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Just two days before Microsoft and Novell signed a controversial deal in 2006, the two sides still hadn't figured out a way to make peace over Linux without violating the licensing terms that govern the open-source operating system. The terms of the GNU General Public License made it tough for Microsoft to get paid a royalty for each copy of Linux that Novell sold and also made it tough for Microsoft to offer patent protection to Novell without giving it to all users of Linux. But, just hours before it hoped to announce a deal, Microsoft workers thought up an end-run around the provision. Instead of protecting Novell, Microsoft hit on the idea of offering legal protection to Novell's customers.

Nothing boosts my productivity more than good music. That's why I always keep Last.fm radio running when I'm working. Or rather, used to keep it running: Last.fm has announced that the company starts charging international users for streaming music. It's not a big deal, except that the service will remain free in the US, UK, and Germany. For me it's as insulting as Windows-only applications. It's not the end of the world, though: as always, the VLC comes to the rescue.

Back when I worked in the Network Operations department at one of my previous jobs, we used to chuckle when a customer would call us reporting that “the Internet is down.” Now, I realize that there are otherwise intelligent computer users out there who don't understand why that might cause a technician to chuckle, and I'm not trying to make fun of them. But you've got to know that help desks get this type of trouble report more frequently than they should. I've known quite a few hardware technicians or software developers who were very good at what they did, but who didn't have the first clue as to how to diagnose a network problem. To them, the Internet, and networking in general, was just “Pure Freaking Magic”. Actually, it is magic, but it's not a magic that we can't learn to troubleshoot. So, let's begin.

Yow to create symbolic links from the command line. Making shortcuts to the files you use most can make your life easier.

Learn to scale your UNIX® Python applications to multiple cores by using the multiprocessing module which is built into Python 2.6. Multiprocessing mimics parts of the threading API in Python to give the developer a high level of control over flocks of processes, but also incorporates many additional features unique to processes.

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global grassroots effort to promote and build awareness of the importance of free document formats in particular and open standards in general. If you have ever received a document from a friend that your software could not open, then you know the frustration of proprietary formats. Document Freedom Day promotes open formats so that users can freely exchange their data no matter what software program they choose to use. Complete interoperability is the ultimate goal of those who support open standards.

A few months ago, we made a legislative attempt (zh_TW) to ask Taiwanese government in their procurement plans to prioritize machines supporting 0-keypress usb-key booting. It was not about forcing the government officials to use Linux on usb keys. It was not about forcing them to use Linux at all. It was a humble request that there be a way to set up the BIOS so that usb keys can be the first boot device without user intervention just like cdroms or floppies have always been, that these machines have a useful second life as donations to remote villages when they finish their services in the government. Microsoft adamantly objected (zh_TW), giving misleading arguments that distort the truth. Our attempt failed, but it revealed that MS is really afraid of usb-booting.

The article is in German, but here's a computer translation: A majority of the delegates felt the regulation suggested by the European Commission only as genuflection before the large software producers, who would have achieved to improve their market position. A legal jungle would have developed. Experts like Richard Stallman warned at that time: "By such software patents the writing of a program becomes so dangerous, as if you would go over a mine field." Over many months the delegates, under it responsible the Austrian Green to EH Lichtenberger, belonged expert and also patent advocate for instance from IBM and Siemens. Finally they came in the end that by the introduction of the patents smaller software developers would be clearly disadvantaged. Because many of them could their developments the licenses not afford and would have ever more limit.

Good Afternoon guys, here I created another Python Script. This script will check your DataStores aka VMFS. I built this script so that it can be used with Nagios and or Zenoss. The purpose of this script is so that you can monitor thresholds on a per DataStore/VMFS. You will need to download and install Pywbem in order to use this script

Altera, the world’s second-best-known FPGA company, has struck a deal with Wind River Systems, the world’s second-best-known embedded-software company, to port Linux to Altera’s NIOS II processor. And since NIOS is free, you’ve got yourself a free 32-bit microprocessor capable of running a genuine full-on multitasking Linux operating system. Naturally, there’s a catch. In fact, there are two. First off, NIOS is free only if you’re already using Altera’s FPGA chips (more on this later). Second, the Linux itself isn’t free; Wind River charges a significant amount of money for access to the software, and even more money for annual support. That’s right – the microprocessor is free but the open-source software costs money. One wonders how such a paradox came to be.

Back in January Intel had pushed out its first alpha release for Moblin V2. This Intel-optimized Linux distribution targeting systems with Intel Atom hardware was quite unique and offered a number of advantages for being a netbook-oriented operating system. Particularly special about Intel Moblin V2 was its boot-time, which was extremely fast when using a Solid-State Drive. Intel has now put out a second alpha release for Moblin V2, which we are briefly exploring today.

A recent slashdot article outlined some of the DRM that can be found in the new Microsoft stab at relevancy - Windows 7. Unfortunately, Peter Bright, the author of the ars technica piece doesn't see a thing wrong with it. Peter goes on to excoriate the slashdot piece just like any good Redmond apologist would but it was the last paragraph of the article that snatched me by the nether regions:

Linux distributions (the Linux kernel plus a desktop and applications) come in many flavours. Here's an overview of just a few of the recent releases. While the community distributions Fedora and Ubuntu, as well as Mandriva, prepare for their spring releases, Novell has been busy completing final adjustments to SUSE Linux Enterprise. Smaller Linux distributions are also doing some spring cleaning and publishing updated versions.

With apologies for returning to the theme of patents, I'd like to direct your attention to a long and interesting piece that has appeared on the Digital Majority site asking a very important question: “Did Red Hat lobby for, or against software patents in Europe?”

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server 1.0.x (1.0.8 at the time of this writing) on a Debian Lenny desktop system. This is for those who prefer VMware Server 1.0.x over VMware Server 2.

I asked Sam Ramji senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft about TomTom the other day and he claimed that patent issues aren't causing any chilling effect on his part of Microsoft's open source plans.... That said, last year at OSCON, Ramji was quite literally mobbed by the audience after his presentation by attendees that were 'curious' about Microsoft's patent stance.

Moblin V2 alpha 2 has been released, this tiny Linux edition is suitable for various mobile devices like Netbooks.

Recently my local LUG (LILUG) invited Eric S. Raymond (ESR) to come and speak. For those of you who are not familiar with ESR, he is one of the three largest icons of the Open Source/Free Software movement. Needless to say, it was an honor so see him speak. For the most part, his talk was quite tame but one of the points he raised seemed quite controversial. According to him the GPL and other viral licenses are no longer needed as they do more harm than good to the community. I don't want to put words into his mouth so I've transcribed what he said during the talk. You can view the ESR Q/A talk in its entirety, this specific excerpt is about 45 minutes into the video.

Here I created another Python script using Pywbem to get the Storage Pools from ESX. In this script you can get the disk utilisation statistics from each datastore or from a particular datastore. Examples below...

All computer displays show images in bitmap mode. What this means is that every image is really a bunch of tiny little squares that make up the image. What this essentially means is that computers can't display really smooth curves.