Gregg Keizer @ ComputerWorld writes:

Adobe today said that it would stop offering direct downloads of Flash Player for Linux, telling users to move to Google’s Chrome browser, which bundles Flash with its updates.

*Emphasis mine.

OK, well then… let me state my case plainly for Adobe: KISS MY ASS! You’ll NOT be dictating to me what/how I use my own equipment in my own home. I don’t think I’ll follow your orders to use Google Chrome. I happen to like Firefox, Opera, and Seamonkey. What’s that you say? No more Flash for me. Unless you figure out a way to disable my current Flash plugin, my Flash will be just fine.

Besides, there are open source alternatives out there. Ain’t it great?!

• Gnash Project
• LightSpark
• Swfdec

So, pardon me Adobe for being blunt here, but PISS OFF! And take your not-doing-any-evil-as-long-as-greed-doesn’t-count pal Google along with you.

There. I feel better now.

Later…

~Eric

Further reading: Adobe to Linux users: Get Chrome or forget Flash from ComputerWorld

I just wanted to pop in here real quick-like and tell you about a good article I just read over at Linux Journal. It’s a mini command line tutorial on how to backup CDs to .iso files. You’ll like it.

Archiving CDs to ISO from the Command Line

Learn something. It won’t hurt you none. I promise.

Later…

~Eric

I was perusing my usual spots today and ran across an article on jalopnik.com regarding that annoying damned Check Engine light on your dashboard display. I’ve been ranting about the monopolization of the auto repair industry by the manufacturers for years now. Jason Torchinsky writes on Jalopnik about his war against the Check Engine light.

From the article Richard Stallman Weighs In On The Check Engine Light:

My fight against the check engine light still goes on, though, like an uncle with an extensive collection of pornography, I’m sure many of you were hoping I’d just keep it to myself. Well, like your pervy uncle, I won’t. I can’t. And, I’m not alone. Among the many emails I received, most suggesting I speak with my clergyperson, I received an email from Richard Stallman, the founder of the free software movement and the man who started the GNU/Linux operating system.

An email from Stallman himself! I’m impressed. Richard never emails me.

Jason goes on to quote Stallman:

I agree with you about the “Check engine” light, but that is a symptom of a broader and deeper problem: the owners of cars do not control, what the car’s computers do.  These computers are running _proprietary_ software, software that controls its users.

Jason asks:

So why should general drivers care?

Stallman responds in typical geek fashion with a bullet list:

1. So anyone can maintain the engine — including your choice of mechanic.

2. To protect against abusive features (see http://www.bostonreview.net/BR33.2/stallman.php).  In this case, hiding information from you.  With free software in that computer, people would make programs to give them more info than the Check Engine light gives.  And you could use them even if you don’t modify your car in any way.

RAH! RAH! Sir Richard! I couldn’t have said this better myself. For years now the automotive industry has been attempting to kill the independent parts and service industries in this country by forcing automobile owners to go directly to the dealers for any and all service/parts that might be needed. How have they done this? With PROPRIETARY TECHNOLOGY, PARTS, TOOLS, TRAINING, etc. That’s how.

Nowadays, you almost always have to go to a dealer for even the most minor repairs or parts. This has killed the mom/pop auto repair/parts business in this country. It’s GREED on the part of BIG AUTO that has driven this to its current state; costing many their small business, and/or employment. How have we let this happen? The same way we let all oppression happen; through ignorance and apathy.

New cars are great if you can afford the maintenance agreements. If not, you better trade-in and get a new one once that warranty is up. Of course, this is exactly what BIG AUTO wants you to do. Vicious circle, huh?

Have a great weekend!

~Eric

Image credits: check engine light from repairpal.com article - Understanding the Check Engine Light

Richard Stallman courtesy of Wikipedia.org

As many of you know, I’m partial to distributions with the Slackware pedigree. Salix is one that I had not tried before. My favorites up to now have been Zenwalk, Absolute Linux, and Vector Linux. However, I haven’t had any of those on any of my systems for quite some time. I’m patiently waiting for the 64 bit versions.

Now with Salix OS, I find a nice 64 bit version all ready to go. I installed it with the Xfce desktop. Installation was fast and easy using their familiar installer. No surprises here, folks. It just works. I had to do a couple custom tweaks here and there to get the system up and running, though.

After installation, I first booted into Salix using the kernel line alone. On my main system, Arch (my secondary OS) controls the MBR, and its GRUB rules. I had to modify Arch’s menu.lst to boot Salix. Once I was in Salix, I created an initrd using the README.initrd that you can find in most Slack derivatives. Nothing new here either. For you Slack veterans, this will all look very familiar to you. I re-edited Arch’s menu.lst to include the newly created initrd.gz line and away we went. Anyway, most of you will just use the LILO boot loader provided by Salix.

Salix booted up without a burp or hiss. I updated right off using the tried and true slapt-get command line package manager. Anyone who’s ever run Vector or Absolute Linux would be familiar with slapt-get. It’s a cool PM. The GUI frontend in Salix is gslapt. You can set up auto-updates with it. Makes you feel like you’re running Ubuntu, almost.

After updating, I performed my usual Xfce customizations and then took a little screenie for you to look at:

Salix OS has the legendary stability of its parent Slackware along with some ease-of-use features, like the GUI package manager gslapt, more often found in more graphically oriented distributions. You grizzled Slackers will feel comfortable with it. You folks who’ve always wanted to run Slackware, but were afraid to, will love Salix OS. It’s not as hardcore as Slackware. It’s perfect for someone with only minimal GNU/Linux experience. That doesn’t mean it’s a minimal or hand-holding distro. Salix OS is a full-powered GNU/Linux operating system, fully capable of running your little laptop or that business server.

Go visit the excellent Salix OS website and download a copy for yourself. Give it a try. You might be pleasantly surprised. While you’re there, check out the Salix Team of hardworking individuals whose passion and labors have made this wonderful distribution possible.

Later…

~Eric

Image credits: Salix OS logo owned by Salix OS

FBI’s Steve Jobs file: He will ‘distort reality … to achieve his goals’ – from The Washington Post:

By Hayley Tsukayama, Updated: Thursday, February 9, 12:25 PM

Steve Jobs, being considered in 1991 for an appointment under President George H.W. Bush, underwent a thorough background investigation by the FBI, according to newly released files from the agency.

Definitely a must-read, folks. Be sure to check out the actual 190+ pages of documents being served in .pdf format by the Post (link in quote above). I wonder how many of us would come up squeaky clean in an F.B.I. investigation; not many, I’d bet.

Despite interviewees saying that they did not personally like Jobs, many said that they would recommend him for a position in government.

One section said, “It was [redacted] opinion that honesty and integrity are not required qualities to hold such a position.”

Honesty? Integrity? For a position in government. Wow! That would be a novel idea, huh?

Later…

~Eric

I just wanted to post some links to some interesting reading I ran across this morning. Here goes…

Firefox 11 Gets SPDY – Datamation | Sean Michael Kerner

Google’s speed-enhancing SPDY protocol lands in upcoming version of Mozilla’s open source browser.

Mozilla is taking a page from Google’s Chrome development and is gearing up to implement a new protocol to help accelerate the Firefox web browser. The open source Firefox 11 browser, which is now in beta, will include the SPDY protocol. The current stable release of Firefox is version 10, which was released last week.

Beware the power of Google? – ITWorld | Brian Proffitt

Chaotic good is still chaotic

Has Google taken over the Internet? No, I’m not wearing a tin-foil hat, and I’m not looking for a secret villain’s lair when I am in Silicon Valley at the end of the month (though wouldn’t the “Eye of Sauron” be synonymous with “Mountain View”? Hmmm…). But there have been some incidents over the years that have made me stop and ponder a bit about the huge amount of quiet influence Google seems to have on commercial activity on the Web.

How to get started using awk – SImple Help | Sukrit Dhandhania

awk, sed, and grep are three of my favorite tools in the Linux or UNIX command line. They are all pretty powerful. Today we’ll look at how to get cracking with awk to help you ease into using it. Then we’ll look at some useful awk one liners to make things a bit more fun for you.

Read, learn, have FUN!

Later…

~Eric

Ever wonder how all that /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin stuff came about? Well, thanks to a really interesting article by Thom Holwerda at OSNews, you can now read all about it.

It seems that back in the day (early 70s), when Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were at Bell Labs tinkering around with Unix in its infancy, how they came to name these directories was primarily determined by their available storage space at the time. Geeks just being practical; ain’t it great?

From busybox.net list:

Rob Landley
Thu Dec 9 15:45:39 UTC 2010

When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all  the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp…) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space.  When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).

3Meg… WOW! Nowadays, we dash off inane missives that often exceed 3 Meg in size. We don’t even think about it. Can you imagine? I was 10 years old in ’71, running around in a neighbor’s overgrown yard playing “war” with my pals. Dennis and Ken were in their late twenties and using their genius to create the foundation for pretty much everything you see in front of you right now… the Internet, the operating system on your computer, the code that is the foundation for most of it, etc. Amazing, huh?

Thom Holwerda from his OSNews article laments:

Arguing that the UNIX directory structure is a horrible, horrible mess that defiles an otherwise elegant system is like trying to convince a floor tile to flip over. People are so used to their knee-jerk responses about how it all supposedly makes sense, they often refuse to even think about redesigning it for the modern age. Since the geek is a proud and stubborn creature, there’s little to no chance of this ever changing in my lifetime.

Thom is not a big fan of the Unix file structure. I can see his points. When you read how those directories actually came about, you begin to wonder, as Thom often does, whether the whole thing needs a reboot/rename. Well, it probably won’t ever happen. Hell, some of us still like to boot into a command line interface rather than a graphic one. Holwerda says that geeks are a proud and stubborn. Yup… mostly stubborn.

Read the article. Click on the links. It’s some interesting stuff, folks.

Later…

~Eric

Image credits: Ken Thompson/Dennis Ritchie courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, a worthy Internet resource. Help if you can.

Further reading:

The Creation of the Unix Operating System

Dennis M. Ritchie

Ken L. Thompson

The Linux Directory Structure

Arpanet

Tomas Forsman, a member of the Foresight Linux team, probably doesn’t even remember me from back then. I frequented the old support forums for Foresight Linux back when it was in version 1.0. I think that was sometime back in 2006. I remember FL creator Ken Vandeen from back then. I found Foresight, a fork of rPath Linux, while perusing Distrowatch one evening. It looked intriguing. Besides, I liked the green color theme. Green is my favorite color, you know.

I’ve had Foresight on many of my systems over the years since v1.0. It’s never been my primary operating system. You all know that I’m a Slacker, but that doesn’t stop me from experimenting with other distros. I have my favorites that are never far from one of my systems. I can usually be found tweaking (often breaking) these distros on any given day.

I did a major system overhaul a year or so ago and never was able to get a working copy of Foresight installed. It wasn’t Foresight’s fault, though. Tomas knows that I’m an Xfce fan, so he provided me with an alpha of their Xfce version. It didn’t seem to like my hardware for some reason. Well, that was a while ago, anyway. Their Xfce 64 bit version is in final release now and installs and runs perfectly.

I know this because I just installed it  a couple nights ago. I didn’t have any issues during installation. For any of you who have ever installed a GNU/Linux distribution on your system, you’ll not find any surprises with the Foresight installer. It’s pretty straight-forward and relatively easy.

Once I had FL installed, I did my usual tweaks here and there under the hood and with the Xfce interface. All went well. I have a completely updated and usable Foresight Linux installation on my system now. I made a quick custom wallpaper for it and took a nice screenshot for you folks.

If you’d like to give Foresight a tryout, you’ll find that the distribution has excellent documentation and a helpful support community. Tomas also visits Scot’s Newsletter Forums – Bruno’s All Things Linux quite often. You can catch up with him there occasionally. Foresight is a stable, full-featured distribution with a sterling pedigree (RedHat, rPath). It’s suitable for a home system or a business server.

Stop on by the Foresight forums. Tell Tomas I sent you. He’ll get you up and running with Foresight in no time at all.

Have fun with it!

Later…

~Eric

Image credits: Foresight Linux “eye” logo owned by Foresight Linux.

CPU technology seemed to be following a new path of “more is better” rather than worrying about the performance of just one core. In other words, to me anyway, it seemed as if Intel, AMD, and others had just decided that it was cheaper to stuff more processors into a slab than it was to actually design and create a single core that performed at a higher level. I’ve been noticing this trend for a few years now; ever since the Intel Core 2 Duo came out, I guess.

To be honest, and I must add that I’m no expert on this topic by a long shot, I haven’t really noticed a huge performance jump between my current AMD Phenom quad and my old AMD Athlon64 single core CPU. I’m sure there is a vast difference, at least there appears to be when perusing the spec sheets of these processors. However, for my purposes, they’re pretty much interchangeable on my system.

Hruska writes:

For decades, microprocessors followed what’s known as Dennard scaling. Dennard predicted that oxide thickness, transistor length, and transistor width could all be scaled by a constant factor. Dennard scaling is what gave Moore’s law its teeth; it’s the reason the general-purpose microprocessor was able to overtake and dominate other types of computers.

And further on:

For the past seven years, Intel and AMD have emphasized multi-core CPUs as the answer to scaling system performance, but there are multiple reasons to think the trend towards rising core counts is largely over. First and foremost, there’s the fact that adding more CPU cores never results in perfect scaling. In any parallelized program, performance is ultimately limited by the amount of serial code (code that can only be executed on one processor). This is known as Amdahl’s law.

Where is CPU technology headed? Will the corporate bean counters try to pressure the companies to satisfy their stockholder’s greed or will the drive to create a quality product prevail? All good questions. The answers will eventually affect all of us who use computers in some way on a daily basis; not to mention that fact that the world is run by computers these days. Without that little CPU in that cash register at your grocery store, that girl behind the counter can’t even figure out how to count out your change from your purchase. We’ve become dependent on this technology.

Sadly, I think it’s turning us all into mushbrains. However, that’s a topic for another time.

Later…

~Eric

Further reading: The death of CPU scaling: From one core to many — and why we’re still stuck – By Joel Hruska on February 1, 2012 on ExtremeTech.com

I ran Ark as an experimental on my system a couple times in the past few years. I was always impressed with it. It’s simple. It’s not bloated or overloaded with fluff. It’s a working man’s (or woman’s) Linux. For those of you concerned about these things, Ark is a 100% FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) distribution.

The Ark Linux team is a small group of dedicated souls working to keep the distribution viable and as pure to their goals as possible. I’ve noticed that there have been inconsistencies with updates and upgrades over the past year or so. There is still an active presence, so I know Ark is alive and well. It’s just that I’ve become used to some of the more “commercial” distributions that update and upgrade every time their lead devs change underwear. Ark’s foundation is solid. They may not need to do as the others do in this regard.

You can download current and older versions of Ark from Oregon State University’s server (osuosl.org). The information you need to download is on Ark’s download page.

You’ll find Ark familiar and easy to use. It comes with KDE as the default desktop environment. It uses the familiar RPM and Apt as package managers. Most of your favorite Linux apps and tools will run fine on Ark. Their repos have the standard fare found in most distributions’ repositories.

Give Ark Linux a try, folks. You might find something here you really like. I did.

Until next time… learn something, and have FUN doing it!

~Eric

Note: This article originally appeared on my Nocturnal Slacker/Lockergnome blog (now defunct).