There have been a lot of questions today about just what the recent Debian OpenSSL flaw means for Tor clients. Here's an attempt to explain it in a bit more detail.
¶ Addressing How Debian's OpenSSL Surity Issue Impacts Tor
HP's Mini-Note 2133 or Asus' Eee 900?
Asus has an Eee with a 9" screen running at 1024x600, which was the only thing stopping me from getting one and running either Ubuntu and xfce or maybe even OS x.
But as it turns out, even though some are being unboxed now, the Eee launches on May 12 and the Atom version is rumored to launch in June. I'm too damn impatient.
But there's been another competitor, HP's Mini-Note 2133, and reviews love it. Did I mention is has a 1280x768 screen? And is only slightly larger?
How slightly? I made papercraft versions of each machine given their dimensions so I could look at them next to each other and found the small difference in volume to not matter. Little did I know, someone already took pictures of the Eee and Mini-note side by side.
Unboxings of the Mini-note are popping up, the only other information I've seen on this now-shipping machine is one very unhappy user.
Given the Mini-note's larger resolution display and the fact that it is available now, I'm probably going to snatch that up. Why Asus would go with a lower resolution screen is beyond me.
Getting Me A New Mac Pro
Apple announced today new Mac Pro's:
Apple® today introduced the new Mac® Pro with eight processor cores and a new system architecture that delivers up to twice the performance of its predecessor*. The new Mac Pro combines two of Intel’s new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running up to 3.2 GHz, powerful new graphics and up to 4TB of internal storage to offer the ideal system for creative professionals, 3D digital content creators and scientists. The standard 8-core configuration starts at just $2,799.
...
Every Mac Pro comes standard with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of video memory. The Mac Pro includes a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that delivers up to double the bandwidth compared to the previous generation, and supports the latest generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA, such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory, or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of video memory and a 3-D stereo port for stereo-in-a-window applications.
Time to eBay my MacBook Pro tonight and pick up one of these. It will make photo work much much faster. I thought about getting a single 2.8 GHz quad-core CPU and just popping in a second one myself since Apple tends to charge through the nose for components, but apparently, the pricing on the CPUs is quite competitive. Factor in the Mac Pro-specific heatsink I'd need to track down and it isn't actually worth it. (But I'll certainly be doing the RAM upgrades myself.)
I remember when I had a dual Pentium Pro tower and all my friends had CPUs that were much faster, but they were single processor machines. But under load, mine was fine and their mouse pointer's position would refresh every half a second. Since then I've been using laptops for portability, but thanks to my iPhone, I've got the web and email in a much smaller (though often not as convenient) form factor. Since I'm starting to do more photography and dealing with many gigabytes of RAW photos, the horsepower would be a welcome addition.
Besides, if I find I really need a portable computer, and not just a phone, I can run XFCE and Ubuntu on an EEE.
¶ Ubuntu With XFCE On Eee
eeeXubuntu is a custom version of the Xubuntu 7.10 Live CD with fully-integrated hardware support, including native wireless drivers, functioning Ethernet support, tweaks for low-resolution desktop environments, and other miscellaneous fixes. Wherever possible, these changes are incorporated using custom .deb packages rather than spewing assorted files all over post-install.
I love XFCE.
Virtualization Software
It's articles like this that make me look into buying virtualization software. I'm very not used to having a MAMP stack because managing a LAMP stack, as I have been for years, is worlds easier. Sure Apple has Software Update for the OS and various other software offerings of theres, but how much longer until an all encompassing solution like Debian's (and Ubuntu's) apt software and deb file format?
¶ What If Running Linux Does Allow Software To Be Run With Adverse Effects On Hardware?
There's a debate going on over at bugs.launchpad.net on whether it's the Ubuntu, BIOS, hard-drive manufacturer, or pick-any-player's fault, but Ubuntu (and perhaps any OS) may be dramatically shortening the life of your laptop's hard drive due to an aggressive power-saving feature / acpi bug / OS configuration. Regardless of where the fault lies or how it's fixed, you might want to take some actions now to try to prevent the damage.
What would be scary is if things like this laid the grounds for the claim that running Linux voids your warranty. I'd hate to see that happen.
¶ How Open Source Can You Get?
But what's the point of Gobuntu's existence if it still contains non-free components? Apparently, Canonical even went to the trouble of removing everything except the copyrighted-all-rights-reserved image files. i'm left scratching my head, wondering why they bothered with this farce if they weren't prepared to go all the way?
...
I spoke with Mike Connor about this issue, in person, at the Firefox 2 release party last year. (Mike is the Mozilla Corporation employee who filed this bug that eventually led to Firefox’s removal from Debian.) Mike admitted to me that these files are not released under an open-source-compatible copyright license, and that this means that any build or package that includes those files is not open source. Furthermore, he does not have a problem with this (I believe his exact words were "I'm OK with that"), and it appears that his employer shares his apathy. The Mozilla Corporation’s solution to the "Linux problem" has been to pressure each major distributor to ensure that Mozilla’s non-free applications, complete with their non-free image files, make it into the default install. Debian refused to cave to this pressure (Mike literally told them to "bend the DFSG a little" — you can imagine how well that went over), so their only choice was to remove the Firefox package from Debian.
¶ Ubuntu 7.10, Gutsy Gibbon, Released
The Ubuntu team is excited to bring you the absolute latest and greatest software that the open source and free software communities have to offer. This is Ubuntu 7.10, which brings a host of excellent new features. You may also like to view the Ubuntu desktop screenshot tour.
NetworkManager Removal Problems On Dapper
I dist-upgraded to Dapper the other day (more on that later) and decided to try NetworkManager, however, it doesn't support wireless connections with a static IP. So I uninstalled it. However, since then, my laptop's wifi has stopped working. Thankfully it has built in ethernet and I'm not going any place any time soon where I will need to us a wireless network. The thing that really irks me is that when I reinstall NetworkManager, my wifi now works. Which leads me to believe that the uninstall process doesn't clean up to well after itself.
Ubuntu Community Schism
There is a definte split in the Ubuntu community. I think on one side, you've got the folks who read the list, idle in IRC, join the Ubuntu doc team or even become Ubuntu MOTU. Now before the doc team started kicking ass, a member of the unofficial Ubuntu forums created a monolithic one page guide on how to do common tasks. For the most part, the advice was alright, but there were a couple of mistakes. However, since he was the only one with control over it, nothing could be done to change it. Also, this created a rift. On one side the doc team was just starting out and now there was a fragmentation of knowledge. Let the people who are new to Ubuntu have one place to go for help, not seven because seven people want to write their own guides. Since the creation of this guide well over a year ago, it has not been updated. People still follow it and it does cause problems. There have since been other guides and I tend to agree with the response of why do this by yourself when you can help out the doc team and accomplish more as a team than you courself could ever do as an individual?
Another issue is the Automatix software created by another forum member. It is similar to EasyUbuntu in its goals, however, the creator of the software has not responded to several inquiries about his less than ideal methods of doing things. That combined with the fact that it has caused several totally hosed boxes leads me to not even want to try it myself. The developer of the software responds hostily that the IRC community and the mailing list community continue to spread FUD while the forum community has downloaded it several thousand times without problem.
I think as a whole, the community that sprang up around the forum does not understand that cooperation and team work is what makes Ubuntu (and other open source projects) so powerful. I also think that the communication between the two is a major issue. Why does the forum community have its own IRC channel, why do they not go into the larger main Ubuntu channel? Do they understand what their communications look like when they try to interface the mailing list through the forums?
Do they have any idea that as a person who interfaces that mailing list through a mail client that their message is totally worthless? Do they understand that those who use a newsreader or a web browser through Gmane will find the same? Again, I agree with the statement that those who run the unofficial Ubuntu forums could greatly improve them. I would even go as far as to say that they do a disservice given the current configuration. I just hope that Automatix doesn't get slashdotted again.
Addendum
Just caught this in #ubuntu-devel:
<jdong> floam: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=899834&postcount=7
<floam> and I thought nothing useful was ever stated on the fourms.
<jdong> floam: umm, what would make you think that?
<floam> jdong: just my last few years experience with the internet. webforums for Linux distributions tend to be places where cluebies spread false information and diseases
<floam> they are usually devoid of anyone important
<jdong> I see....
<jdong> there are developers who regularly are on the forums
<jdong> while it's true that any online community you're going to get some level of false information....
<floam> the signal-to-noise ratio is usally much worse for web forums than for the proper mailing lists
<jdong> I wouldn't say so... our forums just have monstrous proportions of traffic compared to the lists
<jdong> but we do acknowledge that problem... it's getting better though
And there's the entire kubuntu.de debacle. I agree with Matthew East's point about ignoring the dispute resolution mechanism.
