Showing headlines posted by gus3

To celebrate World IPv6 Day, I thought I would join the “festivities”—one day late, unfortunately—and enable IPv6 on my home network, with a total switch-over if possible. The three most common services on my network are OpenSSH on all three nodes, and NFS and HTTP on my central server running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, so I wanted to make all three work over IPv6.

A long-standing task for the Linux kernel has been the removal of the Big Kernel Lock, and it looks like version 2.6.39 will achieve that goal. However, user-space applications which use information about the BKL are now failing to build or run, including the Linux Infrared Remote Control project. Naturally, this gave me an itch, and I wanted to scratch it.

Finally after a long time coming, we are pleased to announce the 1.0 release of the core EFL libraries (With the exception of Eet at 1.4).

In my previous report about journaling filesystem benchmarking using dbench, I observed that a properly-tuned system using XFS, with the deadline I/O scheduler, beat both Linux’s ext3 and IBM’s JFS. A lot has changed in the three years since I posted that report, so it’s time to do a new round of tests. Many bug fixes, improved kernel lock management, and two new filesystem (btrfs and ext4) bring some new configurations to test.

Don’t let the title scare you. This is only on my main file server, which holds both shared material (source tarballs and update packages) and 116G of movie files. It has recently begun to mis-behave under Linux. The specific symptom is a network freeze under heavy I/O load. This is not unknown with the Realtek 8139 Ethernet chipset, but it’s a big hassle when a movie player stops hard because NFS has suddenly disappeared.

The EFF have announced their 2010 Pioneer Awards: transparency activist Stephen Aftergood; public domain scholar James Boyle; legal blogger Pamela Jones and the website Groklaw; and e-voting researcher Hari Krishna Prasad Vemuru, who was recently released on bail after being imprisoned for his security work in India. "These winners have all worked tirelessly to give critical insight and context to the tough questions that arise in our evolving digital world," said EFF Executive Director Shari Steele. "We need strong advocates, educators, and researchers like these to protect our digital rights, and we're proud to honor these four Pioneer Award winners for their important contributions." Press release here; PJ's comments here.

I picked up a PC Power Pad Pro at a garage sale, for something like US$0.50. A steal, for 2% of its original retail, right? Except I couldn't get it to work with my sound card. I did all kinds of Google searches, trying to figure out why my controller wasn't... controlling.

[It was a simple fix, but hard for me to find. - gus3]

A multi-national entertainment company, caught using Free Software, while at the same time opposing the right of their customers to use their own computers in any way they wish.

Bash has had multi-processing for a long time, via job control, the $! environment variable, and the "wait" command. Judicious use of parentheses for sub-processes, and pipes where necessary, can put comparatively long-term procedures into the background. Bash 4 now provides a new multi-processing paradigm for shell scripting, via the "coproc" statement.

When the only connections to a Linux system are the power cord and the Ethernet cable, sending the console output to another host on the local Ethernet is a great way to observe boot-time behavior, including any panics that hang the system.

Asay's job will be make sure operational activities match up to the company's strategic goals and make sure that day-to-day operations go smoothly. He will also head up Canonical's marketing. Asay is extremely well known and respected in open-source business and technology circles.

[However, Pamela Jones takes exception to Asay's defense of Microsoft in her NewsPicks comment on this story. - gus3]

In a post to his personal blog Thursday morning, ten-year Mozilla vet Asa Dotzler quoted Schmidt in full before indicating that he's not too happy with the Googler's haughty take on data retention. "That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy," Dotzler says, after quoting the Google boss. "There is no ambiguity, no 'out of context' here." Then he pointed Firefox users to an add-on that inserts Bing into the browser's built-in list of search engines. "Here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google)," Dotzler said. The links are his.

I'm writing course notes for a sophomore (college) level survey, with tomorrow's material on Henry David Thoreau. All of a sudden, I got a a notification "The published version of this item cannot be shared until a Google review finds that the content is appropriate." The "share" link is disabled. This means I can't upload to my Google website from this page. I suppose I could cut and paste to another brand new document... but that might get me kicked off Google entirely if it still scans for and sees something "inappropriate"!

[For all the cautionary notes about The Cloud, there hasn't been much said about arbitrary denial of access. - gus]

"While we worked extremely hard to try and get the code ready for release by today, we still need to test and localize it. Our goal is now to release the tool in all languages on the same day in the next few weeks."

[Excuse me all over the place for not buying that excuse. Publish the code of the program as it was released!—gus3]

The fundamentals of computation theory are not obvious. A group of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century needed decades to figure them out. If this information is not communicated to lawyers and judges they have no chance to understand what is going on and mistakes are sure to happen. All the errors I have found result from this omission. The purpose of this text is to help fill the gap.

[A long read, but definitely worth it for the philosophical defense of FOSS - gus3]

LXer Feature: 01-May-2009

Earlier today (as I write this), our esteemed tuxchick made a very bold statement:

If people don't want to learn an unfamiliar environment why do they stick with windows? Win 95 was radically different from 3.1, and it was a huge success. XP was way different from 2000, and everything was moved around and stuffed into different places. Vista was even weirder, with the added free bonus of new extreme annoyances like UAC. Windows 7 is organized differently yet again, and the tech press are all swoony over it and hailing it as The Best Windows Evah.

This touches on something I've been shopping around privately for a couple weeks now: Why do we in the "Linux community" assume prior experience with Windows, or any WIMP interface? At its core, this is a bad assumption for absolutely everyone, proprietary software houses included.

This communication provides additional information on the Fedora infrastructure intrusion first reported on August 14, 2008. In part this communication reiterates information provided in previous announcements.

[Includes a fairly detailed timeline of the incident.--gus3]

Dismissed, dismissed, dismissed. $2,547,817 in converted monies, over $918,122 in interest on it, and $625,486.90 for the constructive trust against The SCO Group. That's well over $4,000,000 that SCO will no longer have for bogus litigation. If they are indeed ordered by the court to pay, it will reduce their equity by roughly half. My money is on Darl McBride never being allowed to try this stunt again.

In Linux 2.6.24.5, the problem is explained in init/do_mounts.c. Following the execution path, you can see that the first root filesystem mount happens in mount_root(). First, the device name is converted to a (major,minor) device number pair, then /dev/root is created with that (major,minor) pair. Finally, /dev/root is mounted as the root filesystem.

The catch to this is that the only partition accessible is the one created for /dev/root. The way around it is to make some other mount the first mount, then switch to the XFS later in the boot process. This is exactly what an init ramdisk gives us.

Part of my "economic stimulus check" went to a 500GB SATA drive. My original intention was to buy two of them, so I could claim, "over a terabyte of disk space!". Alas, I got a little ahead of myself; my system had only one open hard drive bay. With a slightly bruised ego, I returned the unopened second hard drive and began to ponder how to exploit my super-roomy disk space. I quickly settled on one goal: find the fastest journaling filesystem (FS) for my SLAMD64 dual-core computer, with 2G of memory. My testing focused on three main areas: filesystem, disk I/O scheduler, and CPU speed. Frankly, the final results stunned me.