Not gone, just bussy...

The past month has been one hectic month and as you know and can see there has been no real update on the blog, but brace yourself, there is TWO reviews to follow very shortly.

For a long time I put off even looking at something remotely Fedora/Red Hat related, but finally got over my prejudice and installed the latest version of Fedora on the laptop... just to have a look. All I can say is, I'm surprised...

Next on to my all time n00b friendly favourite, PCLinuxOS, and the latest release on that. There was some unexpected hiccups, but boy oh boy...

Stay tuned for more exciting news in the next few days as I will give in depth reviews on both and add some random babbling of my own here and there...

Beryl!

Ok so I just discovered Beryl and it rocks!

Beryl is a fork of Compiz with very much the same features and some more. You have probably already seen the screenshots on various Linux forums.

I never tried Compiz since many people reported it a mission to get going in KDE and I absolutely hate Gnome, so I never tried it. Beryl on the other hand is very easy to install and it works superbly with KDE!

Read through the Wiki, install it and enjoy the wobbly windows, rain on the desktop and whatnot!

The cubed box desktop effect.

Wobbly windows! Notice the red emerald in the systray, yup, that is Beryl.

Look closely in the Konsole window and you will see the "mouse cursor on water" effect!

The "rain on desktop" effect.

Invert all colour!

Invert current window colour only.

There is much more options to exploit, I just quickly took these few screenshots to wet the appetite.
Quickly now, install it and enjoy the eye-candy!

RAID setup!

Well, after quite a battle I finally got RAID to work on my desktop machine!

I love Gentoo, and every time I try something new it has been one big adventure and sometimes a steep learning curve.

Not to be outdone, the documentation for setting up RAID is very precise and to the point, but there is a catch in Gentoo, not all installations is the same, therefore there is the documentation, but it is generic. If the popo hits the fan, then it is hours of Googling and searching various forums to fins out where the problem is.

In my case the first setup was perfect, except that udev did not play nice, and I only found this out three days later after countless hours trying various ways to force my system to boot with a broken udev.

With the latest unstable udev-103 I got one long list of errors stating something was not right with my udev installation. After many reboots and different tries of reinstalling every system package (including of course udev) and trying to configure my system, I finally read on the udev mailing list that I'm not alone. They suggested downgrading to udev-096, but still no joy.
The errors were less, but something did not quite fit...

The third and final day I reverted back to the traditional install (I have a stage-4 backup of my entire system so it takes less than 30 minutes to reinstall) after yet another failed attempt at RAID, only to be greeted by the exact same error!

All the time I was convinced that it was a RAID/udev issue and this led me to the solution! Searching now was much easier since the error can be replicated on various setups and finally I found the very simple solution.

The udev-103 symptoms were a never ending scrolling error being written to /var/log/syslog:

udevd[826]: get_ctrl_msg: unable to receive user udevd message: Socket operation on non-socket
udevd[826]: get_netlink_msg: unable to receive kernel netlink message: Socket operation on non-socket
udevd[826]: get_ctrl_msg: unable to receive user udevd message: Socket operation on non-socket
udevd[826]: get_netlink_msg: unable to receive kernel netlink message: Socket operation on non-socket
udevd[826]: get_ctrl_msg: unable to receive user udevd message: Socket operation on non-socket
udevd[826]: get_netlink_msg: unable to receive kernel netlink message: Socket operation on non-socket
etc.

This output would keep on scrolling by until you hit reboot. The simple cause was that udev did not populate /dev after the initial install, and the rather simple solution?

Boot from LiveCD
create the RAID arrays
mount /dev/md(x) /mnt/gentoo
cp -rp /dev/* /mnt/gentoo/dev/
reboot

As simple as that! Once that was done the machine booted up no problems and I can finally shout: "Eureka!"

For further reading:
BIOS RAID setup
Software RAID setup
RAID0 with lilo
The solution to my problem
I read allot more articles than those mentioned, but they are the ones that helped me on the right track.

Happy RAIDing!

Novell sold out?

I really should learn to do much more research before coming to sudden conclusions, especially where Microsoft is involved...

Seems there is much more to this "joint venture" than meets the eye...

First of, it might be against the GPL to do what Novell has done:
Story here

Secondly:

Today Novell and Microsoft announced a partnership in which Microsoft has made some unlikely-seeming promises regarding Linux. What aren't they telling you? First, you can be sure that Microsoft's not out to help a competitor. This announcement paves the way for Microsoft to implement significant control over commercial customer's use of Free Software. And it has significant negative implications for Open Source in general.

More here!

Seems like MS will remain the evil giant for now, until they can PROVE that what is said in the agreement was really out of concern for all OS development.
Yea right....

Microsoft is coming to terms with Linux

Just when I thought everything is quieting down suddenly the OS world explodes with new news!

Take the following for example, Microsoft and Novel wrote an open letter to the FOSS community:

Joint letter to the Open Source Community
From Novell and Microsoft

Today's announcement of the collaboration between Microsoft and Novell marks the beginning of a new era: Microsoft is coming to terms with Linux.

Over the past six years, we've seen the effect that the open source community has had on Microsoft. They've shared some source code, driven community projects like IronPython and WiX, and they continue to work with a number of open source software companies like JBoss, SugarCRM, XenSource, and Zend.

However, today's news is a big step forward for the Linux market. Today, for the first time, Microsoft is collaborating directly with a Linux and Open Source software vendor. With this news, Microsoft is saying that Linux is an important part of the IT infrastructure.

More importantly, Microsoft announced today that it will not assert its patents against individual, non-commercial developers. Novell has secured an irrevocable promise from Microsoft to allow individual and non-commercial contributors the freedom to continue open source development, free from any concern of Microsoft patent lawsuits. That's right, Microsoft wants you to keep hacking.

Why is Microsoft doing this? Because they recognize that customers today are deploying mixed source solutions - Windows and Linux - and they want these solutions to work well together. This will help Microsoft by making it easier for Linux customers to deploy Windows in their Linux environments. Microsoft is committing significant resources to promote joint Windows-Linux solutions. This is all about co-existence and giving customers greater choice.

The collaboration has multiple pieces:

* Patent coverage

• The concern over potential patent infringements makes some people nervous about the deployment of open source technologies.
• To do this, Novell and Microsoft are providing covenants to each other's customers, therefore releasing each company from the other's patent portfolio.
• What it really means is that customers deploying technologies from Novell and Microsoft no longer have to fear about possible lawsuits or potential patent infringement from either company.
  

* Virtualization

• Microsoft and Novell will collaborate in enhancing and developing the functionality required to efficiently virtualize Windows on Linux and Linux on Windows.
• Both will now be first class citizens in data centers, addressing the needs of mixed environments. They will both enjoy optimized, supported and tuned device drivers to maximize their potential.
  

* Virtualization Management

• As a plus, the companies will work together to implement the necessary standards to manage data centers that run mixed environments (WS-Management).
• Novell will develop tools to manage virtualized Windows machines, and Microsoft will develop tools to manage virtualized Linux systems.
  

* Office Open XML

• Novell engineers have been working for the last year together with Microsoft engineers through the ECMA TC45 working group in producing a complete specification that would allow for interoperability across office suites.
• Novell will develop the code necessary to bring support for Office Open XML into OpenOffice, and we will contribute that support back to the OpenOffice.org organization. We will also distribute the Office Open XML plug-in in our own edition of OpenOffice. In addition, we will participate in the Open XML Translator open source project.
  

* Collaboration Framework

• One of the most important components of the collaboration agreement today is that we have setup a framework between Novell and Microsoft to discuss future collaborations.
• Today's announcement marks the beginning of a new era, and should not be considered a limitation. With the collaboration framework in place, we will periodically evaluate areas where we can work together improving the interoperability of our products.
  

* Mono, OpenOffice and Samba

• Under the patent agreement, customers will receive coverage for Mono, Samba, and OpenOffice as well as .NET and Windows Server.
• All of these technologies will be improved upon during the 5 years of the agreement and there are some limits on the coverage that would be provided for future technologies added to these offerings.
• The collaboration framework we have put in place allows us to work on complex subjects such as this where intellectual property and innovation are important parts of the conversation.
• Novell customers can use these technologies, secure in the knowledge that Microsoft and Novell are working together to offer the best possible joint solution.
  

This is a watershed moment for Linux. It fundamentally changes the rules of the game. We're really excited about this deal, and we hope you are too.

Now this is interesting! With this we realise that Microsoft is seeing Linux now as a mayor factor in the IT word and it would be bad for them to keep on having very poor support for different Os's, like support for Samba, maybe a few Linux file systems, etc.

This is truly an inter resting announcement!

The Linux Timeline

Ever wondered when a distro was created and what it is based on? Then have a look at the following sketch and see if yo can find your favourite distro and determine if it was a ground breaker or just follower of an already successful recipe...

Laying low...

Well, the last few weeks have been quite uneventful, a few distros gets released every now and then, but nothing mayor to get one excited.

Even on the general Linux side things have been quiet, everyone just waiting out the storm of the season as we draw closer to Christmas.

What we are looking forward to is:
KDE 4
The new Linux kernel

KDE4 has been anticipated as one of the all time great updates of the Linux DE world since ever. However we know precious little of what is waiting for us, except that in the light of Windows Vista's release later this year/ next year we all hope and wish it to be a really awesome improvement over everything we are so used to. Here's hoping we are not disappointed!

The new Linux kernel, well now there's a though one. I have cracked my noodle thinking of what would be an improvement, but right now the kernel is as user friendly and complete as ever. How are the kernel devs going to improve on almost perfection? What new feature could possibly be added to herald in a new kernel era? I'm dying to see what would happen in the next few months for Linux, we are all expecting great things to come!

This has to be the most inspirational video I have ever seen...



A bit of history on the people involved:
http://www.teamhoyt.com/

For the past twenty five years or more Dick, who is 65, has pushed and pulled his son across the country and over hundreds of finish lines. When Dick runs, Rick is in a wheelchair that Dick is pushing. When Dick cycles, Rick is in the seat-pod from his wheelchair, attached to the front of the bike. When Dick swims, Rick is in a small but heavy, firmly stabilized boat being pulled by Dick.

At Rick's birth in 1962 the umbilical cord coiled around his neck and cut off oxygen to his brain. Dick and his wife, Judy, were told that there would be no hope for their child's development.

"It's been a story of exclusion ever since he was born," Dick told me. "When he was eight months old the doctors told us we should just put him away, he'd be a vegetable all his life, that sort of thing. Well those doctors are not alive any more, but I would like them to be able to see Rick now."

In 1975, Rick was finally admitted into a public school. Two years later, he told his father he wanted to participate in a five-mile benefit run for a local lacrosse player who had been paralyzed in an accident. Dick, far from being a long-distance runner, agreed to push Rick in his wheelchair. They finished next to last, but they felt they had achieved a triumph. That night, Dick remembers, "Rick told us he just didn't feel handicapped when we were competing."

I once saw another clip where at the end of the race a reported told Dick that if it wasn't for his son holding him back he would have finished in medal position.
To this Dick replied: "Why would I want that? I'm only doing this for my son."

FOSS people never ceases to amaze!

Just when you think there can't be anything stranger, then some people stand up to openly defy everything the corporate giants believes in.

For a while now we have had the privilege to see the tremendous grow of FOSS, like OpenOffice, Firefox, and a few other movers and shakers that rocked the software world.

But how about going at it the wrong way? Like Underground Linux? Just have a look at the packages included to give you a general idea of what this distro is all about (if the name didn't give it away):

Features:

• X.Org 7.1
• KDE 3.5.4 (most modules, including Kontact)
• OpenOffice.org 2.0.3
• K3b 0.12.17
• Firefox 1.5.0.7
• Ktorrent 2.0.2
• Kmplayer 0.9.3-pre2
• Streamtuner 0.99.99 (browser for internet radio stations)
• DVDRipOMatic 0.95 (DVD-to-XviD ripping tool)
• Easy network configuration, with wifi support (see docs)
• Fixes in printing support
• HP printing drivers
• Fixes/improvements in the look and feel

Now I have nothing personally against people distributing this, but isn't it a bit stupid to go out seek trouble? That is like branding this distro as "I'm a pirate/underground Linux user". Why on earth would someone go and do something so blatant? Piratebay.org ring a bell anyone?

The same tools are available for any other distro, but they do not openly advocate it. Download it, use it, become a dev and help them out but for the love of sanity why go out and openly look for trouble?

The hacker distros have cleverly coupled themselves with security, naming themselves stuff like "Inside Security Rescue Toolkit" and like all the rest here, and there is something most of us can learn from this. Make your distro "friendly" do not go out and look for confrontation, or you're going to get it...

Really, sometimes the FOSS community have the foresight of a 16 year old high on testosterone.

Eish....

If only I had enough time to do everything I liked to do...

There is still no mayor update on the gaming front since I have really not had any time to play and test some new games, but maybe the next month or so will be a turning point, anyone wanna help me out here?

What I have been testing out lately is the multimedia capabilities of Linux, i.e. the recording, editing and writing of video and music files (sermons of over 400Mb per track).

What really put me off is that it seems that Audacity seems to have taken a step backwards.
Nothing wrong with the recording, but the effects lack allot! For example, I could not get the default "amplify" plug-in to do anything, and the noise removal plug-in is useless! In the end I had to install all the 3rd party plug-ins to get the job done and 5 hours later I still could not get rid of that irritating "hiss". No fun at all...

This led me to search for a better alternative, and up until now I have yet to find one. What is sorely lacking is the ability for audio editors to import WAV, filter it and then be able to edit out the unwanted noise (hiss, click, etc.)

Sweep seems nice, although I cannot figure out how to get the above mentioned functions working in it. Maybe a little RTM would help?

Maybe someone in the Linux multimedia dev. section should take a look at GoldWave (still my favourite audio editing app in Windows) and try do get something similar in Linux. Come to think of it, all we really need is some very decent plug-ins for Audacity and all will be bliss!

Someone, take up the challenge and give us user friendly plug-ins to correct our mistakes!
:)

On the other hand, the video editing software really amazed me since I last used it in early 2006. Kino has come of age and Kdenlive, Cinelerra and Avidemux make for a complete solution! What more could an amateur need?

Even creating the DVD is a cinch with QDVDauthor and Kmediafactory.

Go on, try them, absolutely stunning!

It's that time of the month again...

GAMING TIME!!

I have done a bit of searching again over on Happy Penguin and came up with a few gems for you to try out and enjoy!

Since I'm not big into multi-player games, like online FPS games, I always look for something that offers you single player mode as well.

Here are the winners of this month:
Sauerbraten

Now this is a winner in my book. It's got very nice single player missions and I would think that multi-play would be a blast! You MUST try this one, it is a complete remake of the old Cube, but much better!




I'm bussy trying out a few more, will update this post as soon as I'm done testing.

Free movies!!

Yup, free movies!
Free movies

There is a HUGHE collection of movies, documentaries, cartoons, etc. that has been released from copyright or that has been released under a more liberal license. Head on over and see if there is something you may like.

A few that caught my eye:
Reign of the Fallen
Eyes of the Werewolf
Star Wars: Revelations

A tip:
Click on the website that is given for a movie, they have the full download and trailers there...

Evolution?

How true is this, despite evidence to prove the opposite there are still "scientists" who proclaim a false and unsound theory, namely evolution.
Just to ask but a few questions and something to ponder on, most would see this as trivial, but to me they are the foundations of this myth:

What caused the "Big Bang"?
The first rule of physics states that matter cannot be created or destroyed, so where did the mixture, concoction or whatever for the "Big Bang" come from?
This is the general direction that almost all the mayor arguments for the evolution theory takes, namely that it is not consistent with what modern science believes and practices.

Another example, has there been a case of progressive evolution documented? Why are we solely relying on fossils to create and substantiate a theory? Where is the evidence today?

Science has been meticulously recorded since the Renaissance and there has been no change in the human or animals that one could constitute as evidence of evolution.

I will stop my rant here and urge you to go over to the following URL and have a bit of a read, see if there is any way in which you can get hold of the videos and listen to it with an open mind, then make up your mind on what you believe afterwards.
Dr. Dino

Also head on over to the download section on Dr. Dino and download the seminars, great stuff!

Some free games

Well what do you know, they have released Mech Commander free of charge!
Go and get it here and someone PLEASE host it on a better server!


Another one for the Flight Sim guys, Targer Tobruk.
From the screenshots it looks stunning, so why not download it and give it a try?

I just thought about the latest developments in hardware and realised that the x86 arch is dying, not due to lack of support, but one of these days it will be impossible to by a 32-bit CPU, everyone and their uncles are moving over to 64-bit.

Now here's the problem.
We know that there has been great strides on the x86_64 terain the pst couple of years, but this post got me a bit worried.
QUOTE

blubb
Developer

Currently, it is nearly impossible to have a pure stable system with Gentoo/AMD64. I think everybody who has ACCEPT_KEYWORDS=amd64 in his make.conf also has a rather large list of packages in /etc/portage/packages.keywords. To adress this issue, we need either a massive improvement in amount of menpower or a list of packages we can to focus on. If you run a stable system and you're interested in helping...

LINK

Currently, it is nearly impossible to have a pure stable system with Gentoo/AMD64.

The reason I bring this up is because I wanted to try amd64 again after quite a while (I last tried it over a year ago) but this has totally put me off. I want a system that works, I need mulitimedia apps (recording and editing video and audio) to be stable and 100% functional and I think for this reason I'm staying with x86 for the time being.

Now, are the Linux devs missing the boat here? Shouldn't they be scrambling to get the x86_64 as stable as soon as possible? Intel and AMD are never going back to 32-bit and you don't get 32-bit CPU's for AMD anymore at all (I think the Sempron is also a 64-bit CPU not so?) and it would seem a waste to spend all your manpower on projects that are going to be obsolete in about a years time.

I guess all I'm saying is that I'm a bit worried that they are focusing their efforts on the wrong projects atm.

Lin Libertine Fonts

Oh wow, seems like the Linux world is abuzz all of a sudden! Must be the change in seasons!

Here is a great new site to go check out, Lin Libertine.

The reason they developed this was because of the pesky restrictions on TTF from Microsoft, e.g. they are not open source.

Philipp H. Poll started the Linux Libertine Open Fonts project in September 2003 because of his dissatisfaction with the fonts shipped with GNU/Linux distributions. "In SUSE 9.x," he recalls, "you had to use a script to download the Microsoft core fonts if you wanted to have good TrueType fonts." To improve the situation, Poll chose to start with the basics with Linux Libertine, an alternative to Time Roman and Times New Roman, the most commonly used typefaces in computing, and to develop it using free software methodologies and tools under the GNU General Public License.

There you go!

Recovering lost files

This is an excellent article covering how to get those lost files back.

It happened with me when I upgraded my hard drives and one of the older ones using ReiserFS just lost all the data that was on it while I was copying it to the new drive. Not deleted, no hard drive failure, it just vanished! (I heard some other people having the same experience with ReiserFS so I moved on over to Ext3...)

This would have helped allot getting the 100+ Gb of data back, so have a read here and bookmark this site, you will need it sooner or later!

How to recover lost files after you accidentally wipe your hard drive

Blog update

Well, just switched to the new beta blog and decided to change the template a bit also. Great new features and much more user-friendly than the first one.

Will be posting some interresting stuff soon, but this is all for now!
:P

Frank's Corner, Running Windows applications and games on Linux using Wine

Found this deilightful "little" site and though to share it with the world (as if "the world" read this, heh).
Head on over to Frank's corner and have a look at the application you want to get working and follow the how-to!

Could not be any easier!

Maybe even I could finally get wine to do great things for me?!
:P

Is Gentoo treuly the King of Linux?

I have tried almost all of them:
SuSE, Mandriva, RedHat and Fedora, Slackware, PCLinuxOS, Linspire, Vector Linux and some few other and it never fealt like it was totally up to par with Gentoo.

I have been using Gentoo since 2002 (after I tried Mandrake, RH, SuSE and Slackware) and it stuck!

Since then I tested said distros on a regular basis but never again did it feel "right". The power was lacking, and sometimes the GUI interfaces messed up the distro beyond repair.

The latest versions I'm testing is SuSE 10.1 and the latest Mandriva. My one friend swears only to Mandriva, funny though, he constantly reinstalls everything, about every 2 months or so.

The beauty of Gentoo is that this machine has not known a reinstall since late 2004 and it is more up to date than the latest binary/rpm distro availble. This is through hardware upgrades and hard drive upgrades (even the root hard drive) and I only reinstalled to see what the fuss was with the latest LiveCD installer.

The history of this machine:
It began as a Athlon XP +1700 socket A on an Asus motheboard with 40Gb Maxtor harddrive.
Then it became a Athlon +2500 Barton Socket A on a Gigabyte and Chaintech motherboard with over 600Gb of harddrive space.
It then went from a +3200 socket 754 on a MSI motherboard to a +3200 socket 939 MSI Diamond and it now finally sits as a +3800 x2 on the same motherboard.

Final specs:
AMD +3800 x2 939 CPU
MSI K8N Diamond motherboard
2Gb KingMax performance RAM
Nvidia 7800 GTX 256Mb GFX card
2x SATA Harddrives (200Gb Western Digital + 200Gb Seagate)
1x SATA Samsung DVD+R/Rw
450W Antech Smart Power

Not sluggish at all, and everything works 100%!

To sum it all up, I have no desire to work on another distro, but I love trying them out. I love to see the new inovations and to tease the shortcommings of some, but I will always (so it seems) remain a Gentoo addict!