Some of you might know LZMA as the default compression algorhythm of 7zip. *nix counterparts had support through LZMA utils. GNU Tar could be patched to support it, but there was no way for libarchive to support it - until recently. A new spec, a new name (xz) and a future change of license allowed for xz support in the codebase. Since pacman and makepkg rely on libarchive for compression handling, that makes it possible to build and install packages with xz.

For those unfamiliar with LZMA/xz, in the realm of compression formats it stands between gzip and bzip2 for compression and decompression speed, and it tops the list when you talk package size. Now let's have a look at how to get this going.

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.

Joy oh joy. Remember the good ole days when OpenWrt accused Sveasoft of violating the GPL, only to be accused by Sveasoft themselves in return to do something similar? Welcome to the déjà vu then.

It seems DD-WRT is doing the same thing.

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 GNU Public License 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.