Paranoid Android. Canonical and Gnome. A new OSI. And more.

Paranoid Android
If you are interested in the potential violation of the GPL by the Android kernel you have probably already immersed yourself in the numerous blog posts published on the topic. If not, start with Sean Hogle’s analysis or Bradley M Kuhn’s overview of the original allegations and work backwards from there, not forgetting a detour for the obligatory Microsoft connection. Linus Torvalds said claim “seems totally bogus”. In the meantime, Microsoft …

If you are one of the few unfortunate blokes that’s pulling your hair out over random File Menu popups on OpenOffice — Word or Spreadsheet — and have been hitting your head against a brick wall trying to find the solution, I hear you.

I intially thought there was some interaction with Skype, but now I have to retract that statement. In all honesty, I have no clue what the problem is.

But I decided to just watch the “random” File Menu problem and time it. And now I am more confused than ever.

On my computer running 64-bit Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic), I noticed that the File Menu toggles twice a second when OpenOffice has the focus. One toggle event happens precisely on the 11th second; the other toggle event happens around 35th to the 45th second. The second toggle seems to be related to when I launch OpenOffice; the first is always precisely on the 11th second.

And this is something peculiar to …

If you’re using Fedora 10, and are a KDE desktop user, you’ll notice that your latest KDE 4.2 update, requires having a local MySQL server installed. This is due to Akonadi, part of the KDE PIM packages, that now rely on MySQL as a default server, for storing PIM data. Just a few months ago, I mentioned the news that Amarok 2 will also use MySQL as a default database.

Akonadi uses MySQL mainly as a cache, not as a data store. This is something that Debian users will also see. Eventually, anyone with KDE 4.2 will see the requirement to have a MySQL server installed. If you already have a native installation of MySQL provided for by your distribution (maintained by RPM/DPKG), it …

I’ve always been more of a GNOME guy, and when running Linux, I use Rhythmbox to play my music. However, Amarok 2.0 might just change that.

They’ve chosen their database - it is none other than MySQL. The release notes state:

Some features, such as the player window or support for databases other than MySQL, have been removed because either they posed insurmountable programming problems, or they didn’t fit our design decisions about how to distinguish Amarok in a saturated market of music players.

If you want to know why the decision was made, read MySQL in Amarok 2 - The Reality. It has a lot to do with the fact that MySQL can be embedded, and performs well. Its a generally useful read to see …

I don't even remember how I ended up on the Akademy site this morning .. but luckily I did.

Akademy takes place in Sint-Katelijne-Waver , ages a go my grandparents lived there to, that's Belgium if you didn't notice yet.

Now the weird thing is that there seems almost no fuzz about it in the Belgian Foss Community , nobody talks about it.
Also on Upcoming.org the event can't be found. :(

Honestly this worries me, why isn't there more talk about a rather big FOSS event in Belgium, don't we care anymore ? Or do we just not care about KDE. (apart from the people organizing the event ?)
There's lots of Drupal, MySQL and Gnome activity going on in our little country but somehow less KDE. Hopefully Akademy changes that.

Sadly I have already a fully …

If you are a GUI-oriented person, you need not read this. But if you are like me, you make heavy use of the console. If you are managing many machines as well as your own Linux workstation, it’s VERY important to know where your console session is.

Too many times in the past I had wanted to bring down my workstation, and would type “shutdown” or “reboot” in the console window, only to find out to my horrors that the console was really a remote session to one of my web servers serving up hundreds of web sites.

Whoops!

Well, that prompted me into developing a solution where I can tell at a glance where I happened to be logged in. This way,  I wouldn’t be in danger of issuing dangerous commands on the wrong server. And if you are working for someone else, it also keeps you from being FIRED!

I use KDE to do my development and …