Nokia N9 announced

Nokia today announced the N9, their first (and perhaps only) MeeGo device of the year. Codenamed Lankku (which is Finnish for 'Plank' - ironic isn't it?), the N9-00 features a curved Gorilla Glass 3.9" AMOLED screen with 858 x 480 resolution. It runs on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattan.

Chrome OS

The amount of attention by self proclaimed experts on Chrome OS is rather unnerving. For those who do not know, Chrome OS is a Linux distribution filled with adware, basically a trojan horse for Google's advertising business - minus the bits that makes Linux great. You may realise that I have adsense on this blog, but you can always adblock it if you want to. With a Google controlled OS and browser, you may not even have a choice.

If you want an open source operating system, stick with OpenSolaris or many of the billion Linux distributions out there. Also harddrives are cheap as chips, so I see absolutely zero reason to trust your data to the "cloud". Anybody who is excited by this and "cloud computing" ought to open up their eyes and realise they are basically putting their data into the hands of a corporation, whose interest lies with their shareholders and no one else.

Fedora 9

Fedora has got to be one of my favourite Linux distro since I migrated from Red Hat and Mandrake years ago. I occasionally use their Live CD, though to be honest Windows XP works fine and is stable enough for me. The Register has a nice write up on some of the new features of Fedora 9, of which I agree the most interesting news with it is the ability to create a persistent Live USB stick with Fedora 9 on it. Documents created will be saved on the USB drive and so are any updates and software installations. I may have to buy that 8GB USB drive I saw at last week in preparation for this. Seriously this will be a boon for me when it comes to other PC. Plug in and fire up Firefox 3 or some of the new features, then save your setting when you shut down. You just can't do that with a Live CD.

Make sure to fire up your torrent client of choice later today, the i386 and x86-64 DVD images should be live soon.

World Community Grid

Rather than donating money to charity chuggers, who pocket 50% of the monies for 'administrative' and tax purposes, do something better for a change by donating surplus computing power to research institute that can, in the long-run, benefit man-kind. And I know for a fact that everything I donated will be put to good use, unlike that of charities.

For the past month I have been donating computing power to the World Community Grid via United Devices client (you can also use the more popular BOINC client). Because the client only takes up idle CPU time (and it rarely put the processor under stress), electricity consumption is minimal. I only turn it on when I am actually using the computer, rather than leaving my PC on 24/7. Right now there are four projects on WCG, two of which my PCs are crunching for: FightAIDS@home and the Fiocruz Genome Comparison Project.


United Devices client calculating a WU for the Genome Comparison project on Windows XP

There are plenty of distributed computing projects around to suit anyone. CERN's LHC@home would probably suit physics geeks and Einstein worshippers more. Sci-fi nerds would most likely prefer to run SETI@home. Then there's the PS3 - Folding@home does demonstrate the crunching capability of STI's Cell processor.

Forget about Vista (for now)

While I am not a big fan of Dell, I have to say good for them on offering Ubuntu to their customers. Personally I would prefer if they offered Fedora Core but I guess with its Red Hat roots, it might seem too nerdy! Plus Ubuntu's awareness is rising. Ubuntu should prove to be a hit - if Dell could market it outside the usual geeky demographic that Linux is usually associated with. I probably won't be a huge problem as some Dell customers has proven themselves to be pretty tech savvy (though not as savvy as an IBM user!) - even managing to force Dell to start offering PCs with Windows XP again rather than Microsoft's newer, sexier but unproven and rather bloated new OS.

Speaking of Windows Vista, I had the opportunity to test the Home Premium edition on some one's new notebook (and also learnt that manufacturers do not give out recovery discs today, even on uber-expensive PCs). As I mentioned one the previous paragraph, the new OS is pretty nice to look at. But strip the glossiness away and what you have is effectively Windows XP with an updated GUI shell and some annoying security 'feature' and tacked XP Media Centre features.

The new Aero interface is a pretty slick but useless feature with no advantage to increasing productivity (that I know of! - although to be fair the GUI is now vector based making everything pretty, even when magnified). Flip 3D (win+tab) which was meant to be a GUI replacement to the alt-tab task switcher is a novelty feature at best. The first thing we did was to strip away all the useless 3D feature and special effects, then found that everything worked much faster. My opinion on Vista is if you have already have XP SP2? Don't buy it, yet. It is too expensive and it doesn't do anything that XP can't do with the right third party applications (eg. Yahoo! Widget). If your new PC happens to come with it bundled and only have 1GB of RAM, tweak it to allow for best performance or get another 1GB RAM stick. If not wait for Vienna due in 2008/09.

Better yet save that extra hard drive space and instead triple-boot Windows XP, Fedora Core/Ubuntu and Solaris.

Before I sign off I want to mention that I am currently watching the Liverpool-Chelsea match on ITV1. First live football match on the telly that I bothered to watch in a long long time (actually I am not watching, but merely leaving the telly on, with the occasional glance). I guess Jose's child-like behaviour tends to get to you. Not a fan of either... but go Liverpool!

Blogger of the year: Groklaw

I couldn't agree more with Dana Blankerhorn that if anyone ever deserves the title of blogger of the year, it would be Pamela Jones of Groklaw. I have been reading PJ's blog since August 2003 when the SCO Vs IBM case came to my attention. PJ has been a huge asset to the Linux community in digesting the legal documents that so many geeks would not understand if not of her.

Congratulations Pam!

IBM frees up 500 patents

IBM has pledge to release 500 software patents into the open source community as it proves its commitment into the Linux operating system.

This is great news. Although IBM will still own the patents, royalties are not expected by developers and users who use them in their open source softwares.

Hopefully the European Union will see fit to reject the pending and controversial uphaul to the EU's way of handling software patents.

Source: Groklaw

PalmOS for Linux

PalmSource has purchased a China based mobile phone company called China MobileSoft which specialises in embedded LinuxOS mobiles. The point is to create the popular PalmOS GUI and API on top of the LinuxOS. PalmSource has stated that the new version will sit along side PalmOS 5 Garnet and PalmOS 6 Cobalt and not to replace them.

My take on this is PalmSource might be intending to create a cheaper OS that it can sell. Also, China MobileSoft has a vast network of inside knowledge in China's mobile market. I think PalmSource is doing the right thing here. What they are buying from CMS is not only the Linux optimization knowledge but also an entry into China's expanding mobile phone market (5 million a month sold). Another great thing I can think of is applications that work on mobile Linux and the thousands of existing PalmOS applications can work on this PalmOS version if they are properly coded.

You can read PalmSource's press release on the acquisition here. If you care, there is an open letter to the PalmOS community as well as an open letter to the Linux community. A FAQ is available here.

A note here, Palm, Inc. originally wanted to take PalmOS forward into Linux a few years back before the company split. However they finally settled on BeOS.

How to replace your Zaurus's original ROM with OpenZaurus

Just bought one of those very cheap and nifty Sharp Zaurus of eBay and not happy with Sharp's Linux distribution?

This site will guide you on replacing the ROM image on the Zaurus and replacing it with another Linux distribution called the OpenZaurus. You can choose from two GUI - GPE or Opie or you could go for a Bootstrap without any GUI installed.



Source: Linux Journal

SCO's case crumbling

Those who knows me will know I am a Linux advocate. Not that I use Linux much or do programming but because I believe in open source. Although Microsoft is a necessary evil to me, I do use a lot of open source programs such as Firefox and OpenOffice.

I did not know that one day I would be supporting the Goliath - in this case IBM! I won't bother you with the history of SCO Vs IBM. For those who wants to know more you can visit Linux.org or Groklaw for more information.

Anyway here is part of Dr. Randall Davis of MIT's second declaration:

III. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS

16. Despite an extensive review, I could find no source code in any of the IBM Code that incorporates any portion of the source code contained in the Unix System V Code or is in any other manner similar to such source code. Accordingly, the IBM Code cannot be said, in my opinion, to be a modification or a derivative work based on Unix System V Code.

17. As explained in detail below, I used two programs, called COMPARATOR and SIM, to help automate the process. COMPARATOR looks for lines of text that are literally or nearly literally identical, while SIM looks for code that is syntactically the same.

18. I used both programs to compare all 26, 759 lines of the IBM Code identified by SCO against all 67,797,569 lines in the Unix System V Code.

19. I believe that the comparisons I performed using these tools are conservative and hence resulted in more potential matches than might otherwise be found using a less conservative approach.

20. These comparisons required on the order of 10 hours of computation time on a dual 3 GHz Xeon processor system with 2 GB of RAM. This is a high-end workstation routinely and easily available off the shelf from commercial vendors such as Dell.

21. COMPARATOR reported 15 potential hits. I reviewed each of these potential hits in detail and determined them not to be true matches of copied code, but rather coincidental matches of common terms in the C programming language. (Paragraphs 30 below discuss conincidental matches in COMPARATOR.

22. SIM did not report any potential hits.

It is pretty obvious that the courts would never find any so called 'SCO owned Unix' code in Linux and SCO's arguement is getting thinner by the day. You can find the whole text at Groklaw.

Source: Groklaw