Category: Linux

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All the Linux desktop action these days is in KDE and GNOME, but on older hardware, servers, or anything else where you need to squeeze every last ounce of performance from the box, something lighter is needed.

[Screenshot of a WindowMaker desktop] My Linux box at work — a 300 MHz Pentium II — runs WindowMaker. It’s familiar, it stays out of the way, and it doesn’t tie up the memory or CPU that a modern version of KDE or Gnome (or Windows, for that matter) would. But you need to add applets like a clock or a desktop pager. You can find them easily enough — I ended up using the aptly-named wmclock and wmpager – but there’s a significant problem with both. WindowMaker lets you change the size of the dock icons, but when I shrank the dock to get more space I discovered that both applets have a hard-coded size of 64×64 pixels.

[Pair of WM Applets, first at default 64x64 size (they look fine), then at 48x48 (they don't adjust and edges get cut off)] As you can see, a 64×64 applet just doesn’t work in a 48×48 space. It surprised me, though, since these dockapps are designed specifically for WindowMaker, and it’s WindowMaker itself that lets you change the size. You open up Preferences, change the size, and restart WM. Just menus and buttons. No config files, no registry, no third-party add-on. This isn’t an esoteric hack that takes serious effort to find, it’s a basic feature. You might as well design a Mac program that assumes the Dock is on the bottom of the screen. For most people it will be, but it’s not rocket science to move it.

In my ICS classes, they always discouraged us from using “magic numbers” — just throwing a number in the code without identifying or abstracting it. There are two very good reasons for this. The first is that you might forget what this 64 is doing. The second is that you might decide to change it later on, and it’s much easier to change one SIZE=64 definition than to track down every 64 and hope you’ve neither missed any you need to change nor changed any you need to leave alone.

Those dock applets are stuck at 64×64 pixels because the programmers were thinking in terms of the pixel grid, not in terms of actual display size. Continue reading →

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Groklaw has posted an affidavit in the SCO vs. Daimler Chrysler case.

Essentially, SCO sent DC a letter saying “as per your license terms, send us a list of all the computers you’re using UNIX on.”

DC wrote back saying, “We haven’t used UNIX in seven years, so there is no list.”

And SCO sued them for not providing the list.

I’m not making this up, folks – this comes out of SCO’s own deposition!

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OK, I haven’t written much on the SCO vs. Linux debacle in a while, mainly because others have done so much better and in much more detail than I possibly could, so here’s a summary of the situation as I see it.

SCO: Linux stole from us!
Linux: Uh, no. What did we steal?
SCO: Linux stole from us!
Linux: No, we didn’t. What are we supposed to have stolen!
SCO: Linux stole from us! They’re un-American commie terrorists!
Linux: Dude, what the heck? Tell us what we stole or stop accusing us!
SCO: Linux stole XYZ from us.
Linux: No, we got that legally from so-and-so.
SCO: Uh, never mind. We meant to say Linux stole ABC.
Linux: No, we got that legally from such-and-such.
SCO: No, we mean JFS and NUMA!
IBM: Hey, we invented those ourselves.
SCO: We have proof! We have millions of lines that Linux stole!
Linux: Such as?
* crickets *
SCO: We have millions of lines! Millions of them!
Linux: Shyeah, right.
SCO: But don’t worry, for a mere $699, you can assure yourself that we won’t sue you for this chunk of Linux that we haven’t actually proved we own yet!
Linux: $699? For a small piece of something you won’t even prove you own? What’s next, charging Windows users an extra $700 for Notepad because they can write code with it? [Looks up definition of “protection racket”]
SCO: Did I mention we own BSD, MacOS, and Windows too? They’re next! (Well, except Windows, ’cause Microsoft gave us money. For something else, I mean.)
BSD: You’re kidding, right? We went through this in court a decade ago.
SCO: Wait, we never said anything about BSD.
BSD: But in this interview right here —
SCO: Linux is evil! The GPL is unconstitutional! If you let people use software for free, then the terrorists have won!
Linux: What are you people smoking?

Then there are the lawsuits:
Continue reading →

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A long-standing challenge for advocates of Free and Open Source Software (a.k.a. FOSS) has been explaining just what the term Free Software means, because in English,* the word “free” has several unrelated meanings. The classic explanation has been to compare “free speech” and “free beer.”

You see, when the average person hears the phrase “free software,” they generally assume it means the same kind of thing as “free beer.” But it’s really about the software being unencumbered – it’s about your ability to use, study, learn from, and improve the software. It’s not about the price tag.

The problem with the “free speech” label is that the phrase has its own very specific meaning and political overtones. As a result, people tend to focus on the ideas inherent in freedom of speech, dealing with software as a form of expression and focusing on issues like censorship. These are valid issues, but not the heart of what “free software” means.

Today I read a post on Groklaw describing it in terms of “free as in coffee” vs. “free as in liberty” – primarily because he didn’t like the association with beer – but I liked the use of liberty (edit: or just freedom if you want to keep the phrasing consistent) rather than speech, because it conveys the meaning without bringing in other issues.

(Ironically, the FSF page explaining the phrase links to a list of confusing words and phrases that are worth avoiding… that doesn’t include “free!” Update: These days it lists “for free,” “freely available” and “freeware”…but that still doesn’t solve the confusion of “free.”)

*In other languages, the meanings are more distinct. There’s no confusion between software libre and software gratis.

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It looks like it wasn’t quite the perfect time I thought to order a PowerBook. I received confirmation today from TerraSoft that the delay is due to the changes in the PowerBook line (which were half the reason I chose now to order it). It seems they’re still waiting for a shipment from Apple!

Presumably they had some in stock when they updated their store, in which case this is probably a good thing: it means not only are the new PowerBooks selling faster than expected, but they’re selling well through a Linux shop!

That said, if I have to wait too long I may just cancel this order and drive down to the Apple store. Of course, then I’d have to deal with repartitioning and trying to set up dual booting myself, and not only is it more complicated than dual-booting a PC*, there’s a lot less information available.

Ah, well.

* In particular, I don’t know of any utilities like Partition Magic or Parted that will allow you to resize an active Mac OS filesystem, so I would have to wipe the disk and reinstall Mac OS along with installing Linux.