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).

Today, I stumbled onto the following nasty bit of shell code in SECURITY Limit User Processes over on the Gentoo Wiki. No, I haven’t switched to Gentoo.

:(){ :|:& };:

Warning, this will cause your shell to create processes as fast as it can; most likely grinding your computer to a halt if you don’t have the appropriate limits set.

After spending some time trying to figure out what this command was doing assuming the colon was functioning as a no-op, I did a quick Google search and found this nice explanation of what it actually does. So, today I learned that Bash allows functions to be defined which override built-in commands.

Doc Searls (Linux Journal guy) has offered up another explanation of the Linux kernel. This explanation is a extension of the “Linux is the trees” analogy which has been discussed in past Linux Journal issues.

I found the link to this article on Kernel Planet.

The September 2005 issue of Linux Journal has another nice SSH article. This one is called Managing SSH for Scripts and cron Jobs.

Note worthy is the discussion of how to securely use passphraseless keys for remote command execution.

Also, I didn’t realize that SSH could be used as a pipe target.

cat file | ssh HOST "cat >> file.out"

Brace expansion is a Bash shell feature that I never seem to remember.

[dan@ganymede ~]$ echo httpd.conf{,.bak}
httpd.conf httpd.conf.bak

[dan@ganymede ~]$ echo abcd{1,2}
abcd1 abcd2

Qt, the GPL, Business and Freedom

The above is an interesting commentary on the GPL. He shares a view that I have held for quite a while; software ISVs are not white knights that are required to move Linux forward. Quite the opposite, bringing the proprietary ISV world to Linux would be a giant step backwards.