Mozilla Craziness

Posted on January 11, 2009 by ehurst

The generic Seamonkey 64-bit download from Mozilla.org runs the new beta 64-bit Flashplayer from Adobe on CentOS.

So here we are, CentOS 5.2 for x86_64. I installed the latest beta release of Flashplayer for 64-bit Linux. By “install” I mean I unzipped and untarred the archive package and got a single file: libflashplayer.so. I moved it, according to instructions, into my $HOME/.mozilla/plugins/ folder. Firefox, which comes bundled with CentOS can find it, but won’t use it much. Once or twice it has run a Flash ad, but otherwise closes up the space where a Flash window should be on the page. At the same time, it works very nicely in Opera.

However, the main reason I’ve always loved Mozilla’s browsers is because they render webpages into plain text better than any other browser. It gets the embeded links, the text attributes, vertical space between paragraphs, and always neatly wraps things to 72 characters. For a researcher who keeps finding critical pages disappearing from the Net, this the best way to prevent losing referenced material. So I keep using Firefox. Also, it handles some JScript better than Opera.

Just for fun, I decided to see if I could get a Seamonkey package to work on my system. Perhaps it would make a good semi-graphical browser I could cripple for security reasons — turn off all plugins, graphics, and disable JScript most of the time. It turns out neither RH nor any of the clones for this version offer a Seamonkey package. I could build one, but I wondered if there might be a quicker path. So I downloaded the 64-bit contributed build for Linux from the Mozilla site. It was just a big gzipped tar archive, and when opened, it was a simple matter to move the resulting seamonkey folder in under /usr/local/ and link from there to my desktop. I also had a set of Seamonkey icons in PNG format.

After picking up a compat-libs package for it, I launched it. Then I played with it a few minutes, checking a news website just to see how it rendered. Lo and behold, Seamonkey displayed the Flash content when Firefox would not. Yes, that includes Youtube and sound. I have no idea what’s going on, but if all the other plugins work with Seamonkey, it will be Firefox I use as the crippled safety browser.

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Riots: It Will Get Worse

Posted on January 10, 2009 by ehurst

Take a look at the riots in Greece. Just a bunch of hoodlums? Perhaps, but not everything wrong there falls on only one set of shoulders. It is widely established as fact the government of Greece at all levels, as a whole, has zero interest in the will of the people they govern. Same here in the US.

Did you ever stop to notice what a massive, monumental effort it takes from the grass roots to stop the federal government doing something stupid? Case in point: the FDA made a move to regulate the natural vitamin industry. It’s no secret the reason was pressure from the big commercial vendors of artificial vitamins. While the word “vitamins” has a concrete meaning in terms of chemistry — vitamin C is ascorbic acid — the word has a different connotation in marketing. It’s playing semantic games to denounce natural vitamins as “no better” than raw chemicals isolated from their natural complex environment in human nutrition. So when the folks who sell these natural supplements, and those who consume them, found out about this almost secret effort, the outcry reached the deaf ears of the FDA. The really dirty secret is those voices had to fork over a lot of money to buy the assistance of some insiders to be heard. Otherwise the FDA would have ignored the outcry. Furthermore, the FDA still plans to do this, but they are being even more secret about it, now.

In other words, it is the fundamental nature of the US federal government to tell the citizens to get lost (that’s framing the attitude nicely). Way back when Abraham Lincoln came up with that sweet-sounding phrase — government of the people, by the people, for the people — he knew it was a bold lie. The entire premise of his whole service in US government was to insure “the right people” were in control, and he had very clear notions who those people were. Indeed, he made no bones about it in his writings and speeches. His war was the one thing which most served to reverse the clearly stated principle the US federal government was supposed to be the coordinating office of the states, the servant of the states. Instead, he made it the supreme overlord of the states. This was not what was intended by the Founding Fathers, so at the very latest, it was during Lincoln’s administration we trashed the Constitution once and for all.

It was the same as any other revolt in human history, except for the peculiarity of being a revolt of institutions against other institutions. That is, while it was certainly people who revolted, it was specifically on behalf of institutional offices, not their own selves. So it seems quite ordinary, decent and good people can step into those offices, and something happens. They suddenly are annointed with infallibility, but only because they have adopted the prevailing adendas of “The Powers That Be” (TPTB). Actually, you probably realize nobody who is ordinary, decent and good can get into those offices in the first place. Let’s get one thing clear: It is with rare exception anyone in office has not already compromised themselves in such a way the others could get rid of them in a heartbeat if any dare to cross certain lines. Do you really think Eliot Spitzer’s private sins are worse than any other big shot in government? He was exposed by people in government because he crossed the line, planning to prosecute someone belonging to TPTB without the authorization of TPTB.

Please note: It had nothing to do with Democrat versus Republican; Republicans have their brand of sleaze. Yes, those two go at each other with zeal, but that zeal is cultivated by even higher TPTB. It’s a side show. Spitzer was not marked for termination as a Democrat, because they could easily have protected him. No, he dared to suggest the banks which would shortly be demanding a bailout — preplanned well before the public awareness of the “need” — were running crooked operations. The timing is the key, along with the ID of which banks Spitzer was investigating. Oh, and while it may have nothing to do with this case, Spitzer’s favorite supplier of sex was a business front for Mossad, and the US knew it.

Never mind Jews, this is about clandestine government agencies allowing those of other nations on their turf. In this case, there’s nothing wrong with guessing it was designed to be a trap in the first place. Most espionage requires casting a net to capture agents of your target government via their vices or virtues — catch them being naughty, or identify something they hold sacred. From there, simple blackmail is enough. That the US would knowingly allow Mossad to operate a high-end bawdy house means pretty much the same as that old Echelon trick. While eavesdropping by the CIA on US citizens is technically illegal, it’s okay if they get the intel from MI6 eavesdropping on US citizens. Mossad is allowed to operate freely because they can pass on the goods without breaking the law, so to speak. At least, the US government can pretend they didn’t know, and officially refuse to discuss it.

But the people find out. When they start trying to get answers, the government is not only uncooperative, but tends to threaten the people for daring to ask. Do you not know most laws exist, not to be enforced, but to be selectively enforced? That is, enforcement agencies cannot possibly go after every violation, so they choose to emphasize violations based on policy. Enforcement policy is presumably tuned to meet needs identified by the political process. However, that’s not the only thing going on. The idea is you cannot possibly live your life without breaking one law or another. When something you do really does matter, you cannot possibly escape prosecution for one thing or another. It won’t matter what you do or don’t do; the criminal justice system can indict a random shovel full of dirt not yet removed from the ground. Cross one of those invisible lines, and you will surely suffer, if not for the thing itself, then something arbitrarily made up from some other part of the system. The people are starting to figure this out.

When they do, it only takes one truly brassy act of oppression before the apathy dies and people react. That’s only half the formula, though. When you read all the official stuff put out by government mouthpieces, and all the documents they write, even the ones which slip out by accident, you realize one awful thing: No government agency ever admits doing wrong. Nothing indicates a rational concern the citizens might just object to something. It’s invariably cast in the light any objection must be seen as criminal. There’s scarcely any pretense any more of responsibility and accountability to those governed. You may see those words from time to time, but notice carefully how government people avoid applying it to themselves or their agencies.

It’s getting worse. You can see it as more and more agencies and officers boldly reject in public statements any hint of contrition for mistakes. Further, the system is closed to change. Voting means nothing if the candidates are uniformly members already of TPTB. Frankly, the only change possible is literally killing the whole lot of them. That’s not to encourage violence, but a simple recognition of facts. You want to stop the war in Gaza? Nuke the Knesset while it’s in session, because the leaders of Hamas are agents of the Israeli government, created by it. Those leaders of Hamas who remain obedient will still be alive next year, even if the entire rest of the population of Gaza is dead. Want to stop US unconditional support of Israel? You’ll have to nuke DC on a good workday. Sorry, but that’s the facts; by no other means can you persuade the federal government to stop it. No one among TPTB will hear you because there’s too much money in it for them, and for those who control them.

That rioters are thugs doesn’t change anything. The folks at the top are simply bigger thugs, successful thugs. Anyone who harbors the least desire to make decisions for any other human being is already vile. Those who succeed in getting to the top simply choose who will share that honor. They have no trouble using violence to maintain that position — cops do carry guns — and would claim some form of monopoly on the use of violence. That they succeed at times in keeping some semblance of public civil order is purely an accident. There are always folks who find your peaceful coexistence oppressive on them.

Right now the pendulum of history swings toward more oppressive government, so more violent revolts is just the natural result. Get ready.

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No Paradise

Posted on January 9, 2009 by ehurst

I don’t balk at eating crow. When you don’t take yourself too seriously, you can laugh with those who laugh at you.

No sooner do I announce I’ve decided to go with openSUSE 11.0, as less broken than 11.1, and more easily adjusted to the mass market than CentOS, but I immediately have a rough time with it. I’m trying to analyze the cause of my disillusioning experience, and here’s what I see so far:

Third party multimedia enhancements. I’m sure this is far more involved than my feeble mind can discern, but the experience with CentOS is a whole lot better. We all know the copyright laws of the US make it hard to for legal entities — such as commercial Linux companies — to just make it easy to play anything you like. Yet it doesn’t take long for any interested user of either CentOS or SUSE to find the path to modifiying the default installation. SUSE puts it right on their website, with links to both a commercial offering (Fluendo) and the community freebies, with the advisory you are taking the risks of lawsuit upon yourself. It’s so easy, you just click the button and install.

With CentOS, you can find the instructions on their wiki, and it’s more work. However, it works out far better. That is, it’s far less hassle in the long run, especially on 64-bit. On SUSE, the one-click leaves you with a bunch of unresolvable conflicts. I had to put up with crashing YaST until I ran through an esoteric routine to fix the RPM database. This is apparently quite common, particularly on 64-bit, because the enhancements assume you have to use some 32-bit codecs and so forth, which requires wrappers, and it seems a lot more complicated than necessary. There are some fine 64-bit codecs from the same source, and they seem to cover just about everything I’ve thrown at them. At any rate, on CentOS, the result was better and a lot less work, despite the lack of a one-click solution.

GVFS A recent innovation on the GNOME desktop is the incorporation of the GVFS virtual file system. On the one hand, users can mount and control external file systems for themselves, without fighting permissions designed for protecting a server. A feature of this is, once mounted in the user’s home directory, not even root can access it. The idea, as I understand it, is to prevent a privilege escalation attack (“getting root”) by mounting something dangerous into the file system. The whole thing comes from something in the kernel itself. However, this breaks just about everything else in Linux which refers to permissions. There are a raft of complaints in how the FUSE and GNOME people implemented this, usually accusing the developers of ignoring the needs of everyone else. At a minimum, this represents one more thing for which everyone else has to develop a work-around. The whole point is openSUSE implements this, and CentOS does not. There is a fix for SUSE by creating a file /etc/profile.local and activating there the environmental variable GVFS_DISABLE_FUSE

This latter point, of course, is part of what shapes my complaint about helter-skelter innovation in Open Source. Not only is there the appearance of very poor coordination across various projects, but truculence about backing off innovations which may not work too well just yet. When I went with my decision to support GNOME, I knew that project was no better than KDE folks about breaking things, particularly user settings, and refusing to discuss fixing previous releases. An older, more stable GNOME is a usable thing, but I don’t consider any desktop environment (DE) “good” just yet. As noted previously, the major point behind choosing GNOME is the adaptive technology. Since I don’t have the resources to focus on mulitple DEs in testing and tracking for the users I seek to cultivate, that pretty much shuts out Xfce, Rox Desktop, and anyone else who can’t incorporate auditory cue hooks in their interface and widgets. KDE 4 is a hopeless mess for the foreseeable future, so we won’t go there. Besides, I’m looking at older spec machines, and 3D rendering just isn’t all that important.

So the search continues. I’m seeking the balance point: Whatever I’m going to install routinely will probably have to be remastered with a different set of defaults, both in packaging and settings. At the same time, I can’t pretend I’m going to solve all the issues by how I install it. Once the system is in the user’s hands, it has to yield reasonably to their efforts to refine settings to suit them. It has to better than Windows, or they’ll never accept it.

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Typical Breakage: Adobe Flashplayer 10 Beta for Linux 64-bit

Posted on January 8, 2009 by ehurst

Actually, I’m not poking at Adobe this time. Say what you want about how Flash has ruined the Net, and I’ll agree. But people expect to have it working.

The breakage here is that Firefox never has been much good at this in Linux, particularly on 64-bit. I’ve had it working briefly on a few distros, but almost always as a result of running a 32-bit browser with a 32-bit plugin on a 64-bit OS. Silly, no? The whole advantage of 64-bits processing for most users is the improved handling of sound and video.

So, on both CentOS 5 and openSUSE 11.0, it’s exactly the same thing. I download the latest version, install it in the proper directories for browser plugins, and remove all traces of the 32-bit adaptations. Opera 64-bit runs it just fine. Firefox just closes up the space on the page where the Flash should be. This, even if I turn off Flashblocker.

I don’t pretend to know why it works that way. However, I do know I can’t get any information from the logs or even by running Firefox from the commandline. In other words, I can’t even report a bug.

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Searching for the Linux of Mass Appeal

Posted on January 7, 2009 by ehurst

As a computer service volunteer and Linux advocate, how can I get the average computer user to adopt Linux?

This has nothing to do with what I happen to like, but what I find actually doing the job. Having to work around minor issues is no sweat for me, but the average refugee from Redmond isn’t gonna like it. Just getting past the inertia of moving away from what comes bundled on the PC from the store means we have to be significantly better. Gamers and hobbyists already know what to do, but most home users have too many other concerns in their lives. We want them; we need that mass appeal to overcome hindrances we have faced since the days Linus first posted his ideas on Usenet. We have to offer a compelling reason to switch.

Simple security is not enough. Everybody knows Linux is better at security, if they even know what Linux is. I remain firmly convinced neither the Russian Mafia nor NSA will find a typical Linux home PC an easy target for cracking over the wire. This is because of fundamental differences in structure, not just market share. There is a huge difference between a system which starts with all the gates closed (Linux) and one which has no fence (Windows). But the people who bring home a Vista box from Wal-Mart will simply run what comes on the system, even struggling with ill-considered security measures, will not install something different unless it’s worth more to them than the presumed value of that bundled OS.

What they want is easily determined from anyone who serves these same people when the security measures fail, or when something simply doesn’t work. I can convince them to be more careful in selecting their optional hardware add-ons, because they are used to being ripped off via false advertising. I can’t convince them their entire OS is broken because they can see it running on their computer. What will move them is something which works with the hardware which came in the box. We are doing a lot better in that department, and I’m really impressed with the proliferation of projects grinding out working drivers for just about everything. We’ve also done a great job with Linux gaming software. We will probably never capture the insane gamers who live inside their PCs until we capture more market share and convince game developers to add a Linux port, but that’s the whole point. We have reached out to every marketing area except one: the mass of users who simply want their system to work better with less interruption. They consider a computer essential, but not at all central, to their daily lives.

These people will all too quickly revert to Windows, demanding it loudly, if the daily activities for which they have been using their system is in any way hindered. They’ll forgive a drab and boring desktop if it they can find everything and use it pretty much as they did in Windows 98. Over the past three years I’ve been testing systems based on what I see my clients and friends doing on their PCs at home. Please note, we’ve already covered Linux distros with rolling release or frequent releases, and which refuse to support any previous release longer than one year. Those are out of the question. I find a 3-year support cycle is the absolute minimum. As I compare what they see with what I experience in the Land of Linux, here are some observations:

1. GNOME is slightly ahead of the game over KDE and others. More stuff works, more consistently, right out of the box. They include things like the default CD player, screensavers, applets, and frequently font rendering. People don’t give a rat’s patootie about clutter or simplicity as a matter of aesthetics, but once they have it set up, it better work first time, every time. GNOME has a better track record. It also has a bigger share of the common use applications interfaces. While plenty of KDE stuff works better technically, and is more familiar in terms of general appearance, Windows refugees are more likely to find GNOME usable. As a side note, I find KDE 3.x still broken, but it seems abandoned now. At the same time, I doubt 4.x will be usable for at least a couple of years, particularly from the standpoint of common users.

There is one issue so large I can’t overstate it: Adaptive Technology. Right now, KDE is very poorly covered by this. I’ve seen a range of add-on software for Windows, from the cheapest to the most expensive. I’ve seen how it works, and how the vision-impaired want it to work. I haven’t tested the Linux version, but that will begin next week. Fully blind users are another issue, but in my reading I’ve seen nothing to compare with the Orca Project in Linux, and it is based on GNOME. The built-in stuff with KDE won’t do it, though it covers motion-impaired users well enough. A significant part of my service is to vision-impaired people, and I can’t afford to invest time in something which isn’t even close to readiness.

2. Hardware detection is everything. It’s not just a question of, “Will it work in Linux?” It’s a question whether the installation process of your chosen distro will minimize the pain. Frankly, Ubuntu/Knoppix and friends are loosing ground on this front where I’ve tried it. I won’t pretend to know what’s behind it, but the last few releases have given me fits with display setup. The GUI config utility is entirely too simplified, and there is no means for simply choosing the monitor from a list, nor even setting the hardware specs if known. There are at least a half-dozen systems where the boot process froze, and one or two where all the expert boot incantations in the world can’t get past the hardware detection freeze. On the same boxes, RedHat clones or SUSE do just fine. I’ve had to quit offering the former CDs, because they just don’t work.

3. There is such as a thing as “too secure.” Here is where CentOS and other RH clones break down. Security should work in the background. The number one complaint against Windows I hear is the way security software dominates the system resources and too often fails in one way or another. The primary consumer complaint against Vista is the obtrusive security measures which serve only to make it hard to use. In a hundred little ways, those server distros do the same thing. Yes, we want security on our servers, and server distros are the primary source of stability over the long haul. However, persuading CentOS to loosen up for a different mission is quite a large task. We can add all sorts of third-party goodies without breaking a sweat, but I have found, in consultation with developers and sysadmins, all that tweaking of the underlying assumptions is probably not worth it. Somebody needs to step forward with a different model, or we’ll never gain that wider acceptance.

4. For now, openSUSE is probably the best bet. Complain all you like about compromise with Leviathan, and apparent bloat, SUSE on the desktop is the current leader for the mass market. This, even though their latest release is badly broken in some places. I’m going to be offering to my clients and friends the DVDs from 11.0, particularly those with 64-bit hardware. People who could care less about the technical differences between 32-bit and 64-bit are often the first to notice the difference in multimedia played on them. It’s no longer just databases and heavy graphics rendering questions; 64-bit sound and video playing is noticeably better than 32-bit. I’m surprised how little this is noted in the Open Source articles I’ve been reading lately. SUSE was quite early in the game of releasing 64-bit desktop stuff, and naturally holds a lead in some aspects.

It won’t matter I’m not happy with the way SUSE tends to run a little more slowly than other distros. It won’t matter I prefer KDE (3.x) to GNOME, the latter is better for my clients. I’m finding the difference between 3 years’ support and 5+ is just small enough I can probably sell it, at least from the way my clients and friends react. Should there ever come a day when Novell wises up and releases the update SRPMs for SLED in a more timely manner, they’ll steal a huge share of the non-paying adoption market. Yes, that won’t make them any profit directly, but it will make a huge difference when they grab a much bigger market share because of the direct feedback on improvements which keeps RedHat cooperating with the likes of CentOS and Scientific Linux. For now, Novell’s policy is to restrict access to update SRPMs, and allow non-paying customers only an annual “service pack” ISO. A year is a really long time in the field of computer technology. While patching and recompiling from source is easy for folks like me, a build-ready SRPM is far simpler and quicker to deploy on a large scale — that’s the whole point behind having RPMs.

So far, no distro is a shining star. SUSE is just barely enough better than Windows I have some hope of selling it. I’ll be running it as my primary work station only so I can keep track of little things which make a difference to clients. I still prefer CentOS for my own use, but I don’t have enough computers, nor enough space for more of them, to make like some commercial operation.

Update: Notice the follow-up to this post — No Paradise

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Tinkering: Mail Servers on the Desktop

Posted on January 6, 2009 by ehurst

In my early experience with Linux, I learned The Way for email was to run an MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) in the background, a fetching service, and did email from the commandline. My preferred setup was Postfix, Fetchmail and Pine. For those who loved, and still prefer Sendmail, feel free to chain yourself to hours of esoteric scripting on a system designed by developers who genuinely hate humans. I ran this trio off and on for years, and recently resurrected it on my CentOS box.

Postfix is still one of the simplest to configure, with lots of examples in the documentation (even for dialup connections), and even more scattered across the Net. It’s easy and secure, and I still like it best. The number one piece of information you need for using Postfix through your favorite mail service is how to establish your relayhost.

For some reason, Fetchmail doesn’t draw the same “let me help you” crowd. Recent changes in Fetchmail itself seem aimed it making it difficult enough for home users to be discouraged. For some time now, most users have learned you really need to put nodns in your configuration, because otherwise Fetchmail will download, then promptly reject mail from servers hosting multiple domains. A newer complaint from Fetchmail is regarding all those messages you get from mailing lists which don’t specifically put the precise “envelope” in the headers preferred by the Fetchmail developers. You now get warnings about “envelopes” and “multidrop” which will make no sense to the average users invoking Fetchmail from the commandline. If you read the documentation, you will find it’s carefully written to confuse you. If you ask for help on forums where Fetchmail experts hang out, you’ll get rude responses about “RTFM!” from people who know beyond all doubt you won’t understand it. All it really requires is you add no envelope to shut up the warnings. Here’s my own .fetchmailrc (obviously some details have been changed to protect my privacy):

poll mail.example.org protocol POP3 nodns no envelope
        user me@example.org is user me here
        password "0x0x0x0!"

The only other significant change was in Pine: It’s now Alpine, and it’s open source. Instead of settling for the version 1.0 offered by my third party repos, I chose to hunt down a RedHat-based source RPM for building 2.0. One of the newest features of no real significance is a wider array of colors for enhancing the display of Alpine on the Xterm. You can now elect to build with 256 color capability. I’m too old fashioned to care much, so I still use the original 16 colors. Still, that’s just a silly example of some changes in user configuration options and the way it works under the hood.

Aside from some minor security advantages there is no particular reason for doing things this way. It’s just that I enjoy it. I’ve configured Alpine to use Joe as the editor for composing and replying. I’m comfortable with this setup, having used it for years.

As a side note, things are not all peace and joy in CentOS Land. You really do want solid security in the server room, but on the desktop, it can be a nuisance. Some security settings simply aren’t justified for common users. The standard permission settings for users on CentOS are just a little too tight. Even without enabling SELinux, I still run into too many places where I have to login as root. For example, I cannot review any part of the system logs. It’s probably a simple matter of adding my user name to some obscure group in the system, but I haven’t worked it out yet. I may be shifting back to SUSE 11.0 (because 11.1 is too badly broken in too many places). While I don’t think 3 years is really long enough for supporting a distro release, it may be the best I can get right now.

For all you Ubuntu fanboys, forget it: No version of Ubuntu or its clones will read the detection signature of my monitor, and I have to fight like Hades to get bigger than 800×600 on a monitor designed for twice that. This is a pretty standard Dell hand-me-down CRT. Even after I install the nVidia drivers, the Ubuntu hardware recognition module ignores my monitor. The entire Debian chain of products offers no simple path to adding enough details to xorg.conf to get a reasonable display out of the box. I have to add, not only the monitor freqs, but the modelines by hand. That I know how to fix it has no bearing on the question; none of my clients should have to experience that. I am working toward supporting one or two best distros for the quickest and simplest deployment for home users.

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Green Deities

Posted on January 6, 2009 by ehurst

During the summer of 1979, I got my hands on a copy of the Greenpeace Manifesto, as it existed at the time. The mass-produced photocopy got lost during a subsequent move, and I have not found a copy since then. To my knowledge, they don’t even have a copy on their own websites. I’ve also seen a few other manifestos and philosophy statements from individuals and organizations on the same track.

The thing which stands out for a theologian like me is the underlying pagan earth worship. There’s no better term for it. The assumption is Earth is somehow sacred, and humans are mostly a disease on the Her. Only those sufficiently enlightened to receive this truth are permitted some hope to stay while they work to destroy all other humans. I’m not joking, nor do I believe this is hyperbole. The Greens essentially hate all humans, but will tolerate the idea of keeping a few of their own kind around.

When you understand this, you realize Greens are not interested in human welfare. They want you dead, but in the meantime, they’ll accept taking control of government power to make sure you are reduced to the most primitive standard of living: eating only what falls off plants, wearing only what falls over dead on its own, building nothing, changing nothing, leaving all disease and other medical complaints untreated, etc.

All this hot air about global warming is a part of the propaganda platform. You can push, twist, and pummel evidence until it confesses to all manner of pure nonsense, so it has nothing to do with science. It’s pure religion, dressed up with whatever facts conveniently fit the lie of the day. The few in the very core of the movement are only to glad to find a few Al Gores and a couple million public education fools (including students) to lend credence to the idea you should be regulated and impoverished until you die.

Make no mistake: Greens hate you.

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CentOS: KDE Upgrade the Hard Way

Posted on January 5, 2009 by ehurst

There is one feature of CentOS I dislike very much: the tendency to drag in a lot of 32-bit packages as unnecessary dependencies on a 64-bit system. I found the bundled version of KDE 3.5.4 one of the more badly broken ones. I really wanted to try 3.5.10, if I could. When I attempted to add the KDE-RedHat repo to Yum the default instructions didn’t work. I spent more time trying to understand why, unsuccessfully, than I eventually spent just doing it all manually. In the bargain, I managed to avoid dragging in a bunch of 32-bit junk. So the first move was to completely eliminate the entire group of KDE packages: yum groupremove kde-desktop.

Since the KDE repo was built off the Fedora EPEL project, I first installed that repo via RPM, and it worked okay. I still had to hunt down the actual file archives on one of the mirrors because Yum just would not yield it’s secrets to my lame brain. Then, I opened a simple console session for root and went to work. Mostly it was a matter grabbing the obvious first decencies, such as aRTs and some lib packages from EPEL. One by one I eliminated the missing decencies until I got the RPMs from KDE-RedHat to install.

First, as stated, was to wget the newer aRTs RPM and install it. Then came some goodies like OpenEXR, Taglib, Gnokii, Wavpack, Akode, Libmodplug and Xine-libs, mostly from EPEL. I always tried Yum first; if that failed, I used wget and a direct RPM installation. Back to KDE for KDEbase, and all the other packages which seemed to match what would have been installed from CentOS. Some dependencies required me to Google a bit, but eventually I got it all installed.

Upon logging out of GNOME and back into the new KDE desktop, I was rewarded with a much better working system. Apparently the packagers at KDE-RedHat have been very careful with their defaults, because I really didn’t have to do much to make things suit me. While I don’t recommend this method, sometimes you have to get creative to get what you want.

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I’m Not Alone on Rolling Release

Posted on January 4, 2009 by ehurst

I’ll be the first to admit I don’t understand all the technical details, but I find the Autopackage project is trying to overcome the problems I’ve tried to point out:

What’s a desktop Linux platform? Why do we need one?

Essentially, software is easy to install on Windows and MacOS not because of some fancy technology they have that we don’t – arguably Linux is the most advanced OS ever seen with respect to package management technology – but rather because by depending on “Windows 2000 or above” developers get a huge chunk of functionality guaranteed to be present, and it’s guaranteed to be stable.

In contrast, on Linux you cannot depend on anything apart from the kernel and glibc. Beyond that you must explicitly specify everything, which restricts what you can use in your app quite significantly. This is especially true because open source developers often depend on new versions of libraries that have been out for perhaps only a few months, putting Linux users on a constant upgrade treadmill.

Worse, sometimes the only way of easily upgrading a particular component like GTK+ is to upgrade your entire distribution which may be hard, especially for dialup users (the norm in third world countries). The problem is especially big because many distros don’t install obsolete library versions by default, relegating them to compatibility packages the user must know about and request explicitly.

I especially like that part: “open source developers often depend on new versions of libraries that have been out for perhaps only a few months, putting Linux users on a constant upgrade treadmill.” Just today I heard back from the Cheese project folks, and essentially they say what everyone else in the entire chain says: “It’s someone else’s fault.” I’ve already tried the GNOME people, and they won’t even answer the questions.

At least not everyone in Open Source is that inconsiderate.

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Suck It Up

Posted on January 3, 2009 by ehurst

There are in this life a great many things affecting you which you can’t change. You might try, but if your attempts affect too much other people, it will simply create more and bigger problems. Do I need to raise the issue of externalizing the costs of our own personal comfort? If you feel it’s okay to impose on others, taking away what little comfort they have for the sake of increasing your own, you deserve to die right now. That’s not my judgment, but God’s; argue with Him.

Indeed, most of the world does argue with God, particularly about what constitutes reality. The world is fallen, people sin, even when they don’t really want to, and life at times just stinks. Suck it up. Upon being vested with some authority, if you suddenly begin to take yourself and your position so seriously you forget about the principle of externalizing costs of your comfort and convenience, you deserve to die even more than those without authority.

So it is bureaucrats and other government figures sin on a huge scale. Everybody wants to be left alone, and I can fully appreciate the Zero Aggression Principle. The world needs a really big dose of that. However, it also needs a dose of recognition some intrusions are not the result of aggression, and some aggressions aren’t worthy of response. When bureaucrats think of being left alone, they think in terms of not having to deal with anything which disturbs their comfort. So while their sole employment is wrapped up in handling the mass of variegated humans, they become grouchy because humans have this confounded habit of varying. Such bureaucrats want the citizenry to show up, walk through their bureaucratic process, then go away — all uniform, all simple, no surprises. It’s “leave me alone” blown completely out of proportion.

I first became conscious of this when I was working as a substitute teacher in public schools. I overheard a discussion about teenage sexual proclivities and how the school system really needed to get a handle on it. I groaned inwardly, knowing I was going to be forced to say something which would guarantee I’d never get to work in that school again. At some point, I said, “Yes, these things affect what we face in the classroom, and what administrators face, as well. However, not everything which affects us is our business. We just have to suck it up.” I’m sure you can imagine how that goes over in the socialist public education environment.

Nor would it have done any good to explain how the fundamental philosophy of most of what we were doing as teachers, the very structure of everything going on inside that building, was a major part of what caused whatever problems might arise from teenage sexual escapades. Whole books address this better than I could here. But there is a fully artificial culture kids create in that pressure cooker because socialist education philosophy rejects the notion of passing on our culture, which includes our morals. In the act of saying all morals are relative, you cannot avoid taking a moral position. That moral position demands an intervention which advances the idea those who work in public schools ought to be able to dictate how the world should think and act.

When it first happened, I wondered why the college professors who taught the classes I took while working on my teaching certificate kept trying to persuade me to do something besides teaching. Their arguments began with variations of noting my grades were too high for me to go into teaching in public school. Silly me for thinking the teaching profession needed teachers who knew their subject matter well. The bulk of full time teachers were first and foremost political activists of one kind or another, except for those who were simply trying to find a hiding place from real work.

That’s what I ran into with every job I had where the government paid my wages. The only people who prospered in the system were those who could hardly succeed elsewhere. These are the folks who cannot comprehend carrying their share of the load with the rest of the world. They had some authority, and darned if they weren’t going to make the most of it for their personal benefit.

And bureaucrats wonder why citizens hate them.

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