Category: Linux
Asus violating GPL again?
August 15th, 2008, 7 Comments
There was a small firestorm last year when people realized that Asus was not releasing source code to GPL’d components of the EeePC. At the time, they eventually did post source code on their website. Recently I bought an Eee 901. Asus has modified the kernel’s ACPI driver. They released the source code to that [...]
Kernel interrupt weirdness?
July 12th, 2008, 14 Comments
I’ve had a problem with recent kernels. (I think it’s the kernel that’s doing this.) When my workstation is doing heavy I/O, it repeats keystrokes. For instance, while I was typing this paragraph, audacity was writing audio to disk, and I got this word: heavvvvvvvvvvvy It seems as if it thinks I haven’t let up [...]
Linux on the Desktop
July 1st, 2008, 5 Comments
Later this month, I will be giving a talk at OSCon about Linux on the corporate desktop — something we have done where I work. I’ve been alloted a 45-minute timeslot. I will, of course, be posting my slides online and I think OSCon also posts videos of these things. I’m wondering if readers of [...]
datapacker
April 15th, 2008, 8 Comments
Every so often, I come across some utility that need. I think it must have been written before, but I can’t find it. Today I needed a tool to take a set of files and split them up into directories in a size that will fit on DVDs. I wanted a tool that could either [...]
Desktop Linux: Gnome
August 29th, 2007, 12 Comments
I had been intending to write an entire series of posts about our corporate switch to Linux on the Desktop. To date, I wrote only one introducing the project and our reasons for switching from Windows. That was back in April. Today I’d like to start talking about it all some more. We have standardized [...]
Linux Hardware Support Better Than Windows
August 17th, 2007, 57 Comments
Something I often hear from people that talk about Linux on the desktop is this: people want to be able to go to the store, buy hardware, and be confident that it will Just Work. I would like to point out that things are rarely this simple on Windows. And, in fact, things are often [...]
OSCon Thursday Part 2: Linux on laptops
July 27th, 2007, No Comments
Matthew Garrett A lot of background on the state of laptop support in Linux. It worked reasonably well in the 90s, but with the migration to ACPI, has become much more complicated and less reliable in general, especially with suspend/resume and video. Emporer Linux and System 76 produce Linux supported laptops. I wanted some more [...]
Sierra Wireless 595U / Sprint on Linux
July 3rd, 2007, 10 Comments
Here’s how you use a Sierra Wireless 595U USB modem to connect to wireless Internet service with Sprint: Insert the modem into the USB slot. lsusb should show: Bus 001 Device 005: ID 1199:0120 Sierra Wireless, Inc. rmmod usbserial Then: modprobe usbserial vendor=0×1199 product=0×0120 You should see /dev/ttyUSB0, ttyUSB1, and ttyUSB2 appear. See also instructions [...]
Conferences Suggestions
April 17th, 2007, 4 Comments
At work, we use Linux (and Debian, in specific) for a lot of different things: everything from our phone system (running on Asterisk) to file serving and running some proprietary applications. I’m one of the people that finds, sets up, and maintains these systems, and I write code for our in-house use as well. I [...]
And we’re off!
April 13th, 2007, 1 Comment
Yesterday afternoon, we started our information meetings with employees about our Linux on the desktop project. We’re underway on our migration. But before I talk about that, I need to back up and describe what the project is. We are converting approximately 80% of our 150 or so PC users to Linux desktops. They’re Debian [...]
