This week’s BOFH in El Reg rings horribly true:
“I JUST WANT MY MENU BACK!”
“You mean you don’t like the ribbon? It’s new!”
“I don’t care if it’s new – I can’t find anything!”
Back when I was a sysadmin we used to call users a “test load”.
there is no version 7
November 4th, 2011time to ditch ubuntu?
October 19th, 2011I’ve used Ubuntu on my desktops/laptops and netbook for some time now. I think my first installation was 6.06 (the version 6.04 which was late by two months) and my desktops currently all run 10.04 LTS. I got over the minor irritation of the move of the window control buttons from the top right to the top left (a la Mac OSX). But I disliked the first version of 10.10 I tried on the netbook (sporting an early version the unity desktop) so much I quickly switched that back to to 10.04.
I have used the LTS versions of Ubuntu because, in my view, it provides the best trade off between bleeding edge and stability. I’m a huge fan of Debian and use it on my servers and slugs, but Debian is too conservative (and too purist about non-free software such as multimedia codecs) to make it a truly attractive OS for the modern desktop without a lot of additional work. So, the fact that Ubuntu was based on Debian, but with a rather faster release schedule and added usability has made it an obvious choice for some time. And it has become hugely popular. It still ranks number one at distrowatch and there are many other distributions which are based upon it. But Canonical have been taking some controversial decisions of late, many of which have split the user base.
After trialling the unity desktop on the netbook edition in Ubutu 10.10, Canonical merged the netbook and desktop versions into one with 11.04. This meant that users upgrading from an earlier (GNOME based) version were suddenly faced with a radically different looking desktop. The GNOME desktop (called Ubuntu classic) was still available as a fallback from unity in 11.04, but from the latest release (11.10) this is no longer the case, instead you get a 2D version of unity. So, you have unity or you have a worse version of unity.
Ubuntu may be using the GNOME libraries (and it is now using the GNOME 3 libraries rather than those for GNOME 2 as it did when unity was first launched) but many people, myself included, cannot understand why Canonical did not simply work with the GNOME project on version 3. But Canonical have form here. As a company they have been criticised many times in the past for taking rather too much from the FOSS community and not putting enough back. Without Debian, Ubuntu would never have existed. Ian Murdock (the “ian” in Debian) himself expressed concern some time ago that the Ubuntu codebase could diverge too much from Debian unless Canonical developers pushed changes back into the upstream projects. Furthermore, unlike companies such as Intel and Redhat, Canonical developers seem to be almost entirely absent from the linux kernel development community. An interesting, indeed almost comical, statistic emerged recently showing that Microsoft was the fifth most productive contributor to the Linux 3.0 kernel behind only Redhat, Intel, Novell and IBM respectively. As admin magazine notes however, this position owes much to the fact that Microsoft employee K. Y. Srinivasan made 343 changes. Most of those changes were to clean up the code implementing a driver for Hyper-V virtualization. But this is just a statistical blip – I fully expect Microsoft to drop out of the top five, or even top twenty five, shortly.
Canonical also got into a spot of bother when they ditched the GNOME audio player Rhythmbox in favour of Banshee. Rythmbox is decidedly “free software” and links users to free music downloads from Jamendo and paid for music from Magnatune, whilst Banshee looks far more commercially oriented (it linked to Amazon’s MP3 store for downloads in mid 2010 and Canonical used it to link to its own Ubuntu One music store in the 11.04 release. Such decisions can upset people (and make Canonical begin to look like Apple). If they introduce any form of DRM then there will be hell to pay.
With the release of 11.04, Ubuntu Studio, the Ubuntu based distro aimed at multimedia creators, defaulted to retaining GNOME in preference to unity, saying in its release notes “Ubuntu Studio does not currently use Unity. As the user logs in it will default to Gnome Classic Desktop (i.e. Gnome2)”. Shortly thereafter, in May of this year, Scott Lavender, the project lead for Ubuntu Studio announced that they would move away from unity (and GNOME) and use the lightweight Xfce desktop as the default environment in future.
Criticism of Ubuntu (and of Canonical the company) has become so loud and frequent of late that Jono Bacon, the Ubuntu Community “spokesman” reacted by founding openrespect.org apparently as a means of deflecting some of that criticism. The openrespect website says:
“OpenRespect was founded out of a concern that discussion and discourse in the Open Source, Free Software, and Free Culture community has become a little too fiery and flamey in recent years. The goal of OpenRespect is simple: to provide a simple declaration that distills some of the core elements of showing respect to other participants in discussions.”
But as itwire points out, the timing here is rather odd since it is only now “when Canonical has its feet held to the fire, we have a new website called OpenRespect.org registered and volumes of spiel being generated by Bacon.” Quite so.
Jono Bacon has also popped up in a variety of fora getting all defensive about Canonical’s design decisions. He even fronted an article in the July 2011 issue of LinuxFormat magazine where he “interviewed” four key players at Canonical (including Mark Shuttleworth). That interview included such unbiased questions as “Unity is an exciting new vision. What are your goals and inspirations?” Worse, the article did not bother to mention that Bacon was a key Canonical employee.
I have no doubt that Canonical will make unity work. The installed base of Ubuntu users is so large that developers will be forced to make it work, but I don’t have to like it. My problem is that GNOME itself has also changed radically in the move from 2.30 to 3.0. And I don’t like that either. I find myself in good company though, back in July of this year, Linus Torvalds called GNOME 3.0 an “unholy mess” and announced that he was ditching it in favour of Xfce. Although unlike Linus, I never liked KDE, even before the KDE 4 debacle
I don’t have a start menu
October 19th, 2011You know those irritating conversations you have with “support” staff at your ISP whenever you have a problem which is even slightly off their script? Well XKCD has a solution. Use the code word “shibboleet”. It might work. Nothing else ever does.
With thanks as always to XKCD
clarity is not a virtue
October 14th, 2011Picking up my copy of the second edition I was reminded of the old obfuscated c contests. One of the earliest (anonymous) entries was this tribute to K&R’s famous printf(“hello world\n”);
——————————————————————————
int i;main(){for(;i["]<i;++i){–i;}”];read(‘-’-'-’,i+++”hell\
o, world!\n”,’/'/’/'));}read(j,i,p){write(j/p+p,i—j,i/i);}
—————————————————————————–
c is not known as flexible for nothing.
mountain streams
October 14th, 2011In response to the news of Dennis Ritchie’s death, Ted Harding, a long time member of the anglia linux users group posted an interesting comment to the list this morning. Ted has kindly given me permission to link to that comment. Like Ted, I too hope we shall be seeing proper tributes to both Dennis Ritchie and the elegance of his creations. Sadly I feel that the mainstream media may pay less attention to the passing of this man than he deserves.
Addendum
The guardian ran a reasonable obituary profile of dmr on 13 October 2011. And on 16 October, John Naughton wrote a good piece for the Guardian’s sister paper, the Observer. In that article, Naughton says:
“It’s funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agendas in dozens of countries. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody – except for a few geeks – notices.”
Quite.
And Linux Magazine posted a nice article by Jon “maddog” Hall.
a double googol
October 13th, 2011It seems that google has lost a recent battle to wrest control of the goggle.com domain away from its owner. I wonder if they’ll want to have a go at me next.
Dennis Ritchie dies
October 13th, 2011Now this is getting depressing. It seems that Dennis Ritchie (the “R” in K&R, author and creator of the C programming language and genuine legend in computing history) died last weekend. Bell Labs reported yesterday, and confirmed today, that Ritchie had died after a long illness. He was 70 years old.
As a unix fan, ex-sysadmin and (rusty) C programmer, I owe much to what he created.
dmr once said: “UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity.”
I have a policy
October 11th, 2011As I have said in many posts in the past, I care about my privacy. I also care about yours. Ironically however, I have not until now codified exactly what I mean by that, nor have I identified what I will or will not do to protect your privacy. This seems to me a little unfair.
So I have drafted a privacy policy for this blog.
Let me know what you think (and remember to lie where necessary)
that looks like a scam to me
October 10th, 2011The volume of spam backscatter I am receiving at the baldric.net domain currently runs at around 18-20,000 emails per month, nearly all of which is aimed at the info@ address I have mentioned before.
My mail server is currently configured to reject mail to non-existent users at the SMTP level with a permanent failure message like so: “550 5.1.1
Now there is nothing I can do about the second problem, but if there is any way I can provide additional information which might help the hard pressed admin understand why they might have a problem, then that would aid them, me, and any of the likely hundreds or thousands of other people out there who will be receiving crud in response to mails they didn’t send.
One possible way forward might be to add some additional information to the SMTP rejection message – something along the lines of “hey, you might have a configuration problem here, please consider investigating”. Now I dislike re-inventing wheels (and I’m lazy) so I spent a short while searching for possible modifications to my own postfix configuration which would do the trick. Sure enough, I quickly discovered backscatterer.org and its suggested modification to main.cf (though note that it assumes that postfix is using the dbm database library – not all of them do, particularly on the default debian install). Hey, that looks cool, so if I modify my configuration slightly I will be able to run a lookup against backscatterer’s DNSRBL and in cases of a hit I will send an SMTP reject message that looks like this: “554 5.7.1 Service unavailable; Client host [217.77.96.18] blocked using ips.backscatterer.org; Sorry 217.77.96.18 is blacklisted at http://www.backscatterer.org/?ip=217.77.96.18;” instead of the much less informative message above. Now the sysadmin at mx2.infopac.ru (217.77.96.18) will get a much more useful log message. Won’t they?
But hold on a moment, where does backscatterer.org get its RBL? Can I trust it? And am I being fair on the sending domain if I block all mail coming from there based on the simple fact that they are listed in some third part RBL? That feels a little like SORBS to me. Turn the question around. Would I, as admin for the baldric.net domain (and a dozen others) be happy if mail from my domain to some servers were blocked because I had chosen to implement something like “sender callouts” (unlikely as that might be). Worse, backscatterer.org “offers” to de-list any server from its database if you pay them 85 euros (OK, so that will only be about threepence halfpenny in a few weeks time when the eurozone finally tanks, but it is still extortion, whatever the actual sum).
So I think I’ll stay away from backscatterer – it looks like a scam to me. I’ll just have to find another way of telling my Russian sysadmin friends that their servers are “misconfigured”.
rip steve jobs
October 7th, 2011Whilst I have never been an Apple fan, I was enormously saddened to learn of the death on wednesday of Steve Jobs. He was a visionary architect and was undeniably a charismatic, if idiosyncratic, leader in the world of computing and technology.
Whilst his death was not unexpected, he will be missed.
