Sharma Family Journal

Getting X right with various chipsets continues to be a challenge to open source challengers to the desktop crown. Installed Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex this morning. Everything goes fine - except for graphics.

The bug seems to have been reported for both Fedora and Ubuntu

The workaround that worked for me:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "DRI" "false"
EndSection


I had to use the following in my /etc/X11/xorg.conf to get acceptable performance on a old PC with Ubuntu 8.04 installed.

Section "Device"
	Identifier	"Configured Video Device"
	Option          "AccelMethod" "EXA"
	Option          "AGPMode" "4"
	Option          "ColorTiling" "1"
EndSection

AP article:

There are several examples like that, that we have to address without worrying about the fundamentalism in some of the open-source community,” he said. “One can be an open-source advocate without being an open-source fundamentalist.

– John Negroponte, Founder, OLPC project

Not many people know the origin of the term “gentoo” or how it is related to India. I was messing around with a linux distro called Gentoo Linux and bumped into a description on wikipedia.

There are many descriptions of the word on the internet (such as the term used by the portuguese to describe Telugu speaking people). But this one coming from what looks like a Hindu nationalist website, looks interesting:

An Arab geographical term “Hindu” was mutated by the British into a fictional religious category “Gentoo”. The tribals — the Kols, the Bhils, the Hos, the Nagas, the Mizos — had all disappeared. The Sikhs, the Buddhists, the Jains, the Zorastrians had all disappeared. The British had fought against and displaced the Muslim rulers — so they recognized the Muslim category — the rest of Indian diversity was lumped into one unreliable category of “Gentoo”, and a fiction of a “Code of Gentoo laws” was created in a land in which religion arose from Dharma, not texts and written laws.

Although the name Gentoo Linux comes from the penguins , its connection to India is fascinating. I suspect many Indians wouldn’t be flattered by the above description.

Hmm, the above wikipedia page blames the French for the derogatory term first used to describe Egyptians.

While Mocking MIT’s $100 laptop project, Bill Gates said

Hardware is a small part of the cost” of providing computing capabilities, he said, adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support.

Someone at MS seems to be feeding him misinformation about BRIC. Here are some stats from India:

Whether the commodity OS is a Linux/BSD or pirated Windows depends on the seller and the buyer.

Not many people seem to know about the FreeBSD hg repo that is tracking cvs. It seems to have all 13 years of history in it.

And of course, there is the linux kernel repo hosted on kernel.org.

The Register is running a piece critical of Linus that seems to be high on morality and freedom.

I find suggestions that BSDs are less popular because of their license or that the BSD license is a failed concept as having no factual basis. On the other hand, Linus’s explanation that he found the right balance between the religious right and the “I-dont-care-about-my-software” developer sounds more credible to me.

GPL has goals I share (encourage more people to share software), but its methods are complicated and GPLv3 makes things more complicated.

I still believe that having strong leadership, good timing, pragmatic approach and good code make a project successful, not the license.

… because you’re reading this blog.

United Networks was featured on the Register today as a company with an interesting business model.

They resell Dell PCs with your Linux distribution of choice.

Cheaper Windows for the Rs 10000 PC. The cost of windows is projected to be 10% and “piracy” rates at 73%.