linux

I was just reading a very interesting article from Jeremy Allison of the samba team called The Land of "Nothing for free". A very interesting quote

My panel was rather uncontroversial, Microsoft, Bruce Perens and myself being on our best behavior. The only sparks that flew where when Microsoft made it abundantly clear that they would use their patent portfolio to prevent the spread of GPL software. Section seven of the GPL (the implicit patent grant of the license) now looks like the most prescient writing Richard Stallman has ever done. If you're not familiar with it I'd suggest you read it and understand why using the GPL to protect your Free Software is so important.

Thanks to egrep for linguists for giving this nice and clear example of using egrep.

There are different ways to match both star and stars within a single search pattern. The most straightforward way might be to tell egrep to look for either the string star or the string stars with the help of a disjunction, expressed with the vertical bar, |. This time the search pattern has to be quoted in order for the program to know where the search pattern starts and ends

    $ egrep -w 'star|stars' sonnets.txt
    Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck,
    And constant stars in them I read such art
    Whereon the stars in secret influence comment.
    Let those who are in favour with their stars,
    Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,

If you have been using Linux, I think you must have been frusturated with the lack of good fonts when using Emacs. It gets very hard to distinguish between "l" (the letter l) and 1 (number 1) and between comma and semicolon when programming or examining large amount of code.

The Bitstream Inc have done an excellent work in producing and relesaing under a very liberal license, the bitstream-vera fonts. These fonts are really beautiful and easy to read. To use these fonts with your emacs, just add this line to your ~/.Xdefaults file

 Emacs*font: -bitstream-bitstream vera sans mono-medium-r-*--*-100-*--*--*- 

Business Week has an interview with Linux Trovald. Very interesting and quite insightful. My favourite quote

Q: Some say Linux and a lot of open-source projects really aren't innovative, that they're copies of commercial products. What's your reaction to that?

A: I disagree. It's an easy argument to make. One reason people make it is that, in open source, they don't see the revolutionary new versions magically appearing. In comparison, look at commercial closed systems. They make a new release every year or three to four years with a huge marketing splash. They make it look very different. But it's a circus to make it look like a sudden innovation.

In open source, you don't have a circus. You don't see a sudden explosion. It's not done that way. All development is very gradual -- whether commercial or open source. Even when you have a big thinker coming along with a new idea, actually getting it working takes a lot of sweat and tears.

There's innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I'm proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren't in other operating systems. A lot of them are about performance. They're internal ways of doing things in a very efficient manner. In a kernel, you're trying to hide the hard work from the application, rather than exposing the complexity.

As a result of these innovations, you get good performance, better security. Linux is actually very stable. People complain about how long it takes us to develop new versions, but we made sure that with new upgrades, old programs continue to run. We have programs written in 1992 that will run on the latest versions.

Also it's good to copy good ideas. It should be encouraged. We don't say Einstein was a really smart guy and we should come up with a better theory of relativity. We build on top of his good ideas and have new exciting quests.

Two days ago I installed the Fluxbox window manager(WM), a very nice and lightweight WM. I had to do some digging around on the Internet and startup script files to get Fluxbox as an option in the GDM (the login box, where you have the option to start either the GNOME, KDE or the Failsafe session)

Here is how it is done

1. Compile, install the WM of your choice.
2. login as root and go to directory /etc/X11/gdm/Sessions
3. Create a file in the diectory, and give it he name of whatever WM you have installed i.e. Fluxbox, Enlightenment, WMaker etc.
4. Enter the following lines into the above file
   

   #!/bin/bash
   
   exec  [Path to the WM launcher]
   
   

   Change the [Path to the WM launcher] to whatever your WM uses. In case of Fluxbox it is /usr/bin/startfluxbox , in case of Enlightenment it is /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession enlightenment and in case of WindowMaker it is /etc/X11/xdm/Xsession wmaker. These locations may change according to the options you have used while compiling.