Blogospheric Refraction

Hi All,

I’ve just uploaded the stage 3 tarball for Cobalt users. This build is compiled for MIPS4… hopefully in a few days ~ a week, a MIPS1 build will join it. I’d greatly appreciate it if users could test these builds out and report back any findings.

Also, in case you missed… there’s a new CoLo release. I’ve tested it both booting from disk, as well as netbooting, and so far, everything seems to work as it should… but I’d again appreciate feedback before I bump it to stable. I aim to do this very soon, as the presently stable version does not compile under gcc-4.1.

Hopefully, I should have all this on mirrors by the end of the month once testing has been completed.

A federal jury in San Diego has ordered Microsoft to pay $1.5 billion to Alcatel-Lucent in a patent dispute over MP3 audio technology used in Windows.

In its verdict, the jury assessed damages based on each Windows PC sold since May 2003. The case could have broader implications, should Alcatel-Lucent pursue claims against other companies that use the widespread MP3 technology.

– http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6161480.html

Ouch… See Microsoft?  This is why we use Vorbis.

Hi All…

Some of you may recall a proposed patch to block the use of proprietary kernel modules in the Linux kernel.  This seemed like a good idea, and it’s one I’d support — however, I do realise there are some shortcomings in the plan.  Looking at the thread tonight, I happened to see a post by David Schwartz which suggested a trademark that could be used by the manufacturer if decent specifications were made available.

I did some thinking about this… and the idea of a small (perhaps non-profit) organisation, could be appointed, to devise Linux-compatibility standards, which companies must meet before they can claim their device is “Linux-Friendly”.  If this organisation agreed that, indeed, the device met the specs, the manufacturer would be given a license to use an appropriate logo when advertising their device to consumers, and they’d be allowed to call their device “Linux-Friendly”.  Otherwise, they’d be told how they can rectify the situation.

I’m thinking something like a 3-level system, which indicates the level of support provided by a device for Linux: (The following is obviously a rough draft)
Bronze-Level Compatibility:

1. Complete Hardware specifications must be made available to those implementing open-source device drivers
2. Technical people responsible must be willing to answer questions relating to the implementation of such drivers
3. Drivers and utilities for the device must be released under the GNU General Public License (may be dual-licensed) and should allow a user to utilise all the device’s features.

Silver-Level Compatibility:

In addition to the requirements of Bronze level, a manufacturer must offer technical support (at minimum, by email) for users running Linux.  Such support should apply to the mainstream Linux distributions (Red Hat/Fedora/CentOS, SuSE, Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu), but may include other distributions too.
Gold-Level Compatibility:

In addition to the requirements for Silver level, a manufacturer must be actively involved in the development of the open-source driver.  Examples would include the Intel PRO/Wireless devices, WACOM tablets, HP printers…etc — all of these companies run open-source projects that develop drivers for their products.

The above is obviously a work-in-progress, and should not be considered official.  I use the Gold/Silver/Bronze system here, because many people are familiar with how it works.  If you’re new to Linux, obviously Silver or Gold level is best, but things may JustWork with Bronze-rated hardware… if you have contact with Linux-savvy people, or are Linux-savvy yourself, then Bronze will suffice.  If you don’t see any rating at all, it’s a matter of buyer-beware.
What would the logo look like?  Well… I’ve got an idea for that too:

The penguin was hand-traced from a photograph of a King Penguin uploaded to the WikiMedia Commons.  The thought is, perhaps the blue ring there could be coloured to indicate the level of support.  I have a SVG version of that image here.  Note: I ask people, to not use this logo for commercial use until proper guidelines are worked out.
Anyways… what are people’s thoughts?  I personally think it’ll make life easier for the typical Linux user, in determining what hardware to buy.  If there’s support for the concept, then it encourages through peer pressure, companies to participate, hopefully leading to better quality drivers.

Hi All…

I normally don’t post privately addressed email, and this especially goes for spam… however, I figured you’d get a kick out of this one. (I’ve broken up some of the long lines here… but otherwise, the email is 100% preserved)

Received: (qmail 9490 invoked from network); 19 Feb 2007 21:18:34 +1000
Received: from dsl217-132-169-145.bb.netvision.net.il (HELO dagdans-05n4xgp) (217.132.169.145)
by www.longlandclan.hopto.org with SMTP; 19 Feb 2007 21:18:34 +1000
Received: from 192.168.0.%RND_DIGIT (203-219-%DIGSTAT2-%STATDIG.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN
[203.219.%DIGSTAT2.%STATDIG]) by mail%SINGSTAT.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN (envelope-from
%FROM_EMAIL) (8.13.6/8.13.6)
with SMTP id %STATWORD for < %TO_EMAIL>; %CURRENT_DATE_TIME
Message-Id: < %RND_DIGIT[10].%STATWORD@mail%SINGSTAT.%RND_FROM_DOMAIN>
From: "%FROM_NAME" < %FROM_EMAIL>
%TO_CC_DEFAULT_HANDLER
Subject: %SUBJECT
Sender: "%FROM_NAME" < %FROM_EMAIL>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/html
Date: %CURRENT_DATE_TIME

%MESSAGE_BODY

Yeah… I don’t think I need to add anything to that.

Hi All…

Well, my stagebuilds are in full swing… at this rate, I hope to have stage1 up in a day or two, and I’ll be starting on stage2, etc very soon.
New Profiles:

The structure is much the same as the 2006.1 release, just replace “2006.1″ with “2007.0″ in your profile path. Portage will tell you what to do when we officially mark the profiles deprecated.  Or, you can switch ahead of time… e.g. on Cobalt:

# rm /etc/make.profile
# ln -sv /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/mips/2007.0/cobalt/o32 /etc/make.profile

This will set your machine up with the new profile (using LinuxThreads… see below for NPTL).

MIPS1 Stages for Cobalt:

There has been some demand for such stage files for some time now, mainly for enthusiasts that wish to run Gentoo on mipsel machines that don’t implement the full MIPS4 ISA. In this release (after I get the MIPS4 stuff pushed out safely), I’ll build MIPS1 stages for those who wish to experiment. Please Note: We can’t help you with queries involving unsupported systems. For some userland-related issues, we may be able to provide some assistance, but anything involving hardware or kernel, you’re on your own.

The MIPS1 stages are primarily being used in a few unofficial ports of Gentoo to various architectures. I won’t say much more than that, as there are some legal issues which need to be addressed first… however, it is hoped these ports can go ahead. Naturally, I’ll let you know when this happens.

Heads Up – 2007.1 release:

In 2007.1, we plan to switch over to running NPTL across all MIPS platforms. At present, I’m doing some testing on mipsel using NPTL to confirm stability. Other MIPS developers have been running NPTL on SGI boxes for some months now with great success, so the code is considered reasonably stable now, even though it’s not keyworded as such. To use NPTL, switch to the nptl/ profile for your system, unmask glibc-2.4-r4, then upgrade glibc:

e.g. on Cobalt:

# rm /etc/make.profile
# ln -sv /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/mips/2007.0/cobalt/o32/nptl /etc/make.profile
# echo '=sys-libs/glibc-2.4-r4 ~mips' >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
# emerge -a glibc

It would be greatly appreciated, if a few brave users could give this a try, and report back their findings.

Yep… it’s another gripe… this time, Symantec’s (really Roxio’s tool) system recovery tool, “GoBack” is in my sights.

For a while, my father has been talking about getting back into using Linux. He recently replaced his dying IBM ThinkPad T22 laptop, with a much more modern LG P1 Express. The machine came pre-loaded with Windows XP, which was fine, we intended to dual-boot. On went the necessities (Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice) and critical utilities like those provided in the Norton SystemWorks suite.

Well, the other day, we decided to actually do it. The machine has a 100GB SATA drive, plenty of space for both operating systems to coexist. We installed Symantec (actually PowerQuest’s product) PartitionMagic, and told Windows to shove over, leaving 40GB for Linux. It wanted to reboot to do the resize, this is fine — we shut down and rebooted as advised.

On the bootup, we get a dreadded blue screen (BSOD-like, but wasn’t a kernel oops) telling us that it can’t resize the partition with GoBack loaded. WTF? They’re both Symantec products?! Surely they should be aware of these limitations? Ahh well, seemingly not, so we reboot again disable GoBack via its bootloader menu, then try again. The resize goes off without a hitch, and we re-enable GoBack, and carry on.

A few days later, we got around to actually installing Linux. We decided on a hand installation of Gentoo Linux/x86 — dispite the laptop being a 64-bit capable Centrino Core Duo machine, we figured 32-bit would be safest for now. I pop in the LiveCD (actually, the 2006.1 prerelease… I never bothered to download a newer CD since this one worked.), and apart from the onboard ethernet card not working (fixed using a USB ethernet dongle), everything installed smoothly.

An oddity I noticed when I ran fdisk… Windows XP is installed on a NTFS partition (one of the reasons why I used PartitionMagic, rather than chancing it with parted). NTFS partitions show up as Type 0×07 (NTFS/HPFS) in fdisk… this partition was showing up as type 0×44 (Unknown), which I thought was bizzare. It was about 60GB in size, and thus I figured it had the NTFS partition inside, so I tacked an Extended partition on the end of that, and inserted my Linux partitions as logical partitions.

Everything was fine… grub installed without a hitch to the master boot record, in a few hours I had the machine booting off the HDD into Linux, talking to the network. Later I got X working (VESA for now… ATI X1400s aren’t supprted yet), and within a day, I had KDE, and all the basics installed.

At this point, I hadn’t tried rebooting into Windows yet … I assumed it was still working. I was badly mistaken. Windows XP would start to load, then flash up a BSOD (a real one), and reboot. Hammering F8, I managed to get it to show me what the BSOD was about… Bloody GoBack2k.sys! It broke normal Windows boot, it broke Safe Mode, and it broke the “last known good configuration”.

Right… so I searched and searched… nothing. Symantec’s website only told me that dual-booting with Linux was not supported: Helpful fellas… might I remind you it’s not your PC, thus I don’t feel it’s your right to tell people what they can run. It was looking like a reinstall, which I was not keen on.

Then I twigged… earlier I had noticed Windows XP’s partition was of type 0×44… what if Windows was looking for a partition of type 0×7? Windows XP is pretty stupid like that — where such a trivial difference would not phase Linux (so long as it had the filesystem drivers for the root), it really breaks Windows badly. The fix was as simple as:

# fdisk /dev/sda
Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-7): 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): 7
Command (m for help): w

Soon as I did that… Windows XP was happy, I simply booted in, then uninstalled GoBack. The machine is now happily booting both OSes.

I post this here, for people who find myself in the same ugly situation. For those who are about to install SystemWorks… I recommend you do not install this shoddy piece of software. The rest of SystemWorks does its job rather well IMHO… but I say again, steer clear of GoBack — It Is Broken!

Hi All…

Well, it’s that time of the year again… the lead up to release time for 2007.0. The official snapshot date is apparently next week sometime, which means I need to produce some pre-2007.0 stages in preparation.

Recently, I started the beginnings of an n32 port to Cobalt, with these stages being available from my devspace (contact me and I’ll provide the URL). In this release, I hope to provide stage1/2 tarballs (perhaps stage3 too) compiled for MIPS1, potentially allowing all standard (note; the PS2 and PSP are not standard) LE MIPS systems to run Gentoo. Users porting Gentoo to new platforms will still be largely on their own as far as support goes… but at least they’ll have a reasonable base system to work from.

Also on my TODO list, is to update the docs. Things aren’t too shabby, however there are some bootloader-related updates, now that arcboot has been punted from the tree, and arcload 0.5 is stable. CoLo will eventually need to be updated too… I’ve held off doing this, since I use my Qube2 as a file server, and thus value its availability. Also, since my PDA has decided to go on the blink, I’ve been without a convenient VT100 terminal to plug in… thus I’ll need to build a new null-modem cable to hook my laptop up.

Hopefully by next week, I’ll have some prerelease stages for 2007.0 (32-bit only for now)… and can start building the official stages once the snapshots are released by the Release Engineering team.