Oracle-Sun Merger Moves Ahead

After a long review, the EU approved of Oracle’s purchase of Sun. So now it is consumated. Jonathan Schwartz, the Sun CEO, announced his resignation on Twitter.

Oracle has a reputation for being very bottom-line oriented with their businesses. While that is a good thing, in the case of their acquisition of Sun, it caused a lot of questions.

MySQL: Just as Oracle’s namesake relational database management system is the top product in the commercial RDBMS space, MySQL is the top product in the open source RDBMS space. There was justifiable concern that Oracle might use its control over MySQL to eliminate a lot of lower-priced sales. In the process of obtaining approval, Oracle pledged to continue to maintain MySQL’s database products under the GPLv2/commercial plan.

It has seemed that Oracle was pursuing MySQL for years. I recall when Oracle bought Sleepycat, makers of the Berkeley DB. BDB was, at that time, one of two ACID-compliant storage engines that MySQL used. Then, Oracle bought the company behind the InnoDB storage engine, which was the other ACID-compliant storage engine. So the fear that Oracle might shut MySQL down, change its licensing, or slow development was justified.

Java: Many of Oracle’s database features are built around Java. So continued development of Java is pretty well assured. However, seeing that another major Java user is the company behind RDBMS competitor DB2, there could be some changes that are optimized for Oracle’s own products.

OpenOffice.org: I use OpenOffice.org (OOo), KOffice, and AbiWord, all of which have some level of ODF support. (I’m doing some interoperability trials with the standard versions found in Xubuntu and Linux Mint. I have some suggestions for improvement that I hope to write up soon.) OOo is the reference implementation, so I am very interested.

At this time, at least, Oracle intends to keep OOo in active development. This is very good news. But in the interest of motivating Oracle to stick with it, I recommend we try and buy their commercial version, StarOffice, if you can.

Sun hardware: This is where Sun used to make most of its money. In the last few years, I don’t think their sales have been as high. In the x86/AMD64 server market, there are plenty of relatively low-priced competitors (including HP and Dell). Meanwhile, I’m guessing that fewer companies were willing to consider their SPARC hardware. As far as their operating system sales went, I think Solaris was losing ground to both Linux and Windows servers. I believe their biggest market was the financial industry giants, and that market isn’t buying right now.

Sun employees: In any big merger, some employees leave or are left. This one is no exception. It will take some time to find out who is really going to stay for a while. This is going to be good news to competitors of the former Sun Microsystems. It will make some of the industry’s best workers available for hire. So far, it seems that Oracle is losing some of the most well-known dynamic language people.

What does the future hold? If I knew that, I’d buy a lottery ticket.

Denmark Chooses ODF Over OOXML

This is great news (hat tip, Darius Damalakas). Danish government institutions will be using ODF for their documents, not OOXML. Not that there aren’t improvements to be made in ODF-producing and ODF-consuming applications (and the standard itself). Even so, it is gratifying to see user-friendly, constituent-friendly choices being made by government agencies.

I wish that American governmental agencies were more concerned about their users and constituents (rather than maintaining a close relationship with a particular vendor). I’m certain that some agencies here would also make the same choice. Not all of them, by any means, but certainly some of them.

If you are aware of a state or federal agency that is thinking about the file formats of their future, I encourage you to contact them and request that they use ODF as their canonical format, even if they also utilize a secondary format (e.g., OOXML, WPD).

Corporations Are *Not* Persons: Why We Need A Constitutional Amendment

This is another “open government” post. I believe that our government needs to be open for greater participation and influence by you and I, and that it needs little or no influence from corporate organizations. I say “corporate organizations” because I’m not just talking about for-profit corporations (such as General Motors). I’m also talking about non-profit corporations (such as GreenPeace), advocacy groups (such as MoveOn.org), industry associations (such as the RIAA), unions (such as the Teamsters), banks & insurance companies (such as Wells Fargo), religion-based groups (such as the Catholic hospitals), and even local groups with names like “citizens for good government”.

What Is A Corporation

First of all, corporations are simply groups of people who are organized for some specific purpose. The attraction of the corporate form is that they have no natural limit on their life spans, which tends to help them to accumulate money and therefore power. If we assume that everyone that is involved in a corporation shares its goals, this enables them to speak more loudly than a comparably-sized group of people who are not so organized. –my Xanga blog.

There was a court decision in 1886 whereby corporations were declared to be legally-equivalent to persons. This was, most certainly, a mistake. But it is a mistake which has persisted, and which the Supreme Court’s most recent decision only compounds. [Most news sites only leave articles up for about two weeks. The original article date is 2010-01-21.]

Uneven Amplification

As I explain over on Xanga, the effect of this ruling is to give corporate managers, a small subset of those who are involved in the corporation, a potentially louder political voice than that of a similarly sized non-incorporated group of individuals. It creates two classes of citizens: those whose words are listened to by politicians (primarily the managers of the largest corporations), and those whose words and whose welfare are ignored by politicians (everyone else).

We should also remember that corporate management typically only serves the interests of themselves, the corporation itself, and sometimes the stockholders. Employees, contractors, service providers, neighbors, suppliers, and others whose activities help the corporation to do what it does—people who will be affected when the corporation gets its way—none of them have any say in what a corporation decides to lobby for.

Never Satisfied

Do we really want corporate management (remembering that a corporation may not be a for-profit organization) to run the country even more than they already do? Or will we put aside our differences (conservacrat and repuberal) and work to make it easier for you and I (regardless of our individual points of view) to be heard and listened to by our politicians?

Call To Prayer

Christian believers: This could get pretty ugly. Some individuals may become frustrated at the length of the process necessary to repair the damage that this decision and its predecessor caused to our nation. We must pray that our people remain calm, but determined to undo this injustice. This is a time for peaceful campaigning, not for anger or confrontation. Let us not descend into the depths that some other nations have experienced. Pray, then, for peaceful change.

Call To Political Involvement

Open and responsive government is something that all of us have an interest in. Now, more than ever, you and I need to press our senators and congressmembers to vote for a Constitutional amendment that makes it clear that corporate (and similar!) organizations are not people, and have no right to be involved in the political process. Look at the news. See all the mess that is the economy? It was caused by corporate organizations who had too much influence with their regulators and the politicians. The way forward is to make it more difficult for them to get that much power and influence ever again.

This isn’t a “left” or “right” wing issue. It isn’t a “black” or “white” issue. It is a me and you and your cousin Fred vying with a small number of corporate would-be kingmakers and power-brokers to decide whose country this is. I would love to see people of every political persuasion joining together to restore balance to the nation.

Disclaimer

Mandatory disclaimer: This is personal opinion, not an official statement by any company, government agency, or other organization. No organization was consulted before this was written. You are free to disagree, either in the comments here, or on your own blog.

Stifling Debate With Public Funds?

Is This Science? Or Religion?

The Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, has published an article entitled, “A Response to Climate Change Denialism”. The article is pure politics-and-religion style campaign literature. This on a site that is paid for by Californians’ taxes. It is reproduced below in its entirety, both to preserve the evidence, and to facilitate commentary.

A Response to Climate Change Denialism

Richard Somerville, a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, issued the following statement in response to a recent request to address claims recently made by climate change denialists:

1. The essential findings of mainstream climate change science are firm. This is solid settled science. The world is warming. There are many kinds of evidence: air temperatures, ocean temperatures, melting ice, rising sea levels, and much more. Human activities are the main cause. The warming is not natural. It is not due to the sun, for example. We know this because we can measure the effect of man-made carbon dioxide and it is much stronger than that of the sun, which we also measure.

2. The greenhouse effect is well understood. It is as real as gravity. The foundations of the science are more than 150 years old. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere traps heat. We know carbon dioxide is increasing because we measure it. We know the increase is due to human activities like burning fossil fuels because we can analyze the chemical evidence for that.

3. Our climate predictions are coming true. Many observed climate changes, like rising sea level, are occurring at the high end of the predicted changes. Some changes, like melting sea ice, are happening faster than the anticipated worst case. Unless mankind takes strong steps to halt and reverse the rapid global increase of fossil fuel use and the other activities that cause climate change, and does so in a very few years, severe climate change is inevitable. Urgent action is needed if global warming is to be limited to moderate levels.

4. The standard skeptical arguments have been refuted many times over. The refutations are on many web sites and in many books. For example, natural climate change like ice ages is irrelevant to the current warming. We know why ice ages come and go. That is due to changes in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes that take thousands of years. The warming that is occurring now, over just a few decades, cannot possibly be caused by such slow-acting processes. But it can be caused by man-made changes in the greenhouse effect.

5. Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals. Other scientists examine the research and repeat it and extend it. Valid results are confirmed, and wrong ones are exposed and abandoned. Science is self-correcting. People who are not experts, who are not trained and experienced in this field, who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice, are not doing science. When they claim that they are the real experts, they are just plain wrong.

6. The leading scientific organizations of the world, like national academies of science and professional scientific societies, have carefully examined the results of climate science and endorsed these results. It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody. The first thing that the world needs to do if it is going to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it.

— Robert Monroe

Jan. 14, 2010

First of all, the above statement constitutes a clear misuse of public funds. The magnitude, direction, and causes of the observed changes in the earth’s climate over the past 160 years or so is the subject of an intense political debate around the world. Is it caused primarily by human activities? Is it well-understood enough for us to draw any conclusions at all? What dangers does this change, if it continues, pose to humans and other life forms on this planet? What responses should we be making to adjust to the changes, to mitigate their effects, or to prevent those changes from occuring? These questions are part of the political debate, and are not supposed to be advocated by public employees on the taxpayers’ dollar.

Professor Somerville, Mr. Monroe, and the Scripps Institution administration, as public employees, are not supposed to be advocating in either direction. This is not to say that they cannot advocate on their own time, as private citizens. Certainly, they can and they should. But the practice of hijacking public resources to promote one’s private political opinions is one of the first things that you are warned about upon entering the public arena.

The statement uses the term “denialist” to refer to those who do not blindly accept the alarmists’ claims about “climate change”. That term is loaded with meaning–political and social–because it is closely associated with those who deny the reality of the holocaust (the World War II slaughter of millions of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, and others, by the Nazi regime in Germany). Denialists include groups like the Iranian regime. By painting those who question the imposition of scientific orthodoxy with the same brush as these other groups, this is a blatant attempt to muzzle scientific inquiry.

Let us look at the claims of this statement. First, “the science is settled”. This, in itself, is an anti-scientific statement. Science is a set of methods used to learn more about the universe in which we live. As such, the science in any field is never settled. Any grade school science student knows of several scientific theories which were once widely believed, only to be proven false later on. Scientific “truth” is an ever-shifting thing. What we “know” is “true” this year may be laughed at in ten years.

Professor Somerville claims “we can measure the effect of man-made carbon dioxide and it is much stronger than that of the sun”. This is not known to be true. There is no way to measure the effect of carbon dioxide. Instead, we can measure temperature, measure CO₂ levels, and use theoretical models to attempt to connect the two. Models, of course, are mathematical constructs (generally constructed in computer software) that allow one to play out some expected effects of a set of assumptions. In simple English, models have little or no relationship with the real world. They are little more than a more complex version of a spreadsheet user’s “what if” situations. In business, we eventually learn that the spreadsheet’s results are never exactly right–because there are too many factors and weightings that we are missing in our analysis of the situation–something that is even more true when we talk about weather and climate models.

The professor claims that the “greenhouse effect is well understood”. This is only partially true. The greenhouse effect can be measured in controlled conditions–laboratory conditions–not outside of them. The greenhouse effect cannot be measured in the real world, the world where CO₂ forms less than 400 parts per million of the atmosphere, and there are substantial questions about how well-mixed it is and what heights it may be found. This is not to say that it does not exist. Without the so-called greenhouse effect, earth might be an ice ball, similar to Mars.

The obsession with carbon dioxide is in itself problematic. Has it been proven, for example, that one of CO₂’s effects is to increase the greenhouse effect of atmospheric dihydrogen monoxide (H₂O, popularly known as “water”)? Or is this merely unproven speculation, the fodder of the modeling software that produces the fearsome scenarios that the mainstream media blares at us day after day? In reality, there are a large number of actors at work in the earth’s climate system, some of which are unknown.

Third claim: “Our climate predictions are coming true.” This claim is not true. Sea ice in the Arctic, for example, has been growing over the past few years, not declining. Himalayan glaciers, another favorite prediction, are now known not to be declining as rapidly as previously stated. The West Antarctic Peninsula, a favorite spot, has broken off ice sections, refrozen, and then broken the refrozen ice off again. This has been going on for years. Note that Antarctic sea ice has been growing over the past few decades, even as Arctic sea ice has declined.

Another favorite prediction is that Greenland’s ice sheet will melt, causing a large increase in the sea level. In fact, there are parts of Greenland which are currently frozen, which were rich agricultural villages less than 1,200 years ago. How’s that for unprecedented warming that is definitely human-caused?

Even if the climate predictions were coming true, which is not currently happening, every science student knows that “correlation is not causation”. Correctly predicting some event is not the same as knowing what caused it or being able to predict subsequent events. A professional science researcher should already know this.

Fourth claim: “standard skeptical argmuments have been refuted …. natural climate change … is irrelevant ….” Let’s see, about that: is it not true that the earth’s climate was just as warm, or possibly even warmer, during the medieval warming period (MWP)? The IPCC said so. Didn’t the US Geological Survey say the Arctic sea was too warm for sea ice 3 million years ago? [PDF] Certainly, that wasn’t caused by human intervention, was it?

Yes, some of the ice ages were caused by earth’s orbital changes, but what of mini ice ages like the one we just exited around 1850? Could that be caused by changes in the sun’s output, or changes in earth-received cosmic radiation that could be mediated by the sun’s output? What about changes in global oceanic circulation? What about oceanic upwellings that bring colder undersea water to the surface? What about differing amounts of space dust between earth and the sun? What about the earth’s “wobble” affecting the angle of insolation? What about changes in earth’s magnetic field? What about differing levels of volcanism? There are dozens of potential causes that might be at least as likely as attributing all of the warming since 1850 to human endeavors.

Fifth claim: “Science has its own high standards.” Yes, like those revealed in the CRUtape Letters. A small group of influential researchers colluding to prevent contrary studies from being published, and using computer programs that illogically reduce older temperatures below the raw measurements, while raising newer temperatures above the raw measurements. In accounting, the word for that isn’t “high standards”, but “creative accounting”, which is also known as “fraud”.

“[Science] does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals.” Except that Climategate shows that those journal articles are constrained to show one view and only that view. That is why the CRUtape Letters revealed in Climategate are such a big deal. This isn’t just “well-known scientists behaving badly”. This is well-known scientists who are so convinced of the rightness of their cause [which should in itself be a pause-giving concept] that they see nothing wrong with stifling scientific debate, shading the conclusions of their research to suggest things that are not clearly evident in the data, and actively promoting social and political changes as though that were part of their jobs.

How can others examine, repeat, and extend the research when the raw data and the programs used to interpret it are not available for those who wish to replicate the results? How can scientists pretend that only professional (that is, government-paid) scientists “do science”? Science isn’t about who pays you to research, but about the methodology used in that research. It is only since World War II that government funds became so important in scientific research. Frankly, I believe that government funds are part of the problem–he who provides the press also decides the viewpoint that will be promoted. Once the funding agencies decide that AGW (anthropogenic global warming) is an issue, those whose conclusions might show otherwise are not likely to obtain funding for that research.

Publishing in journals is not the same as “doing science”. It serves only to publicize one’s conclusions among his / her peers, so they can then examine, replicate, and / or refute the conclusions. This purpose is performed better, faster, and for lower cost by Internet-published research than by limited-distribution, subscription-based journals. Among other advantages, unrestricted Internet-based publication enables minority viewpoints to be disseminated, such that the hegemony of “consensus” is broken. In other words, if the good professor has any real refuting evidence for the recent television special or Internet-published skeptical articles, he should be doing “peer review” and showing why he believes the conclusions reached to be false.

Appealing to authority lost its value around the time of the Reformation, when the Roman Catholic Church launched the Counter-Reformation, asserting (among other things) that when the Pope speaks “ex cathedra” (from the chair or throne), his words are infallible. If even the Pope’s words are not infallible, neither are those of any scientist or group thereof.

Sixth claim: “The leading scientific organizations of the world, like national academies of science and professional scientific societies, have carefully examined the results of climate science and endorsed these results.” As a public employee myself, I know how these things happen: a committee is appointed, not because of their expertise, but because they are tongue-in-groove buttlickers for the political appointees they report to. As such, their conclusions are unsurprisingly always exactly what the appointees wanted to hear.

“It is silly to imagine that thousands of climate scientists worldwide are engaged in a massive conspiracy to fool everybody.” It doesn’t take a massive conspiracy. The CRUtape Letters reveal a small group of tightly-knit researchers at the center of the whole climate research industry. Those individuals control the basic data that everyone else uses. They needn’t conspire to deceive, merely agree to overstate their case “for the good of the globe”, and everything that is produced by other researchers is automatically skewed in that direction. That those central researchers did indeed overstate their case in order to enhance the advocacy their conclusions were supporting is pretty visible in those e-mails and software programs.

No, there isn’t a conspiracy. There is just an overstated case, something that only a few people knew for certain until November of 2009. Now, if most of those who do such research for a living refuse to reevaluate their conclusions in the light of the lapses revealed by the Climategate scandal, if they continue to rely upon such overstated data without caveats, then one can legitimately call it a conspiracy. Until then, there is not and never has been a conspiracy, thank you very much.

“The first thing that the world needs to do if it is going to confront the challenge of climate change wisely is to learn about what science has discovered and accept it.” This statement is very anti-intellectual and anti-science. It is even more anti-democratic. In a society such as ours, we do not let some self-described expert tell us what is “good for us”, but instead, we discuss and debate it among ourselves and through our representatives in Washington, Ottawa, Sacramento, and other capitals, eventually working out a compromise that is less than what advocates wanted, but more than opponents desired. Science isn’t about some authorities telling us what to think, but about people proposing ideas about some situation, event, process, or occurence and testing those ideas to see whether those ideas might fail to adequately explain observed behavior (and whether it might not explain observed behavior better than then-known competing ideas). We believe in gravity, not because it is certain to exist, but because it is currently the best explanation for the observed behavior of matter and energy in the universe. Accepting what some “expert” tells us is neither wise scientifically nor wise politically.

As an example of just how anti-intellectual this document’s viewpoint is, Professor Somerville’s own site says this: “Governments, corporations, and individuals should listen to and learn from the science, just as intelligent people listen to their physicians when their health is in question.” In other words, do not think for yourself. Let “the experts” do the thinking for you. What happened to examining the evidence, learning some of the explanations that underlie the conclusions that are presented, and weighing them in your own mind to decide for yourself? Under this kind of thinking, Galileo, who proposed that the then-commonly-held earth-centric view of the universe was false, might have been executed by his fellow scientists.

To sum up, this document is unacceptable because it:

• Implies that questioning the textus receptus is the equivalent of questioning whether the Holocaust occurred.
• Is published for political purposes, not scientific ones, by public employees, on a site that is paid for by tax money.
• Makes claims that even non-scientists such as myself can see are not supported by the evidence. Claim 5 is just one example of such a claim.
• Glosses over the revelations of the Climategate scandal, telling us, in effect to trust our betters and ignore anyone else.
• Denigrates non-professional scientific research and the non-paid researchers who perform it.
• Has a very strong anti-democracy, anti-intellectual, anti-scientific bent. It promotes the absolute infallibility of the doctrines scientists release from on high, but seeks to curtail those whose conclusions might not agree with the sacred consensus.

I urge the head of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, to have this page amended with an apology to all of those who have made a valiant effort to understand the research, to replicate and / or refute it, or to openly and without panic, discuss its implications for our society.

Disclaimer: This is not a call for any kind of witch hunt against scientists, regardless of their viewpoint. Neither is it meant to have a negative impact upon their freedom of expression. It is personal opinion, written in response to a publication on a government-funded website, which in my sole opinion, opposes the goals of free scientific inquiry, freedom of thought & expression, and of democratic society. You are welcome to disagree and to publish your disagreement on your own blog just as I did.
NOTE: This appears at both WordPress.com and Vox.com.
H/T: Anthony Watts

Norwegian Broadcasting Moves To OpenOffice and ODF — Linux Magazine Online

Open Norway: Norwegian Broadcasting Moves to OpenOffice and ODF – Linux Magazine Online

Norway appreciates free standards. After the government a year ago recommended Ogg Vorbis, FLAC and Ogg Theora next to their commercial alternatives MP3 and H.264 as standards for audio and video files, this year it focuses on ODF as the standard document format. According to the governmnent’s Reference Catalog for IT Standards, the recommendation should become binding in January of 2011.

The first larger institution, Norway’s national radio and TV corporation, Norsk rikkringkasting (NRK), is now taking the move to OpenOffice seriously. The conversion is based on the better ODF support, therefore the NRK is running many of its clients on Mac OS X because the Mac version of Microsoft’s Office Suite doesn’t support the open document format. Another reason for the move is the Microsoft Office licensing costs.

This is wonderful news. While we still await “government with guts” here in the US, Norway is working to make its citizens able to use and access the content they paid for without requiring specific proprietary applications. Not that there is anything wrong with using proprietary software if that is your choice. But when a government agency requires you to use proprietary software to access content that you paid for with your taxes, that is wrong.

As always, this is my opinion, not that of any employer, organization, or government agency.
H/T: einfeldt

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Newly-Minted

Over the past few years, I installed Linux Mint on my Dell laptop, then “upstreamed” it to become a Ubuntu hybrid, then, a year and a half ago, when it started showing signs that it was dying, I bought what was originally supposed to be a replacement, this one made by HP, with 3GB of RAM and a dual-core AMD processor. After converting it from Vista to Ubuntu, I found that the too-small screen resolution made it too difficult to use, so I gave that lappy and the Vista restore CD to MJ, who almost immediately started complaining about the things that he had to do to make it do anything.

I then purchased another Dell, this one at a Best Buy in the St. Louis area. This Inspiron model has the dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM. I immediately converted it from Windows Vista 64-bit to Xubuntu 9.04 64-bit. The Ubuntu family’s 9.04 release was kind of rough. I upgraded the old lappy the same night I installed Xubuntu on the new one. The primary result was that neither one had working audio, and even after I installed and tweaked, audio started muted every time, then I’d have to unmute and turn it up.

Shortly after I returned home to California, the old XPS model finally corpsified itself. No problem, I had a recent back-up, so I could finally transition to the newer machine. Except that I had decided to go back to using Linux Mint. I installed Linux Mint 7 x86_64, the then-current version for this architecture. Even though it is based on the Ubuntu family version 9.04, I could never get it to recognize my wireless card. I have to say here that I could have manually installed and configured the Broadcom 4312 driver, but I would have to redo it every time there was a kernel update. That’s the reason people rely solely upon the package manager for software installations and updates.

My nephew’s Dell Inspiron was running Linux Mint version 6, and he was waiting for version 8, so we could upgrade. Meanwhile, I had gone back to Xubuntu 9.10, which is solid. Xubuntu is easily the best distro of the Ubuntu family.

By the way, Linux Mint system requirements are very similar to whatever the underlying Ubuntu version requires. So if you want to know what Linux Mint 8 “Helena” requires, take a look at the corresponding Ubuntu 9.10 version needs.

Linux Mint 8 x86_64 (with Mint’s improved GNOME desktop) recently came out. So my nephew and I got together for an installation fest. I didn’t have much data on this computer, because I had already been planning for this ever since the other one died in October. We did our backups, then I stuck the LiveCD into his Inspiron and tested out the desktop. It recognized that there was a proprietary driver available for his WiFi card. We didn’t try the driver out, but everything seemed good in LiveCD mode, except one thing. His one year-old laptop’s hard drive is bad. Not having any funds to replace it, we went ahead and installed on it, but everything we did was a struggle.

Installing the “STA” WiFi driver took approximately 8 attempts before it succeeded. I finally had to install the “B43″ driver, reboot, uninstall it, reboot, and then install the STA driver and reboot.

I then went to work on my own lappy. As expected, everything was quick and easy, except for a few things:

• I greatly prefer the KDM display manager to the GDM display manager. However, KDM doesn’t work right on Mint 8 x86_64. Neither computer could go straight into an X session. Instead, we had to log in under console mode, then use startx to launch X. In this version, at least, GDM seems to find XFCE and KDE. In some earlier versions, GDM could only find GNOME and Enlightenment.
• The STA WiFi driver for the Broadcom card refused to install. Over and over and over. Finally, I decided to do some research. It seems that sometimes, the driver gets placed into the “blacklist” and will not be loaded into the kernel. Checking /etc/modprobe.d/ showed me that this was indeed the problem. It still took several attempts to resolve it. I eventually had to reinstall, and this time, the b43 driver works. I don’t often have access to an Ethernet connection, so I have to have WiFi that works well.
• After years of avoiding it, suddenly, there are quite a number of packages that attempt to overwrite the same file. This is not specific to Mint. I see it on Debian and Ubuntu as well.

Advantages include a faster, more responsive desktop, quick to go from power-on to usable, and quick to change workspaces, even when I have four browsers, an e-mail client, and a twitter client (and either OpenOffice Writer, KWord, or AbiWord) open. Of course, I have learned to keep a terminal open (set to sticky) running top, so I can see CPU and memory use.

I have installed VirtualBox 3.1, but haven’t used it yet, so I don’t know whether that will slow things down a bit. Recent versions of Vbox have avoided the whole VM-causes-dragginess thing. VMWare hadn’t found a way to fix that, last time I used it.

All in all, Linux Mint 8 is great to have, but I’d advise waiting to install until Spring, when the LTS (long-term support) version comes out. Being based upon Ubuntu, I feel, Mint is losing a little of the stability and reliability that made it such a good desktop system. An LTS version, on the other hand, is supported for around three years, so it has to be stable.

I’ve also recently tried out (on a much older machine that is slated for disposal soon) PCLinuxOS, Debian 5.0 “Lenny”, and Mepis.

PCLOS appears to have diverged from Mandriva, so even though it uses APT & Synaptic for package management, its applications are not divided up the same as their Debian/Ubuntu cousins. The KDE version is very smooth and reliable. Until one day, it just wouldn’t boot.

“Phoenix”, an XFCE-based version of PCLOS wasn’t quite as reliable. It continually had problems with its package management. And since a dark theme on an older monitor is too hard to see, I wiped it. So far, I have only seen 32-bit versions of PCLOS, which could be a problem on a RAM/4GB machine.

Mepis was smoothest and most reliable on that older hardware, but the newest version wouldn’t install. It wasn’t just Mepis, though. I tried to put Debian testing “Squeeze” on it, as well as Xubuntu 9.10. No go with anything newer than about a year ago. Mepis’ package selection is rather old (now I know why–I replaced Mepis with Phoenix again, then quickly moved on to Debian “Lenny”, which has the same antiquated selection).

The reason I have had some time is because I am home for a while, serving as on-site tech support for the family, as well as gardener and dog groomer. It is a little too interruption-filled, so I can’t really do anything important. By the time I get back on track after an interruption, another interruption has come along. I am trying to get everything taken care of before I get sent back out for another few months.

Drupal CMS Can Now Import ODF Docs

There is a Drupal project to enable importing ODF files into a Web site. It is still in its early stages, but the plan is to develop this further.

ODF Import allows a user to import ODF files into drupal nodes. Currently the module can import content from ODT files only. No style information is imported in current release.
Future releases will support other ODF formats as well as importing of styles from an ODF document.

My congratulations to Drupal for joining the future, where our documents will be ours, and not subject to the whims of some large, out-of-area corporation (LOOAC).

H/T: freemjd

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IceRocket tags: ODF