I have my crash recovery back!

I tend to have a lot of browser tabs open. Not as many as some -- I work with one system administrator who regularly has 60-80 tabs open at once. But I'll frequently have a dozen or two.

So it's very frustrating when a browser crash or power failure knocks out all those tabs. Its not always easy to find them in your browsing history.

Some years ago, the Konqueror web browser introduced a Crash Manager that created a menu of any web sites you had open when the browser last crashed. Good stuff! You could open them all at once, or pick them one at a time.

Unfortunately, some time ago that feature was dropped from Konqueror as by default. I've missed it. A lot. Fortunately, Firefox now by default will recover from crashes by giving you the option to reload all your pages. Unfortunately, that's an all-or-nothing situation, and it doesn't help you if the crash was caused by one of those pages.

At long last, I've found how to put the crash recovery tool back into Konqueror. Its a two step process:

1. You need to have the KDE Addons package installed. On Fedora, a command like sudo yum install kdeaddons should work. Or use one of the graphical package managers like "Add/Remove Software".


2. In Konqueror, go to the Settings menu and choose Configure Extensions. Under the Tools tab, tick the Crashes Monitor checkbox.

Since I generally prefer Konqueror for 90% of the websites I visit, I think I'll be using it a lot more from now on.

Goodbye XP

After months of planning procrastination, Mrs. Impala's long-suffering Windows XP computer has been cured of atherosclerosis and Alzheimer's disease by an upgrade to Kubuntu.

I've got more experience with Red Hat and the Fedora Core series of distributions, and last time I played with vanilla Ubuntu, I was seriously unimpressed. But Kubuntu seems pretty impressive, and KDE doesn't dumb everything down like Gnome seems to do. And WINE installed flawlessly the first time, unlike my experiences under Fedora Core 5.

And naturally, there was no product activation and we didn't need to register the software. I can change hardware in the PC as often as I like with the operating system deciding that it has been installed on a different PC and refusing to run.

I'll report back after Mrs. Impala and I have had a chance to give it a solid workout.

Update Monday, 13/3/07: Seems I'm not the only one ditching Windows XP for Ubuntu (with or without the K). So is the French Parliament, which is purchasing 1,154 new PCs running Ubuntu.

Screensaver

I wish to complain about the user interface of the KDE screensaver used under Centos 4.4. The relevant part of the screensaver control panel is this:


Notice that you can set the start time in minutes, but the password locking must be entered in seconds? WTF? And no, you can't just type over "seconds" and replace it with "minutes" -- I've tried.

Some tasks really do need to be specified down to the second, but starting a screensaver is not one of them. Why would anyone seriously need to specify that the screensaver locks the screen in 121 seconds instead of two minutes? As functionality goes, allowing the user to specify the time in seconds is silly, but it doesn't do any harm. But requiring the user to use seconds is just ludicrous.

And bad luck if you don't want the screen saver to lock for two hours, because 1800 seconds -- 30 minutes -- is the maximum value it will accept.

The good thing and the bad thing about Linux is that you can pick any one of many different distributions. No doubt other distributions have more sensible screensaver configuration screens. But Centos is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is aimed squarely at the corporate market. If you're a corporate user, chances are good that you'll be using this unimpressive interface rather than the nicer versions found in (say) Fedora Core 5 or Ubuntu. And that just reinforces the meme that Linux isn't ready for the desktop yet -- which simply isn't true.

Russia hits out at Microsoft

It's probably too much to hope for a nuclear first strike against Redmond, but the Russian Deputy IT minister, Dmitry Milovantsev, had a go at Microsoft recently:

He said the low average income of people in Russia is one of the factors in the relatively widespread use of cheaper pirated copies of software. But he also laid some of the blame on the behavior of the large software vendors for their restrictive and expensive licensing policies.

In particular he singled out Microsoft for its policy of not allowing partners to sell computers without copies of Windows pre-installed in Russia.

"If you want to install Linux you have to erase Microsoft, and that increases the cost of each computer by $50."

Microsoft sure have got the distribution channel locked up tight: it costs more to not buy their product than to buy it. I feel like Captain Spaulding (Groucho Marx) must have felt in Animal Crackers listening to Ravelli (Chico Marx) play the piano:

[Warning: May Contain Puns]

Spaulding: What do you fellas get an hour?
Ravelli: For playing, we get-a ten dollars an hour.
Spaulding: I see. What do you get for not playing?
Ravelli: Twelve dollars an hour.
Spaulding: Well, clip me off a piece of that.
Ravelli: Now for rehearsing, we make special rate. That's-a fifteen dollars an hour...That's-a for rehearsing.
Spaulding: And what do you get for not rehearsing?
Ravelli: You couldn't afford it. You see, if we don't rehearse, we a-don't play, and if we don't play (he snaps his finger) - that runs into money.
Spaulding: How much would you want to run into an open manhole?
Ravelli: Just-a the cover charge! Ha, ha, ha.
Spaulding: Well, drop in some time.
Ravelli: Sewer.
Spaulding: Well, we cleaned that up pretty well.
Ravelli: Well, let's see how-a we stand.
Spaulding: Flat-footed.
Ravelli: Yesterday, we didn't come. (To Mrs. Rittenhouse) You remember, yesterday we didn't come?
Spaulding: Oh, I remember.
Ravelli: Yes, that's three hundred dollars.
Spaulding: Yesterday, you didn't come, that's three hundred dollars?
Ravelli: Yes, three hundred dollars.
Spaulding: Well, that's reasonable. I can see that alright.
Ravelli: Now today, we did come. That's-a (pause)..
Spaulding: That's a hundred you owe us.
Ravelli: Hey, I bet I'm gonna lose on the deal. Tomorrow we leave. That's worth about (pause)..
Spaulding: A million dollars.

I'm shocked

You can knock me over with a feather.

As a Linux and former Macintosh user, I'm quite used to being sent proprietary, Windows-only file formats that can't be read except by specific, commercial software -- although it must be said that over the last few years, Linux software has become very good at coping with all sorts of secret file formats. It's been a while I've come across a file I wasn't able to open under Linux.

And then the other day, I received an email with an attached .mht file, and neither Kmail, Firefox, Konqueror or Mozilla seemed able to deal with it correctly.

That's not the shocking thing. The shocking thing is that .mht files are a standard, open file format, with a RFC from 1999 specifying the format: HTML plus external resources such as images, in a MIME encoding. It is simply a MHTML file. Essentially, it is a web page, plus all its images, sounds or other extras, in a single file.

Internet Explorer has supported MHTML in the form of .mht files for years; Opera has recently added support for it. Konquorer does something similar, except it puts the files in a compressed tar ball (.tar.gz or .tgz) and calls it a .war (Web ARchive) file.

As far as I can tell, this is a case where Microsoft has actually done the right thing, using a standard, open file format, and the Linux world is lagging behind. Shocking, but true.

The end of the Wintel duopoly?

Are Microsoft and Intel in trouble? The signs are troubling for the major players in the Wintel world, with Microsoft's earnings cut by 29%, Intel's by 90%, while IBM, Texas Instruments and Red Hat seeing some major growth.

Waiting for the Chewbacca Defence

Today, Harald Welte of GPL-Violations will be travelling to Frankfurt for a special court case.

Generally, violations of the GPL are generally settled out of court, or as part of a preliminary injunction. In this case, however, a well-known vendor of embedded networking gear is claiming that the GPL doesn't apply to them, and that they have a right to use Linux code despite lacking a licence for it.

I'm guessing the defendant is going for either the Chewbacca defence, or this one:

"If I can't infringe copyright, the terrorists will have won!"

Myths and Lies about the Linux kernel

Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman has posted the text and images of his keynote talk at the 2006 Ottawa Linux Symposium here.

SCO hits another iceberg

SCO's nuisance lawsuit against IBM, already in trouble, has just hit the mother of all icebergs. Judge Brooke Wells has upheld IBM's motion to limit SCO's claims, throwing out 2/3rds of SCO's accusations.

This isn't the end of the fight, of course, but even Blind Freddy can see where this is going when the judge hearing the case makes this analogy to SCO's arguments:

Certainly if an individual was stopped and accused of shoplifting after walking out of Neiman Marcus they would expect to be eventually told what they allegedly stole. It would be absurd for an officer to tell the accused that “you know what you stole I’m not telling.” Or, to simply hand the accused individual a catalog of Neiman Marcus’ entire inventory and say “its in there somewhere, you figure it out.”

Pamela Jones' comment speaks volumes:

There has never been an operating system picked over with such care and determination to find fault. And Linux has come through utterly clean as a whistle.

Why your business will be using Open Source

Bernard Golden writes for CIO Magazine:

The first reason you need to begin using open source software is that IT budgets suffer from two simultaneous imperatives: low-growth and increasing demand. One important way to respond to these imperatives is to lower your cost of delivering technology. Open source can be an enormous help in this response.

The second reason for using open source is that the software industry itself is undergoing change and will increasingly resemble the open source model: the software itself being freely downloadable, but with far fewer ancillary services delivered by the vendor for free. [...]

Now, let's discuss the third reason you need to jump on open source -- and this one extends the impact past the confines of the IT organization: open source can offer competitive advantage to the overall organization -- in other words, open source can help businesses perform better financially.

Golden goes on to describe the economic forces that make Open Source a huge competitive advantage, and warns that businesses ignore it at their peril:

The counter-argument to the cost advantage of open source software is that the cost of licenses is unimportant in the overall budget of IT. [...]

This reminds me of the dismissivenss that Detroit used to evince toward Japanese automakers. It used to take US car manufacturers two weeks to perform annual model tooling changeovers. Toyota figured out how to do it in less than a day. So what, was the attitude of US automakers. The cost of model changeover is peanuts compared to everything else.

But Japanese car companies continued to incrementally improve their cost structure -- quicker changeovers, less inventory via JIT techniques, lower manufacturing cost by creating option bundles. One day the US industry woke up and Japanese makers had an unbeatable cost advantage; thirty years later, the domestic manufacturers are still trying to catch up.

Golden gives figures for the cost of licences: 10% to 20% of the cost or individual project, perhaps 6% of the entire IT budget, and warns that many people (especially Microsoft) argue the cost of licences is insignificent in the grand scheme of things.

Who's drinking that Kool-Aid? 20% of the project budget is insignificant? On what planet?

Failure to take a 6% saving is mathematically equivalent to a 6% increase. (Note: the two figures aren't quite equal -- it is actually equivalent to 6.38%, because the base is smaller. But let's not quibble about a few tenths of a percentage point.) So let's do a thought experiment.

Imagine that your head of IT goes to the company accountant and demands a budget increase of 6% "because it's an insignificent amount, you won't miss it." What reaction do you think he'd get? If your IT department is one Windows 98 PC, the accountant probably won't blink. If it is 3,000 PCs and 100 servers, well, blinking won't be the only reaction.

I'm sure that a good IT manager will be able to justify that 6% increase. Sometimes you really do need to put more money into IT. And sometimes the right place to spend it is on software licences. But to say that cost savings of 6-20% are insignificant is sheer poisoned Kool-Aid drinking insanity.

From the tin-foil hat brigade

Found this gem on a tech mailing list:

Can Microsoft or any one else burrow through a Linux internet connection and plant a bomb to destroy Windows programs on a single SATA hard drive with 3 partitions? Linux is a primary partition, XP also a primary and a data partition is the only access to Internet. -- Rupreckt

(Name has been changed to protect the guilty.)

Short answer: yes, but wearing a tin-foil hat has been found to close that security hole.

Serious answer: if your Linux system is configured to give random people coming in from the Internet full write-permission to your hard disk, then yes, anyone can do anything they like to everything on your hard disk. Linux security is not security at all if you turn it off.

Get the non-Facts: Linux server infected by Windows virus

How's this for Bizarro World thinking?

Microsoft's "Get the Facts" campaign is trumpeting a case-study of a small business who switched from Linux to Windows after their operation was temporarily pole-axed by a computer virus which only infects Windows systems:

One of the biggest issues arose when Envirotactics fell prey to the Blaster virus. The firm was susceptible because its Linux system had no critical updating mechanism or centralized virus protection.

So, let's get this straight... the company had not used (or at least incorrectly used) a firewall, or anti-virus software, or patched their Windows PCs, and that's a problem with Linux that is best fixed by having more reliance on the same vulnerable systems that got you in trouble in the first place?

Link here.

Windows servers more reliable than Linux?

Slashdot discusses a survey by the Yankee Group that claims to show that Windows 2003 servers having a higher annual uptime than Linux severs.

From the article: 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and Linux distributions from "niche" open source vendors, are offline more and longer than either Windows or Unix competitors, the survey said. The reason: the scarcity of Linux and open source documentation.' Yankee Group is claiming no bias in the survey as they were not sponsored by any particular OS vendor."

Just because the Yankee Group has had a long and extremely profitable relationship with Microsoft, and just because their previous surveys have been heavily weighted in Window's favour, doesn't mean that this is another example of the same old nonsense. Right?

Unfortunately, the Yankee Group isn't telling where or how they got their figures. Their report is here but it includes little in the way of detail. It isn't even clear whether they found (or claim to have found) that Windows servers have 20% more uptime than Linux servers on average, or that Windows servers' increase in uptime from last year is 20% higher than Linux servers' increase. Are they measuring the length of time between reboots, or the total time running? The Yankee Group aren't telling. In other words, we don't even know what the survey is measuring.

Hmmmm.

Out of interest, Netcraft is reporting that the Yankee Groups' Win2000 webserver has an uptime of... four days (as of today, 8th June 2006). The best uptime they've seen was about 65 days -- which is a long time to hold your breath, but pathetic for a server uptime by Linux standards.

Taiwan says, all new PCs must be Linux-friendly

From the Taipei Times:

The government-run Central Trust of China has mandated for the first time that all desktop computers purchased from now on must be Linux-compatible, demonstrating the government's desire to widen the nation's usage of open source software.