gundy dot org

Dapper \Dap”per\, a. [OE. daper; prob. fr. D. dapper brave,
valiant; akin to G. tapfer brave, OHG. taphar heavy, weighty,
OSlav. dobr[u^] good, Russ. dobrui. Cf. {Deft}.]
Little and active; spruce; trim; smart; neat in dress or
appearance; lively.
[1913 Webster]

The first time I fired-up Linux, it was Red Hat 7. Both Linux and I have come a long way since then. I’ve been faithful to Red Hat for some time now.

• Red Hat 7
• Red Hat 8
• Red Hat 9
• Fedora Core 1
• Fedora Core 2
• Fedora Core 3
• Fedora Core 4
• Fedora Core 5
• Other CentOS and RHEL versions for my servers

I always knew that RH and FC were the right distros for me. I aways came back after testing others. Well, that has changed.

Ubuntu has won me over. What do I like about it?

• One disk installs for desktop or server.
• Server and desktop that share a common base. (FC becomes RHEL - not the same)
• Clean Gnome desktop.
• Polished feel.
• 5 year support on the LTS.
• Many other small things.

I’ll keep-up on CentOS and Red Hat because I’ll need to know them when working in other environments. I may even go back to them after checking out RHEL 5. I really dig Red Hat and think they are one of the best Open Source companies out there. I just feel that Ubuntu gives me more of what I want right now. Somehow, I can’t help felling disloyal :)

Well, last night I finally installed Suse 10.1. It’s the same as ever for me - there are things I love and things I hate. Foremost in the “things I hate” is YaST. I wanted to update some software and found these options under the “Software” section in YaST:

10 options is way to many. Let’s look at the choices that I would have to explore before doing the equivalent of an “apt-get update.”

• Online Update
• Software Management
• Online Update Configuration
• Online Update Setup
• System Update

I know they do different things, that’s the point. Can’t this be simplified? Make it so I don’t have to discover what is going on. I really like the “Software Management” option. Isn’t that what I’m already doing here in YaST?
Don’t worry Suse users. I’ll come out with a list of “things I love” soon.

“Fedora Core 5 Final” torrents from the official site have been posted! It’ll be interesting to see if the ISOs are exactly the same as those posted by unofficial sites yesterday (not that I really care).

file: bordeaux-binary-i386
size: 3,296,658,079 (3.1 GB)
dest: /home/gabe/store/bordeaux-binary-i386
progress:______________________________________
status: finishing in 18:04:55 (0.4%)
speed: 41.9 KB/s down - 140.2 KB/s up
totals: 13.2 MB down - 33.1 MB up error(s):

Everyone knows that the best Free/free desktop is GNOME :) But did you know that GNOME 2.14 just came out?

Get a high-level preview of all the goodness.

D’oh! Bug #34606” says it all! This is bad, bad, bad. Wow, what an oversite!

I’m currently running Ubuntu, kernel 2.6.12-10-386 on my single user desktop. Let’s see how I do…

gabe@office:~$ sudo grep MyPassword /var/log/* -R
/var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat:Value: MyPassword
/var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat:Value: MyPassword

Ouch, Ouch, Ouch! The admin’s password in PLAIN TEXT! Oh, this is embarrassing for Ubuntu! It gets worse still. Check out the permissions on the file:

gabe@office:~$ ll /var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 62118 2006-02-17 08:33 /var/log/debian-installer/cdebconf/questions.dat

gabe@office:~$ ll /var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 62118 2006-02-17 08:33 /var/log/installer/cdebconf/questions.dat

That’s right, world readable. Doesn’t get much worse then that. Well, it’s only locally exploitable. Little consolation!

“Welcome to my server. Would you like to own it?”

I came across this link when googling for “utah linux” - result #6. They are things I said last year at about this same time.

I’m 90% sure I’ll be a SuSE user in the next year or two.

It’s been a year and I’m still a Fedora Core user. I’m pretty stoked about FC5. If Novell pushes XGL outside of NLD, I just might change for that alone.

TOP 10 REASONS I’LL USE SuSE “IN A YEAR OR TWO”: (based on what Novell has done *and* wishful thinking):
0) They are the only “local” distro - unless you count SCO (according to them *ALL* distros are belong to them and are therefore local :)).

Too bad SCO is still here :(

1) They will have a killer Gnome desktop that will no longer play second fiddle to KDE. I mean come on, they bought Ximian. Give them a while. They don’t want to scare the KDE folks and they need time to do it right. I’m not saying KDE will get any less attention. I’m just saying Gnome will arrive on SuSE.

From what I’ve seen, NDL 10 is going to rock!

2) Miguel and I are buds.

OK, we were never buds.

3) ISOs will become more available. None of this crappy ftp stuff or waiting periods. We already see this happening.

OpenSuse is pumping out ISOs left and right.

4) Mono will be an option at install. It will be polished and along with the tools surrounding it, it will be a top notch development environment.

I’m pretty sure Mono is installed by default. They have Beagle, Tomboy and many others that *need* it.

5) Nat and I are buds.

OK, we were never buds.

6) In a stab at MS’s base they will make OpenOffice.org not suck.

Hmmm, OO.org 2.0 is many times better then everything 1.X (and below) but still lacks in a few places.

7) yast will get better and lighter. This will be a result of having opened it up to the community. It will take a while but other distros will adopt and improve it.

I don’t know if yast is lighter or cleaner. I don’t think anyone has adopted it for use in other distros.

8) They will fork their product to offer a more community based version (Red Hat / FC style) that will speed development and reduce costs. This will lead to repositories for SuSE packages springing up everywhere - all the bleeding edge stuff will be an apt-get (tied into yast of course) away.

OpenSuse is exactly what I was talking about. This will be the best thing that’s happened to the green lizard.

9) They will hire me to predict their future.

If they did hire me for that, they would have to pay dearly, now that I’ve demonstrated my powers to predict the future!

I must be bored.

Still, I’m bored with things :)

P.S. I don’t know if the change happened this year or earlier, but “Suse” no longer goes by “SuSE”

Novell has been hard at work. The they have released their Xgl graphics subsystem and the ‘Compiz’ compositing manager and it’s source code which they have been developing in-house. I sure hope that the X.org guys are able to plug ‘n’ chug with it. The site has some good videos but the *sweet* vids are at LinuxEdge (pay no mind to the fuzzy .PNGs). Let’s hope this becomes stock for all Linux desktops - real soon now.

Novell open sources a major Linux security program and shows the world that it “gets it”. I’m not a Novell fan boy but, they have shown time and time again that they are serious about the spirit of Open Source. I don’t follow the earnings of the company but I hope these small moves don’t hurt them before they start helping. The investor needs to know that moves like these are good for Novell in the long run.

What about the app? I’ve read good things. It looks like it fills the same space that SELinux does. That’s going to be interesting to see where that goes. The truth is, I don’t know much about it at this time because it was just Open Sourced. Given a few months, we will all know just how cool this is - or isn’t