Stone me I’m busy. Bah. Haven’t even had time to write some things up here. However, my collection of kept-unread things in Google Reader has reached high enough proportions that I have to do something about it, so this gets a few things off my list. A post about the stuff I discussed at LugRadio Live — whether it might be reasonable to make “be permissive about IP” be the default for Linux distributions and make the Americans and others in oppressive IP regimes do the legwork to remove what they consider to be “patent-infringing”, rather than all of us non-Americans suffering for it — is stacked into the holding pattern and circulating over Heathrow, incidentally.
Recent interesting things
- Google Reader finally lets you search past posts
- Thank god for that. Finally. Finally.
- ATI open graphics specs and open source the driver for video cards
- This is a pretty big deal, this one. At first blush it looks as if two of the three leading graphics card manufacturers (ATI and Intel)* will now have good support in open source. I imagine someone at nVidia has at least noticed that this has happened. More openness of this sort cannot be a bad thing. Well done ATI, I say.
- I should note a couple of small reservations: it’s only for their newer cards (i.e., not most of the ATI cards that are out there), and it’s not as simple as them just open sourcing their existing fglrx binary driver. They’re providing a library to access the BIOS on the card, but most importantly they’re providing specifications for the cards. It’s still down to the open source community to write the driver itself, but we’ve historically not had a problem with that (and ATI are funding the initial writing of this driver!). Phoronix has more detail on what ATI are actually doing — the important quotation is “The aim of this open-source driver is not to overtake the fglrx driver but rather is designed for those who just want a working desktop with 3D capabilities and basic video playback. This new driver is ideal for FOSS enthusiasts” — the point here is that if you want the very best performance from your ATI card you’ll still need to go proprietary, but there’s now enough information that the open source code will be able to provide the things that a lot of people are clamouring for — 3d acceleration, video acceleration, 3d desktop effects. Well done, ATI, I say. Obviously I’d like to see it all being Free, but I’m confident in the open source community’s ability to build a great driver (maybe even a better driver than the binary one?) based on having the information they’ve asked for, and now they’ve got it. Blizzard’s thoughts are informative.
- @media Ajax 2007
- I’m really looking forward to speaking at @media Ajax this year. The list of speakers is pretty cool, indeed, including some people I’ve never had the chance to meet. As usual, details of events I’m going to be at are on my events page.
- Separated at birth
- John “jQuery” Resig says that he’s “baffled” by why I referred to him as John “Kelly Osbourne” Resig in an earlier post. Well, the camera doesn’t lie.
On the other hand, John did an excellent Google Tech Talk on building a JavaScript library, so don’t hold it against him.
- Convert a physical Linux box into a VMWare virtual machine
- Useful, although convoluted. Parallels lets Mac people virtualise from a bootable partition, so you can either boot into your image or run it as a VM inside another OS. Can we do that under Linux? It’d save my dad rebooting into Windows to make his scanner work.
There is a tool called VMware Converter that will do a physical to virtual (p2v). It will also import previously made vm’s from other sources; vmware and otherwise. However, it currently only supports Fat16,32 and NTFS when converting a p2v. So your dad could get a copy of Converter p2v his Windows installation. Install Workstation on his Linux install and run his p2v inside the Linux install.
Justin: ah, that’s not quite what I mean. I don’t want to permanently convert his Windows installation to an image; what I want to do is leave it as a dual-boot but allow a virtualisation program to run *the installed Windows* as a VM inside Linux as well. This is what Parallels can apparently do.
I did this exact thing at work so I can always run Ubuntu, but still get my email in Exchange. My company has images for all the computers so it wasn’t an option to install directly into VMWare. I used this tutorial:
http://www.advicesource.org/ubuntu/Run_Existing_Windows_Instalation_On_Ubuntu_With_Vmware_player.html
Basically you have to edit the vmdk file to contain your particular drive geometry.
One think that is *very* important is that you don’t try to write to the same disk with two operating systems. That means if windows in running in VMWare, unmount the windows partition in linux so you don’t accidentally write to it.
Also once I started the VM from inside linux, and didn’t select “Windows” on the grub menu. So VMWare tried to load Ubuntu while Ubuntu was running directly on the hardware. I’m guessing that this has the potential to corrupt your disk, and after I did it, Ubuntu would no longer boot. Luckily the damage wasn’t too bad and all I had to do was boot the live CD and run e2fsck. The best way to avoid this is to never restart the VM (just suspend it) so you never get the option to boot into linux.
Laszlo: nice. I’ll set that up for dad. Cheers!
Wait – providing incomplete specifications on a supposedly ‘open’ interface in order to try and ensure that all third-party implementations are inferior and cast reflected glory upon the first-party implementation…isn’t that what Microsoft’s been doing for decades? Why are we celebrating when ATI does it?
I suggest that anyone working on an open source driver for an ATI product trust anything ATI release exactly as far as they can throw it (if it’s tied to a very heavy rock). After all, ATI have specifically professed their intention that the drivers based on the information they release should be inferior to ATI’s own drivers. Given this, why would anyone sane trust their information?
Stuart/Laszlo: I’ve done this from the same article you suggest, and one other issue with using a real windows partition in VMWare is that Windows Genuine Advantage (has there ever been a more inappropriate name for software?) does not like it at all. I’ve had the image throwing it’s hands up with a “this system has not been checked” error, fixed that by reverifying (which is somewhat unreliable), later booting into windows on the real machine, and getting hit by the same problem. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you plan on only booting physically or only booting virtually.
While I found your blog posting most informative and very interesting, as I was reading (I am not a skimmer) I was in anticipation that the next new thing you would be talking about is what is going on with Jackfield… Unfortunately I reached the end of the article, but found no information on my most anticipated project for the Linux desktop. I was wondering if you could post an article on Digg, asking for assistance from the community to get the ball rolling? Maybe if you were to contact some of the developers from Compiz Fusion, you may get better assistance? They love eye candy as much as I do… ;- ) One similar but limited project comes to mind… Screenlets. I remember them talking about working with the Jackfield developer when they were first getting their project started. I am not sure if that offer still stands…?
Thanks again for your time,
BrokenCrystal
Just to explain, both the issues Laszlo talks about involve two machines accessing the same filesystem at the same time which a recipe for pain, any changes one makes to the partition (changing a file, allocating inodes, updating metadata etc) happen without the second knowing anything about it so its stupidly easy to end up with an inconsistant/corrupt filesystem, espeacially when you allow for buffer caching in ram etc.
There are ways of doing it safely with cluster filesystems like GFS or OCFS but without them you need to hard power off one of the machines (known as STONITH or Shoot The Other Node In The Head). Shutdown acesses the filesystem so is potentailly as dangerous as not shuting down.
Just dont do it m’kay?
Must remember to sign my posts