Nausea Medialis

My server used to run NFS v3 so I could easily manage my multimedia collection from my local laptop. I found out a few months ago NFS v4 boasts quite some improvements over v3, so I planned to migrate. Unfortunately that never got further than the stage of building the required packages, and yesterday I decided to give SSHFS another go. Compared to v3, NFS v4 brings a more secure solution, but at the cost of slightly more complicated configuration. SSHFS, on the other hand, is childishly easy to set up.

Yeah you read that right! I got this fancy thing (TZ190 N, pictures) a few weeks ago, but since I have to work too, it took some time to put the penguin on it ^_^. Sony was never known for its standard compliance and the Vaio TZ seems to be a prime example of that. None of the Fn keys work. In-depth coverage of the issues I have/had with this laptop are covered here. You'll find the specs there too. However, let's look at this marvel from the positive side :-).

This baby is my precious :-P. Seriously! A real gem. Sony is one of the few manufacturers to pack so much heat in such a small package. Carbon chassis, LED backlit X-brite LCD, Core 2 Duo ULV, an abundant 2 GB of RAM, draft N wireless, and - the icing on the cake - an SSD :-).

This weekend FOSDEM '08, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting, took place in Brussels. It started with the Beer event on friday evening - which I did not attend, I'm not much of a beer fan :-P. Sunday's programme looked like the most interesting to me, with a lineup of talks about Drupal, OpenWRT, suspend, and interaction between the kernel, HAL, udev and networkmanager.

Seems Linux is vulnerable to a vmsplice exploit allowing local users to be come root. This affects kernels 2.6.17 till 2.6.24.1. For those building their own kernels, patches for 2.6.22, 2.6.23 and 2.6.24 are available. For older kernels, you can grab a git commit fixing it, or check the diff between the 2.6.24.1 and 2.6.24.2 patch (I think the latter looks nicer :-P).

Start them compilers!

Someone recently pointed me to a Linux.com article on derivative Linux distribution. Whereas lots of people - including me - used to think it was okay to run a distro without providing sources as long as they were provided upstream, by the 'mother distro', this article makes things clear: it is not. Mepis got targeted for this and had to provide the full sources themselves. Of course, if that is what the GPL says, that's how it has to be done - you cannot claim your distro is GPL if you don't honour that same license. Strangely, it seems, no other distros (and there are plenty of derivative distributions) got targeted at the time.

Zenwalk users might know a certain guy called Béranger, who has 'annoyed' the Zenwalk team with his (rightful) questions about source availability. It seems he did not loose his edgy approach though - read this article about Zenwalk not complying with the GPL. While he certainly has a point, when it comes to his communication skills there really is a lot of room for improvement.

The wait is over: 2.6.24 hit the stores on January 24th. What particularly interests me - and lots of Linux laptop users - is the shitload of wireless drivers integrated! Drivers for Intel's IPW3945 and 4965, Broadcom's 'AirForce One' thingies - I'll keep it diplomatic - and other stuff too. Sadly, the rt2x00 driver seems not to have been updated - which means a lot of people will still experience speed problems. The fix for this is using the rt2x00 git branch.