This OSNews story tracks a conversation on a mailing list about the Linux kernel. Basically, some people who hack on the kernel want to place a warning in the kernel if you try and load a non-free kernel module or driver that it will not work in kernels released as of January 2008. The idea being they will release another patch by then that prevents non-free modules from loading.

I think this is a stupid idea.

First of all, this move would in theory lock out the proprietary Nvidia and ATI graphics drivers. Now I’m running the Nvidia driver for Linux as I type this. If that suddenly stops working in 2008 when I upgrade, then I won’t be able to enjoy beautiful graphics or play amazing open source games.

Also, in theory it would also block a technology called ndiswrapper, which allows you to run Windows network card drivers (usually for wireless cards) under Linux. It’s open source, but since it links with proprietary code (the Windows drivers), it would be restricted presumably.

More importantly, this makes Linux look worse as an OS to people who might consider switching, and might consider the free software/open source ideology. Their 3D graphics will never be able to work out of the box (unless they have an Intel chip) and their wireless cards are never going to work. Is this going to inspire more people to use a free platform?

No. It will alienate potential users and it will make Linux, in the eyes of the average computer user, go from almost a real alternative to being an interesting technical exercise for free software purists, and free software purists only.

To the people considering doing this – would you rather have people use a mostly free platform or use a completely proprietary platform because the 100% free one doesn’t work with their hardware and isn’t therefore useful to them? Make your choice.

I’ve made mine – if this goes through, in a year’s time I’ll be running a patched kernel with this restriction removed. Unless every single device driver goes open source within a year (which isn’t going to happen).

Thankfully, Linus is against this move and I support him on this. There are also other arguments against this – including that it violates Freedom 0, but I’ve said enough and you’ve read enough.

Up until a couple of days ago I still hadn’t tried out Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 which I downloaded a long time ago. Unfortunately, I discovered that the ethernet driver for VMware doesn’t work (and it used to in Beta 2), and so I was forced to wait until a convenient moment to install it on a physical machine (which wasn’t going to be my main desktop, funnily enough).

Windows Vista’s installer is still pathetically fussy about where it will allow you to install Vista. It requires installation to the first primary partition on a hard drive which is master.

Well, that’s really convenient, considering that my partition layout on the first hard drive on this machine was as follows:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1912    15358108+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2            1913        1988      610470   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda4            3009        4870    14956515    f  W95 Ext'd (LBA)
/dev/hda5            4054        4870     6562521   83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3009        4053     8393899+  83  Linux

hda1 was my CentOS server installation, hda5 was a few gigs of data left over from somewhere else, and hda6 was my Ubuntu Dapper installation. Of course, the Windows install required the monopoly on hda1, which currently was occupied.

Well, thank goodness for the flexibility of Linux. I simply used the low level tool dd to make images of all the partitions (onto a spare 160 GB drive also in that machine), and then wiped off the disk.

One Vista install later, and the drive now had just one primary partition of rougly 17 GB with Vista on it.

I then created a partition to match the size of the CentOS install, and dd‘d the image back. After tweaking a few configuration files via the Ubuntu Live distro, I then rebooted with my GRUB bootloader CD in the drive, typed in the boot commands and CentOS booted like nothing had happened. 🙂

I then reinstalled GRUB to the hard drive (with a boot menu obviously, I don’t type boot commands every boot!) and added Vista to the list of OSs to boot.

The Ubuntu Dapper partition unfortunately would no longer fit (by about 2 GB), as Vista is now using a lot of the space, but instead I installed Edgy, and I’ll recover the important files off Dapper when I need them.

So after about half a day of partition shuffling, it now looks like:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40060403712 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4870 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        2040    16384000    7  HPFS/NTFS
/dev/hda2            2040        4870    22733220    5  Extended
/dev/hda5            2040        3952    15359384+  83  Linux
/dev/hda6            3953        3985      265041   82  Linux swap
/dev/hda7            3986        4870     7108731   83  Linux

hda1 is now Vista (NTFS), hda5 is CentOS, hda6 is Linux swap (for both) and hda7 is Ubuntu Edgy Eft.

The things I do to test Vista…

I’ve recently come across probably the worst web application I have possibly ever seen. I’ll keep the application anonymous for now, partly because it’s on accessible via an intranet, and because it’s literally peppered with security holes.

The interface is awful and looks like it’s just come out of the early 90s era of web design, with tables with those terrible pseudo-3D table look (you know, the default style that tables look like?). The login page also extremely rudely finds it acceptable to resize your browser window for you to the maximum possible size and due to the browser configuration on this local network, I’m unable to stop it from doing so.

It violates every single usability guideline for the web I’ve ever found, making the common mistake of navigating when a combo box’s selected index changes (not when a button is clicked, how it should be) and therefore making it very difficult to make the application accessible and providing no user feedback after submitting forms.

But worst of all, there appears to be no validation on returning data from this application. So if you look across at someone else’s screen and take their ID from the location bar, you can view (oh, and edit too!) their data. It’s also potentially vulnerable to SQL injection (although I believe it uses an Access database, so I’m not sure).

Please – don’t make these mistakes when you’re developing, whatever technology you’re using. Have a bit of experience before you get something rolled out. Please, for my sake. I hate manually resizing my window all the time.

Steve Ballmer says:

“The fact that that product [Linux as an OS] uses our patented intellectual property is a problem for our shareholders. We spend $7 billion a year on R&D, our shareholders expect us to protect or license or get economic benefit from our patented innovations. So how do we somehow get the appropriate economic return for our patented innovation, and how do we do interoperability. The truth is, because of the complex licensing around the GPL, we actually didn’t want to do one without the other.”

I say:

Face it, Mr Steve. You’ve sold out and had to finally not only admit Linux is here to stay, but you had to do something about it. And go on, prove that FOSS violates your patents – give me some real evidence and I might be convinced.

Greed is a nasty human tendency, isn’t it?

UPDATE: It seems Ballmer really is off his rocker not in agreement with Novell on this, as this open letter from Novell tells us. I am slightly reassured.

Apple just upgraded the MacBook to Core 2 Duo. And I didn’t even realise the Core 2 did 64-bit either!

I want one.

But I also want Leopard, so I’ll see you in the spring, MacBook Core 2 Duo… with 64-bit Leopard and all my KDE apps running on top of OS X.

In completely unrelated news, I now officially consider myself a Linux geek as I successfully compiled my own kernel and got it to run on my spare machine under Ubuntu.

Beat that kernel name! Hosted on Zooomr

The fact that the code is exactly the same as the vanilla 2.6.18.2 release is completely irrelevant and coincidental! 😛

The tutorial I used to build the kernel is here.

Do you think I was going to wait for Red Hat to package the official Fedora version of Firefox 2.0?

Aside from Mozilla being silly about names, I absolutely adore this browser. What’s more, only a few of my extensions weren’t compatible and I’m sure they’ll be updated very quickly.

And it’s so much faster than 1.5.0.x too, and aside from still having ugly buttons in forms on Linux (and the Mac as well), it’s beautiful.

W00t! I love this browser! OK, fine, I’ll try and return to sanity, I know, it’s only a browser, but it’s an app I’m going to be staring at for a long time until Firefox 3.0…

When I reported on Gizbuzz about EA including spyware in Battlefield 2142, I obviously wasn’t happy about it.

Thankfully, though, BF2142 wasn’t a game I was planning on getting.

However, Joystiq seem to reckon that Need for Speed Carbon will also include this ridiculous ‘software’.

I was thinking about getting Carbon (on the Windows platform) when it came out. I’m not anymore.

Hey, EA, you just lost a customer! Well done…

Since it’s been one year of PWDB, I thought I’d share some of the website statistics for last month and over the whole of 2006 to my loyal readers.

The stat charts following are from Google Analytics and are for September 2006.

» Read the rest of this post…

Alternative title: Today’s PWDB history lesson

In case you didn’t guess by the banner at the top right (or you’re in a feed reader), Peter’s Web Development Blog has been around for one year and today marks my 1-year blogging anniversary! Whoo!

So, what has happened in the last year of blogging? Well, it turns out that the style of PWDB has actually changed rather dramatically to be oriented towards tutorials, interesting hints and tips (usually about Linux, because that’s where I’m exploring) and less specifically about web development.

» Read the rest of this post…

Sorry about the title – but I am not happy with Microsoft today.

According to Slashdot, Windows Vista, the full (rip-off?) retail version of Vista, will only allow you to transfer it to another machine once.

Put in real terms – retail Vista will not allow you to have the freedom to move it around between your machines.

» Read the rest of this post…