troelsjust dot dk

Given that the Danish politicians, yet again, dare even ponder the notion of censoring the Internet, and then try to dance around it like were they walking over a path of burning coal (And the Danish electorate seem to be too damn afraid of those oh so scary Muslims, and their minarets that they don’t care about another chunk of their freedom of expression going down the toilet!), I thought this might be a good opportunity to remind any oppressed Chinese, Burmese, Iranians etc., that if you are in need of computer software, to help you escape the dictator’s grip on your ability to express yourself, check my Encryption Software section.

I’ll have to remember to update and expand it in the near future, because hell, maybe I or my neighbor might be needing it one of these days!

Since Fedora dropped KDE 3.5.x for Fedora 9 and thereby future releases, I was kind of squatting what operating system to use for my main computer. I was getting so desperate that I even considered going back to openSUSE (Which supports KDE 3.5.x in 11.0, which is supported with security updates for two years), which I left in the first place because Novell started to just piss me off with their laissez-faire attitude towards the free software community. Their deal with Microsoft and other things show this to a great degree. Other technical things also annoyed me back then, such as their reluctance to include applications such as Azureus, despite them being completely legal.

I know that Debian 5.0 Lenny, probably coming out in a month or two (Debian loves their delays!), but I REALLY don’t like Debian at all, so that was not a good option.

So what I picked was FreeBSD, since KDE 3.5.x is in the ports system, and looks like it isn’t going away any time soon. Also FreeBSD, in general, is a very solid operating system.
So for the last 10 days I have been messing with FreeBSD on my main computer. However, I discovered how true the saying “Always avoid .0 releases of software” is! I first picked FreeBSD 7.0, and I ran into some serious bugs, the area of networking, where the vr network driver would drop-out as I tried to transfer files to other machines on my local network, or had intensive traffic to the Internet going. I also ran into problems with sound, where the sounded output of KDE’s artsd sub-system would skip and drop. While artsd is very cruddy these days, it still barely works. So I tried installing FreeBSD 6.3 and did a quick test setup, and I didn’t run into those problems. The 6.x series of FreeBSD, has been out for a good while now, and it shows, the system seems more solid than 7.x, I was actually flabbergasted that something as simple as the vr ethernet driver for VIA-adapters was broken, because it’s such basic hardware as 10/100 ethernet networking. I decided to have a look in CVS, to see whether it might have been fixed for 7.1, and I did notice a bunch of changes, so hopefully it will be fixed in FreeBSD 7.1, and if not, hopefully 7.2, because this sort of basic issue would tarnish FreeBSD’s otherwise very good record of solidity, reliability and stability. But anyway, I’m willing to cut them some slack, since 7.0 was exactly that, a “dot zero” release, which often with any operating system and any category of applicaiton, often is a good example of something to avoid, until childhood illnesses are rooted out.

Politically, I am in no way a conservative, in fact, I can’t help but shake my heads at many conservatives I see on TV these days. However when it comes to the computer software I use, I am somewhat conservative. The reason is that I love it when my computer works, literally. Certain people I know, love to run the latest versions of everything, and occasionally have to fix their machines because something broke. I don’t like that, I like to just be able to go over to my computer, sit down and just use it. This is why I don’t use Windows, or any Microsoft software at all. If we look aside the fact, that Microsoft doesn’t give you any freedom in relation to your computing, all their stuff is just broken out of the box. I can’t think of one piece of Microsoft software, that doesn’t simply suck, and is broken out of the box.

One thing I plan to do for the foreseeable future is to use KDE 3.5.x, until KDE 4.x is a full replacement for what I do. And that could take a while to come, which is why I appreciate the KDE has got 3.5.10 coming out next month.

Since KDE and GNOME have agreed to hold their annual developer conferences, Akademy and GUADEC, for 2009 on Gran Canaria from July 3rd until July 11th, maybe it’s time I started saving up for a vacation trip down there for next year! Going there for Akademy would be seriously kick-ass as a vacation!

I’ve been to Gran Canaria several times in the past, nice place, going there alone would certainly be an interesting experience, especially with two really cool free software conferences going on!

Sun just announced the launch of their new OpenSolaris operating system distribution, formerly known under the code name of Project Indiana. This is supposedly a new “Way”, as people in Zen Buddhism say, of Solaris, that is meant to reach out to advanced users and developers of GNU/Linux to get them to take a look at OpenSolaris. At least that’s how I understand it.

From the screenshots I have seen, Sun has essentially taken a page out of Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE and others’ books of a of a 1-CD installable LiveCD, a new package management system for Solaris and a bunch of other things, and created a version of Solaris based around those ideas.

On paper it all sounds cool, you’ve got ZFS in there, along with D-Trace and other good stuff that Sun has come up with.

BUT, there’s a big but here, I am not very impressed with OpenSolaris at all. I admit I have not tried it, and I don’t really intend to (For reasons that I will explain in a moment), but if you go and take a look at the “License Terms” section of this page: http://www.opensolaris.com/get/index.html
You see this (Emphasis is mine):

“License Terms
The contents of the OpenSolaris™ 2008.05 Live Media Image are governed by the Common Development and Distribution License Version 1.0, with the exception of certain portions under other licenses (such as the OpenSolaris Binary License) as provided in the OpenSolaris Live Media License file included with the software and displayed when booting the Live Media Image. The additional software available from the OpenSolaris Package Repository and not included on the Live Media Image is governed by the licenses provided in the OpenSolaris Package Repository License file and/or in the individual software packages.
All of these licenses permit use, copying and redistribution of the software.”

Obviously that means the GPL and other free software licenses like it, since Sun uses GNOME as the desktop, they obviously have GPLed software in there, which is DEFINITELY not CDDL licensed. However, it also means a staggering amount of proprietary drivers and components. Sun has been quite honest about it, and there’s a detailed page, showing what parts are proprietary: http://www.opensolaris.org/os/about/no_source/
However, what makes the hairs on my neck rise is stuff like this:

“uata driver (B) IDE HBA driver
rtls driver (B) Realtek Fast Ethernet device driver
sbpro driver Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audio device driver”

Über basic hardware that have free software drivers in every other free (Read: liberty) OS out there such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD etc. Yet they are proprietary in “Open”Solaris. They ought to call this thing something like “semi-Open_Solaris”, because that’s what the thing is.
I’m sure some Sun fanboy is gonna accuse med of zealotry or whatever, because I want a completely free software operating system (A few exceptions can be made, but not with drivers), and tell me to write my own drivers. However let me rebuff you right now! Sun’s goal with OpenSolaris is to get GNU/Linux guys to use Solaris, which would create a bigger potential customer base for their supported Solaris, and increase chances, by a very small margin, that people buy a computer from Sun. Fair enough, that’s more or less what Red Hat and Novell does, that’s all fine. However, a GNU/Linux distribution such as Fedora gives me a very very good OS, with no proprietary drivers, or major proprietary components, and a freaking huge amount of supported hardware. ZFS is very cool, and I do have some real uses for it, but a file system is worthless without an operating system, and proprietary software is simple not an option for me, and even more so with supposedly free (Read: liberty) systems that one would need to use a proprietary driver in to be able to use it at all on one’s machine …. if it was supported!

That’s another thing about Solaris, AFAIK, the amount of well supported hardware is miniscule compared to that of GNU/Linux. Hell, even OpenBSD, supports more hardware than Solaris does, and they have absolutely N O proprietary drivers, hell, when people write songs (http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39) about why proprietary drivers (blobs) are bad, you really start thinking “Man, these guys are either really weird, or very serious!” and I am of the opinion of the latter, that they are really serious!

Also, I don’t have any bias towards Solaris, I would really like to give it a serious, real-world try for some storage stuff, but I only use operating systems that are fully free, and OpenSolaris, as it is today, is just right out inadequate, to be frank and honest. Anybody who values software freedom to such a degree that he or she, either uses no proprietary software at all, or minimizes their use of proprietary software to very minimal things, would be wasting their time messing with OpenSolaris in my opinion, they ought to go grab Fedora 9 (When it comes out in 8 days! YAY!) or OpenBSD (A truly free operating system).

WordPress 2.5 was released this morning (My time), and I immediately upgraded my blog to this new version. Among many things is a slick new look for the admin interface, much cleaner sky-blue look. Really really nice. It’s also much better organized than it used to be. It’s just hard to say how awesome this is, if you use WordPress yourself, what are you waiting for, go fetch version 2.5 over at wordpress.org ASAP!

I gotta give the WordPress developers’ props for having one of the most pain-free upgrade procedures I’ve ever seen, it’s amazing, it’s just four simple steps! No more, no less!

In case any WordPress developer is reading this, a feature I’d like to see in the future, is an upgrade of the license to some flavor of the GNU General Public License version 3 (GPL/LGPL/AGPL).

Brilliant job guys, please keep it up!

Oh man did it feel good to finally have something positive (Very positive at that!) to write, compared to the last few days!

One of the features of Fedora 8, was the introduction of CodecBuddy/Codeina, as a way to tell users new to GNU/Linux, who tries to play a multimedia file in an encumbered format, where he or she can get codec support for those, as Fedora cannot include them for legal reasons (Hint: The completely stupid, and utterly broken patent system of the United States of America). The problem is though, that the codecs that is being recommended to the user are proprietary software from Fluendo. As a staunch free software guy, that left a fairly bad taste in my mouth after Fedora 8 was released, as it’s widely known that Fedora’s commitment to free software is extremely high, and this new feature seemed to contradict that commitment. Reading Fedora Planet last night, I was happy to notice that this problem has been discussed, and they plan to do something about it. The solution being the removal of the recommendations of proprietary codecs for MPEG-4, Windows Media etc. etc.
Some guy thought that was Fedora making life difficult for the user, while Seth Vidal said the following on his blog:

We think codeina is very useful. As long as it is distributing only open source software then it is fine. It has not been doing that and we are all worried and concerned about it. We discussed it and decided an easy solution was to patch out the closed-source items that are advertised/offered in the xml file that ships with codeina.

I cannot think of a tenet more central to fedora than ONLY AND ALWAYS FREE SOFTWARE. I think the decision of the board is consistent with that tenet.

Which I could not agree more with!

Ubuntu being the superstar in the open source world these days, does, in my opinion, next to nothing to stand up for free software, and the ideals of it. It’s nice to know that somebody does. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it! Go Fedora!!

“An experiment in distributing DRM-free content via BitTorrent has proven to be a success for one Norwegian TV broadcaster, with project manager Eirik Solheim calling the experience “extremely positive.” His network, Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK), has been offering the popular series Nordkalotten 365 as unprotected MPEG-4 files through BitTorrent since late January and has been surprised with the public’s overwhelmingly positive reaction. Solheim said in an interview (republished on NRK’s blog in English) that the experience will likely “clear the rights for this kind of distribution of more content.”
Since the experiment’s inception just over a month ago, Nordkalotten 365 has been downloaded over 90,000 times—shocking to NRK, since Norway is a small country of only 4.6 million. Not only that, but the people downloading have been good torrenters too. The files have had ratios close to 95 percent, which Solheim said saved license fee payers 95 percent of all distribution costs. “People are happily seeding the files,” Solheim said.”

Source: Norwegian broadcaster: P2P experiment “extremely positive”.

This is brilliant, absolutely brilliant!
This is like THE perfect smack in the face, for the recording industry (Who likes to buy laws that take away our freedom!). A Norwegian TV broadcaster comes out and openly states that BitTorrent just “saved license fee payers 95 percent of all distribution costs.”, rather than try to tell lies that say that they lost money or something.

To the guys at NRK, keep up the good work guys, I love what you’re doing! Cheers and applause from Denmark!

On Monday at roughly 11:10 AM, I came home from a weekend trip to London, England. I went to visit a friend of mine, whom I had, up until Friday last week, only spoken to over the Internet, never met in real life. Well, that’s no longer the case, and the trip was by far one of the best vacations (The first one in close to 8 years) I’ve ever had.

While in England, I used my VISA card quite a lot, so when I came home I wanted to use my bank’s (Danske Bank) online banking facilities to get an overview of all the transactions that had occurred while I was in England. But guess what! A few days before I went to England, Danske Bank decided to “improve” the security features of their online banking, and now it no longer works with my computers. Their online banking requires Java, and they specifically mention Sun’s Java. However, for me, the IcedTea JDK, which is shipped with Fedora 8 (The GNU/Linux distribution that I use) had been working really nicely until they made their little “improvement”, in fact it was working better (The fonts and Java GUI stuff, looked better!) than Sun’s non-free proprietary Java platform, but with this bullshit “improvement” of theirs, it does not work at all. And in addition to that, which in the first place pissed me off, they also check what version of Java you use and start bitching if you don’t use Sun’s Java. That really upset me, because I pay them for a service, and they fucking dare telling me what I can and cannot use!!! That’s just utterly retarded, and is intolerable. Yesterday I sent them an email, wherein I acknowledged that the Java I use is not a “official Sun Java”, but made the point that it was working fine before, in fact better than Sun’s Java, and that their “improvement” (Sarcasm!) was a huge regression for me. After that they changed their stuff a little, so that it’s possible to bypass that stupid-ass Java “check” of theirs, which was actually forcing everybody to use Sun’s Java to use the online banking. This is, in my opinion, vendor lock-in, in other words, Microsoft’s specialty, which I cannot tolerate being subjected to.
My argument is not that they should test their system with every implementation of Java in the world, but if something works well, but they make a change and break it for me, that is just bullshit! This is the kind of shit some retarded, moronic fool with an MSCE certificate would do! Luckily I am not using GNU/Linux on PowerPC as my primary platform, because if that had been the case, I would have been completely stuck, as Sun’s Java platform is not technically available for GNU/Linux on PowerPC, and GNU Classpath would have been rejected by Danske Bank’s Java “check”. I use a standard x86 PC, so in theory I could install Sun’s proprietary Java, but why should I have to? The license conditions are not acceptable to me, IcedTea is included and integrated, in and by my distribution, and for fuck’s sake it was working fine before the idiots at Danske Bank “improved” their system. Ugh! Frustrating!!!

I can see that I am not the only one who has had trouble with Danske Bank’s retarded “improvement”:
http://home.coming.dk/index.php/2008/02/07/p774
http://home.coming.dk/index.php/2008/02/13/p776

So hopefully these morons will fix their shit! They have a few more days, and then I’m switching to a better bank, because this is just intolerable and extremely absurd!

A few days ago, I finally got around to publishing the article about FreeBSD jails, that I wrote late last year. However to make a HOWTO article, like this one properly readable on this site, I needed a new layout for my blog. The reason being that, the amount of space for the actual page content in the WordPress theme that I was using previously (Almost Spring by Becca Wei), was too small to fit the configuration file examples in the article. So I poked around at themes.wordpress.net, and found the theme Classic Beauty by Ei Sabai Nyo. When I noticed that it was licensed under the GNU General Public License, I installed it, and liked it a lot, and it worked perfectly for my article on FreeBSD jails. I fixed a few bugs related to full W3C compliance, cleaned up the header bits and fixed a hard-coded path. I emailed the author all the changes, in the classic free software way, in case she was interested, as of writing I have not gotten a response.

Anyway, if you’re interested in FreeBSD, and don’t already know about the kick-ass jail feature, you might want to consider taking a look at my article titled Security, Process Isolation and Virtual Hosting with FreeBSD Jails.

Happy Hacking!