* Posts by Adam Williamson 1

273 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2009

Page:

The Reg guide to Linux, part 1: Picking a distro

Adam Williamson 1
WTF?

Not at all true

"Unfortunately they had a particularly stubborn core of developers that refused to listen to their user base. It was very much the case of their way or the highway. This lead to some really dreadful tools (rpmdrake for one) that never took user suggested improvements on board."

This is not remotely true. rpmdrake had two major redesigns. In both cases, large chunks of the new designs were based directly on user feedback, and they were further refined on the basis of more user feedback.

"The maintainer gave me a reasoned explanation of why he had considered but ultimately rejected my personal request" is not the same as developers "refus[ing] to listen to their user base". Listening to users does not involve blindly implementing everything any single user ever requests. If you do that, you wind up with ccsm. And no-one wants to wind up with ccsm.

Adam Williamson 1

Agreed

That's a good way of summarizing Fedora's strengths, which I think the article's rather off-base on. Not many people tend to describe it as either 'shiny' or 'pretty' (actually we regularly get panned for being less pretty than Ubuntu). Fedora is likely to be of interest if you want to take a hands-on approach to being involved in Linux rather than simply using it as a black box operating system like Windows or OS X. Fedora tends to ship very recent versions of software, jumps to new technologies usually before other distros do, and has a strong connection the upstreams of many significant projects (partly because a lot of the upstreams are Red Hat developers).

It also places as high or higher a value on software freedom as any other mainstream Linux distro, which may or may not be important to you.

(I work for Red Hat in the Fedora QA department.)

Copyright wally of the week

Adam Williamson 1

Well...

well the guy thought you wrote a good article and the readers of his local paper would benefit from reading it, and proposed a way for this to happen. It was you who, following your own particular obsessions, saw this immediately through the prism of 'intellectual property' and your 'ownership' of what you wrote. Not everyone thinks about this stuff all the time. That angle probably hadn't even occurred to the guy. His thought process was just 'hey, it'd be neat if this appeared in my local rag so some other people could read it'. Sure, for professional or amateur copyright law enthusiasts there are more proper ways to go about making that happen, but it's not as if he was asking you for permission to sell photocopies down the local market for a fiver, is it?

Ubuntu v iTunes: the music playoff for Applephobes

Adam Williamson 1

KDE overhead

Try running any KDE app (inc. AmaroK) in a console in GNOME and see just how many KDE components are started up, just so you can run that one app. All of those take up memory.

Adam Williamson 1

Music player sync

Odd that the article didn't mention one of the nicest features of Linux music players. Most of them can support almost any portable device capable of playing music just like an iPod. This is thanks to a neat bit of HAL (I guess it'll move to udev soon, if it hasn't already) which is essentially a little list of the USB IDs of devices that can play music, the formats they support, and what directory structure needs to be used to store music on them. So you can plug some six year old MP3-playing cellphone into a Linux system, run Rhythmbox, and see it pop up, with all the tracks on it accessible. You can drag a track from your library to the phone, and - if you have the appropriate codecs installed - Rhythmbox will automatically transcode it to a format the phone supports (if necessary) and transfer it.

I always thought that was awesome, and something Windows just really doesn't do as well (seems like every device comes with its own janky app for transferring music).

Sony Vaio P netbook

Adam Williamson 1

Battery

You can get an extended life battery which sticks out of the bottom a bit, makes it weigh a bit more, and gets it up past 3 hours. I keep that one in my P almost full-time now. It's still very light and small. But yeah, the stock battery is pretty inconvenient for anything beyond a quick website check.

Adam Williamson 1

Performance

"What you can do is complain that the Vaio P has an odd mix of components - maybe people who are prepared to pay a large premium for the screen would like to pay a small premium and get better performance as well."

I'm sure Sony would've made that possible if they could, but it's not terribly practical. The Atom has one big thing with two consequences going for it in this form factor: TDP (power consumption). It's very light on power. This means it generates very little heat - which is important as something as small as the P has very limited heat dispersion capabilities - and is light on the battery. Obviously, given the size of the system, the P's battery is tiny. Even with the Atom CPU the battery life is crap; the stock battery gives me barely 80 minutes. With something more powerful it wouldn't ever be practical to use the thing without a power cord.

(Have to admit, though, the above doesn't excuse the appalling performance of *both* the stock hard disk and SSD options. The hard disk in the original P is a very slow 4200RPM implementation. The SSD in the original P was pretty crappy performing for an SSD, and bizarrely was connected with some kind of janky IDE->SATA converter, IIRC. No idea why Sony made that decision. I'm not sure if the SSD in the second-gen P is any better, but the benchmarks don't look great. Sony's certainly capable of sourcing good SSDs as the SSD in the Z is stonkingly fast, so yeah, color me confused.)

Adam Williamson 1
Stop

Nope

The original P has been out for months and you can't buy a knock off version of it.

Sony is still capable of real top-end engineering, and its high-end systems like the P and Z are custom designs made in Japan; there's no template for cheap unauthorized clones in the Chinese manufacturing business, because the original isn't made there.

Not that this means the P is what you actually *want*, but it's an undeniably impressive bit of engineering and not something that can easily be knocked off by any idiot with a factory...

Adam Williamson 1

Linux on the P

FWIW, the current status of common distros with the GMA 500 graphics:

Ubuntu 8.04 through 9.10 - you'll be fine with a few forum threads, it's pretty well developed.

Ubuntu 10.04 - still being worked on, but looking hopeful.

Fedora 11 - add RPM Fusion repo and install xorg-x11-drv-psb package.

Fedora 12, 13 - see Ubuntu 10.04, it's in progress and depending on the same fixes.

Mandriva 2009.1, 2010.0 - should work out of the box.

Mandriva 2010.1 - I think in much the same status as F12/F13 and Ubuntu 10.04.

Forum thread to look at for Ubuntu is http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1229345 .

I'd bet the trackpad issue is the same as on several recent Sonys, the fix is to add kernel parameter 'i8042.nopnp' . The patch to fix this is working its way upstream, see https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/89139/ . If that is the issue, someone should probably let upstream know more than just the Z1 is affected...

Adam Williamson 1

more convenient reference for Ubuntu

More convenient than the forum thread - https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupportComponentsVideoCardsPoulsbo/

Retailers lobby for lower charges for contactless payments

Adam Williamson 1

Charges

"or a charge by the bank on a transaction which doesn't involve them?"

Retailers are charged, either a flat rate or a very low percentage, for all credit and debit card transactions. This is where VISA etc make a large chunk of their money, and why they can afford to provide completely 'free' service to credit card users who pay off their balances on time, and most debit card users; they charge retailers for the service so consumers don't see the costs. (In case you've ever wondered why a lot fewer retailers accept 'premium' cards like AmEx and Discover, it's because they charge retailers much higher fees to cover the additional services they offer to cardholders; it doesn't make much sense for shops which sell relatively inexpensive items to accept these cards. If you buy a pack of gum on AmEx the retailer loses a bundle of money on the transaction).

I'm not sure where the reference to 'banks' comes in, though - AFAIK it's VISA, Mastercard etc who levy these charges. Even for the 'new contactless payment systems', which I think are mostly owned by the same companies.

Firefox comes over all cloudy

Adam Williamson 1

Tabs

"The service works, though we couldn't get open tabs or passwords synchronised "

Can't tell you about passwords (I keep mine in a separate app), but tabs are synchronized. However, this doesn't mean the tabs that were open on one machine automatically show up on another. Instead you can click the down arrow at the right hand end of the tab bar and click 'Tabs From Other Computers', and it'll show you the open tabs from other systems.

Adam Williamson 1

History

Because Firefox Sync syncs your browsing history, which for me is by far the most important thing. I don't bookmark stuff any more, I just tend to remember some key word from the URL or page title and when I type that in, the awesome bar finds it for me. That's what I need to have synced between my machines.

Adam Williamson 1
Stop

Well.

The data is encrypted on your system before it's ever sent to the server. As someone earlier posted, you can run your own server if you'd rather not send even encrypted data to Mozilla's. And you can choose which things to sync, so if you *still* don't want to sync passwords, you can leave them out.

Software freetards demand axing of ACTA

Adam Williamson 1
WTF?

Er.

He never claims to have, and nor does the article, or any of the previous comments. So why do you bring up this particular straw man?

(RMS would never say _anything_ about 'open source'. He promotes 'free software'. There's a rather significant difference there. Particularly if you're RMS.)

Apple reels as Steve Jobs Flashturbates

Adam Williamson 1
FAIL

Grannie?

"Do you think the Grannie who just bought an iPad knows anything of the HTML5 war?"

Grannies don't buy iPads. Trendy twats with far too much money buy them to use as toys. Check the demographics.

Linux IRC server leaves backdoor open

Adam Williamson 1
FAIL

Not 'the Linux version'

Since you've already made one correction, Reg, perhaps you could make another? As several commenters have pointed out, the exploit is not in 'the Linux version of IRC server Unreal', it's in the source code. Which is, as even current Reg hacks should surely know, is not platform specific. The source of the confusion is possibly that the project appears to follow the fairly common practice of providing pre-rolled binaries for Windows but not Linux. That doesn't make the source tarball 'the Linux version', though. It's still just the source tarball. You could compile it on many platforms.

So, the story is...two-bit IRC server project gets its website compromised. Wewp, stop the presses. That must have affected, oooh, at least 20 machines. It's not like Unreal is even the most popular IRC server in the world. I mean, zoiks.

Adobe euthanizes Flash 10.1 for 64-bit Linux

Adam Williamson 1

because the browser's 64-bit

If you're running a 64-bit distro you want to run a 64-bit browser, so you don't wind up with a pile of 32-bit dependencies. And if you're running a 64-bit browser you want all your plugins to be 64-bit as well, because 32-bit plugins won't run in a 64-bit browser without a janky wrapper layer (nspluginwrapper) which is a pain to live with.

Tories declare students a burden on us all

Adam Williamson 1
WTF?

Funding and idleness

"I bloody well resent having to fund some idler who is doing little more than prolonging his/her adolesence at my expense. </rant>"

Well don't worry, Ted. You said you're over 60? Give it five years and they'll be funding you to prolong your life in idleness. What goes around, comes around.

First WiMAX handset not Sprinting from stores

Adam Williamson 1
Stop

Not just 4G

It works on 3G where there's no 4G signal, of course. It'd be pretty frickin' useless otherwise. Even without the 4G functionality it's a very impressive phone, probably the best Android phone available today (and therefore, to some people, the best phone).

Stephen Fry's truly terrible mistake

Adam Williamson 1
FAIL

Earth to Andrew

"It's simple. It's Stephen Fry's indiscriminate love of a voiceover cheque. And it's the ruin of his reputation."

No, really, it isn't. Andrew, I know it's hard to believe, but the rest of the world does not place such a huge value on your personal hobby horses as you do. Out of all the people in the UK, probably less than 1% would consider it a terrible blow to Stephen Fry's reputation that he does voiceovers for a digital radio switchover campaign (I mean, sheesh). If he were actively endorsing eating babies, maybe you'd have a point.

Council staff helping selves to data

Adam Williamson 1
Stop

Or...

People seem to be drawing comparisons here where there's no data to support them. The statistics on unauthorized access to personal information in the private sector are conspicuous only by their absence. This is because you aren't going to get very far if you send a FoI request to Sky.

If you could, though, I bet the rate of snooping on other people's data in the private sector would turn out to be equal to or higher than the rate in the public sector. I know I used to work for a cable company and it happened all the time ('hmm, wonder what dodgy porn my neighbour's been watching on VOD'...) Not that this makes it any better, but it seems unjustified to assume this is all the fault of The Evil Gubmint / Unions etc.

Mozilla man blasts Apple and Google for HTML5 abuse

Adam Williamson 1
FAIL

That, way over there, was the point

The whole point is that putting up a site which requires you to use a specific browser is completely the wrong way to go about claiming you support a _standard_.

And you conveniently avoid the other major point, that Apple's demo is not a demo of HTML5, but a demo of HTML5 and CSS3 and some other junk that has nothing to do with either.

Adam Williamson 1

Why?

"Why is a Firefox evangelist slagging off Google then?"

Because Mozilla actually has a shred of ethical sense and allows its employees to say what they think, regardless of underlying commercial relationships?

Jobs: iPhone sales spank Android

Adam Williamson 1

Separate contacts?

"I can't put shortcuts to my colleague's work and mobile phone numbers on my home screen because they would both come up with the same name and picture, and they can't be individually changed."

if you want to treat their numbers as separate contacts like this then, well, enter them as two contacts, not as one?

Freeview HD sacrifices surround sound for World Cup scramble

Adam Williamson 1
FAIL

surprised...

that anyone puts up with the awful quality of Freeview anyway. I'm in the UK for a couple of months a year and regularly surprised at how terrible most Freeview channels look. The snooker was on last time I was there, on the red button channel the balls look like they've been drawn with about 16 pixels each - you can see gigantic jagged edges on the frickin' things!

Is this because of all the junk 'premium rate services' taking up tons of bandwidth to subsidise the cost of the whole system, or what? Sheesh, if I lived over there I'd be on freesat or Sky fast as anything.

iPeds, iRobots, and the Chinese iPad clone machine

Adam Williamson 1

japanese

My japanese ain't good enough to get the whole report either, but I can at least tell you it's a fairly light report - it's a general-interest news show, not a tech show - and spends a lot of time not saying very much; the first half is just mentioning that the iPad's about to come out in Japan but you can already buy one...but wait! It's not an iPad, it's an iPed! The second half they're mostly just pointing out that even though it's a knock-off running Android it can still do a lot of stuff - look, it browses the web! Look, the screen rotates! Look, it plays music! Then they point out the price relative to the iPad (the knock-off seems surprisingly expensive, actually, you can buy 'em a lot cheaper on eBay). Overall they actually give a pretty positive impression of the knock-off. They don't point out anything like how it's completely incompatible with the iPad's software ecosystem or anything as far as I can tell. They don't say anything about the hardware either. It's not a very enlightening story.

Statistics prof nails Blackpool hoopla scam

Adam Williamson 1
WTF?

Statistics? Hmm.

While we're all indulging in a spot of jolly old British pikey-bashing, it seems to me there's some rather dodgy logic going on in the court case here. The story suggests the court decided this was a game of luck, not of skill, because a statistics professor told them someone would need a couple of thousand shots to stand a decent chance of winning.

Obviously there's a lot of detail missing there, but on the face of it, it looks rather dodgy. Surely who you'd need to call would not be a statistics professor - who'd be excellent at telling you how long it'd take someone just making completely random shots to win - but some sort of international hoopla champion, i.e., someone who can testify as to the _skill_ involved. Given that what's under debate is whether this is a game of skill. Surely the test should be about how well a truly skilled player can reproduce a beneficial result, not how many attempts it would take a blindfolded monkey to do it once.

I mean, if you ask a statistics professor to figure out how likely it is that 'someone' will make a hole in one, or a half court basket, or hit a home run off Alex Rodriguez, or score a goal on a 35 yard free kick, they'd give you some pretty bloody low percentages there too. Does that mean all those things are entirely a matter of chance, and the NBA, MLB, PGA and Premier League should all be up applying for gambling licenses?

Something not quite right there. Clearly the morally 'obviously' correct verdict has been reached, but I'm not entirely sure it was done on the right basis...

Mountain View delivers Google Analytics opt-out

Adam Williamson 1
Joke

Follow-up

No word yet on how Google plans to use the new tracking data it now receives on who exactly chooses to opt out of its other tracking mechanisms? :)

Ubuntu open to greater touch

Adam Williamson 1

really doesn't have much to do with Windows

You mean, the Windows they already run on their handy, around-the-house, tablet form factor device? No, wait, that's right - no-one runs Windows on such devices. Almost no-one owns one. Which is sort of the attraction. This argument is about as silly as saying no-one would buy a Nokia mobile phone because it doesn't look like Windows.

Having said that, this does seem to be a rather long article for saying "You can ship it with a different desktop if you like. Oh, and we think we put Multi-Pointer X in there, but we're not really sure because we didn't write it and don't actually having a freaking clue how it works". So, Canonical as usual, then.

Mobile Broadband Best Buys

Adam Williamson 1

Not using a dongle

Good article, but just a note: it would have been useful, probably, to point out the possibility of not using a dongle at all. The phone companies obviously don't talk about this option very loud, as they'd far rather sell you another bit of hardware and another contract, but you can use just about any smartphone for tethering, with either first- or third-party software. There's apps for Windows Mobile and rooted iPhones and Android phones which can set them up as wireless routers, even, to share their data connections with multiple close systems. The more conventional options are to connect the phone via a USB cable or Bluetooth.

Some carriers intentionally disable the tethering functions on the phones they sell, and/or tell you not to do tethering via their AUP. The former is usually fairly easy to work around by adding a third-party application. The latter, SO I'VE HEARD, is also usually workaroundable, but of course leaves you liable to awkward calls (and large bills) from the phone company if they catch you at it. So, really, it's entirely up to you. But there are definitely quite a lot of plans which don't contractually restrict tethering.

When I visit the UK I use Tesco Mobile PAYG, which has a reasonable rate of £2 a week for 'unlimited' data and no tethering restrictions, but with the rather large proviso that 'unlimited' is not unlimited at all, but 100MB a week, which they describe as a 'fair use' restriction. Which is, of course, cobblers; it's just a limit they don't want to tell you is a limit. Ah, well. If you go in with your eyes open it's not a bad option, though there may be better. It's on O2's network, and I concur with the review that the 3G coverage on O2 is not stunning. On the Euston to Piccadilly run you get 3G most of the way, but there's definite patches where it drops to GPRS and everything slows to a crawl. It doesn't seem as slow to me as the article suggests, though, where I *do* get 3G coverage.

Android tops iPhone in US (no thanks to the Nexus One)

Adam Williamson 1

Revenue

The revenue from the handset sale is almost irrelevant in the smartphone market, it's all about the revenue from the plan. It doesn't really matter much that some of these phones may have been sold at low 'prices' or 'given away' in the two-for-one deals that Verizon does on smartphones, they still wind up getting the revenue they really care about. Contract revenue for the lifetime of a single contract is usually up in four figures, the maximum low three-figure handset cost doesn't really matter much in the long run.

Twitter bomb joker found guilty

Adam Williamson 1
Stop

'Arrested'

Yes, keyword, 'arrested'. Not 'criminally charged and convicted'. Usually when this happens at an airport the plods give the idiot in question a hard time for a while then tell him not to be such a twat in future and let him go, they don't charge and prosecute him for no sensible reason.

No argument that the dude's an idiot, but if a criminal conviction were a reasonable penalty for being an idiot, the whole country would be a jail by now...

Global warming dirt-carbon peril models are wrong, say boffins

Adam Williamson 1

Well, sure, but

Well sure, but we seem to be talking about different problems. As far as I know the whole 'runaway warming' concept has always been something of a supposition, and - as I said - the understanding I've got from casual reading on the topic is that mostly scientists are worried about the direct increase in warming caused by human activity. I didn't get the impression that, if there's no runaway warming, there's no problem.

Adam Williamson 1

Hmm.

In all the forecasts I've read, 'just a few degrees' (assuming we're talking celsius here) of human caused warming is the _problem_, not the trigger for the problem. Any further warming caused by carbon being released from soil after that initial few degrees warming is more in the 'icing on the cake' column. 'Just a few degrees' of human-caused warming is liable to produce enough problems all on its own...

Nokia's lost weekend ends with N8?

Adam Williamson 1

Sensor

They claim it has a rather larger sensor than other phones, which would make it make a little more sense. Looking at the sample pics linked to, they _do_ look rather like what you'd get out of a cheapo 12mp P&S, which isn't bad for a phone. It probably can't really take advantage of the whole 12mp, but only in the same way most P&S cameras can't either, and it does genuinely seem capable of resolving somewhat more than 5.

Lucid Lynx fights 'major' X-Server memory leak

Adam Williamson 1
WTF?

Er, no

"Since I'm so stubborn, I'm going to go ahead and blame it on all the X development that (I imagine) is wasted on features so unimportant as jiggling windows and "Oh look it's raining on my desktop!""

'Imagine' is the operative word there, as nothing of that kind is done in X. There's various projects which implement some kinds of desktop-whizzy-stuff like that, but none of them is part of X.

"Happening on two different distros with different video drivers and different versions of X, so I rather assume it's not due to some uncommon combination of circumstances."

Hard to say, but overall I'd disagree; I don't have any long-term memory leak issues on a dozen different machines (yeah, they add up) running various versions of two different distros, with a range of graphics cards. You can, of course, have someone eminently more qualified take a shot at figuring out what the issue is by filing a bug.

"I haven't noticed any improvement in my user experience from X since they went with the modular version, which I believe coincided with Canonical taking over development..."

Nurgh, do what? Canonical haven't taken over development of anything. Canonical does no X development at all. They have one paid person working on X - Bryce Harrington - and all he does is work on integrating X into Ubuntu, he does no upstream development.

No one company or body controls X development; various companies make contributions, including Red Hat, Novell, Mandriva, Intel and several other companies and distros.

Adam Williamson 1

"From RedHat"

Just to clarify this, they're right in a sense to say the patch they used came "from RedHat", in that it was written by someone who works for Red Hat (Matthew Barnes). It does not, however, come "from RedHat" in the sense of being part of any Red Hat or Fedora product. It was an initial suggested fix attached to the upstream bug report which Ubuntu jumped on for their distro; it was never actually committed into upstream X.org, any version of Red Hat, or any version of Fedora. As far as I'm aware, nothing but Ubuntu 10.04 - and certainly not any Red Hat or Fedora product - is affected by this leak.

Jobsian drones shackle gamer with 'lifetime' iPad ban

Adam Williamson 1
WTF?

Nothing sadder?

"Nothing is sadder than seeing the look on a little kid's face when you don't have the toy they want, because you just personally sold the last half-dozen to a shady guy in sunglasses who reeks of cigarette smoke. It gets old really fast."

Well, two points. One, drowning puppies. Drowning puppies are definitely sadder. Two, any kid who thinks the iPad is a 'toy' is already an overpriviliged little fucker who's probably going to go on to own a hedge fund, so really, where's the harm?

Nazi soldiers pose for Red Army calendar

Adam Williamson 1

Caption gag

I'd expect a lot of El Reg's American readers to be familiar with Craig Ferguson's twist on the caption gag - "Do we have a photo of Paul McCartney?"

Canon EOS 550D DSLR

Adam Williamson 1
FAIL

d'oh

"I've always regarded the lower end models as chick's cameras - not in a derogatory way"

Right there is the point where you applied your head to your desk with massive force.

New ISS machine makes water from waste CO2

Adam Williamson 1

Adrian 5:

It's rather difficult to be entirely confident whether a machine will work properly in low-Earth orbit without, well, sending it to low-Earth orbit.

Hasselblad CFV-39 digital back

Adam Williamson 1
FAIL

Damn...

...just checked the back of the sofa and my piggy bank and I'm *still* 9,995 short. Curses.

US gov cries foul on MPAA piracy claims

Adam Williamson 1

Hmm.

"noticed in Game how the PC games section is ever decreasing in size"

Heard of Steam?

Fedora 13 - Ubuntu's smart but less attractive cousin

Adam Williamson 1
Stop

Not really.

"Fedora is primary a testing ground for RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so it is not allowed to flow too far away from its main sponsor. That is why you will never see all those fancy newbie stuff."

This angle is overplayed. That's not what Fedora is. Red Hat also doesn't entirely control Fedora, so Red Hat really can't 'not allow' people to add useful apps. With the current Fedora process, it'd be entirely possible for an app to go from not being in Fedora to being included in the default desktop spin without anyone @redhat.com having to be actively involved, or even give approval, at any stage.

Fedora really isn't 'primarily' a 'testing ground' for RHEL. It's a desktop Linux distribution whose development is sponsored by Red Hat. It is the upstream for RHEL, that's not the same thing as being a 'testing ground', and Fedora has a distinctly different focus in terms of usage from RHEL. Fedora is *not* a server distribution, no-one would really recommend you run production servers on Fedora. Fedora is more aimed at desktop use. In a sense it's intended to be the desktop that someone who pilots RHEL servers might use, maybe, but that's just a rough approximation.

Fedora has tons of apps and features aimed at being useful to the desktop user. The inclusion of the Shotwell photo management app in this release, for instance, which is mentioned in the release documentation, is hardly a feature of interest to your average server maintainer. =) Nor is 3D support for NVIDIA graphics cards.

Fedora devs contribute extensively to the development of GNOME, and of tools such as system-config-printer (for printer management), gnome-color-manager (for color management), upower (power management)...Fedora has tons of devs working on features that are of direct interest to desktop users.

Fedora 13 includes a new social networking app, much as Ubuntu does; it just hasn't been as aggressively promoted. We chose Vino rather than Gwibber, due to Gwibber's rather heavy dependency on Ubuntu's cloud stuff.

Adam Williamson 1
FAIL

you're welcome

Fedora's 'holier than thou' attitude is a large reason why we now *have* a good open source version of Java. It's also the reason a good open source NVIDIA driver now exists, and the reason for all sorts of other F/OSS software that exists now that didn't before, and never would have if all distros had just said 'oh, fine, we'll just ship something proprietary then'.

You're welcome!

"Not letting mp3 files be played from install"

That has nothing to do with a 'holier than thou attitude' and everything to do with the patents on decoding MP3.

"Not to mention their nasty bias towards Gnome"

Er, what's 'nasty' about it? We pick a default desktop and go with it. It's not as if anyone's trying to hide this.

"forcing everyone to install worlds of unwanted Mono programs."

Wait, what? First you're talking about a holier than thou attitude to freedom, now you're moaning about Mono? Within the space of five lines? A little consistency, please!

Adam Williamson 1

Er...

Because of course want you want on your server is shiny new versions of everything all the time. That's definitely the best way to make sure it's stable and its behaviour is predictable.

Adam Williamson 1
Thumb Up

yep.

The recommended method is preupgrade:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpgrade

though there's a rather icky bug where that will fail for most F11-F12 and most F12-F13 cases because the /boot partition is too small (see https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F13_bugs#preupgrade-default-boot ).

The other option is, as you thought, yum, which isn't technically supported but usually works okay. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum provides general instructions and also specific caveats for particular version upgrades; there'll be notes on the f12-f13 upgrade at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Upgrading_Fedora_using_yum#Fedora_12_-.3E_Fedora_13 .

Lib Dems demand niceness, ignore technology

Adam Williamson 1

Still...

if that's the worst thing about them, it beats out the others by a mile. After all, trying to decide what's the worst thing about the current Labour lot is like playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey on a sodding donkey farm, and the Tories are, well, Tories. It's barely even a contest.

Fedora tempts fate with Apollo 13 beta

Adam Williamson 1
Linux

Indeed

Yeah, that's true. Obviously the Zarafa included in Fedora is the open source code, and there's no mechanism for it to advertise the closed versions at you, but still. We've started a discussion on that in the Fedora marketing group. Personally I'd rather have pushed eGroupware, but we'll see what happens.

Page: