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Graphics by Gimp, Tuxpaint, Culmus-fancy fonts, AP online lectures and .. Bibi :)

Ubuntu stability and UHR

I have been planning to port the Ubuntu Hebrew Remix remastering scripts to 9.04 for a long while now and I even started some related tasks but it seems to me more and more like this is not the right time. Ubuntu 9.04 is a shameful mess - with intel/nvidia, sound and other hardware devices having severe issues which, no doubt, will scare off new users and already made some Ubuntu users switch distributions.

Someone in Linux-IL mailing list said that Ubuntu just had bad timing(luck?) in releasing just before a few major software releases (XOrg1.6, OOo3.1, Pulsaudio(?) and new intel driver infrastructure).

I'll continue the porting effort (just to have easier job in October) and release the scripts with no ISO images. UHR will have to wait for 9.10 (hopefully 9.10 will be better). Users who need UHR for their grandmother/kids will have to manage with 8.04LTS for now.

A thought that comes to my mind: Maybe UHR should be based only on LTS releases. UHR doesn't seem to be a "big hit", but I received several thank-you notes which means it was useful to people other than me.

Why you probably won't see me on WINE

In Mark Shuttleworth's own words:

We need to make a success of our own platform on our own terms. If Linux is just another way to run Windows apps, we can't win.

link
/. link

I was trying to say similar(Hebrew-2004) things(Hebrew-2008) in the past but Shuttleworth did it better. Translation of my words to a user trying to run ICQ, Winamp and MSN Messenger on WINE:

.. You may not like the alternatives(The native Linux apps) but when you use Windows programs on Linux you use an alternative windows API to execute them and it's not only buggy and heavy on resources but eventually it will provide a really crappy user experience and you are expected to be "disappointed of Linux" real soon. I think you should consider trying the existing (Native) alternative applications in Linux. IMO you'll find them more usable than using WINE and sometimes even better than the Windows apps you were used to.

You can say the same thing about Mono but it might be an exception because currently both MS and Novel are behind it (until some s!@# will hit the fan.. I guess).

Anyway, here are two nice sites to add to your bookmark:
http://www.linuxalt.com/
http://www.osalt.com/

Sometimes the dog will bite: MS sued TomTom for using Linux

It seems that the war has begun - the same war that everybody said is happening only in my imagination. Microsoft sued TomTom over using the Linux kernel which implements, as MS claimed before(2007), some of MS's patents.

I really hate to be right this time.
Quoting Shahar's comment in my anti-mono post:

The "patent war" is fought by MS by making threats. MS is not, and will not be any time soon, be suing anyone. When MS start suing end users, you will know it is time to dump their stocks. Suing your potential customers is a sure sign of a dying company (see SCO, and that's not the only example).

Not being able to sue, all MS can do right now is threaten. Taking these threats seriously means giving in to MS's strategy. Rejecting free software for no reason other than some obscure future threat means doing what you claim they want you to do!

Shahar can be very coviencing and I respect his opinion. I even wrote another post saying that I might be wrong and maybe MS really did changed it's ways (but I was still very skeptical).

It seems that the patents in MS lawsuit might be over the FAT32 implementation in Linux.
FAT has existed for almost two decades, and the FS driver in Linux for quite some time as well. So it seems like MS waited for their FS to become a standard so they could sue. FAT is used everywhere today - digital cameras, flash memory. No company is safe.

Where are all those people now?
Those who told me that MS will never use the patent weapon?
... that registering software patents is just a strategic weapon?
... that Mono/.net is safe for use and implementation?

Well, guess what - you better reimplement your Mono apps.
Happy porting!

Installed Ubuntu 8.10, got sick of brown

I installed 8.10 last week and lost my theme settings (some packages mostly).
The installation went pretty well and so far I'm happy with it. Don't know why so many people are whining about it. Sure, Debian-stable is fine but Ubuntu gave my wife and my brother a great entrance into the Linux world.
I did get sick of the brown/Orange human theme thought, so I decided to modify it and this is how:

sudo apt-get install blubuntu-theme
sudo sh -c "for i in \`find /usr/share/icons/Human -type f -name '*.png'\`; do convert \$i -recolor '0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 0' \$i ; done;"

To revert the icons back to brown/orange:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall human-icon-theme

I don't care that it's a butt-ugly hack. It works :)

Screenshot attached:

Moonlight debate gets hot on Debian mailing lists

I already wrote too much on this but if your following the issue it's worth to read the Debian-related follow-ups. As published this week on DPN, the debate on whether to accept Moonlight into the Linux world has reached the Debian mailing lists.
Seeing DDs thoughts and fears regarding this issue validates some my own thoughts.

have fun.

More thoughts about Mono

With the release of the version 2.0 of Mono I want to share with you my recent thoughts.
Right after my previous post here I had some chats with friends who claimed the following points (hope I didn't miss/forget anything):

• We already have Microsoft propriety technologies integrated deeply in the Linux distributions - like SAMBA for example. It seems that in the past MS people helped SAMBA and they even made some attempts to pull the patents trick again and they lost because you just can't give me something and the sue me for using it. (I didn't check the facts on that).
  
• My rants on the subject is exactly what fuels the MS FUD. They don't really want to sue. They just want people to be too scared of not using MS products.
  
• In Israel, where I live, there is no law restricting reverse engineering (actually, there's a law permitting it). So, re-implementing .Net in Linux is legal... In Israel.
• Microsoft spreads FUD even when you don't use their technology directly (for example, last year's claim of having 235 violations of their patents in the Linux kernel). So why bother with the potential FUD that could be spread after .Net is integrated in Linux distros, they'll do it anyway.

Well, in this post I just wanted to present the other side. The arguments are "kind of" logical but I still can't help smelling something fishy in the whole thing.

Mono 2.0 implements C# v3.0 which has some neat features like the LINQ, for example.
Well, I don't have any issues with C#. The language is standardized and legal for reimplementation. There's an interesting interview with it's creator in here.

Mono 2.0 also includes a debugger for the first time.
It's getting more and more usable and I have a feeling that it might take over the whole RAD development in Linux (if you can call it by this name) currently dominated (IMO) by the dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, PHP ... FPC/Lazarus? (*ducks*).

The thing is that I think Linux could use more good RAD tools and it seems to me like Mono is going to do it where the others have failed. I'm just saying that it will be a darn shame if we realize later that it's legally unusable in half of the world (US and others?).

I think that other people in the FOSS community started to feel the need for RAD tools and today you can see cool projects like Vala and Lazarus come to life/resurrected.