What happen? Linux set us up the bomb.

The FUD machine raises its voice again. CNN Money has unveiled a new article about Linux and patents, and the evil empire. Open source community has formed a new site for this kind of FUD, but Microsoft never replied. FUD might be more powerful in the past, but not anymore.

According to article, Linux is violating more than 200 Microsoft patents, and this is the reason of open source software is high quality like this. We’ve heard Microsoft complains about patents infringement before, but it seems that this time, they will demand loyalty fees from everyone, including users. For the people who lives outside of USA, these cases don’t mean anything, as patent system is different in all other countries.

Microsoft is desperate now. They are losing huge amounts of sales all around the world. China is thinking to switch Linux. Japan are thinking of switching to Linux, because of vendor lock-in. Dell will ship preinstalled Linux on their machines. Most of the hardware comes with Linux support, or supported by Linux itself. There are lots of companies who considers Linux as a deployment option on their laptops. Linux is even being teached at the universities.

Sometimes people ask: “What if Microsoft starts suing companies for patent and IP (Intellectual Property) cases?”

Short answer: It will start a patent war.

Every company, especially IBM, has a patent portfolio. This will start a patent war against Microsoft, and the results can not be foreseen. There are huge companies which support and deploy Linux and Open Source solutions, like IBM, Novell, HP, Dell, Sun. These companies have lots of patents in their portfolio.

It will be really fun to watch and see what happens.

Want some Lemmings taste?

I suppose everybody whose age is over 26 will remember the Lemmings game on PC. Today, I stumbled upon a game called Pingus, which gave me the same taste I had after almost 15 years. It’s statically compiled, and should work on every Linux system. It features a really good tutorial, and a cool level editor. If you love Lemmings, just drop by and have fun

If you want to play full screen, just  pass the -f parameter to pingus executable. You can also alter game resolution by -g AxB parameter, where AxB is 800×600 by default. Game menu becomes crappy under 1280×1024, but the game itself is looking very cool at this resolution.

Amd will open source its Ati drivers?

According to this article, Amd will open source its drivers. It is good news for people still using Ati chipset on their display adapter.

Ati was always behind of Nvidia under Linux. The quality of Ati drivers was (and still is) worse. Thanks to stable open source drivers provided by community, we can use our Ati cards under Linux at least as stable. This can’t change everything in the Nvidia & Ati competetion, but can lead to a really good result: Choice.

Until now, people had to use Nvidia for Aiglx. Open sourcing Ati drivers will allow us:

• To use that eye candy with Aiglx, without messing with XGL.
• The community will add features that won’t be available at Nvidia drivers, which is closed source.
• Nvidia will be the one who plays catch-up with Ati drivers under Linux, because community will be adding functions to it.
• As a best supported display adapter under Linux, AMD will profit from it.

Now, I hope at least this time Ati won’t lie to us. If you make geek community upset, you’ll be more upset in return, as these people are the ones who – mostly – build, recommend, install computer systems.

Why I hate Microsoft, Take One

Short answer: Because they are evil.

Let me explain it a bit further.

Microsoft gave computer world too many good things, I admit that. They pushed hardware with every new version of their bloated software. Without them, we would be still paying thousands of dollars to computer manufacturers and software solutions. Now look at the situation, we have started to pay these thousands of dollars to Microsoft itself. Thanks to Microsoft, It is now possible to buy a PC which is cheaper than an operating system, as in before.

They always provided crap-ware, and marketed their products, and everything else is rubbish compared to their products. Just look at history for their “Microsoft sponsored studies” which compares other products with their own. Microsoft does not provide a “Microsoft sponsored study” unless the product which they are comparing to is clearly superior to their product. They hide every feature which is superior to their product, and they provide only good sides of their products. Also, they have used, using, and will use FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) to break competition with other companies. Recent cases around OSS and Linux proves this nicely.

Hardware vendors were the main reason for Windows to thrive this much. Microsoft paid lots of money to hardware and PC vendors for a “Windows compatible” logo on their hardware. But the case is reversed now. Microsoft wants money for their logo, and their WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) logo for software which ships with it.

Some vendors indicate this on their driver page:

“Microsoft demands money for WHQL license, thus, we’re providing these drivers without WHQL. Because these drivers are not signed by Microsoft, you’ll get a warning when installing. Please skip this warning to continue installation.”

Microsoft used its dominant position for their country’s intelligence. Most of you may remember Microsoft apologizing because of a thief code in Office 95. Recent studies uncovered that, every Windows version has a back door created by NSA, which allows access to any Windows machine, if Windows version is greater than Windows 95 (First Edition – OSR1). When asked, Microsoft said “Access key is stored at Microsoft, in an extremely secure place”. However, for some strange reason of fate, this does not concern most of Windows users. Most of them says “What will they steal, the poems I wrote?”. Unfortunately, this case is more than that. If the computer running Windows is a development platform, they will have access to billions of ideas and source code. And guess what, Microsoft steals every idea they haven’t invented, patents them as their property, and using these patents to make more money. Think about military and government computers. You’ll get the big picture.

Perhaps these are not the all of the reasons, but I think it shows the general picture, and why I hate Microsoft. Please use any OSS (Open source software) or Macintosh where possible.

LFS?

After using Slackware for 10 years, I did switch to Arch Linux. But the update system is really broken. There is always a chance for something which works, does not work after an update. Latest nvidia drivers proves that. I was unable to compile against latest Arch kernel. After a kernel update, my framebuffer screen is corrupted on next reboot, I had to lower the amount of memory shared by my ATI X200 onboard to 64 mb’s. Also, some of the software like Links are compiled in a way (e.g. without framebuffer support) that is not really productive. Do not get me wrong, Arch is the best Linux distro out there after Slackware, but it has its own problems too.

Slackware is outdated now, Arch is unstable, Debian sucks, Gentoo has development problems lately, and Ubuntu and Suse are lame distros. I suppose only way for me after now is to create my own distro for my personal needs, using LFS.

I was using Slackware before Arch because:

- I was in control of everything.
- Nothing breaks unless I want to.
- I have complete control on kernel confıguration.
- Everything was stable, it just works.
- 99 source tar balls out of 100 compiles succesfully under Slackware.

Now I want a stable system with ultimate control, and only the software packages I need. It seems LFS is the only way to go.

A new blog emerges.

Welcome to my blog.

Stick around to see interesting news, reviews and more from now on, or click here and search for some more interesting things, like George Bush. Like it or not, this is my personal space, and unless I mention otherwise (And I won’t, you can trust me on this one), everything posted on this page is my property.