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Extensive Coverage of Ottawa Linux Symposium 2006
cdlu writes "LWN and NewsForge both extensively covered the goings-on at this year's OLS. NewsForge: day 1, day 2, day 3, and day 4. LWN (subscription required for most): article 1, article 2, article 3, and article 4." I especially enjoyed the description of reverse engineering a USB device from cdlu's coverage of day 3; one day wireless USB devices will really work with out-of-the-box Linux! Update: 07/25 04:57 GMT by T : Eric Preston, who delivered that talk on reverse engineering USB devices, kindly linked to both his slides and the accompanying screenshots.
How long can this event be held in canada? I mean, sure its the right environment for penguins now but what about global warming?
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"one day wireless USB devices will really work with out-of-the-box Linux!"
Not as long as dumb users keep accepting binary only shit drivers. Until the morons stop creating the problem, there will continue to be more hardware needing reverse engineering than people with the skill, time, and patience to do the work.
I can think of a hundred different places I'd rather go for a symposium before Ottawa.
Obviously, they must have not be expecting a lot of out-of-towners.
The best presentations, IMHO:
Killing Kittens (David Arlie)
LuserSpace sucks (DaveJ)
Myths about Linux (Greg KH)
OK, not the exact names, but you get the picture.
The first one adresses graphic vendors that think their closed driver has fairy poo on them.
The second adresses brain dead programmers that keep mistreating files AND the general OS.
The third has the coolest last slide I've seen in a presentation.
how long until
Almost 1,000 pages of very interesting whitepapers from the event can be found in the first and second PDFs.
I read the papers and listen to radio here in Ottawa. I run Linux on my machine and have helped my girlfriend and her little daughter switch as well, we're the sort who'd like to have known that this was going on. But not a peep.
Was there advertising in 'trade' papers that I just didn't see? Or is this basically a convention for out-of-towners with no seats for 'off the street' folks? More of a 'Linux Symposium' (held in Ottawa) than an 'Ottawa Linux Symposium' I'd say... heh.
Kevin
Something like a memory dongle should present little problem to reverse engineer. A wireless interface, on the other hand, would be very difficult. You have the problem that you can't easily see what happens when you send the device a command. The article referred to taking months and years to figure out what's happening.
The problem is especially acute where the device driver does a lot of computing. The example that comes to mind is a web cam. The web cam itself might not be very smart. All the color balance and brightness would be done in software. So, we have the case where the driver is sending a lot of commands to the web cam but we're not sure what they are doing. We can force the system to react by changing the light level an seeing what happens but we really end up relying on trial and error. It's really not a lot of fun.
How long until we have one of these in the Cincinnati area? Nothing ever happens here except shootings.
DIS
Getting a driver into Linux is so full of road hazards because the "community"(read: the loudest mouths) is too idealistic, eccentric, and inflexible...and as a result, most companies go "fuck that 2% of the market" and release Windows drivers that, long as they work, nobody complains about, ever. Even MacOS X is easier; it's a much more stable "target" hardware/software-wise, and the community doesn't mix politics with purchases.
Not to mention most likely Brand X wireless card came complete with drivers from OEM company Z, just with Brand X silkscreened on the PCB...and Brand X couldn't "release" the drivers or write open-source ones if they wanted to.
Please help metamoderate.
That's a pity that a few talks about containers (OS-level virtualization, a la advanced Jails, a la Solaris Zones/Partitions) were not covered at all. There were (at least) four of them:
- Eric Biederman's talk about namespaces
- Cedric Le Goater's talk about application mobility (a.k.a. live migration of containers)
- A BOF on containers, moderated by Dave Hansen
- A BOF on the resource management (one of the components of containers), moderated by Dipkanar Sarma
There was also a half-an-hour discussion about containers on the Kernel Summit. Let me summarise all these in a few lines:
1. Containers are a real alternative (or a good addition) to Xen and paravirtualization. In most cases they can be used for same applications, without incurring all the Xen's overhead and dirty hacks)
2. Everybody wants containers in the mainstream kernel
3. There are different implementations (IBM's stuff, OpenVZ, Linux-VServer, and Eric's) and their developers need to agree upon them what to submit/push into mainline. This is hard to do, but a required step.
4. Resource management: User Beancounters from OpenVZ is a good (the only?) candidate for inclusion into mainstream.
-- Kir Kolyshkin, OpenVZ project leader.
Has the Wireless USB (WUSB) specification even been finalized yet? Isn't it a little early to get excited about a niche protocol that may never reach the market?
Or does the submitter not understand the difference between Wireless USB and USB Wireless Networking Adapters?
"Corbet says that there's not a firm kernel bug count. As the number of users increases, he noted, so to does the number of bug reports. More code means more bugs, even if the proportion of bugs (bugs per thousand lines of code) drops."
Oh dear. I can see that being quoted.
I reserve the write to mangle english.
(Ottawa)(Linux)(Symposium) (2006) Hhhm.. something tells me no booth babes were present..
//WR
Well I met a babe, so I never made it to a booth.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
1999
And, boy oh boy, its anything but penquin weather here. We get the extremes and its on the hot end of the scale right now.
You know, I used to think just like this -- though I didn't consider it 'whining', I worried about the practice, thinking it might just put the vendors off.
And then I watched the OpenBSD project flame the hell out of a Hifn representative for asserting that his company provided 'open documentation' (when in fact acquiring said documentation required registration that the OpenBSD developers felt violated their privacy). When I first read the systematically harsh response to the Hifn representative (including Theo's threat to drop the free driver from the OpenBSD tree), I was absolutely stunned that a group of free software developers would be so reckless.
But it got me thinking... we can't all bend over and ask for it from the vendors forever. Linux marketshare is growing in every segment, and we do have an increasing amount of support from giants like IBM. If it were possible for the projects to take a unified stance (across Linux and the three *BSDs) and persistently demand programming specifications from the vendors, what's going to happen -- they're going to say "fuck you for asking" and drop their binary drivers too?
Something tells me that giving your customers the finger, even if it's only an operating system or two only represent 6-10% of your desktop market, isn't the sort of thing you do to appease shareholders. So while they might not respond immediately, it's not like we're losing anything.
I'm thinking we should start a unified petition to AMD now that they're acquiring ATI - form an online petition to AMD that says "We are NVIDIA customers who will eBay our GPUs tomorrow and buy ATI if you release open drivers".
There is a mall attached to the convention center. Go to the food court. Proceed to the Japanese place. Eat.
Warning: do not forget to smuggle real Mountain Dew into the country. Canada banned caffeine in drinks that are not brown, and Pepsi chose color over content.
Xen's overhead may be bigger, but at least it only affects the people who use it.
Containers hurt everybody.
Nobody wants vendors to release drivers. We don't want them, and we never will want them. Simply supply the docs they already have, and let us make drivers. We will support their hardware for them, for free, and it will always be up to date, always work out of the box, and always be consistant with other similar hardware for users. Quit re-hashing the same stupid excuses that have nothing to do with reality.
I wonder if there will be any protesters shouting "BSD, BSD, DOWN WITH LINUX, BSD, INTEGRATION, BSD, SECURITY, BSD, CODE QUALITY, BSD, TRULY FREE CODE, BSD, BSD, DOWN WITH GNU, BSD, DOWN WITH RECURSIVE ACRONYMS, BSD, BSD, WINE IS AN EMULATOR, BSD, BSD".
Or if someone insults someone else's text editor. "WHAT DID YOU SAY ABOUT vim? I DON'T NEED AN ENTIRE OS FOR A TEXT EDITOR! OR A BROKEN PINKY!" "HEY YOU, WIMPY VIIMACS USERS, ed PWNS YOU ALL. IF YOU NEED MORE THAN A "?" FOR OUTPUT, YOU ARE TEH SUCK""EMACS CAN RUN vim AND ed FOOLS!" Then someone will break out a beowulf cluster of Linux flame-throwers.
Stupidity is like nuclear power, it can be used for good or evil. And you don't want to get any on you.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Good news, everyone. Tomorrow, you'll all be making a delivery to Redmond 9, the virus planet.
Hermes: Why can't they go today?
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Because tonight's a special night and I want you all to be alive. It's the Ottawa Linux symposium.
Fry: Wow, I love symposia!
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: It's the scientific event of the season. Every member presents their own custom kernal build. The best one wins the Academy prize.
Bender: Sounds boring.
Professor Hubert Farnsworth: Oh my, yes.
I suck at humor, so if you don't like it you can bite my...
one day wireless USB devices will really work with out-of-the-box Linux!
Woohoo! Almost five years behind Windows!
Hopefully we will be able to use SATA by sometime this century! Go OSS!
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Linux is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Linux community when IDC confirmed that Linux market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Linux has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Linux is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Linux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Ubuntu is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Ubuntu developers only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Ubuntu is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Debian leader Murdock states that there are 7000 users of Debian. How many users of Ubuntu are there? Let's see. The number of Debian versus Ubuntu posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ubuntu users. Kubuntu posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Ubuntu posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Kubuntu. A recent article put SUSE at about 80 percent of the Linux market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 SUSE users. This is consistent with the number of SUSE Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of SUSE, abysmal sales and so on, SUSE went out of business and was taken over by Novell who sell another troubled OS. Now Ubuntu is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Linux has steadily declined in market share. Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Linux is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Linux continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Linux is dead.
Fact: Linux is dying
I recently bought a Huawei CDMA card. It worked 'out of the box' with Ubuntu. The USB version also worked first time.
Of course, we had to figure out the wvdial config file to make it do anything, but that didn't take long.
Max.
one day wireless USB devices will really work with out-of-the-box Linux!
Yeah right. That will happen the day after video card manufacturers release Free Software drivers...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Linux Weekly News' articles are only available to subscribers the first week they come out. After that they are available to all. Kudos to the editor, Jon Corbet, for finding a solution that enables the content that he creates (and that of other contributers) to be available to all. Albiet after a slight delay. :)
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