Kennon’s Space

I just wanted to share two things real quick. Here is a link on how to use beryl-vidcap. And here is a link showing just how multimedia ready Linux really is. It looks a little choppy but that is because the vidcap is kind of resource intensive. But without the vidcap running the cpu utilization for doing what I show in this video is around 5-10%-ish

So it has been a while since my last blog…I’d say that I’m sorry but I’m not really. I have been kind of busy. So let me take a couple mins and bring this thing up to speed on current events.

First, I went to Portland Oregon last week for 5 days of Linux training. I was shooting for my SUSE Certified Linux Professional but I was a few points short on the test. It was a pretty brutal 5 days. I mean it is basically 13 days of material per the courses from Novell packed into 5 12-14 hour days. In hindsight I am not sure I will do any more “bootcamp” style classes where the test is a practical exam. I mean bootcamps are awesome when you can do a brain dump and just pour over exam questions and stuff. But the CLP exam is a real hands on test. No multiple choice…no true/false…just you and a VNC connection to two SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 servers and list of objectives to complete. Out of the four objectives I scored 100% on the first and 50% on the second and third and never even got started on the fourth. If I had another hour I would have passed the test. The problem is that I am unaccustomed to working under those kinds of time constraints. I was bouncing back and forth between task two and three because they were kind of related, and looked up and the clock and realized that I only had 10 mins left. I am going to take another crack at the test at Brainshare next month.

Secondly, ESR wrote an open letter to Red Hat a couple days ago. In his letter he basically asserts that Red Hat has lost his loyalty due to a bunch of problems both with the distribution and it’s politics. I really feel for him on this, being a former Red Hat/Fedora zealot I can attest to the shear number of hours I spent troubleshooting packaging and dependacy problems I had when I finally jumped ship back in Fedora Core 3-4. I actually switched to SUSE mainly because of my work, but once I switched I was blown away by how simple and intuitive SUSE was compared to Fedora, especially when it comes to package management. I know in OpenSUSE 10.1 they really fucked up the updater. And some people still to this day refuse to use Zen because of a bad first experience but the package management in OpenSUSE 10.2 and SLES/SLED10 works great for me now.

I kind of admire ESR on a couple levels. He and I seem to share a lot of the same philosophies regarding Linux desktops and freedom, and firearms for that matter. I think he is a little out there with his chosen religion, but otherwise I find myself agreeing with him far more than not. One of the biggest reasons to appreciate the man is he is never afraid to go against the grain, even when it means possibly alienating a lot of other Linux users. IMHO there is a big culture clash going on in the community right now. I think myself and most Linux users I know kind of identify with ESR’s reasoning a little more readily than the really radical side of the Free Software movement, in which it is not good enough to just be open source, but you also have to be 100% free.

If we could get the world to at least get to the open source way of software development I think the next logical step is to move to a free software environment. But those out there like Alan Cox of Red Hat and RMS who believe that the term Open Source should be done away with marginalize Linux in the commercial marketplace.

Linux has already won the hearts and minds of most technology enthusiasts. Ramming a somewhat radical philosophy down the throat of the average user is the least productive way of setting their computers free IMHO.
“All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, is founded on compromise and barter.” –Edmund Burke