[Mon Nov 22 15:05:48 CET 2010]

I have just received an email announcing that Attachmate is buying Novell for US $2.2 billion. Rumors had been circulating for a while now that Novell was up for grabs, but it sort of surprised me to hear that in the end it was bought by a relative unknown (I had never heard of Attachmate before, to be honest). According to the information one can find on the Web, it seems to be a private firm owned by an investment group. Like I said, not what one would expect. One way or another, I found the second paragraph of that news piece published by Computer World quite interesting:

The company has also agreed to sell certain intellectual property assets to CPTN Holdings LLC, a technology consortium led by Microsoft Corporation.

We are left to wonder what those "certain intellectual property assets" may be. Conspiracy theorists must love it.

Also on a related note, Attachmate has published a short press release on the openSUSE project. They already explained that their plans were to "operate SUSE as a stand-alone business unit after the transaction closes", which led a lot of people to question what would happen to openSUSE. According to their press release, they "anticipate no change to the relationship between the SUSE business and the openSUSE project". A couple of issues come up to mind: first of all, what is left of Novell once we remove SUSE and make it "a stand-alone business unit"?; second, was it truly necessary to go through all the roller-coaster experience of selling the old SUSE to Novell so that, in the end, it will be its own independent unit once more? I suppose it did save Novell's neck for a few years. Ah, the joys of the business world! {link to this story}

[Fri Nov 19 14:35:28 CET 2010]

Good news for all those who run Linux on the desktop. Phoronix tells us about a 200 line patch to the Linux kernel that does wonders to desktop performance:

In recent weeks and months there has been quite a bit of work towards improving responsiveness of the Linux desktop with some very significant milestones building up recently and new patches continuing to come. This work is greatly improving the experience of the Linux desktop when the computer is withstanding a great deal of CPU load and memory strain. Fortunately, the exciting improvements are far from over. There is a new patch that has not yet been merged but has undergone a few revisions over the past several weeks and it is quite smal —just over 200 lines of code— but it does wonders for the Linux desktop.

The patch being talked about is designed to automatically create task groups per TTY in an effort to improve the desktop interactivity under system strain. Mike Galbraith wrote the patch, which is currently in its third version in recent weeks, after Linus Torvalds inspired this ideas. In its third form, this patch only adds 224 lines of code to the kernel's scheduler while stripping away nine lines of code, thus only 233 lines of code are in play.

Well, now that my company has decided to switch to the Cisco AnyConnect VPN client instead of using the VPN kernel module we had to load before, perhaps I will be able to play with the kernel a bit more once again. I have not had a chance to do it for years.

Anyway, here is a video that shows the improvements after applying the patch:

UPDATE: a good friend pointed out to me that Lennart Poettering, a Red Hat developer, replied to Linus Torvalds on the mailing list that there is an alternative to the patch that only requires running a couple of commands from the shell. The document contains information on how to do this both in Red Hat and Ubuntu based distributions. However, I have not been able to get it working on an old Ubuntu 8.04 system. I will have to try it with a new version of the software. {link to this story}

[Sat Nov 13 22:48:39 CET 2010]

Linux Weekly News published last week a story about the openSUSE Conference 2010, dedicated to the future of LibreOffice that includes a few priceless comments apropos the talk given by Cédric Bosdonnat about easy ways to contribute to the Libre Office project:

The Document Foundation's wiki even has a page with a list of these easy hacks, and some of them have already been completed. Many of these easy hacks are a form of code cleanup: translating German comments that have been there since the StarDivision days, removing code that is commented out, removing duplicated code, and so on. According to Cédric, the latter is a bad habit among OpenOffice.org developers at Sun/Oracle: many specialists are working on their own module and are not collaborating. As a consequence, OpenOffice.org has, for example, three different line-drawing implementations: one for Writer, one for a Calc cell or table, and one for an Impress table. "When I wanted to add dashed borders, I had to hack three places, so eventually I merged them,", Cédric concluded. The OpenOffice.org code base also has six classes for a string, and according to Cédric it should be reduced to just two (for Unicode vs. 8-bit encoding).

Now, remember how not so long ago quite a few people kept repeating over and over again that there is no way open source can come up with the same quality code as the "tried and true" commercial model. Errr, I don't think so. As with everything else in life, it all depends. {link to this story}

[Sat Nov 13 21:41:23 CET 2010]

Great piece explaining six easy ways to get started programming open source. Perhaps some day I will finally decide to take the plunge and check out the code for one of the applications I use on a daily basis, see the open bugs and try to give them a hand. {link to this story}

[Sat Nov 13 20:52:04 CET 2010]

Saturday evening. I finally had some time to check out the technology news and blogs to see what is going on. It's been a tough week at work, and barely had time to even catch up with life. So, let's see. What do we have? First of all, an interesting story about Linus helping fix a sound bug in Fedora. Apparently, an end user reported some problems playing an MP3 file on Fedora 14 and the initial tests pointed to a problem with the kernel or sound driver. However, after some testing by Linus himself, it was discovered that the problem was due to an issue with glibc. To make things even more interesting, Linus provided a workaround to fix the problem until the glibc developers manage to put together a patch (assuming they ever do, since apparently they consider it a "feature"). In any case, what I find fascinating from this story is how none other than the top guy himself got involved in what appeared to be nothing but a simple problem reported by a regular end user. We see, once again, the benefits of open source. I don't think there is much of a chance to see something like this happening with any of the major commercial OSes out there.

The second story comes from the blog of Martin-&Eaacute;ric, an Ubuntu and Debian developer, who ponders whether it would make sense to launch a new project for a new non-official Ubuntu kernel working at a default clock rate of 1000Hz and with preempt enabled. As he puts it:

Back when Linux kernel 2.6 was released, one of the immediate benefits that I noticed was how beautifuly responsive my desktop had suddenly become. As it turned out, Linus figured out that he would create a buzz to accompnay kernel 2.6's release by having a default clock rate of 1000Hz. However, the excitement was short-lived and kernel defaults were soon brought back down to a more conservative rate of 250Hz, allegedly because some peripheral chips could not handle such a high frequency bump without producing an increased amount of processing errors. Adding insult to injury, Ubuntu defaults eventually dropped another responsiveness enhancement, kernel preemption, allegedly because the goal was to have a one-size-fits-all kernel shipping with Ubuntu and preemption was detrimental to the kernel performance when the host is used as a server, which was a problem because Ubuntu had somehow decided to shift its focus from the desktop market towards the more lucrative server market.

Open source to the rescue once more. In this case, by allowing the user community to run a kernel that the software vendors don't deem safe enough simply because it may not work correctly on some systems, even though it does benefit many other users by drastically improving the interactivity level. As a matter of fact, one of the readers of the blog post commented that there is aready one such kernel available in the PPA repositories. Gotta love such flexibility and freedom!

Now, getting to the more technical side of things, Lars Wirzenius has published a short tutorial explaining how to write man pages. According to this entry on his personal blog, he put it together "so I can point people at one I like when I get into my next argument on whether manual pages are impossible to write by hand or not". I can attest that it is perfectly possible to write them by hand. I am not a guru and have done it several times. All it takes is some effort and careful attention to what one is doing. That's all.

Finally, let's move onto an activity that many of us spend hours doing every day: reading messages sent to mailing lists. Joey Hess, another Debian developer, put together sometime ago a hilarious document on thread patterns that is a godsend. Being able to identify many of the thread patterns he discusses will definitely save some of your time. {link to this story}