¹.

Obviously this is a move perpetrated to allow Microsoft’s competing VoIP product (Lync) an unfair competitive advantage by offering features that Digium can no longer offer – not because of technical issues but because Microsoft will not allow it.

Taking that into account, Microsoft claiming the sale of this patents to Google is unfair is just the pot calling the  kettle black.

Related articles

• Microsoft wants guarantees if Google buys Nortel patents (zdnet.com)
• Apple gets antitrust OK for Nortel patents bid (news.cnet.com)
• Google’s $900 mln Nortel patent bid OK’d: Report (marketwatch.com)

1. I know that technically they did not stop supporting the module – just not allowing any new sales, but they also put a deadline to stop supporting the Skype-Asterisk integration module: it will not work past July 2013. Cutting this any sooner would have netted Microsoft/Skype a serious law suite so obviously they did the worst they could get away with [↩]

Lets face it – Kontact is a nice application but its not really a contender if you want integration with your corporate address book and calendar in your PIM application¹ and Evolution is the only solution for the feature set one would expect from a corporate friendly PIM solution.

Evolution works great when running under GNOME, but if you hate GNOME 3 as much as I do², then you are likely to try to run Evolution under a recent KDE 4. And then problems start mounting – there’s the file dialogs which look completely different and don’t inter-operate with KDE’s virtual file system layer (KIO), but the most annoying problem is saving the passwords for your email, address book and calendar services.

Evolution relies on GNOME’s keyring service to store passwords for remote services, and that service is not running when you start KDE. Without the keyring, Evolution will keep asking you for passwords to all your email services when you start up, and for all your address book services when you try to compose an email. Which wouldn’t have been that bad if not for the fact that before popping up the password dialog, Evolution spends minutes (!!) trying to contact the GNOME keyring service. Only after being frozen for a couple of minutes you get asked for the first password, and if you have more then one service then please wait two more minutes while Evolution tries fruitlessly to contact GNOME keyring again!

The solution is simple – have GNOME keyring launch automatically when you log in to KDE, just like it does for GNOME. There are several ways to do this – for example using KDE’s “startup applications” system or writing custom profile scripts (I’ve tried both), but the more elegant solution I found in fedorahosted.org where someone committed a simple script that generates GNOME keyring startup and shutdown scripts for KDE. I’m guessing this is used in the KDE live CD spins for Fedora.

Anyway, this script can easily adapted to generate GNOME keyring integration scripts for your local KDE installation. Just start Konsole, and paste this into the command line:


cat > $HOME/.kde/env/start-custom.sh <<EOF
#!/bin/sh
eval \`gnome-keyring-daemon\`
export GNOME_KEYRING_PID
export GNOME_KEYRING_SOCKET
EOF
chmod 755 $HOME/.kde/env/start-custom.sh
cat > $HOME/.kde/shutdown/stop-custom.sh <<EOF
#/bin/sh
if [-n "\$GNOME_KEYRING_PID"]; then
kill \$GNOME_KEYRING_PID
fi
EOF
chmod 755 $HOME/.kde/shutdown/stop-custom.sh


Now you can log out, and when you log back in, GNOME keyring will be running in the background, providing keyring services to GNOME applications. This will also make working with the Fedora bug reporting tool – ABRT – so much easier as that too relies on GNOME keyring and suffers from the same “freeze while looking for the keyring service” issue that Evolution suffers from.

Related articles

• GNOME vs. KDE: the Latest Round (tech.slashdot.org)
• GNOME 3 on Linux Mint 10 (martinwebster.eu)
• Fedora 15 beta released as GNOME 3 backlash grows (linuxfordevices.com)
• Are You Looking Forward to GNOME 3? (ostatic.com)

1. also – contrary to popular belief in hacker circles, rich text editing is useful – and Kontact really sucks at that [↩]
2. if you are a GNOME user and weren’t exposed to GNOME 3 yet, then don’t worry – soon coming to a distro near your, and you’re likely not going to like it [↩]

ובגלל שזה הולך להציק לי כל היום, אז אני אפיל את זה עליכם:

משקאות קלים

מה קל במשקאות קלים? ממה זה יותר קל, מממשקאות כבדים?¹

לדעתי זה מגיע מאנגלית – המונח hard liquor משמש לתאר משקאות אלכוהוליים, ומכאן: “משקאות קשים”.

אבל למה ההפך מ”משקאות קשים” הוא “משקאות קלים”? זה צריך להיות “משקאות רכים”, כמו באנגלית – “soft drink“. ²

1. בסופו של דבר הכל מורכב ממים ששוקלים קילו לליטר והשוני במשקל בין משקאות שונים צריך להיות מינורי [↩]
2. באופן עוד יותר מוזר, המקבילה בעברית לערך הוויקיפדי “Soft Drink” הוא דווקא “משקאות תוססים” שהם, אליבא ד-וויקיפדיה, סוג של “משקאות קלים” [↩]

As we all know, MySQL 5.5 is the best thing since sliced bread (or, not exactly, but that’s what everyone will have you think), but unfortunately Ubuntu‘s latest and greatest server operating system – Ubuntu 10.10 Server comes with MySQL 5.1.

Even the next version of Ubuntu – 11.04 Natty Narwhal – doesn’t seem to deliver MySQL 5.5, so upgrading is not really an option as of yet. There is a bug report to deliver MySQL 5.5 for Natty, which is even marked as “in progress” but there’s no guarantee that it will happen.

So how to go about (ab)using the latest software from Oracle? One way is to build it yourself on your server, or convert the Oracle provided RPM packages using the alien tool – but its not really Ubuntu native and a mess (in both cases). Here is another approach:

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Another article in the “I need to write this for myself and what better place then on my blog” series:

If you are familiar with the old (but great) Warcraft 2 game, then you know its a great multiplayer game but unfortunately you need a “Battle.net server” to play and even if the Blizzard servers were up (and for this old game, they’re not though there are a few 3rd party free servers) – you probably don’t want to have all the party goers connect up to an external server.

So how to run a Warcraft 2 LAN party?

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I’m using the current Ubuntu alpha – 11.04 as my desktop OS on my laptop, and on the same laptop I sometimes need to run VirtualBox to access an MS-Windows environment.

In the current Natty alpha this doesn’t work well. I have VirtualBox 4.0 installed from Oracle’s repository, but it doesn’t manage to compile the kernel module it needs – probably because of the “RC” nature of the current Natty’s kernel (2.6.38-rc4) as of this writing.

I’ve seen many posts on the internet about running Ubuntu 11.04 as a guest in VirtualBox, but couldn’t find anyone talking about my problem, which is the opposite – running VirtualBox on Ubuntu 11.04. So here’s how to get this thing working:

1. Install VirtualBox 4.0 (from Oracle’s repository)
2. Install the kernel headers package for Ubuntu: sudo apt-get install linux-headers
3. Edit the headers’ Makefile to declare the same version as the uname command: run uname -r and note the suffix after the version number, for example mine says “2.6.38-3-generic“, so I am interested in “-3-generic“. Edit the Makefile using sudo gedit /usr/src/linux-headers-<version>-3-generic/Makefile , and the fourth line should say something like “EXTRAVERSION = -rc4“. Change the value (in this case “-rc4“) to what you found out from uname.
4. add autoconf.h to the linux include directory, because it is missing for some reason:
   cd /usr/src/linux-headers-<version>-3-generic/include/linux
sudo ln -s ../generated/autoconf.h

Now you can run sudo /etc/init.d/vboxdrv setup and it should complete successfuly and allow you to start VirtualBox.

Related articles

• Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narhwal” Will Not Have A Release Candidate (digitizor.com)
• ‘Natty Narwhal’ Alpha Offers Peek at Ubuntu 11.04 (pcworld.com)

Ok, it might not be new – but it’s new to me: Ben & Jerry’s have managed to make a crunchy peanut butter ice cream! It is called Chubby Hubby and I can totally understand why its called that way – I can eat it all day 🙂

Related articles

• Next Android Version to be Called Ice Cream Sandwich (pocketnow.com)

Is because my laptop only has 2GB of memory.

OK – it sounds worse then it is, but with normal use Firefox is simply way too heavy for my – not too shabby – Thinkpad T61 Core2 Duo T7250 @ 2GHz with 2GB RAM. Its not a stellar machine by today’s standard by its less then 3 years old and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be able to run a modern browser.

But with both Evolution (that requires a couple hundreds MB of memory) and Eclipse (at ~ 600 MB memory) I can’t also run Firefox which with just a few tabs open takes up close to 1GB of physical memory (and tons of virtual). My system just comes to a standstill, and lets not talk about running – oh, I don’t know – a terminal!

So I’m using Chromium and while its developer tools are not as good as Firebug, at least it doesn’t hog up all my RAM and with a few dozen tabs open my system is still pretty responsive.

It may be the process separation in Chromium that is better, allowing the operating system to swap out completely tabs that are not used. I’ve heard some talk about having the same thing for Firefox (project electrolysis – though at this point it seems to be focused on the Fennec mobile browser) and I do hope they get on with it because Firefox’s memory consumption has grown in leaps and bounds in the last couple of years and unfortunately my computer’s memory has not grown with it :-(.