Nuudelisoppa

Category: Uncategorized

  • RIAs and Free Software

    Some issues with RIAs I’ve been wondering:

    • How come there’s no Flash-based Ogg player? Actually, it seems that a Vorbis player is being worked on, which is great, but I’m still puzzled that this hasn’t come about way, way earlier.
    • How come there’s no Flash-based Ogg player that would work with the free Flash player implementations? Granted that having one that works with the non-free plugin, which is the most prevalent, is of massively bigger importance for spreading Ogg, than having a fully freedom-friendly one. And also, those of us who choose to use the free implementations probably have no problems playing back Oggs without a Flash-based player. However, I’m not trying to be critical here; these are just issues that I find confusing in how the free software community works. (More on this below.)
    • Is Flash a non-free format? Is there such a thing as a ‘non-free format’, or am I just confused in my terminology?
    • Are there any truly free RIA platforms? I know of none. Based on what I understand from the Wikipedia article, Moonlight can hardly be considered one, given its MS-imposed restrictions.
    • If there aren’t any truly free RIA platforms, why not?

    As I said, this isn’t a criticism. I’m just genuinely puzzled by these questions and how the community works. More generally, I would presume that it would be natural for those striving to free people from non-free formats and software, to begin from their own side of things (the free software world), and from there to reach towards those still locked in. This would pave a nice, finished road for the unfree to flock back to the other side with them.

    Let’s say a locked-in user comes to contact with Ogg through a Flash-based player on the web. They then, through proper evangelising, start to contemplate switching to a free Flash player. But if the free player can’t play the Ogg files displayed on their favourite sites, they face the added difficulty of having to try and get them to play otherwise.

    If, instead, they’d find that the free Flash implementation they’ve now switched to plays the Ogg player just fine, they won’t have to go through the hoop of getting the Oggs to play otherwise — at least not until they start contemplating ditching Flash altogether for being a non-free format.

    And what about ditching Flash, if you still want to have RIAs in your truly free world? With Ogg itself it seems to me that the work began as it should have, with laying the foundations by creating a free alternative. But what if there’s no free alternative for the non-free RIA platforms?

  • Uutinen: Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) julkaistu

    Ubuntu 8.10, koodinimeltään Intrepid Ibex, on julkaistu, ja on nyt ladattavissa Ubuntu Suomen sivuilta. Tietoa uusista ominaisuuksista sekä muita lisätietoja tuoreesta jakeluversiosta löytyy esimerkiksi julkaisutiedotteesta ja julkaisumuistiosta.

    Itse olen käyttänyt virtuaalikoneessa Intrepidiä jo sen varhaisista testijulkaisuista (Alpha) lähtien Hardy Heronin rinnalla. Kehitysvaiheessa Intrepidin kohutuin uudistus oli sen uusi, tummiin sävyihin perustunut teema, johon ainakin minä alun kulttuurishokin jälkeen tykästyin kovasti. Tämä uudistus jätettiin lopullisesta julkaisusta pois, mutta sen saa halutessaan käyttöön valitsemalla Ulkoasu-asetussovelmassa DarkRoom-teeman.

    Ulkoasupuolella uudistukset typistyivät uuteen taustakuvaan, ja sekin on mielestäni vähemmän onnistunut kuin Hardyn tyylikäs haikara.

    Ulkoasunhan voi kuitenkin räätälöidä ihan mieleisekseen, joten tärkeintä on tietysti se, mitä on pinnan alla. Heti välittömimmän pinnan tuntumassa on Intrepidin mielestäni mielenkiintoisin uudistus, eli GNOME-työpöytäympäristön tuorein julkaisuversio 2.24. Sen jälkeen merkittävin uutuus on uunituore Linux-ydin, 2.6.27.

    Jatkossa tämän blogin merkinnät perustuvat Intrepid Ibexin käyttöön ainakin seuraavan version (jonka koodinimi on Jaunty Jackalope) julkaisuun saakka.

    Lopuksi muistuttaisin vielä, että niiden Hardy Heronin käyttäjien, jotka ovat tyytyväisiä nykyiseen järjestelmäänsä, ei ole syytä rynniä päivittämään sitä. Hardy Heronhan oli pitkällä aikavälillä tuettu julkaisu (LTS), eli sen käyttäjiä tuetaan vielä seuraavat kaksi ja puoli vuotta. Hardyn voi siis halutessaan päivittää vasta seuraavan LTS-julkaisun tapahduttua.

  • Temporary File Name

    For creating temporary files with unique names, there’s the hard way and then there’s the easy way.

    I would have left a comment about this on a little stupid blog, but the comments were closed, so I’m making this entry in the hopes that Google’ll pick it up and show it to someone like I was a minute ago, forgetting the name of mktemp.

  • You learn something new… occasionally

    Ha, I just discovered that apt-get build-dep whateverpackage is an easy way to satisfy some, if not most or even all of the dependencies required for building whateverpackage from newer sources.

  • Making the Epson Perfection 660 scanner work with xsane

    Looks like this takes a while without ready-made instructions, so I’ll jot ’em down here for future reference.

    1. Pick up the Scan Tool zip archive from Epson’s site (not sure if the link works, but it’s in the support section. I picked Windows XP as my OS, the Linux option took me to a site which didn’t mention the 660 so I don’t know about that.
    2. Extract Euro/DATA/BIN/TAIL_061.BIN from the archive.
    3. Toss the file into a suitable directory; I chose to create /usr/local/share/sane/snapscan for this purpose.
    4. Edit /etc/sane.d/snapscan.conf and fix the firmware line to point to TAIL_061.BIN in wherever you put it in the previous point.
    5. Add your unprivileged self to the scanner group. Log out and back in to make it actual.

    That’s it.

  • Swirling again

    In case anyone’s interested, I’ve branched off my Debian ramblings into a separate blog just as I did with posts related to Ubuntu earlier this year.

  • Lenny’s GStreamer plays Asao

    I just discovered that Lenny’s GStreamer plays Nellymoser’s flash audio without any difficulty. This is awesome and definitely so much easier than with Ubuntu Hardy. Back then I had to convert such FLVs’ audio tracks into MP3 using ffmpeg built from source.

  • Hardware notes for my own reference

    So the CPU inside my AMD Shuttle box (an SN45 with the latest, FN45S00W BIOS) is marked AXDA2600DKV4D, which means it’s a Barton-core XP 2600+ @ 1917 MHz with a 333 MHz bus (166 MHz external frequency) and a 11.5 multiplier. The manufacturing code, AFAICT, is AQZFA0348MPM, which in turn means the multiplier’s locked (the unlocked ones were made prior to week 39 of 2003, or 0339, according to OC forums).

    The single memory module it’s accompanied by currently is a 512 MB Elixir PC3200U @ 400 MHz, marked CL3. And apparently I just destroyed it while gathering this data.

  • Swirling towards the inevitable

    It looks like I need to have a place for making notes while tackling Debian, so I’ve set up this blog. I don’t intend to make this as formal as my Ubuntu blog, but more of a “casual scribblings” type of thingy, so reader beware!

    This initial post might be a good place to elaborate on my choice of operating system.

    I’ve been a free software proponent for a long time, not only because of political reasons, but because I often find the open solutions superior to their closed counterparts. There was a time recently where this philosophy did not extend to the OS for some reason. I don’t recall what made me switch from Debian to XP; perhaps it was just laziness, not bothering to dual-boot when I had to have Windows for some tasks. So for some years I was a slave of Microsoft.

    I mentioned Ubuntu, and what was my production machine up until recently still runs Hardy Heron, which I installed about six months ago. Initially I installed it parallel to Windows XP on a whim, after trying it out and taking a liking in how everything Just Worked. Then I discovered VirtualBox and found out I could now do MSN video conferences and other necessities through it, without having to dual-boot, so I ditched the XP partitions altogether.

    Then I found myself more and more drawn back to Debian. It’s not that there’s anything technically wrong with Ubuntu. On the contrary, I think Canonical are doing a great job with it. It’s just that I’d rather see myself supporting (with my choices) a purely community-driven distribution than one involving a company, no matter how freedom-focused they may be. I wouldn’t consider myself a socialist either, however. I believe there is room for both community-driven and commercial operating systems — even closed-source ones.

    In fact, because of my personal beliefs, I’m sometimes tempted by the BSD variants due to their licensing. In my ideal world, most code would be released under a permissive license, and despite the possibility of closed derivatives, there would be enough open, solid code for us to choose to use it exclusively, should we want to. But it may be that in real world, a GPL-type hack is required for us to have this choice. At the very least, I believe it’s required for the time being.

    But I digress.

    When I switched to a slightly lower-end machine for my desktop use, I had a chance to switch the OS as well, and the choice was more or less obvious, especially after having played around with lenny inside VirtualBox. So after some years, I’m back in Debian.

  • Debian (Lenny): How to change MAC address while installing

    It’s easy enough to change your network adapter’s MAC address once you have a Debian/Ubuntu system installed, but I needed to do this from within the Debian installer (Lenny beta 2), and it took me a while to figure out how. So I’m making a note of it for my own future reference, and maybe someone googling for the phrases I initially did will find this helpful.

    So here’s the problem: my NIC’s default MAC address is (say) 01:02:03:04:05:06, and for one reason or another, I need it to be 06:05:04:03:02:01 instead. Furthermore, I need this change to be in effect while I’m inside Lenny’s installer, so ifconfig is not available. Here’s how I did it:

    1. From the installer’s boot menu, select Advanced options, and Expert install.
    2. Work your way down the steps as needed, starting from the top, until you’ve gone through Detect network hardware. Instead of the next one (Configure the network), pick Execute a shell from further down the menu.
    3. In the shell you can check your network interface status with
      # ip link show eth0

      You might use eth1 or some other port instead of eth0, but I haven’t done this with anything other than the one NIC I had in the setup, and so haven’t used anything besides eth0.
      In my case, entering the command gives the following output:

      2: eth0:  mtu 1500 qdisc noop qlen 1000
    link/ether 01:02:03:04:05:06 brd ff:ff:ff:ff:ff:ff
    4. Next, the spell you’ve been waiting for. Let’s change that MAC address!
      # ip link set eth0 addr 06:05:04:03:02:01

      If all goes well, ip won’t say anything. Re-run the ‘show‘ command listed in the previous point to see that it actually worked.

    5. Type exit to return to the installer.
    6. Now you pick up from Configure the network, and proceed installing from there.

    One last point: the changed MAC address won’t survive the reboot finalizing the installation, so if you want to make it permanent, you’ll want to set it after the first boot into your new system, by using the method I linked to in the beginning (editing /etc/network/interfaces). Or you could to do it from the installer, using nano (in busybox).