Posts by AdamWill

Containers! Containers! Containers! And RHEL 7.2. Employ as you wish

nitpick - not 'fallback mode'

"That said, RHEL makes a compelling workstation, particularly if you like GNOME's fallback mode, which RHEL uses to make the desktop feel a bit more like GNOME 2.x. "

Nitpick - that's not a "fallback" mode. It doesn't have any lower graphical (or other) requirements than the regular mode. It's just an alternative UI for people who prefer a more Win98-style desktop. It's officially called "Classic mode".

Back in the early days of Shell there was a "fallback mode", which actually used the old GNOME 2 components (more or less) and was explicitly intended for hardware which couldn't handle Shell, but which some people forced in order to get a more old-style desktop. Classic mode is not fallback mode, they're different animals.

Learn you Func Prog on five minute quick!

oh god yes

One of my favourite perl things is how, somewhere in the official documentation, it says something like "Look, whatever syntax you're using to writing, just try that, and it'll probably work".

Boozing is unsafe at ‘any level’, thunders chief UK.gov quack

er, what nanny state?

"Bollocks! If I fancy a beer, I shall bloody well have a beer!"

Well yes, yes you will. It's a free country. That's why the government health body issues *guidelines* and *recommendations*, not orders. So I'm not sure exactly what brave stand you think you're taking because everyone would be perfectly happy to acknowledge that yes, you have the right to drink however the hell much beer you like.

three pints, moderate? er...

"with moderate drinking defined as men who drink about three pints a day and women who have two glasses of wine a day."

Er, I really don't think that can be right. IIRC a pint is counted as two units. Three pints a day would be 42 units a week. I'm pretty sure that's never been considered 'moderate'. I suspect you were shooting for 21 units a week, which would be a pint and a half a day.

The Register's entirely serious New Year's resolutions for 2016

big thumbs up

"Expect less SHOUTINESS, an evolving sense of humour, more modern and global cultural touchstones, science coverage that gives proper prominence to peer-reviewed, evidence-based research and a recognition that attempted self-aware hopefully ironic sexism is almost always indistinguishable from actual sexism."

This is great news. Might even start reading regularly again. Thanks, El Reg.

IT bloke: Crooks stole my bikes after cycling app blabbed my address

Re: Common sense

It's exactly like that. You get to be part of a 'community' where everyone pretends to be wildly interested in where and how fast everyone else is riding their bike, the payoff being that other people will pretend to be wildly interested in where and how fast you're riding *your* bike. Doesn't that sound fun?

Press Backspace 28 times to own unlucky Grub-by Linux boxes

Re: Many eyes off the ball.

No, not really. grub is a generic bootloader, you can use it to boot anything. And this doesn't exactly root anything, it bypasses a very specific form of protection - as discussed upthread, the grub password really only protects the grub configuration, and is only useful at all in extremely limited circumstances. Drive encryption and firmware-level passwords are much more generally useful for limiting access to a system.

Free HTTPS certs for all – Let's Encrypt opens doors to world+dog

Re: Devils advocate

"and more importantly is it 'trusted' by the majority"

https://letsencrypt.org/2015/10/19/lets-encrypt-is-trusted.html

How much do containers thrash VMs in power usage? Thiiiis much

Re: It would be nice if they weren't ``Gee Whiz'' graphs.

Yup. The OP has a graph with a sane Y axis (starting at 0) sandwiched between three 'gee whiz' graphs, for no apparent reason (figs 7, 8, 9, and 10).

Also note that the network tests were the *only* ones which showed any significant difference in power consumption. So El Reg pulled out the most misleadingly presented graph from the most extreme of the conditions tested.

As the OP's conclusion says:

"The results show that the power consumption of hypervisors and containers is similar when challenged with heavy CPU and memory workloads. Some differences can be observed in the case of network performance analysis, where, for most of the cases, both of the container solutions introduce lower power consumption."

Oh dear, Microsoft: UK.gov signs deal with LibreOffice

Re: Which part of free is not-free?

Implementation and support deal with Collabora, basically. You can follow Michael Meeks, an LO dev who is involved in the whole thing:

https://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/

if, er, you don't mind the constant updates about going to church. Read the ones like http://www.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2015-10-20.html .

PHONE me if you feel DIRTY: Yanks and 'Nadians wave bye-bye to magstripe

Re: Never understood it

Because banks assume liability for bonk transactions - i.e. if you challenge them, unless the transactions look wildly suspicious or you have a history of doing it, they'll just refund you. It's not really more secure, but it's true that the consumer's exposure is pretty limited. (And there is the fact that you really do need to have the card or a very good facsimile in close proximity to the reader, i.e. somewhere you'll be on a camera).

The banks ran the same numbers Starbucks ran a few years back, when they stopped bothering to ask people to sign credit card receipts (and hence assumed liability for the transactions) - whatever they lose on the few people willing to faff around stealing $4 lattes, they gain more on the shortened transaction time for the far greater number of honest customers. Ditto for bonk payments, which is why there are various caps and cutouts, not just the single transaction limit. (If you tried the whisky wheeze you'd find PIN prompts would start showing up somewhere around the fourth or fifth bottle shop).

Actually just the US

Actually this isn't really North America, just the U.S. Canada more or less moved everything to chip and PIN at the same time as the rest of the world, and most retailers have bonk now too. It's only US banks that are behind. Canadian retailers (especially near the border) tend to accept chip-and-sign to accommodate travelling USians, but all Canadian cards are chip-and-PIN.

If the Internet of Things scares you now: Cisco's CEO is bent on hooking up robots, everything

"It's machines learning the behavior of other machines [to ensure security]"

Oh, good, nothing could possibly go wrong there, then. And it'll be really easy to audit.

Pocket mobe butt dialing clogs up 911 emergency calls, says Google

"In addition, the researchers believe that creating a system to automate the callback process for those accidental dials will help save time"

If you are being murdered in your own home, please press 1 now. If you would like to hear about Google Now On Tap from our friends at Google, please press 2 now...

Ubuntu 15.10: More kitten than beast – but beware the claws

Re: ?

GNOME 3 shows a thin scrollbar whenever the active window has scrollable content.

Linux-powered botnet lets rip on victims with 180Gbps network floods

Re: security tips

Yeah, the first-time catch 22 is why we (distros) typically leave it available by default. You need to be able to get into a remotely-deployed server one time to set up keys and such. You should disable direct root access and password access after that.

Out-of-band access mechanisms are fine and all, but tend to be security nightmares in their own right...you can find some pretty hair-raising analyses of some implementations.

I think you're operating with an excessively simplified definition of 'server'. Several things in Linux use the 'client/server' paradigm entirely within a single system. You can't just run around turning off everything with the word 'server' in its name or definition, please at least try and understand what it's for first. Just because something's a 'server' doesn't mean it's binding to a remotely-accessible port.

Don't allow ssh access with a password

"Initially, attackers gain root access by brute-forcing a machine's SSH service – disabling root login from SSH, or using a very strong password, will defeat this."

As will disabling ssh access with a password at all. There's rarely a good reason to allow this; set up key-based access instead. (And of course, use a strong passphrase for your keys).

'Disruptive Innovation'? Take this theory and stuff it: MIT Profs

not 'ivory tower'

The 'disruption' concept is kind of the opposite of an 'ivory tower' thing. It's mostly being recited by businesses operating in the 'real world' as some sort of mantra against criticism of any kind ("BUT BUT WE'RE DISRUPTORS SHUTUP SHUTUP NOW"). It's the people in the ivory towers pointing out that it's bullshit. You get a nice clear view of the situation on the ground from an ivory tower - much better than the people on the ground have. Which is why people built 'em in the first place.

Red Hat bolts the stable with RHEL 6.7

Re: Just started testing CentOS 7

We didn't write grub2. RHEL 7 uses it because no-one is interested in maintaining grub-legacy, and there's no viable alternative. No-one particularly loves grub2, but no-one seems to hate it enough to make something better.

Re: Just started testing CentOS 7

You can still edit grub.cfg by hand in RHEL / Fedora; the scary warning telling you not to comes from upstream grub2, which expects the config file to be updated by grub(2)-mkconfig, which does indeed nerf manual changes. In RHEL/Fedora's system, though, the config file is updated (on new kernel installs and so on) by grubby, which does not nerf existing manual changes to the file.

The grub2 file does look a bit scary at first but a lot of it you can pretty much ignore, if you're just wanting to change kernel boot parameters and the like you can just find the appropriate lines and append the parameters you want, just like before.

Fedora 21: Linux fans will LOVE it - after the install woes

Re: systemd vs Play Services (was: play the ball not the player?)

I'd say that's a complete misunderstanding. I can see where the idea comes from if you don't know anything about how RH works, but it looks nothing *at all* like that from where I'm sitting. systemd isn't really a Red Hat project at all. It's a Lennart project. Lennart isn't an RH plot; he's an engineer. RH hired him based on his Avahi/PulseAudio work. No-one ever told him 'hey, Lennart, Red Hat wants to own init now. Go write an init daemon, and make it a big one.' He just got interested in the area and decided to write something; same as he did with all his other projects. He'd have done the same if he'd been working for Wal-Mart.

systemd got adopted in Fedora because Lennart proposed it and fought the technical merits until he won. It got adopted in RHEL for the same reason. It came from the bottom up, not the top down - there wasn't some PHB somewhere coming up with a strategic vision for the future that involved an init system, it was an engineer pushing something he thought was good. If you want to look at the stuff that actually *does* come from Red Hat's strategic vision and gets dropped into Fedora, look at stuff like Cockpit and FreeIPA and to an extent the Cloud stuff (though some of that is engineer-driven, too). That's the stuff RH's 'strategic vision' is resulting in. Not init systems.

It doesn't really *benefit* RH to 'own' init (not that we do; even if you accept that Jude person's point that there are ~10 core contributors to systemd, half of those don't work for RH). That's not much of a selling point to any of our customers. It's just more work we have to pay someone to do. Have you looked at RH marketing lately? Have you seen how much of it is about systemd? That would be 'none'. It's all hybrid cloud this and container that and devops the other. I mean, I just went to https://www.redhat.com/en and clicked around the marketing crap aimlessly for about 10 minutes and the word 'systemd' didn't appear once.

Oooh! I finally found it, on page 6 of https://www.redhat.com/en/files/resources/en-rhel-whats-new-in-rhel-712030417.pdf , which is six clicks from the front page, one unobtrusive link on https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux . Prominent, this ain't.

Re: Why install when it's going to be obsolete in a few months?

Er, no. Believe it or not, not everything is about systemd. I was talking entirely literally about climate change. I stopped reading this site regularly back a few years ago when they'd post a new anti-climate-change wibble from Lewis Page every day - he's still at it, see http://www.theregister.co.uk/Author/93/ , though he seems to have slowed down a bit.

Re: @DrXym - No to gnome, no to systemd

The RHEL default desktop isn't a server GUI. It's a desktop GUI. People run RHEL on desktops; we have major customers running multiple thousands of seats on it. That's what the RHEL desktop is for.

Probably most people running RHEL as a server OS don't run a graphical desktop directly on the system at all; those who do usually run something pretty geeky and minimal, not GNOME. That's not what GNOME is for.

RH is working on 'server GUIs', but more in the line of webapps than graphical desktops running directly on the server machines. See, for e.g., Cockpit - http://cockpit-project.org/ , included in F21 Server - and the FreeIPA web UI - demo site at https://ipa.demo1.freeipa.org/ipa/ui/ .

Re: @AdamWill - As Gnome 3 requires systemd - NO THANKS

"If you guys were that great in changing the design of Secure Boot why didn't you change it to allow replacing the Microsoft public key ?"

Er. What?

The UEFI specification's Secure Boot definition does not make any requirements whatsoever regarding who should be the provider of the platform key, or any other key, or whether any keys at all should be provided in any particular firmware implementation.

The Microsoft labelling requirements explicitly require that the system owner be able to replace the Microsoft key. Look, they're right here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/jj128256.aspx

"On non-ARM systems, the platform MUST implement the ability for a physically present user to select between two Secure Boot modes in firmware setup: "Custom" and "Standard". Custom Mode allows for more flexibility as specified in the following:

A.It shall be possible for a physically present user to use the Custom Mode firmware setup option to modify the contents of the Secure Boot signature databases and the PK. This may be implemented by simply providing the option to clear all Secure Boot databases (PK, KEK, db, dbx), which puts the system into setup mode.

B.If the user ends up deleting the PK then, upon exiting the Custom Mode firmware setup, the system is operating in Setup Mode with SecureBoot turned off."

"Let's not forget that by doing what you did you prevented the rest of the Linux community to stand up and fight"

What do you mean by 'doing what we did'? And how did that prevent anyone else who gave a crap from pulling their finger out and doing something useful?

Re: Lost me at 7.

"Those who like systemd should do a forensic exam of a failed system, do this using a linux that does not support systemd."

Why? What's the point of that entirely artificial restriction?

Re: Fedora is doing its best to drive me away

You can install any package set from the 'Server' network install image, it is really a generic network install image. The Product stuff is a first cut in F21, it's still being shaken out; this kind of quirk will be straightened out for F22/F23.

Re: F21 - Harder to install XFCE than it should be.....also PAE

You can use the Server network install image to deploy any package set. The generic DVD image is gone, though - something had to give, with the Product changes. Sorry about that.

Re: Why install when it's going to be obsolete in a few months?

Er, if anyone was paying me to do PR, they'd want their money back, I think. No-one's sending me anywhere to do PR, my job is QA. This I do on my own time, God knows why. I've been posting here since it was a useful tech news site and not some sort of weird climate change sceptic backwater, and long before I worked for RH....

Re: Why install when it's going to be obsolete in a few months?

If you'd rather use something with a long life cycle, that's entirely up to you, but it's kind of presumptive to assume you speak for everyone "who use our machines as a tool to get on with our actual work".

Fedora's life cycle is ~13 months (technically it's 'until one month after the next release but one comes out' - F19 goes EOL in a couple of weeks). That's not like RHEL, or anything, but many people find it perfectly viable for getting all sorts of 'actual work' done, and upgrades generally work well these days.

Re: No to gnome, no to systemd

They don't.

Re: No to gnome, no to systemd

"Nitpicking aside, answer my original questions about the necessity of a qr code lib and a http server for journald."

Simple: they aren't necessary. Fedora's systemd does not require an HTTP server:

[adamw@xps13 ~]$ cat /etc/fedora-release

Fedora release 21 (Twenty One)

[adamw@xps13 ~]$ rpm -q --requires systemd | grep http

[adamw@xps13 ~]$

Fedora's systemd is built against qrencode, but that's a Fedora choice:

[adamw@adam anaconda (master %)]$ cd ~/local/systemd/

[adamw@adam systemd (master %)]$ grep -R qrenc *

configure.ac:have_qrencode=no

configure.ac:AC_ARG_ENABLE(qrencode, AS_HELP_STRING([--disable-qrencode], [disable qrencode support]))

...

Build systemd with --disable-qrencode if you don't want it to have a qrencode dependency (or in fact just don't build it with --enable-qrencode , disabled is the default). The benefit is some convenience when setting up keys for Forward Secure Sealing of journal contents; see the --setup-keys argument in 'man journalctl' for details.

As for the HTTP server - again it's a compile time option, --enable-microhttpd to turn it on. Fedora does in fact build with it, but then splits it out into a subpackage so the core systemd does not depend on microhttpd. The subpackage is systemd-journal-gateway . As that name suggests, the feature it supports is allowing remote access to the journal; the thinking was that there's a handy protocol lying around for reading information over a network which everything and its dog supports, so why not just use that instead of inventing some new protocol for remote accessing journal data? See http://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/systemd-journal-gatewayd.service.html . Of course, even when the package is installed this is not enabled by default, and the package is not installed by default.

"Of course the broader question is why does so much of systemd, which is replacing the OS incrementaly, need to reside in user space?"

Erm. Why would you want to build it into kernel space?

"Why the single point of failure in PID1?"

There's *always* been a single point of failure in PID 1. That's sort of what PID 1 *is*. Note that much of systemd does not run as part of PID 1. systemd-journald, for instance, is pid 559 on my system as I write this. systemd-udevd is pid 606. systemd-logind (the daemon GNOME uses, for the 'GNOME requires systemd!' haters) is 871.

Re: As Gnome 3 requires systemd - NO THANKS

Actually, we're the guys who got the original Secure Boot implementation designs substantially changed to be less sucky. Without the RH representatives in those discussions, all systems with Windows 8.1 pre-loaded would likely be as locked down as an iPhone.

You're welcome.

Minimal install

Thanks for the review, glad you enjoyed F21 overall!

"Given the base system shared by these new flavors, I hoped there might be a plain, base flavor - something akin to Debian's Minimal install, which would let you build a more customized desktop. But so far that's not something Fedora is doing. In fact, the Fedora project emphasizes that the base set of packages is "not intended for use on its own"."

Where did that "not intended for use on its own" quote come from? It might need tweaking. You certainly can do a minimal install of Fedora, and it's fairly common. It won't be a Product, but it's a perfectly valid Fedora install. To do it, use the Server network install image, go to the Software Selection screen and pick the 'Minimal Install' option, it's all the way down the bottom of the left-hand column. (Note for the haters: Minimal still uses systemd, NetworkManager and firewalld. Sorry, haters.)

"With Fedora's installer it isn't immediately clear what you need to do – or even that you need to do something"

Well, er, there *is* a rather bright orange bar at the bottom with a little attention icon, that says "Please complete items marked with this icon before continuing to the next step." And the spokes you have to complete - only Installation Destination is required, usually - are marked with that attention icon. Was this not visible enough?

"GNOME on Wayland is still very rough around the edges and there are a number of apps that won't work with Wayland (some of which might never be ported to use the Wayland protocol)"

Note that most of those should still run in a Wayland *session*, via XWayland. In fact I think it's still the case that most apps run via XWayland in Fedora's Wayland GNOME session by default - GTK+ 3 does *have* native Wayland support now, but it was still so crashy the devs decided not to use it by default yet.

"Other Fedora 21 highlights include some SystemD updates"

Nitpick: it's systemd, all lower case. The 'SystemD' spelling tends to be associated with the comment thread monster raving loony faction, so the devs get sensitive about it.

Thanks for all the kind words!

Tech bubble? No, no way, nope, says Silicon Valley investor

Re: Here's the real red flag...

If we're losing this much of your money right now, think how much *more* we could be losing in a year's time!

Old hat: Fedora 21 beta late than never... and could be best ever

On schedules

Matt Miller (current Fedora project leader) has a take on 'delays' which I hope people will consider:

http://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-21-beta-is-on-for-november-4-and-a-word-about-fedora-schedules/

Fedora's release schedule is a hybrid of time- and feature-based, which perhaps isn't always best communicated (and it's much easier to look at a date and say 'hey, it's that date and this didn't happen' than to understand all the subtleties behind it).

F21 was never planned to be a six month release cycle from the start, and was pretty much expected to have some bumps, since there's so much change involved.

Aside from that, glad you're enjoying the Beta so far. We hope the Final shouldn't diverge too far from the current schedule (we really don't want it to drag out past December).

GNOME 3.12: Pixel perfect ... but homeless

Facebook workaround

There's a bug report for the Facebook issue:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=726609

which notes that you can actually navigate the Facebook UI behind the 'too small!' overlay using tab and enter, and authorize the account that way, as a workaround. That works, I checked (though it's a bit tricky to see).

small correction

"In Fedora, for example, most of the account setup process is handled in the Anaconda installer, thus bypassing the GNOME version."

Not in fact. You aren't required to create a user account in anaconda; you have to *either* set a root password *or* create a user account with admin privileges (otherwise we can't be sure you'll have root access to the installed system). If you just set a root password in anaconda, you'll get the no-user-created-previously version of GNOME's initial setup tool.

Even if you create a user in anaconda, you still get most of the GNOME initial setup process after first boot. The only step missed is the user creation step, because...you already created a user. Seems sensible. You should still get the bits about language, keyboard layout, and online account configuration (and anything else I forgot).

Thanks for the bug report about Facebook user accounts - I'm about to see if I can reproduce that here.

Sanity now: Gnome 3.12 looking sensible - at least in beta

Re: New day, same...

"Still a touch-oriented UI on a non-touch desktop"

No, it really isn't. If it was touch oriented, you wouldn't see this:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?status_whiteboard_type=allwordssubstr;query_format=advanced;status_whiteboard=touch;bug_status=UNCONFIRMED;bug_status=NEW;bug_status=ASSIGNED;bug_status=REOPENED;bug_status=NEEDINFO

"Still missing 99% of the functionality of Gnome 2"

Yawn. Troll.

"Still hard-wired to systemd (why does a DE have a dependency on a specific init system?)"

It doesn't. It has a dependency on a decent session manager. ConsoleKit wasn't one. logind is. If someone had written a good one that wasn't part of an init system, GNOME would happily use that. If you write something else that implements the logind API, GNOME will work fine with it.

"Still bloated beyond belief"

Wait, I thought the cool thing to say about GNOME was it didn't have enough features? How can it not have enough features yet be bloated beyond belief? I'm confused.

"Still driven by sneering twits like Lennart "do you hate handicapped people" Poettering"

You appear to be confused. Lennart is not a GNOME developer.

"belief"

"which would seem to fly in the face of GNOME's belief that features confuse users"

There is no such belief. It's just an invention of snarky tech journalists. More actions on right-click in the Dash have been planned all along; just the devs got around to doing it now.

DJANGO UNCHAINED: Don't let 'preview' apps put you off Fedora 20

Don't worry, future archaeologists will find your body in the vast cavern labelled KDE Control Center in a mere handful of thousands of years ;)

Look! GNOME 3.10 (with Fedora 20). Did we mention GNOME 3.10?

Clarifications, corrections

"The other, more controversial change in GNOME 3.10 is the disappearance of the minimise button. The only button you'll see in the top right corner of a GNOME 3.10 window is the close button. The GNOME developers think the typical trio of buttons is just too confusing. At this point there seems little point in arguing, the button is gone, GNOME 3 marches on"

Um. This isn't anything new in 3.10. Minimize buttons haven't been present by default since 3.0. Perhaps you turned them back on in gnome-tweak-tool and then forgot you'd done it?

What is 'new' in 3.10 (though really I think 3.8 or even 3.6) is that some apps use the 'combined' titlebars you mention, and those don't have 'minimize' buttons even if you enable them in gnome-tweak-tool.

"It's not hard to see the inspiration for Software – it looks and behaves pretty much like Ubuntu's Software Center."

Kinda, but FWIW, we've had a plan to build something like this for several years and never quite got around to it until now. It's 'inspired' as much by the Android and iTunes app stores as Ubuntu's - it's basically just the whole concept of 'app stores' that it's an implementation of.

"The Fedora project wiki is in a transition stage at the moment, migrating to a new feature-tracking process, which at the time of writing does not offer much in the way of progress reports."

Well, it's not the wiki per se that's "in a transition stage". It's the feature process, which just happens to post some of its content on the wiki. It used to be the 'feature' process, it's now the 'Change' process, it's mostly inside baseball you don't really need to worry about. "Progress reporting" hasn't actually changed much, and isn't an incredibly strong point of the process in either form - it relies on the feature/change owner providing progress reports voluntarily. But if you just want to see what stuff is definitely scheduled to be in Final, you need to be looking not at the _proposed_ list but the _accepted_ list: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/20/ChangeSet

Re: Fedora devs, please wake up!

What do you mean 'your GNOME 3'? Fedora doesn't write GNOME. GNOME writes GNOME. We just ship it. If you don't like it, use any one of the other dozen+ desktops we also ship.

You can still use yumex if you want something 'GUI-for-yum'-y. In fact, the old gnome-packagekit stuff still exists for now, but I don't know if Richard is going to maintain it any more.

Dell orbits Linux a third time with revamped Sputnik notebooks

Re: Depressing comments

But that weighs an extra 0.8lbs and is much larger (not just for the screen size, either - it's a less efficient design with a much bigger screen bezel). For $1,000 you only get a hard disk: if you want an SSD - which the XPS 13 has - it's an extra $125, which is almost back to the price of the XPS 13, for a bigger heavier system.

Ubuntu 13.10: Meet the Linux distro with a bizarre Britney Spears fixation

Mir? Mirbe not.

"Ubuntu 13.10 is, however, something of an iceberg - the bulk of what's new is hidden away under the surface. Ubuntu 13.10 marks the arrival of Mir, Canonical's new graphics stack designed to replace the ageing X Server."

Or...not so much.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTQ3NDQ

"Ubuntu 13.10 Desktop Will Not Use XMir By Default"

Seems like they really thought this one through carefully.

Re: Do you actually SEARCH your files and programs?

"Do you really use search to find the programs you want to start, or the files you want to open? You don't use menus or browse?"

Yes. Typing 'start, xc, enter' - without even needing to look at the screen, as it's an entirely predictable interaction - is approximately sixty thousand times faster than going start, mouse or keyboard navigate up to 'internet' or 'chat' or some other weird category, mouse or keyboard navigate through a pokey list to the entry labelled xchat, click or hit enter.

I'm stuck in Xfce at the moment because GNOME 3 is not working (occupational hazard of being a QA guy and testing lots of marginal stuff), and hating it. I can't find anything in these ridiculous Windows 98 menus.

Re: All very nice ...

"The web is absolutely full of users bitching about these two items."

There are about three people in the world who both a) still have and b) are still, for some bizarre goddamn reason, attempting to use a G400, so no, no, it really isn't. It is always a valuable thing to get a realistic handle on how much everyone else actually cares about your Precious Snowflake Bug. The answer in your case is 'not at all'.

Have you asked Windows for a Windows 8 driver for it yet? How's that going?

(For those who don't remember, or weren't born, the G400 came out in 1999. It was moderately popular, for a year or two.)

Breaking bad: Oracle's Unbreakable Linux website takes a break

Re: I wonder who uses this Linux

Yes it is. (I work for RH). Oracle takes our entire product, rebrands it, and then attempts to steal our customers by claiming cheaper support prices (and not bothering to do any of the hard engineering work).

Of course, when someone tries to compete with Oracle by offering third party support for their products, they welcome them, say 'this is capitalism!', and compete fairly. AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH JUST KIDDING no they don't, they sue their pants off: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/07/26/2346235/oracle-sues-companies-it-says-provide-solaris-os-support-in-illegal-manner

Oracle: truly the world's shittiest company.

Red Hat parachutes into crowded PaaS market

Free tier

(Note: I work for Red Hat, but not on Openshift). The story seems to be missing the information that Openshift has a free tier - three small gears with no official support. The $20 tier adds support and more storage (6GB vs 1GB on free), and a few other things. See https://www.openshift.com/products/pricing .