Nvidia woes

I’m not the type who needs to be on the cutting edge of 3D drivers, I usually just install the packages available for each openSUSE release and stick with those throughout the release cycle.

This time I was kind of looking forward to getting newer drivers for openSUSE 11.1 (due out on December 18), hoping that my FX5500 would then perform on par with, or perhaps even better than, the Intel 945gm on my laptop, when it comes to KDE4.

Instead, to my dismay I discovered that the FX5500 is no longer supported by the latest Nvidia drivers – which means I’m now a second class citizen in the Nvidia world, having to use an outdated, barely maintained (maybe even unmaintained?) driver. To add insult to injury I can’t get the legacy driver to compile on openSUSE 11.1 beta. I expect “they” will manage to provide a package for 11.1 final somehow. But Nvidia are surely not on the top of my list when sending out holiday greetings this year.

Right now I’m diverting as much positive energy and vibrations as I can to the Radeon, RadeonHD and Nouveau developers, and also wishing Intel would sell non-integrated graphics cards. Freedom matters.

Openjdk og netbank

Jeg er kunde i Forstædernes Bank, som bruger netbank-løsningen fra Bankernes EDB Central (BEC). Det samme gør næsten alle andre banker, med undtagelse af Danske Bank, Nordea og Jyske Bank, så vidt jeg ved.

I det store hele har det fungeret fint for mig som GNU/Linux-bruger, men det har betydet, at 1) jeg var afhængig af Sun Java, som stadig har enkelte ufri komponenter og dermed 2) jeg var afhængig af 32-bit Firefox, da Sun ikke leverer et 64-bit browser-plugin til Java.

Det er med stor glæde at jeg konstaterer, at et af problemerne er løst, siden i dag kan jeg benytte min netbank med Openjdk 1.6 på openSUSE 11.0, når jeg bruger pakkerne fra dette repository på openSUSE Build Service: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/Java:/openjdk6:/Factory/openSUSE_11.0/

Sun Java er hermed fortid på mit system, da jeg ikke bruger Java i andre sammenhænge. På openSUSE 11.1 vil Openjdk i øvrigt være standard. Træerne vokser dog ikke ind i himlen, med kombinationen af 64-bit Firefox og 64-bit Openjdk segfaulter Firefox under login til netbanken. Så foreløbig må jeg stadig leve med at køre 32-bit Firefox på mit i øvrigt 64-bit system. Men andre applets – i hvert fald test-appletten på Java.com – virker, så afhængigt af hvilke Java-applets man skal bruge, kan Openjdk måske løse Java-problemet på 64-bit-systemer for mange allerede i dag.

Jeg er nysgerrig efter at høre om andres erfaringer med Openjdk. Har nogen fået det til at fungere med BEC-netbank på et rent 64-bit-system? Hvordan virker det med de andre netbank-systemer?

Yet another Open Source Days blog post

Everyone in Denmark is blogging about Open Source Days, and now I am too. Open Source Days is an annual two day conference in Copenhagen – formerly known as Linuxforum – which was held this weekend. It covers both business aspects as well as technical and community aspects of free/open source software.

First of all I’d like to congratulate the organizers and volunteers on an extremely well carried out conference. Everything was smooth, schedules were kept, no technical issues, etc., if there were ever any problems at all the organizers managed to keep them well hidden behind the scenes. However I did notice that some of the bags that were handed out had more than one copy of the same promotional material, so at least there is one little thing to improve upon

I saw a few interesting talks, but not as many as I would have liked, mainly due to duties in the SSLUG booth. I’m looking forward to watching the videos of the ones that I missed, when they become available.

SSLUG booth
In the SSLUG booth we had fun as always, among other things showing off the Fit-PC Slim, which we had borrowed from Peter Toft.

That’s my “new” FSC Lifebook E8110 on the corner of the table btw.

The SUSE perspective
Of course, some of us tend to see things in a distinct green tint…

The total absence of Novell.dk was striking. Last year they were sponsors, had a booth, the Novell user group was there. This year? No trace of them anywhere. But of course there was a strong SUSE presence nevertheless.

Most interestingly I discovered that Linuxshoppen.dk are taking orders for the MSI Wind (on the left) and the HP Mini-Note (on the right), due to become available within a few weeks with Danish keyboard and everything – both of them preloaded with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 with the GNOME desktop environment. Linuxshoppen had a couple of these on display at their booth.

Adam Jollans of IBM gave a presentation, using the IBM Open Client which he said is used every day by ~30.000 IBM employees. He said it was based on Red Hat – but I’m pretty sure it’s actually based on SLED. If I’m mistaken, at the very least it does have the (in)famous Slab menu on it.

Robin Rowe and Gabrielle Pantera gave their keynote presentation about GNU/Linux in Hollywood on openSUSE 11.0/KDE4.0. Nothing crashed, in case you’re wondering.

Software Freedom Day 2008 – Copenhagen

This saturday was Software Freedom Day. Traditionally SSLUG and our partners DKUUG and other interested organizations, have celebrated Software Freedom Day by taking it to the streets, handing out media and fliers to Aunt Tillie and Joe Sixpack and balloons for the children. This has always been great fun, but we started doubting the effectiveness of it – none of these people ever seemed to show up at lug meetings or on forums or anywhere else.

Therefore we decided to try a different approach this year. We wanted to try having a small conference like event and let people who were actually interested and curious about free software come to us, instead of approaching random people and talking to them for a couple of minutes at best about very complex issues.

With our advertising we tried to target students – primarily in technical areas and also new EeePC owners, who we expected might be curious to learn more about that strange OS on their new gadget (so far the Eee is the only netbook that’s sold with GNU/Linux pre-installed on it in Denmark afaik). Our advertising was pretty succesful with mentions in Comon.dk, Computerworld.dk, Prosa, Modkraft.dk and a large Danish newspaper, and possibly other places that I’m unaware of. We had prepared posters which we encouraged people to print and put up at educational institutions and of we announced the event on a few relevant forums.

We had put together a pretty impressive list of presentations in my opinion – Sune Vuorela, Debian KDE developer, spoke about benefits of free and open source software – Bryan Østergaard, Exherbo founder and former Gentoo core developer, gave an introductory presentation about the GNU/Linux platform – Leif Lodahl, Danish OOo spokesman, talked about OpenOffice.org (3.0) and John Andreasen, who teaches image editing professionally, presented some GIMP magic.

We hope to have videos of the presentations available online before long.

However we only had about 20-25 people in attendance, not many of whom appeared to be students, and noone – other than Sune and Keld – were wielding EeePCs. We had certainly hoped for a higher attendance – but we had also feared it might have been even lower, given the slightly experimental approach to the whole thing. It was my distinct impression that the people who did show up, had an enjoyable afternoon, therefore I rate the event as fairly succesful overall. But it needs to sink in more, before I’ll draw my final conclusions on what we’ve learnt about how to promote free software in the future.

The next event for SSLUG is less than two weeks away, opensourcedays the annual large and professional two day conference in Copenhagen, formerly known as Linuxforum. SSLUG will have a booth, where we’ll hopefully be recruiting new members, meeting and discussing things with current members, and of course, generally having a lot of fun. We also have a comfortable chair and an internet connection to offer, so please come by and say hello when you have a spare minute.

Software Freedom Day

Lørdag d. 20. september er den årlige Software Freedom Day. I den anledning inviterer SSLUG sammen med KLID og DKUUG til nogle hyggelige timer med foredrag på Handelshøjskolen på Frederiksberg.

Har du lyst til at høre lidt mere om hvad fri og open source software egentlig går ud på så kig forbi. Du kan finde de praktiske detaljer her.

Du er selvfølgelig også meget velkommen til at komme og fejre dagen med os, selvom du i forvejen ved alt hvad der er værd at vide om fri software.

Farewell KDE3 and hello KDE4

After checking out KDE 4.x at arms length for months, I had decided that I would try out 4.1.0 fulltime on my “production” machine for at least a week, when it was officially released.

After a slightly frustrating first few days configuring everything and figuring out how to get around all the quirks, I seem to have gotten everything set up more or less to my liking. So now that the week has passed it looks like I’ll be staying on KDE4 from now on.

I still don’t find it quite as pleasurable as KDE3, and I have to keep recommending KDE3 to demanding users and non-geeks for now. But it looks like a truly enjoyable KDE 4.1.x desktop on openSUSE 11.1 this December is possible. Now that I’m using it full time I can better provide feedback to the packagers, help out new users, and eat my own dog food in terms of translations.

#opensuse-nordic

I’ve registered #opensuse-nordic on freenode. It’s intended to be a common Swedish, Danish and Norwegian openSUSE support channel. Of course it’s still young, but please join and help build it.