Will Novell be another evil SCO?

Novell won the court case. Linux finally goes legit! The copyright of Unix belongs to Novell, so SCO no right to claim billions from IBM and the Linux disti for claiming the Linux contains some Unix codes in the kernel. If you’re still unsure and simply paranoid that Novell will follow the steps of SCO to dig out some money from Linux users, now you can be relieved. As they promised, they won’t do the same thing as what the SCO had done over the past few years. They’ve defeated SCO and they’re the supporter of Linux, what for they’re gonna repeat the same thing as what the evil SCO did?

The Novell spokesman says: “We’re not interested in suing people over Unix, We’re not even in the Unix business anymore.”…..”We don’t believe there is Unix in Linux,” Lowry said. “We’ve been fighting that all along. It wouldn’t be consistent for Novell to say, ‘Oh gosh, now that this has been confirmed, we’re going to suddenly take a different position’ and sue companies for copyright infringement.”. But, what if they just simply feel it’s fun to be inconsistent? This is how today’s business men are reacting…. LOL.. Who knows? Perhaps, Novell wanna kill other Linux disti, so their SuSE Linux will be the king?

Anyway, there are still some unresolved issues here. Companies like Microsoft and Sun started paying SCO a few years ago as they didn’t wanna get sued that would have given them bigger loss if SCO won the case. The court will decide later if the money paid to SCO for the past few years by these companies need to be thrown out to pay Novell…

Source

Yeah! Linux finally goes legit!

I almost forgot this lawsuit that happened in year 2003. Still remember? A lawsuit was fired by bloody SCO, which claimed that IBM and the Linux community has some codes in their Kernel that was stolen from the SCO Unix etc bra bra bra! At that time, probably everybody started worrying about if the uncertainty of using Linux.

Especially, those started migrating from Windows to Linux since couple of years ago. Yeah, we’re one of them, our office servers especially mail, web, name servers are on Linuxes. Even, our databases on Oracle are now on the Linux platform too. Except the workstations, we have now only two Windows servers out of 12 servers here in the office. Lets get back to lawsuit, don’t get out of track of what this post is meant for.

Yeah, Linux is finally legitimate. You can now freely use it as your workstations and servers. The lawsuit that lasted for 4 years finally ended last Friday and Novell is the winner. Yes, Novell came out to defend while SCO was pushing for asking billions of dollars from Linux distis and IBM. And the lawsuit has even created the uncertainty over using Linux in their companies. As people were all worried about deploying their servers or workstations in Linux would end up of having to pay much more expensive licensing to SCO, if SCO won the case. Anyway, Novell is the winner, some more SCO has to pay Novell. Since Novell is the Linux supporter, so there won’t be any issue about the uncertainty of Linux…. Start converting all your servers platform to Linux now if you have NOT!

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FireFTP, a drag and drop FTP client that works as a Firefox extension

I’ve used couple of FTP client software over the past few years due to heavily involved in web development that always need me to upload files to servers. I’ve used the kinda FTP client from command line to Windows GUI, some support secure FTP and some don’t, such as CoreFTP, CuteFTP, WinSCP or you name it!

FireFTP is the one that only recently caught my attention, simply but its name that has the word fire. Of coz having a name associated with the word fire is nothing a big deal, it could be just a marketing gimmick for boosting the product. The name FireFTP actually caught my eye from an attached CD that came with the magazine that I bought recently. But, anyhow, I misplaced that magazine, but the name, FireFTP, still remained in mind. So, having a little free time today, I tried googling around what the hack this FireFTP is about.

Well, I got it, it’s downloadable here. It’s a little different than the other FTP clients that I’ve ever used. Yes, it’s different as it works as a Firefox extension instead of a standalone program to be installed on your desktop. Frankly, I’ve been a Linux user for couple of years, but I haven’t got a clue what FTP client available in Linux platform, which is in the GUI mode that allows me to drag and drop as what I’m used to doing it in Windows, such as those CoreFTP, CuteFTP can do. On Linux platform, I’ve been using on the command line interface, firing those commands such as “put”, “mput”, “get” to get those files uploaded or downloaded. Of course, it’ll be lacking some kinda handiness while compared to the drag and drop feature in GUI version of FTP clients. Especially coming to uploading hundred of files or directories.

FireFTP works as a Firefox extension, just enough for me to use it as a drag and drop FTP cliemt, even though I’m now on Fedora Core 7 now. To install it, just download it from the website, it’ll go thru the process similar to what other Firefox extensions offer. And after the installation, you will be able to access it again on your Firefox by going to “Tools” then you’ll see it there! Anyway, FireFTP is still lacking the SFTP feature, I’d love to see an improved version later that supports the secure FTP over port 22.

GIMP, just enough for me to have picture editing while blogging!

It seems to be lacking of some ideas what to write about today. Anyway, this blog post is all about is always the question that my friends and colleagues always ask, “what I use for picture/image editing since I’m on Linux platform?”. It’s GIMP. I’m no good at all at any graphic editing work. But, I’ll always need to include some pictures on my blog, as I always feel that the blog post must be associated with some pictures then only ut looks nice. So, GIMP is the one that I always use for resizing pictures and then upload to wordpress here.

Especially, when writing on this blog, I always need to capture the screenshot, as this blog contains entries about software, web app, Linux stuff that always involve capturing screen shots and also resizing these captured screenshots into smaller images in order to go nicely on blog posts. So, GIMP is the tool I use for doing all that. I ain’t no expert of graphical editing. What I know only is to open up a picture, lets say a captured screen, and then using GIMP’s image scaling function to scale down the image. For example, a captured screen of 1024×768 then I’ll always scale it down to have only the width of 450.

I hope to spend more time to explore more on GIMP. I’m kinda no graphical design background although I’m pretty familiar with web app development such as those PHP, JSP. But when coming to using GIMP or exploring other similar image processing tool, such as Photoshop, I seem to go impatient of doing that. Anyway, GIMP has been the tool that main tool for image editing since I was on Windows platform. Due to mainly it’s open source, no need to bear any license. All free for use. And it follows me even I’m on Fedora Core 7 now. GIMP had gone in during the installation, so to access it, I normally go to the terminal there to type “gimp”, then it will pop up! I hope to free up some time to explore more about the tutorial on GIMP later…

SELinux dead annoying?

As mentioned before I have just switched to Fedora Core 7. But after switching what I’ve found dead annoying is the SELinux. I haven’t got much clue about what this SELinux is about. It seems to be some kind of new security policy for program execution that has been added for the recent distributions of Linux system. I appreciate the additional security on Linux, but it damn gives some inconvenience especially coming to installing third party software.

The first thing I wanna do after getting my Fedora Core 7 was to get my Apache web server with PHP to run. I quickly mounted my own old hard drive that is still on Fedora Core 3, where I have an Apache there. I tried to start that Apache on the mounted partition, but it failed to start telling me message saying “cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied” (Preceded with other longer message, so not handy to print here). At first I thought this was due to different lib or modules with the new kernel that I had to recompile my Apache + PHP (I’m used to using the unix compilation version instead of those RPMs). So, I did that for all the Apache and PHP, going thru those ./configure , make, make install. All gone thru well, and then I tried to start Apache again. Agai, it showed me similar problem, the same message.

The only thing I could do then was to google around, by typing the message “”cannot restore segment prot after reloc: Permission denied” into Google’s search text box. And I found this web page telling me that SELinux is the culprit behind all these. So, I followed the instruction, first I tried to issue the command

chcon -t texrel_shlib_t /usr/local/www/modules/libphp4.so

Then tried to restart Apache, but it seemed to give NO avail. So, I then tried using the GUI SELinux Management tool, by adding label, but the system gave me a big window with all the errors… as shown in the following attached screenshot.

Finally, I decided to set SELinux to disabled (I set it to enforcing during installation time as I didn’t know much about what it was. My thought was having extra security was good at first). So, I did that by editing /etc/sysconfig/selinux , then set SELINUX=disabled instead of enforcing. I then thought I probably needed to do some kind of /etc/init.d/selinux restart to activate it, but it has nothing to do with that. When I got back to the SELinux GUI Management, it showed me the System Default Enforcing Mode is now “disabled”, but the Current Enforcing Mode still remained “enforcing”. Then I tried to start my Apache, this time it works! Even though I set the SELINUX variable in the /etc/sysconfig/selinux back to “enforcing”, I still can start and run my Apache web server. So, this currently left me some kind of puzzle which the one that had taken effect to let the Apache run. The only thing I need to do is to explore more about this new SELinux security feature. Or totally disable SELinux to avoid any hassle for running any 3rd party software. Doesn’t it mean, we have to sacrifice some security if we wanna run some 3rd party software on newer disti of Linux? Sounds getting more complex. But, I’ll try to explore more about SELinux when I have some free time later.

My first impression of Fedora Core 7

Recently, I’ve got myself upgraded to the Fedora Core 7 from the old Fedora Core 3 for my office PC. The Fedora Core 7 definitely gives me much better usability, better GUI, better navigation. But one thing to my surprise, I don’t get the networking part working quite right. I’ve used the network manager (as shown in the picture, that can be selected under System menu -> Network) to set the network card configuration but after restarting or activating, the network interface card gives me the correct network IP address, but  no the default route. Although the default has been set correctly using the network manager as shown in the attached screen. So, what could have gone wrong, a bug in Fedora Core 7. For the time being, every time I restart my machine, I’ve gotta fall back to my old method, the method that I’m so used to, i.e to use the command line to reissue the network IP address setting and also the adding the default route as follows:

ifconfig eth0 10.10.10.252 netmask 255.255.255.0

route add default gw 10.10.10.254 

Anyone  facing similar problem? I’ll try to look for solution for this. It’s a bit inconvenient that every time I have to reissue the command. Although I could have added in into the /etc/rc.d/rc.local for the two lines, but I feel the latest version of Fedora Core 7 shall have taken care of this via the GUI, which shouldn’t leave much hassle for non-power users. I hope I could find some solutions for the patching if possible.

Anyway, another thing that I like about the Fedora Core 7, it allows to setup the ADSL broadband by using the GUI, which is very much easier to do with the much older version that I have to edit a shell script.