The Null Device

Linux filesystem developer Hans Reiser has been found guilty of the first-degree murder of his wife. He is yet to be sentenced, though apparently the death penalty is not being considered.

¶ crime hans reiser linux usa [no comments]

Is anybody else having problems scrobbling tracks to last.fm using third-party software?

My home music-playing setup consists of a Linux box running MPD, a client-server music playing system. To this, the mpdscribble client is attached, monitoring its status and sending the details of tracks played to last.fm. As of a few days ago, though, mpdscribble stopped working; it connects to last.fm's servers well enough, though once the time comes to send a track, it reports an authentication error, as if the password were incorrect.

I have tried the same username and password combination for logging into the website, and for using the official OSX last.fm client, and it works. I have also tried two other, independent, MPD/last.fm clients (scmpc and lastfmsubmitd), and found that they had the same problem; as, indeed, does the (somewhat old) third-party iScrobbler client for OSX. (This was, needless to say, on two different machines.)

Could last.fm have broken an older version of the AudioScrobbler protocol used by a lot of open-source software? (It appears that these clients use protocol 1.1, whereas there is now a 1.2 protocol.) Oddly enough, a Google search fails to reveal anybody else reporting this problem.

¶ last.fm lazyweb linux tech [2 comments]

Nokia to buy Trolltech, the Norwegian company behind the Qt C++ user interface library (as used in Linux desktop KDE and numerous multi-platform applications including Google Earth and the Last.fm client) and the Qtopia mobile user interface platform. Nokia has pledged to continue the development of Trolltech's software and its commitment to open source, and this step could give it more of a foothold in the Linux mobile phone market. The future for Nokia's own Maemo toolkit (based on Linux and rival user interface library GTK) looks less certain.

(via Engadget) ¶ business linux mobile phones nokia qt scandinavia software tech trolltech [no comments]

Two technological death notices: firstly, the latest version of OSX, 10.5 ("Leopard"), can no longer run MacOS Classic (that is on PowerPC machines; the Intel ones, of course, never got Classic in the first place). Apparently this has nothing to do with technological constraints and everything to do with Steve Jobs having decided beneficiently that the users should have moved on by now. Of course, if you still want to run that ancient copy of Fontographer or whatever, you can probably do so on SheepShaver or similar.

Meanwhile, TrollTech have knocked their Linux-based Greenphone on the head, and will be concentrating on developing their phone OS on the very hackable and (soon to be) highly commercially available (though somewhat more cheap and plasticky-looking) Neo1973 phone.

(via Engadget, /.) ¶ apple greenphone linux neo1973 osx rip tech trolltech [no comments]

Last night, I went to the London Open Source Jam, a Linux-themed show-and-tell hosted at the Google offices near Victoria Station.

They had various speakers who came in, bringing in variously interesting Linux-based projects, talking (very) briefly about them and then letting people poke around with them. They had some people from the One Laptop Per Child project, who brought along two prototypes of the US$100 laptops which they are going to build and distribute to children in the developing world. The machines are very well designed (they're full of innovative design features, they're reportedly almost indestructable, and they look desirably good); they're based on Linux and Python, look nothing like the machines used elsewhere, and are designed to encourage tinkering and exploration. They even have a key (labelled with a graphic of a cog) which, when pressed, takes you to the source code for the currently running program so you can hack and modify it. (That didn't seem to be working on the laptop I looked at, though that prototype wasn't working perfectly.)

Someone also brought along a Trolltech Greenphone; that's a new mobile phone, created by Trolltech (the Norwegian company that makes the Qt toolkit (a rather elegant GUI library) and the Qtopia interface for portable devices), and based entirely on open-source(ish) software. It looked much like a regular phone, albeit with some developer features. I saw no evidence of it containing WiFi, though, so it may be lacking in that department.

Sony sent along a representative with a PS3 console, to show that it could boot Linux (and not only from special Sony-approved distributions, as the PS2 could, but from any distribution of your choice). Of course, the catch is that when the PS3 boots an untrusted Linux disc of your own providing, it runs it in a sandbox (under a Xen-style hypervisor), isolating it completely from the nifty graphics chip (so that game developers can't evade Sony's game-licensing fees by distributing full-featured games as bootable Linux live DVDs), and reducing it to a generic computer with a somewhat unusual CPU. They had a demo, which rendered a Mandelbrot set and let you zoom around on it; it was like a faster version of something I saw on a 386 PC in 1989. All in all, I found this demo underwhelming; when asked why anyone would want to run Linux in a sandbox on a PS3 when one could build a PC for less and get access to better graphics capabilities, the Sony rep didn't have a good answer; it was intended, she said, for people who already have a PS3 and, for some reason, are seized with the desire to run Linux on it. Though I suspect that, the fact that doing so doesn't involve breaking locks or using the hardware for anything more than it was designed for (the fact that the PS3 can be a mediocre Linux box is about as exciting as the fact that an iPod can be a mediocre PDA, or a mobile phone can be a mediocre MP3 player), will largely leach any such endeavour of any hack value it may have had.

¶ first-person google linux open-source tech [no comments]

Hot on the heels of the TrollTech Greenphone, a company named FIC is releasing an open-source, Linux-based mobile phone. The OpenMoko won't have WiFi (as the GreenPhone will), but it will have a GPS receiver built in, as well as Bluetooth, USB, a MicroSD slot and a multi-touch touchscreen capable of understanding two-fingered dragging gestures. More importantly, it's not so much a mobile phone (which is to say, a locked-down proprietary appliance) as an openly hackable general-purpose computer with a GSM module and GPS receiver attached. (The radio components are, for regulatory reasons, closed modules; everything else, though, is fair game.) And apparently it will have a Debian-style package management system built in which can download new (or updated) software components on demand. And, also unlike the Greenphone, it will be released to the mass market (they say in January, which could mean sometime in the first half of 2007).

(via /., gizmodo) ¶ gadgets gps linux open-source phone [no comments]

Hans Reiser, the author of the eponymous Linux filesystem, has been arrested on suspicion of murdering his wife, who went missing more than a month ago. More sordid background details here. Meanwhile, the Slashdot peanut gallery has been busy; in between impassioned debates on the death penalty, sincere hopes that this does not disrupt a fine project (now that would be a tragedy!) and discussions on whether ReiserFS will be renamed if he is found guilty, there have been a lot of off-colour jokes:

What's the difference between O.J. and Hans Reiser?
Hans kept a journal.

If the transaction doesn't commit, you must acquit!

This isn't meant to be funny or insensitive ... but if he did do it and is found guilty it seems like he'll have a bunch of time on his hand. You know, with the long jail sentence and all. Is their a reason why he can't continue working on this project from jail? Also, working on a OSS with your free time in jail seems like it might get you some good behavior points.

(via /.) ¶ crime linux slashdot [1 comment]

Trolltech, the Norwegian company behind the Qt user-interface toolkit (as seen in everything from KDE to Linux-based handhelds) has just announced that it is getting into the mobile-phone business, with an open-source Linux-based phone. The Greenphone, which is due to begin shipping in September, is based on Trolltech's Qtopia Phone Edition toolkit, and is designed to be extremely hackable; everything but the actual radio-frequency interface (which is subject to government regulation) is open-source and can be recompiled and replaced.

Anticipated applications include games, business applications, and web services frontends, along with "unpredictable" applications. The company says it expects to be "surprised" by what users come up with, adding, "[The] spirit of innovation has been key to the success of the PC and Internet. We think that the same dynamic has to appear in the mobile market."

Don't expect to find it in your local phone shop next to the Nokias and Sony-Ericssons, though; the Greenphone won't be available separately as such, but rather only as part of a development kit, The good news is that Trolltech specifically plan to put this kit in the hands of open-source developers, which hopefully means that it won't be too expensive. (Update: The development kit is expected to cost about US$690, if my limited command of German is right.)

CTO Benoit Schillings added, "I'll tell you a secret. Getting the phone into open source developers' hands is exactly what I want to happen."

(via /.) ¶ greenphone linux phones tech trolltech [no comments]

Google have just released a MacOS X version of their amazingily intuitive CAD package SketchUp. This program is rather nifty, and seems to use various human-interface heuristics to disambiguate what the user is trying to do, and consequently making 3D drawing a lot less painstaking than with traditional CAD/modelling programs. It also has some rather nifty rendering modes (such as pencil sketch, or precise-yet-cartoonish-looking textures), and looks good for everything from designing DIY projects to making comics. And it's free.

Also from Google: a new beta of Google Earth, now with a Linux version. (For some reason, though, the view window is all black on this machine, even though it does have OpenGL.)

(via Make, /.) ¶ google google earth linux osx sketchup software [no comments]

These people are porting Linux to the Palm Tungsten. Apparently they now have it running on the T3 and showing a graphical environment (Qtopia or KDE, at a guess, though they don't say).

(via lshift) ¶ linux palm tech [no comments]

If you're planning to buy a new MP3 player, beware, as many of the new ones use a proprietary interface protocol tied to Windows Media Player. Whereas a lot of older players (the Archos Jukebox series and iRiver H100 and 300 series, to name two, not to mention various generic Flash-based players) were USB Mass Storage devices (i.e., looked like external hard disks to a computer), new ones use a proprietary Microsoft protocol named MTP, to transfer data to them and possibly enforce RIAA-mandated inconveniences on the user.

MTP appears to be based on the Picture Transfer Protocol used by some digital cameras, only with some Microsoft extensions, and is tightly integrated with the Windows Media Player; it is currently possible to hack gPhoto, a command-line PTP client, to talk to at least some MTP players. There is some doubt over whether or not this infringes on patents. Users of pre-XP Windows systems, however, may be out of luck.

For Penguinheads and other Windows refuseniks, the Apple iPod is apparently still usable. It looks like a USB Mass Storage device (or a FireWire hard disk), and can be copied to/from, though requires music files to be indexed in a proprietary database file onboard, which iTunes writes; there exist open-source tools, running on UNIX-like OSes, for writing this file as well. (Disclaimer: I've never owned an iPod and so have no experience of how useful or clunky it is to use without iTunes. My way of filling my MP3 player involves mounting it as a disk and copying files or directories to it.)

(via reddragdiva) ¶ iriver linux lock-in microsoft mp3 mtp usb [2 comments]

The Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, a hand-held, Linux-based, WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled web-browsing/email appliance, is out. In the UK, it's selling for £245, and appears to be out of stock already. It costs twice as much as the other hackable, Linux-based gadget, the GP2X, though has wireless communications technologies (which the GP2X lacks altogether) and more than four times the screen resolution; however, external storage is limited to the smaller RS-MMC cards, as opposed to the somewhat larger SD cards the GP2X takes; also, while it's likely that someone will port MAME to it, playing arcade games with the nagivation pad probably won't be as comfortable as with the GP2X's controls. I'd have one of each, had I £370 I had no better use for and a jacket with infinitely capacious pockets.

And here there is a round up of reviews of the Nokia 770.

¶ gadgets gp2x linux nokia videogames [no comments]

This person is planning to build his own home-brewed GSM mobile phone, out of an ARM-based Linux board and a GSM module. It doesn't appear that he's quite hardc0re (or insane) enough to write his own GSM stack over software radio and risk a visit from the FCC Ofcom's SWAT team, though at the end of the day, he will end up with a phone that runs Debian.

(via bOING bOING) ¶ diy linux mobile phones tech [no comments]

Never mind the PSP, I want a GPX2. It's a pocket-sized SD-based media player (capable of playing DivX/MPEG4 movies and MP3s) and some undefined games (with the provided joystick). Most interestingly, it runs Linux; assuming that they don't deliberately cripple it, that means it's going to be possible to put MAME on it, load up a SD card with old arcade ROMs and have an arcade in one's pocket. The only thing it's missing is WiFi.

(via Gizmodo) ¶ gadgets gpx2 linux retrocomputing videogames [no comments]

This looks interesting: BlackDog appears to be a device the size of a USB flash drive containing an entire Linux-based computer. Plug it into a PC's USB port and it appears as a network-connected Debian box, and auto-runs an X server to connect to the machine in question (this is presumably on Windows). It also includes a "biometric reader" to control access to it.

And then there's the Neuronium. An eye-catchingly blue box hand-built by a German vintage synth designer, it looks like some kind of dance-techno sample-synth module or virtual analogue synth, but is basically an analogue neural network for generating vaguely Tangerine Dream-esque electronic burbling noises. If you have €2499 to spare, it could be yours.

(via gizmodo) ¶ ambient computer music electronica gadgets linux music tech [no comments]

Everybody Loves Eric Raymond, a web comic for penguinheads, involving Richard M. Stallman, Linus Torvalds and Eric S. Raymond living in a shared house.

And then there's Buzz Aldrin's Conspiracy Smackdown:

(via bOING bOING, reddragdiva) ¶ buzz aldrin comics conspiracy theories eric raymond geek humour linux open-source [no comments]

jwz gets pissed-off at Linux soundcard complications, buys an iMac, never looks back; imminent death of xscreensaver predicted.

¶ jwz linux mac [2 comments]

The Nokia 770 looks nifty. It's not a mobile phone, but rather a thin client, with a touch screen, web browsing/RSS reading/VoIP facilities; it can connect to the internet via WiFi, or by Bluetooth through a mobile phone. Even more interestingly, the system software is entirely open-source, based on Debian Linux and GNOME with a Symbian-esque GTK-based UI named Hildon. Full developer tools are available for downloading.

Of course, the 770 has its downsides, such as the lack of storage facilities more substantial than a MMC slot; though even with these shortcomings, it looks extremely hackable. (You could try playing cat and mouse with Sony on getting user code running on a PSP, or you could get a 770 and run what you want on it with Nokia's blessing.) MusicThing already lists one application for it, as a control surface for music performance.

Meanwhile, Nokia have committed to allowing use of all their patents in the Linux kernel.

(via MusicThing, /.) ¶ linux maemo nokia [no comments]

Cuba is now planning to abandon Windows for Linux, following such radical states as Brazil and, umm, Munich. The "open source = Communism" mob will undoubtedly have a field day with this news.

Del Puerto said his office was working on a legal framework that would allow the replacement of the Windows system.

Hang on... a legal framework? Isn't Cuba on the list of countries it is illegal to export Windows too? I imagine Microsoft would have a hard time selling licenses to Cuba, for one. And would Cuba even recognise US software licensing law? Perhaps they have to make a show of being good global intellectual-property citizens if they are to keep those Che merchandise and Buena Vista Social Club CD royalties coming in.

¶ communism cuba linux [no comments]

The latest thing to come out of Iceland, following Björk, Múm and Sigur Rós, is a patch to allow C++ in the Linux kernel. It appears to be quite well optimised (the runtime library has been modified, bringing the cost of throwing an exception below that of calling good old printk() in the plain-C kernel). As such, it looks like it could be good for performance and stability; Darwin (the MacOS X kernel) is written in (a somewhat stripped-down) C++, and seems a lot more solid than Linux, and less likely to be destabilised by unforeseen conditions (i.e., devices/filesystems/&c. suddenly disappearing); I suspect that C++'s exception handling has something to do with this.

¶ c++ iceland linux tech [1 comment]

A few pieces of good news: Microsoft's claimed patents on the FAT filesystem have been shot down, thanks to a challenge from the Public Patent Foundation.. As such, that ugly, inefficient throwback to the days of CP/M and 100Kb floppies that, nonetheless, has become the universal standard for storing files on everything from digital camera memory cards to MP3 players is free for anyone to use without having to pay a cent. With any luck, it's not the last overbroad software patent to go down in flames. Meanwhile, in Europe (where US multinationals are doing their all to push software-patent legislation through Parliament), Munich is pressing ahead with dumping Windows for Linux, despite claims that Linux violates loads of software patents and is a massive legal liability. Finally, in the US, part of the Patriot Act has been struck down as unconstitutional.

¶ linux microsoft patents tech the long siege [no comments]

From a Slashdot interview with Jeremy White of the WINE Windows API emulator project and/or Crossover:

We also go to all kinds of interesting lengths to avoid problems with viruses and worms. For example, we have a hack in our flavor of Wine, in the CreateProcess call (the code to start an executable) that basically checks to see if the parent process is outlook.exe, and if it is, we crash and burn, preventing many of the worms and such from running.

Meanwhile, someone's porting WINE to MacOS X. It doesn't actually emulate an Intel CPU, so it won't run your Windows binaries, but you can recompile Windows programs from source code and get them to run, and look authentically Windowslike, on your Mac. Though you'll need to use X11 as well, as it doesn't speak directly to Quartz/Cocoa/Carbon (and there don't appear to be any plans to make it do so).

¶ emulation linux windows wine [no comments]

Remember the Simputer, the tiny Indian-designed Linux-based computer that was going to be cheap and rugged enough for remote villages and powerful enough to be useful, and was going to revolutionise life in the developing world? Well, it's now available. The Amida Simputer has some fairly decent specs, and connects to a lot of things. The internal software is based on Linux and X, only with a custom toolkit. The bundled software gives a glimpse of what PCs would have been like had they been invented in India rather than the US, with "Khatha", a financial planning package based on traditional Indian accounting methods and an astrology application ("Even if you are only peripherally interested in astrology, it may still be fun to find out if your girlfriend's star matches yours!") alongside the usual notebooks, MP3 players and world clocks. (via WorldChanging)

It'd be interesting to get a closer look at one of these; on the website, it looks fairly promising, just from the specifications and screenshots. Though so did the Agenda VR3 Linux-based PDA, which turned out to be half-baked and next to unusable, once the novelty of calling up a UNIX shell on something without a keyboard wore off.

¶ culture gadgets india linux simputer tech [1 comment]

Crackers break into Linux source code server, attempt to trojan the Linux kernel, giving root privilege to processes. The attempt was caught, and even had it not been, it wouldn't have matched against Linus' separate copy of the kernel sources.

It makes you wonder who's behind it? A teenager with something to prove? Spackers laying the groundwork for the next generation of distributed spam-hosting/sending/DDOS servers? The Russian Mafiya/Shanghai Triads/Yakuza doing a spot of long-term strategic planning? Al-Qaeda? Maybe even our own intelligence agencies?

¶ crackers crime linux security [2 comments]

This looks potentially interesting: the Zero Install System, an experimental alternative to packaging systems for Linux. Instead of installing software, users run the software from the website on which it is hosted; the Zero Install System downloads and caches the binaries and libraries as they are needed. Additionally, it runs without root privilege.

¶ linux software [no comments]

Rocknerd's Ben Butler connects the SCO/Linux lawsuit to the recording industry's woes. What links SCO and the RIAA, you see, is that both have seen their markets become commodified, eroding their business models, which depended on them being able to name their own prices and terms.

The process goes something like this: you sell widgets. You are the only company selling widgets. Some other companies enter the widget market. They undercut your price. But yours are the original, superior widgets, so you charge a premium for them. More competitors enter the market. The price drops more. Suddenly widgets are cheap. Your brand value is eroded - people figure out that all the widgets are substantially the same and besides, even if your widgets are better made than everyone else's, it no longer matters - they're cheap enough to throw out and replace when they break.

¶ commodification economics linux riaa the recording industry [no comments]

The Dashboard project looks quite interesting. It's a bit vague (the only documentation is a developer's diary, with screenshots) but it appears to involve applications (terminal windows, mail programs, IM clients) sending XML-based "cluepackets" to each other, looking up information related to the subject at hand and then sending it to a "dashboard" sidebar for display; i.e., if a friend's ID appears in GAIM, a cluepacket is sent off to various agents, which match it against their address book card, and the dashboard shows their message logs and the RSS feed of their blog. It's a GNOME thing; not sure whether it's integrated into the GNU Network Object Model (whatever that is) or whether non-GNOME applications can play as well. It's good to see open-source developers trying something novel rather than just chasing taillights and trying to implement a GPLed equivalent of your favourite Microsoft/Adobe/Electronic Arts title, only five years later. (via Oblomovka)

¶ dashboard gnome linux myware software [no comments]

Struggling UNIX vendor/patent owner SCO sues IBM, making nebulous claims of stolen trade secrets in Linux. Penguinheads hold protest outside SCO offices. And SCO staffers hold counter-protest. with identical-looking hand-drawn signs reading "I (heart) Software Piracy" and "Give Communism a try - use Linux". Are they sure it was SCO employees, though, and not some group of Ayn Rand zealots? (via Slashdot)

¶ linux protest sco [no comments]

The latest blow in the KDE/GNOME catfight: How GNOME became LAME. In short, GNOME was started with a vague idea of being "like KDE only better" and more ideologically sound, a fetish for being language-independent (to the point of doing object-oriented programming in C, which is invariably ugly and painful to work with) and some highfalutin' promises about a "network object model", which turned out to be just hot air. It was meant to swiftly overtake KDE (which was tainted with the black mark of proprietary software) and consign it to the dustbin of history, ushering in a Brave GNU World. A few years later, KDE has KParts which make everything very modular and doovy indeed, and bindings for lots of non-C++ languages, while GNOME has forgotten all about the "network object model" stuff, swapped window/file managers a few times, acquired a Windows-like registry and is quite possibly about to follow it up by reinventing itself as a Microsoft .NET-esque system. However, there is no component mechanism, so applications which don't want the default widgets invent their own, with jarring results.

Perhaps the KDE/GNOME stoush can be seen as a manifestation of the clash between the European and American cultures? KDE (whose developers are primarily German and Northern European) is a model of Teutonic efficiency and/or European dirigisme, providing a central framework and set of interchangeable components conforming to a strict standard. Meanwhile, GNOME takes more of a laissez-faire libertarian approach, relying on the glory of the free market of ideas and enlightened self-interest (if someone wants a better file dialog, they'll write one; if we end up with a dozen different file dialogs, that's more choice in the marketplace of ideas, and the good ones will get adopted; it's ugly but it works without central planning). Does that make any sort of sense?

(Incidentally, I don't use either system. My desktop is a bunch of xterms launched from a WindowMaker menu, with the odd KDE or GNOME app running by itself. Though KDE does seem to be a lot more coherent these days.)

¶ gnome linux [13 comments]

I just downloaded and compiled Sodipodi, after seeing a link to it from a Slashdot forum on SVG. It looks like a fairly promising vector graphic editor for Linux; and about time too. (KDE's Kontour is slow and bug-ridden, the new KDE Karbon requires KDE 3 which doesn't play well with Debian yet, so I haven't had a chance to try it.) It's still a bit rough (it prints lots of diagnostic messages on stdout, and lacks a few things, such as a "select all" option), but it's looking quite promising.

¶ linux open-source svg [no comments]