Friday, November 17, 2006

Fast User Switching

I’ve just put up some notes about Fast User Switching and how we plan to integrate this into Fedora for our next release.


Most of this work builds upon ConsoleKit by the ever-so-awesome Jon McCann of gnome-screensaver fame. It’s not very Fedora centric so hopefully other Linux distributions (and other free UNIX-like systems like OpenSolaris and FreeBSD) will pick it up too. I’m excited, in particular, about the fact that, with infrastructure like this, we’ll be able to enhance applications to behave intelligently when f-u-s is used, e.g. pause media playback, go to away mode for IM etc.



pjones, campd and J5 at Charlies
Don’t forget the beer tonight


Going to pick up Kay later in the PM, he’s flying in from Hamburg. We’ll most likely end up at Flat Top’s later tonight for Dave’s shindig!


A few days ago Artem merged the Solaris backend for HAL. Awesome. The FreeBSD backend is going to be merged real soon now as well, the patch is already on the list.

Thursday, November 16, 2006

Thursday, November 9, 2006

Trying to be Constructive

Daniel, actually I wasn’t referring to binary drivers per se in that particulary obnoxious post of mine; what I had in mind was primarily out-of-tree drivers / features including ones that explicitly disable rootkit prevention features for example. Using the word damaging to the free software community however was perhaps over the top, sorry it upset you and probably others, but I just don’t think including a bunch of not-so-heavily-audited code (e.g. a driver that is not in mainline) or code that disables security features is doing your users service. Most users of course don’t care, but developers like you and I should. In particular, OS vendors needs to care.


It seems you and I don’t disagree on Linux based distributions including proprietary drivers but I think that one thing you might not realize is how damaging it is when a popular distro starts doing this… years of work in dealing with certain vendors to open up code is undone in a jiffy. I don’t want to be all moody here, trying to be constructive (could use much stronger words but that would serve no purpose), but it’s flat out depressing when stuff like this happens.


With regards to you commenting on the Fedora community, most of your points, I think, are well understood by the community and some are being dealt with. For the record (and this should be clear to anyone involved in the areas I also participate in), I think of myself much more as an upstream guy rather than a Fedora guy as I think it’s silly we have all thesse differences between distributions - just do the work upstream (swim upstream dammit :-) ) instead of adding distro-specific non-sense unless it’s absolutely necessary (things like branding, defauls etc. all fall under this). I think you know this already, so please don’t tag me as a Fedora guy just because I’m ranting about other distributions on my personal blog space. I happen to use Fedora because it’s aligned with my personal views about free software, because it’s a first class distro with cutting edge features… and also, of course, because I’m paid to work on the software by my employer.



_MG_1630.CR2
introspection, bridges and people driving by


The larger problem, in my view, is really that we have some work left in building bridges between the various communities that participate in writing code for the GNU/Linux system. Heck, even inside a company like the one I work for it’s sometimes difficult to coordinate features between kernel, base os and desktop teams, sometimes even more difficult that dealing with other downstreams. However with collaboration zones like freedesktop.org we’re slowly getting there and things do look a bit better than they did just two years ago - next up, for example, is pm-utils so distros can start sharing quirks and infrastructure to improve the power mangement mess.


I hope this clarifies.


(Disclaimer: I am employed by Red Hat and am paid to work on (among other things) Fedora but my views are strictly my own.)


(Oh, and I also think it’s called “The New Pink” instead of “The New Black” but, uh, maybe saying that just reveals I’m eligible for membership in the GNOME old farts club.)

Software Freedom and Dealing with Resume Failures


  • Go read davej’s thoughts on Why Fedora isn’t Ubuntu. Required reading for people who believe in free software and thinks shipping insecure drivers is a bad idea. Choice quote: Maybe we can get a spaceman with lots of money to pay for the subsequent legal costs too.

  • Someone here at Red Hat was unhappy about a review of early RHEL5 code where Suspend to RAM didn’t work for the reviewer. Though I’m of the firm opinion that the root problem should just be fixed, reality is that it won’t get fixed anytime soon. So I ended up hacking up something so if suspend/hibernate fails… the user is presented with this on his next login:


    Problem resuming, buddy!
    Problem resuming, buddy!



  • This (somewhat useless) dialog is just the beginning; the long term upstream plan is to hook this up to Bug Buddy. Determining when to show this dialog is actually really difficult because the most common problem is that the system resumes just fine but the video isn’t turned on. And there is no chance of detecting such a failure programmatically, hence we need to be smart about it; find patches and more information here. I expect this to land in Rawhide pretty soon.

  • Am still in RHEL5 bug fixing mode; at least there’s light at the end of the tunnel so I can return to doing upstream work.

Saturday, November 4, 2006

Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore?

Saw Can Mr. Smith Get to Washington Anymore? at the Kendall Square Cinema last night (review here). Movie itself was good. What was pretty awesome was that after the movie there was a Q and A session featuring Jeff Smith himself where we could ask questions about both the movie, the grass root stuff and his current political engagement.


If you have the chance run, don’t walk, down to the cinema and see the movie.