The main yum executable doesn’t have an option for downloading source RPMs. Fortunately, this task is made easy by yumdownloader which can be found in the yum-utils package.

yum install yum-utils
yumdownloader --source scponly

This will leave a copy of the scponly source RPM in the current directory.

Q&A: Torvalds on Linux, Microsoft, software’s future

CW: Lots of researchers made millions with new computer technologies, but you preferred to keep developing Linux. Don’t you feel you missed the chance of a lifetime by not creating a proprietary Linux?

Torvalds: No, really. First off, I’m actually perfectly well off. I live in a good-sized house, with a nice yard, with deer occasionally showing up and eating the roses (my wife likes the roses more, I like the deer more, so we don’t really mind). I’ve got three kids, and I know I can pay for their education. What more do I need? . . . So instead, I have a very good life, doing something that I think is really interesting, and something that I think actually matters for people, not just me. And that makes me feel good.

From New Linux look fuels old debate:

For Nvidia, intellectual property is a secondary issue. “It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help,” said Andrew Fear, Nvidia’s software product manager. In addition, customers aren’t asking for open-source drivers, he said.

The open-source community already maintains many drivers. Even if NVidia’s drivers are somehow better at present, I bet NVidia would be very surprised how quickly the community would improve them. “It’s so hard to write a graphics driver that open-sourcing it would not help,” sounds like something people would have said about building a high-quality operating system like Linux 10 years ago.

Secondly, as an NVidia customer, I am asking for open-source drivers. I am sick of the driver dance that closed drivers force me to go through. I want my graphics driver to be packaged and updated as necessary by my distribution just like the rest of my system. I want an open-source driver so that the Xorg developers can modify the driver to take advantage of new features and architectural changes. As the speed of development on Xorg increases (which appears to be the case in recent history) proprietary drivers are going to have more difficulty keeping pace.

The next graphics card I buy will have good open-source drivers, even if it slower than the alternative with proprietary drivers. From the article linked above, it looks like it may use an Intel graphics chip.

Note: If you don’t understand why the Linux kernel developers dislike the idea of closed-source drivers so much you should read Linux in a binary world… a doomsday scenario by Arjan van de Ven (also linked to in the quoted article).

So my favourite magazine, Linux Journal, has a new editor. Nicholas Petreley.

I have been a Linux Journal subscriber for 8+ years and I proudly have every issue on my bookshelf. I even paid for a subscription for my favourite computer store to help them gain knowledge about Linux and FOSS.

It used to be that the final page of Linux Journal had good information; news from the community, law advice etc. Now that Petreley has joined, the last page of my favourite magazine has uninformed rants that at best belong in a Slashdot comment on a KDE vs GNOME story.

I can only imagine what people new to the community will think when they pick up their first issue of Linux Journal and see that the writing style typified by Slashdot comments also makes it into the community’s print publication.

I will reserve my judgement on the article content for a couple of more issues since the articles that have been published so far were quite likely in the pipeline before Petreley got involved. However, I seriously doubt that Petreley’s biases will not bleed into the rest of the magazine.

On the plus side, the new larger, more graphical layout is quite visually appealing. To whatever extent Petreley was involved in the graphic design changes I compliment him and the rest of the Linux Journal team. Too bad the new layout does not make up for the loss in editorial quality.

For those who don’t know, there is a lot of good work happening on X these days. Especially interesting is Xgl, AIGLX and the composite extension. Since Xgl and AIGLX are two different ways to bring GL-accelerated effects to the standard Linux desktop, there has been much arguing over which is the better approach.

NVidia appears to believe that the AIGLX approach is a better long-term solution but there is no denying that the combination of Xgl and compiz produce better results at present.

Despite reading extensively on both of these projects, I don’t know enough about deep graphics issues to really make a good decision as to which is better. I’ll leave that to the X people. For now, I’m just really happy to see these features coming to my Linux desktop soon!

Check out this video from Novell to see just how cool this stuff is.

Xgl demo (58MB, XVid).