Freeculture.org has announced the winners of the DRM video contest. These videos are really fantastic – the only thing that’s a shame is that the proprietary Flash plugin is necessary to view (most of) them. The GNASH project is not quite there yet, unfortunately. I definitely looking forward to the next release though.
scanner
People are always talking about ‘the year of GNU/Linux on the desktop’. And they’re always wondering which year that will be. In the future.
I think that future is here already. I purchased a scanner, and it arrived today – a Canon Lide 60. It came with a big sticker warning that the software is to be installed before the scanner is plugged in. I ignored that warning, plugged the thing into my laptop (it’s USB), apt-get installed sane, and started scanning using the Gimp.
That took all of a couple of seconds.
Then I tried to install the scanner on my wife’s big Imac. I spent a good 20 minutes installing all the software that seems to be needed to use the scanner, and then it worked. Granted, there’s more eyecandy and more ‘features’ on the Mac. But I don’t need all that stuff. I just want to scan.
Posted in Free Software/Open Source
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solar power
Google is installing 1.6 megawatts of solar panels at their Mountain View campus.
Awesome.
Posted in Everything else
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Amazon’s S3 and EC2 services
Amazon Web Services is offering two relatively new services: ubiquitous storage via S3 and ‘elastic’ computing via EC2. The Cardbox folks have an in-depth analysis of S3 online, and Smugmug uses an S3 backend.This is very interesting. If it wasn’t for all the problems with the S3 contract, I would consider using this.
Now; that being said, ParkPlace is worth looking at – it allows running an S3-compatible server on any of your machines. Here’s some more info on ParkPlace.
And finally, here’s a good overview of S3 compatible software.
Posted in Everything else
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LinuxBIOS symposium 2006
The LinuxBIOS symposium 2006 in Hamburg was pretty amazing. Very, very interesting – and it was great to finally meet some of the folks from the mailing list. There are photos and slides from the talks at the LinuxBIOS wiki.
If you’re ever in Hamburg, you have to check out Wunderland, by the way. Never seen such an extensive model railroad setup in my life! Check out my photos.
Posted in Free Software/Open Source
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the belgian google lawsuit
I must admit that I’m ashamed – my countrymen are being ridiculous. The lawsuit against Google does not make any sense. The Google blog has a nice post outlining the basics of the case.
Basically – if those newspapers don’t want to be indexed by Google News, they could just use robots.txt. And while they are indexed, Google News only shows a small photo and a couple of lines of text – if the user clicks on the link, she is redirected directly to the website of the newspaper.
This is basic stuff. This is how search engines on the web work. This lawsuit is ridiculous. Great work, fellow countrymen. Once again, you are making us all look like fools.
why VAlinux went out of the hardware business
At work, someone donated an old VAlinux server 1000 a while back. It has all sorts of weirdness about it: no vga and ps/2 ports onboard, but a breakout box that provides them. The breakout box connects to the server with a proprietary connector. Also, the power button works in very strange ways – basically you need to press it at least twice, with the right duration for each press and enough time between each press for the server to actually start.
We’ve taken the thing into production (yes, we’re a non-profit!). It’s stable, runs fine. It has 2 serial ports (DB9) at the back, one of which we were already using. We wanted to plug in the second one today. Get this – the connectors are too close together for 2 standard DB9 cables to fit next to each other. Baughj had to shave off a couple of millimeters of plastic from the side of one of the connectors to make them fit together.
What were they thinking? I sure am glad these people don’t make hardware anymore.
Posted in Completely clueless
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gumstix
I’ve been meaning to play with some of these gumstix for a long time. Recently they released the Netstix 200xm-cf that puts ethernet, a CF socket, a 200MHz Xscale CPU, 64MB of RAM and 16MB of flash in a tiny package. It comes with a tiny 3MB Linux distro, with kernel 2.6.17!
I was not aware of the AstLinux project – I think I’ve just found a reason to buy a 200xm-cf and experiment.
Now all I need is some time…
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Simply RISC
I wrote a while back about Sun’s decision to GPL the design for its Niagara T1 chip.
As Larry Lessig reports, there is now a company in Europe that is shipping a modified design targeted at embedded systems. Check out the Simply RISC homepage!
Also, the problem of having to use proprietary software to work on the chip design seems to be solved. This is an excerpt from the SimplyRISC homepage:
The development environment of the S1 Core can run on any Unix/(GNU/)Linux box and no commercial tools are required, since both simulation and synthesis of the Verilog files of the design can be performed using the free software Icarus Verilog.
Way, way cool.
Posted in Free Software/Open Source
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another LinuxBIOS build tutorial
We acquired a Tyan Transport GX28 with a Tyan s2882 board at work (rather by accident, in fact). Turns out my Tyan S2881 Build Tutorial worked pretty much out of the box for the S2882, so I’ve put up a complete Tyan S2882 Build Tutorial too. It’s basically the same, with all references to the S2881 replaced with S2882 and a couple of extra comments.
Now if the sata drives had not been plugged into port 3 and 4 instead of 1 and 2 (this chassis only has 2 drive bays) it would have worked with the first build of my image. Building LinuxBIOS images is not hard at all now. Just follow the build tutorials, and you’ll see for yourself!
I can’t reveal the purpose of this box just yet – but if all goes well it’s going into production this Friday (with LinuxBIOS!) and there should be an announcement made at the FSF site sometime next week.
By the way – the LinuxBIOS summit in Hamburg, Germany is only a couple of weeks away. That should be a very interesting event.
Posted in coreboot
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