Gentoo

Yesterday I forgot to take my laptop-powerplug from linuxtag with me and as my battery was quite empty, I couldn't blog yesterday. So here are some more impressions from Linuxtag.

Luminocity - Eyecandy for X

After I saw it at the X.org-booth on Linuxtag, I had to try out the nifty features the xorg-devs are working on. One really nice thing is luminocity. You have waving windows, which looks really cool. I found a HOWTO in the Gentoo Forum, which worked right away. I was really impressed by the performance of waving, half transparent windows. I also made a small video of it (it's ogg theora).

While many people may think this is just playing around, imho eyecandy is quite important. That's one of the reasons why MacOS X is so successful. I'm really looking forward when those features will be available on usual desktops.

Reverse engineering Microsoft cubes

At the Microsoft-booth on Linuxtag, you could get some nice white cubes with colored lights in it. Sadly, they had no open interface for it, so we tried to reverse engineer them. We weren't able to install Gentoo on them yet.

Geekish art

A project at the Linuxtag was creative geeks, a group of people creating creative commons licensed art with linux stuff (e. g. tux-pictures).
Another very nice thing were the konqi-videos from kde, they are made with blender. I didn't know that blender is that good (though I'll probably never learn how to use it).

Today, the Linuxtag in Karlsruhe started. I'm present at the gentoo booth.
Impressions from the first day: According to the Linuxtag blog, Ute Vogt from the german government helt a speech and spoke against software patents, which is opposed to the politics of the german ministry of justice.

As I already told yesterday, a couple of software patent lobbyists are present, especially Sun, HP, Intel, IBM and Nokia. I asked at the Sun booth for an opinion and the answer was basically that nobody is there who can give a statement. I plan to ask the others as well, it might be a good idea if others would do this as well.
I also plan to ask other companies about there opinion and if they are opposed to software patents, if they would support the economic majority campaign.

Mirabile of MirOS asked me to create an ebuild for mksh, which I did, and he promised to spend me a beer for it ;-)
I'm currently at the AKK, but didn't see him to get it.

Pictures are here

I've written a longer article about free software and the demoscene, I hope it'll be published in the hugi discmag.

Update: Changed some parts of the article by the feedback of Adok/Hugi.

This picture looks really nice, and it's getting better every day. You can also add your picture to it and join the online demonstration against the EU software patent directive.
The software patent decision is really important for the future of free software. While I doubt that free software can be stopped by competition products for the long term, legal threats are and will be a real problem for all of us foss-developers.
Join the online demonstration here.

Today, several news-pages reported about a new working draft of the CSS 2.1 specification. CSS 2.1 removes some features from CSS 2.0.

One example is text-shadow, which is really a nice thing. If your browser supports it, you can see it here.
Why did they remove it? Because none of the mainstream browsers supports it. The one and only exception is Konqueror (and Safari, which is a fork of Konqueror). This feature may come back in CSS 3, which won't be released until the cows come home. This is imho really a bad decicion, it shows how browser vendors stop innovation in the world wide web. CSS 2.0 was released 1998, seven years ago and just NO SINGLE BROWSER implements it completely. If you don't believe me, just check text-shadow and empty-cells in all browsers available.

Because of the lack of modern standards, crappy, proprietary alternatives like Flash evolve. There are alternatives. SVG? Not really used at all. Do you know VRML and X3D? Really nice things. Do you know how many browsers support it out of the box? Not a single one.

It's really a pity that in these days, nice web-standards are available, but you can't use them. No doubt that the Internet Explorer is the main problem here. But Mozilla isn't much better. While Firefox brings a lot of innovation in user interfaces, the development of the gecko-engine lacks a lot of things. The only innovative force on the browser market at the moment is konqueror (which is probably the project with the smallest number of developers).

Yesterday, there was that message on pro-linx that several projects using bitkeeper for managing their sourcecode now have problems because bitkeeper will no longer be available for free. The most important project using bitkeeper was the linux-kernel. Luckily, the kernel developers developed an alternative called git and seem to be happy with it.
The bitkeeper-issue was one issue showing how using proprietary software on free systems can lead into problems. But at all, it was not that big issue. The source was still free and the projects could switch to other software like git, svn or monotone.

Now, another issue has been brought up recently: Current OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta versions need the proprietary Sun Java Runtime Environment to work. This is imho a much more grave issue. Imagine Sun does the same as BitMoover and says from one day to the other that they won't provide java for free any more. Or, even worse, if sun decides not to support future linux-versions. At the moment, this might not be that big issue, because most parts of OOo are still written in C. But imageine larger parts of it are java-based, this could mean OOo would be suddenly unavailable on Linux (or other free/alternative Systems).
Luchily, the FSF is working on getting OOo to work with the free GCJ (GNU Java Compiler).
(Beside that, although it's always claimed, sun java is limited to a very small number of architectures and thus not very portable)

Another very dangerous threat to free software are binary drivers. Some days ago, NVidia released a new, proprietary linux-driver.
They removed support for some older graphics chips.
What does that mean? If you own such a card, your opportunities are very limited:

• You can continue using the old drivers as long as they work with current kernels and xorg-versions. If they fail with a kernel-update, you can stick to that kernel. If security-hole appear in that kernel, you have a problem.
• You can switch to the free drivers in xorg and use your card, originally probably an expensive, state-of-the-art 3d-gaming-card, without any 3d-functions.
• You can buy another graphics-card.

That's the consequence of binary drivers. If a vendor stops supporting your device, there's just nothing you can do.
The bad thing with graphics-cards is that currently there is no real alternative. ATI is releasing binary drivers, which are very unstable and lacking a lot of features (Jon Lech Johansen wrote about that recently). As I read in the changelog of xorg, they are working on supporting newer ATI-chips (probably by reverse engineering). For the future, maybe the OpenGraphics-Project will be an alternative.

Beside that, there's another problem with binary drivers. Did you ever tell people "Open Source is good, because many people can look at the code and find bugs, security holes and backdoors"? Well, if you load binary drivers in your kernel space, you can just forget this argument.

Another good text I found about that issue is Freedom 0, here is the german version Freiheit 0.

I often read in forums and hear from people "don't be so ideologic, not everything can be free", "RMS and the FSF are stupid, they are too ideologic", "I'm happy that nvidia releases drivers at all" etc. I hope I brought some arguments why in my opinion, free software is important and why I try to avoid the use of non-free software whereever possible.