Today I read this rant about how the Linux desktop is not free enough. I almost stopped at the first sentence but still read on. I have to comment on a few things, but of course I don't have a google+ account, it's not free enough.

Desktop Linux Owns Too Many Apps

Ingo Molnar says: Desktop Linux distributions are trying to "own" 20 thousand application packages consisting of over a billion lines of code and have created parallel, mostly closed ecosystems around them. Not really, distributions maintain packages and you are always free to join discussions with most package maintainers/distributions, it's often easier than you think (mailing, IRC, etc) and mostly doesn't require creating an account with google. If your distribution isn't open enough, change. The typical update latency for an app is weeks for security fixes (sometimes months) and months (sometimes years) for major features. They are centrally planned, hierarchical organizations instead of distributed, democratic free societies. It's like that when you depend on your distribution to kindly package everything for you and make your life so much easier and virtually headacheless, however there is nothing stopping you from getting the sources and compiling the latest version yourself.

You seem to not understand that the democracy part is within the distribution, the devs and maintainers (etc) are the demographics that get to vote and decide when and how to implement updates/upgrades and such to their distribution. The passive consumer gets to use the whole thing for free with no questions asked. The passive consumer can also switch to any other distribution, or even create their own distribution, etc. I'm not sure what your vision of a free society is.

The Future is App Stores

No way I would think that, but I then read: What did the (mostly closed source) competition do? It went into the exact opposite direction: Apple/iOS and Google/Android consist of around a hundred tightly integrated core packages only, managed as a single well-focused project. Now I see what Ingo Molnar means by "free society", a free market. ...most new packages are added with a few days of latency (at most a few weeks), app updates are pushed with hours of latency (at most a few days) - basically it goes as fast as the application project wishes to push it. This is exactly why some people are happy to have their once a year updates. My requirement is that the software I use today isn't changed, updated, edited or removed potentially every few hours. If I do need the latest for a specific program, I get the source and compile or even get the easy to use binaries (like for Icecat/Firefox...). And if I always need everything to be bleeding edge there's a distro for that.

On a side note, I am going to guess that there could be less malicious code in among a quality distribution's packages than in an Iphone or Android App store. (Random search result: 30+ New Malicious Apps Spotted In The Android Market).

And so

I'll finish with this last bit: Desktop Linux users are, naturally, voting with their feet: they prefer an open marketplace over (from their perspective) micro-managed, closed and low quality Linux desktop distributions. This would be true if most Linux distributions were closed and low quality, actually I can't speak for most but I can speak for Debian as I've been using that for my workstations since 2002. I can say that it has always worked, updates are fast enough for me and the quality is so high I get dizzy thinking about it.

I've heard many good things about other distributions as well, they each have their ways of doing things which seems to correspond to many different people's needs and such. This sounds more like "free society" to me, the possibility to maintain an entire operating system and all the programs you want however you want.

I don't ever want my desktop or system to be managed or controlled by an "app store". I'm not against paying someone for their code, but I am against giving up the control of my system to every developer whose program I've installed. Mostly I totally respect the work provided by my distribution in keeping everything clean, coherent, maintainable and secure.

Yes, I know.. . . .WTF is Firefox doing here, it's a browser not a resolver. If anyone from Firefox reads this, WHY ?? Let people who want this useless function enable it themselves and not the other way around.

Now to disable it, very simple is the procedure, and very very intuitive.. .aheum:

• Open a new tab and go to about:config
• Search for network.dnsCacheExpiration
• If you don't have it, add it (right click "new Integer)
• Set value to 0

Oh, and don't mess it up because if you create the wrong key or make a boolean rather than a string you can't delete the key or modify its properties, only the value.

Today I noticed on a Xen DomU running Debian Squeeze that time seemed to be running a bit too fast, I noticed the same on a Debian Wheezy DomU. They both have in common the kernel 2.6.32-5-xen-amd64.

After breaking a few keyboards I found the following on domU: cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/available_clocksource xen tsc jiffies cat /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource jiffies So I tried changing the clocksource as follows: echo "xen" > /sys/devices/system/clocksource/clocksource0/current_clocksource And voilà, time is back to normal.

To make the changes permanent I changed this in the domU.conf file (on dom0) from: extra="clocksource=jiffies" to extra="clocksource=xen"

Stella GNU/Linux is finally born. It is a desktop focused, Gnome2 based Centos 6 remix (exact words of the maintainer). The features look really neat if you are looking for a CentOS/RPM based OS that is rock stable rather then bleeding (buggy) edge...

You can get it here (1 Gbps, IPv4, IPv6).

This year FOSDEM is supported by CodePlex (among other sponsors). CodePlex is Microsoft's vision/version of an "Open Source" project hub.

I don't know what strikes me more, that FOSDEM would accept dirty money or the realisation that Microsoft has completely (or so it seems) changed their minds about open source.

It was only in 2008, before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft that he said such things like:

"there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

[Open source creates a license] "so that nobody can ever improve the software,"

It still seems difficult for MS to integrate the term "open source" completely, it's all over the CodePlex website, but on the FOSDEM page there is a link to www.microsoft.com/opensource which redirects to www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/default.aspx. It's as if it's too much too soon to have the term "opensource" in a microsoft url. : ]

In the end I guess one could say that Microsoft is a better place without Bill Gates. Maybe Apple will soon follow .. HAHAHAHHAHA!!

Today I discovered PhpTop and I must say it looks really cool. This will show Php processes like top.

To install, you can either get the .deb packages or just download the binary (which I did to try out first), and add this to your php.ini (I personally added this to /etc/php5/conf.d/phptop.ini which seems to work as well): auto_prepend_file=/path/to/phptop_hook.php And voilà.

You can even output to HTML and hence generate a nice web page... .

Everybody loves Firefox, they are your friends, they are the "resistance", the alternative.. . the Free browser and all that crap. Yet, they somehow have started to annoy me to a point where I almost considered using Google Chrome... heck, I might just. :] (kidding!)

Here are just a couple of #$!%U*&ing things that annoyed me today..

Right Click -> New Tab: Gone

I'm not alone here, there are others annoyed by this as well. Please click on "I have this problem too" (if applicable).

Why remove such a simple ergonomically correct menu item ? People used it, they just broke it. (You can install a plugin that includes that functionality).

64bit ? But You Have to Look for it

Nowadays many computers have 64bit processors, so you can often use 64bit operating systems and enjoy 64bit programs. Cool. Some programs are not available in 64bit mode, that's fine but Firefox is available in 64bits since 4.0 .. However, you cannot easily find it. I've even found some tips on how to get the Firefox to run using ia32-libs, libraries to run 32bit programs on 64bit platforms !!

Funny thing is, while clicking through the "Need Download Help" button I found myself searching for 64 bit Firefox, the first result is "Uninstalling Firefox".

Anyway, if you still don't hate Firefox (or, like me, it's the browser you hate the least), you can get your 64 bit version from the Mozilla FTP site.. (of course this link was found somewhere on some forum or something... maybe some other rant).

The other day I upgraded my computer, I went from my 6 and a half year old laptop to a 4 year old desktop, and wow that's an impressive upgrade. Anyway, my username changed, hence the path to my photos has changed too, and Digikam stores that info in its internal DB (sqlite). Even if you copy your digicamrc file and your photos, and the digikam4.db database you might have to edit the db yourself to let it know the new path.. This is not as complicated as it may sound.

You can use sqlitebrowser for exampe. On Debian: apt-get install sqlitebrowser Then open your digikam4.db (wherever it may be): sqlitebrowser digikam4.db and edit the path, "specificPath". Images may help, so voila:

Go to the Browse Data tab, look at the specificData row.

Double click to edit the the cell and correct the value to your new path. Don't forget to "save" the database changes, you should be all set. ... the volume identifier (in my case at least) will be updated by Digikam.

Note: It took about 25 minutes for Digikam to start after these edits, but since it works totally normally.

Hopefully there could/should be a tool in a newer version of Digikam to add a tool to help with this.. Anyway, if this helps you today, that cool. : ]

Over the past couple of days Jag and I have set up a little special page that gathers aircraft data in a most beautiful way. Check out air traffic contrlol. For some explanations, read on.

This is data captured by a radar then decoded using a GPL program, ADS-B decoder written by Meinolf Braeutigam and edited by Jag. Jag captures the data as he lives near London Heathrow, then feeds it to my database and then our page displays it to you...

The colors are based on the ICAO of each aircraft, they use hexadecimal web color compatible code which we in turn use to color each flight.. which means that each aircraft has it's own unique color.

The past week has left 65% of the Interweb (the part of the Internet that cat lovers use most) was trembling with great ph34r as CVE-2011-3192 has been out there causing people to pull their hair out while coming up with RewriteRules that could save the day while we wait the "in 48 hours fix" which just didn't come in time...

Well actually, I personally didn't mind as a little DDOS would have just given me an excuse to just shut down the web server for a few days and use my bike a bit more...

In any case, I don't know about your favorite distribution, buy mine has just released an official patch that also addresses another issue...

So voila, update/upgrade your Debian server and you can now sleep tight, that was the last vulnerability for Apache for *ever*.

Recently Microsoft bought Skype and then Skype started to break down and have many little issues here and there. Of course the expected result has been confirmed in the FSF's latest mail.

Read more about these Skype replacement projects at the FSF website.

I don't use FTP anymore to transfer files.. However today I *had* to. This is the day I realise that I still haven't found the perfect FTP client.

The LFTP problem:

Don't get me wrong, I like this program, however it's when I need to "get" recursively that I start to have to think.. is it "mirror" or "mirror -R" ? .. knowing that one of the options will delete stuff remotely I have taken the habit of simply not using this tool. It does seem completely stupid to have such an option when most people are used to the "-r" switch.. . why would "get file" become "get mirror directory/" ? So close yet, no. (And yes, I know, I can be that way : ] ).

The NCFTP issue:

hmm, well, it's actually the program I've used the most, it has bookmarks and stuff, uses the normal "-R" syntax, it also has some neat features useful when scripting. However it does not support any form of encryption, so it can only be considered private if used in 1855. Another issue I encountered today, is when I finally was going to recursively get a directory I got this new and neat error: tar: This does not look like a tar archive Yes, directories are not tar archives, thanks for the heads up.

Yet another FTP client, YAFC:

This one seems cool, I'm sure it's the best one for me EXCEPT (of course) that whoever develops this program does not seem to care about the users enough to leave a help file or something. There is a manual, but say you copy a file that already exists, you get a nice prompt: Overwrite? [yncauR, ? for help] And yes, the "?" has no effect (in my case at least). Even the "help" command does not work. So this could be the one, but I might never know. To be fair, I met this program only recently so maybe when we get to know each other better things will work out... .

The solution:

I think that the 3 developers need to get into some threesome and bring to this earth a decent, simple, functional command line GNU FTP client that works..