User: Bruce Perens

Is this news?

On: Most Linux Distros Won't Run on Pentium 4

Linux has a very small kernel bug that keeps it from running on some Pentium 4 systems, that you can work around with a boot-time command line argument. Nobody has Pentium 4 systems to run Linux on yet. It's not clear that anyone even wants them yet. Intel didn't get talk to the kernel team in time (forget about the distributions, it's not their problem). But a repaired kernel is already available.

It must be a slow news day :-)

Thanks

Bruce

Re:PPA printers

On: HP And Bruce Perens

Invention is always the exception to the rule everywhere. Not just in Open Source software.

And yes, we've started by catching up with everybody else by cloning them, which was necessary. We are at the point now that we've pretty much caught up.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Release date?

On: HP And Bruce Perens

My main goal is to disclose hardware interface documentation so that the Linux folks can write (and improve) their own drivers.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Don't forget about HPUX!

On: HP And Bruce Perens

Do you still have that PA-RISC box? You are no longer SOL. Write me and we can talk about your options.

Regarding open-sourcing HP-UX, I think right now it makes more sense for me to put energy into Linux on PA-RISC. But if I have to seed a few HP-UX licenses into the community, nobody at HP will complain about that.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:HP history and pnm2ppa - from a core developer

On: HP And Bruce Perens

I will be in touch with you folks, and will try to do a bit better than you've seen so far.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Sure, brief

On: HP And Bruce Perens

"More than a year" is a heck of a lot less than the decades that most career VCs put in.

Yeah. It was long enough to be sure that I was wasting my time, this time. I remain in touch with a bunch of VCs, from Opticality Ventures (the Zope and Python investor) to HP's own venture fund, and yes, some of them have been in this for a long time.

Depending on who reads the submission, and what else they've read that day, and what their mood is, anything can get accepted or rejected.

Not such a great system IMO.

I submitted on Wednesday and Monday.

Besides, don't you think it looks a little less like self-promotion if the article is submitted by someone else?

Indeed. But sometimes there is something gained in getting the news from the source.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Don't forget the other free software OSes

On: HP And Bruce Perens

I am more interested in documenting the interfaces, because I think that the Free Software folks do best writing their own drivers. You will, however, see a lot of Free Software written by HP people on salary.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?

On: HP And Bruce Perens

Yes, there was constant immitation a while back. But the .signature itself became a sort of joke, and something that was itself widely imitated. And now people everywhere refer to me as the "real" Bruce Perens. I guess this is the price of our nerdy flavor of near-fame. I don't bother myself about it too much.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:hey bruce!

On: HP And Bruce Perens

How do you know that such things exist at all?

Rather than chase down every flavor of operating system, shouldn't I just get the interfaces documented so that people can write their own drivers?

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Submitting stories is a waste of time

On: HP And Bruce Perens

I submitted the story about HP and me too, and was rejected just like you. Twice.

Bruce

Re:yes, but WHICH Bruce Perens?

On: HP And Bruce Perens

That wasn't me, you got duped by "." Bruce, the impostor. Remember to look at the user ID number.

Bruce

Re:A fine thing, I suppose

On: HP And Bruce Perens

Hi Grant,

I'm not a consultant. I'm an employee. I've got a badge and everything :-)

Nice job on the printers pages.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:Sounds good to me.

On: HP And Bruce Perens

OK, I've made your day.

IMO, Linux' role can only increase. With that said, some things will take years,

Thanks

Bruce

Re:HP is doomed, with or without linux

On: HP And Bruce Perens

Didn't the RF design software go to Agilent when it was spun off? Bdale of Debian fame is over there. I do want to work on wireless, though. 802.11, Bluetooth, and wireless WAN are probably in my future.

Bruce

Impostor

On: HP And Bruce Perens

Note the "." before the name. Another Bruce impostor.

Bruce

Re:My personal experience with HP and a suggestion

On: HP And Bruce Perens

Why not just document the hardware interfaces and let outsiders do the drivers? That would sure work best for Linux, and you know, might even be better for other systems as well.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:PPA printers

On: HP And Bruce Perens

We need interface documentation first. Given interface documentation anyone can make a binary driver. There is no reason you can't have Open Source drivers, they would just not have the same algorithms HP uses for color correction and resolution enhancement, but what we can do is good enough.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:PPA printers

On: HP And Bruce Perens

It happens that I bought one too. That message is not lost within HP.

Bruce

Re:PPA printers

On: HP And Bruce Perens

Go look at Raff Lewin's open-licensed patent portfolio (someone find the link, please). He has a lot of good innovation in the computer graphics field, and he's one of the people I will contact because he's taken over Ghostscript.

I think you can also go back to slashdot archives where this question has been asked and answered before. It turns out that we are not quite so immitative as you think.

Thanks

Bruce

Brief stint?

On: HP And Bruce Perens

CT, I spent more than a year as a VC, not a brief stint. You know the market has been terrible, there's no point in doing that now. Also, why the heck was this story rejected twice when I submitted it?

Thanks

Bruce

Re:PPA printers

On: HP And Bruce Perens

The Free Software community is well able to come up with its own color correction. This is a well-known art, with lots of technical papers published on it. You might not get color correction as good as what HP does, but you'd get good enough and knowing you folks, you could improve on the state of the art. What we need is to be able to send raw pixels to the printers, something that does not require the disclosure of HP's color correction algorithm. So, I don't really consider this a reason to keep from releasing a printer driver.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:My personal experience with HP and a suggestion

On: HP And Bruce Perens

Hi Flavio,

The lack of printer drivers (and by extension, other hardware drivers) is the number one thing I'm hearing about from the community. I have now collected a mandate from one division to deal with it, and will work on another division tomorrow. Right now you can look at hp.sourceforge.com and a second effort on sourceforge that deals with HP printers, but possibly not the printers you want. I will probably have to visit the printer divisions in Ohio and Washington state to talk with people. My desire is that all HP hardware interfaces be open and documented. Obviously, I will have to evangelize that within the company. I will have something to say, and something to show, at LinuxWorld in NY, but will not have finished with the issue by then. It could take much longer. In some cases documentation doesn't exist, in some cases you may be able to command the device to destroy itself, in some cases the existing Windows driver contains other people's proprietary IP, not just HPs, etc. So, this will be a pain to deal with, but it'll get done.

Thanks

Bruce

Re:sat

On: Two For The Sky: Satellites For HAM And You

You'd have to live on the equator for it to be directly over your house :-)

Bruce

Re:finally, now i can ask my question w/o being OT

On: Two For The Sky: Satellites For HAM And You

This is pure B.S. It has been decades since FCC has shut a ham down for an interference problem. In general it's the receiver's fault, because there is no specification for interference immunity in consumer equipment.

Bruce

Re:finally, now i can ask my question w/o being OT

On: Two For The Sky: Satellites For HAM And You

Well, this sounds like a CB-er with perhaps an illegal amplifier.

Hams don't use "cheap unshielded equipment". It would interfere with other hams and they'd track it down fast.

Bruce