The World without a sage web browser? — or — Why Firefox sucks //at 22:57 //by abe

Although I read our Debian’s Joey’s blog posting about not being able to produce Mozilla security updates for Debian, only now, after reading about other Debian’s Joey’s try to fix a security hole in Debian’s Mozilla Firefox, I see how asshole-like the Mozilla Foundation’s security policy looks to Linux (and maybe other operating system’s) distributions, who favour stableness over feature richness.

As many know (or at least were forced to know ;-) I don’t like Firefox, because in spite of all the plugins it can’t cope with all the useful features of Galeon 1.2.x or Opera. That’s the UI point of view.

But from the political (correctness) point of view, we have to ask ourself: What sage browser does the open source world still have?

• Mozilla does not provide security patches, so Firefox, Mozilla (RIP), Epiphany and Galeon are no more acceptable for distribution use.
• Konqueror has planed to drop KHTML in favor of Mozillas Gecko. So see above.
• Dillo’s rendering engine is fast but not really state of the art. Same counts for glinks (aka “links -g”).
• Lynx, links and w3m somehow don’t count since the distributions (and sometimes, me too ;-) primarily need a graphical web browser.

But back to usaility: I heard from quite a few people — even open source people — evaluating or even already using Opera as an alternative, because there is no sage open source web browser, even if you don’t count Mozillas security policy. And I can understand them. If Galeon wouldn’t exist, I probably would be a convinced Opera on Debian user myself, although Opera is closed source. But I and many more can’t live without a working and sage web browser.

The only thing, I don’t like with Opera is that this company seems to be (or at least was a few years ago) very chaotic and uncoordinated. (And I really wonder, how they are able to produce such impressive software.) But that’s another story…

SuSE sucks! //at 05:44 //by abe

Since SuSE closes the security support two years after release and the recent KDE JavaShit remote code execution hole wasn’t patched as fast as I would have expected it (the patch came out after the upgrade I’m writing about here) in the SuSE 9.0 which was installed on my 2.66 GHz AMD desktop at work (it started as in 2002 as a SuSE 7.3 on a 400 MHz box and has been upgraded since then to 8.0, 8.2 and 9.0 IIRC), I decided, it’s now really time to upgrade to SuSE 10.0. (Although 10.1 will be out soon, I just don’t want to wait for it.) And since my boss only wants SuSE boxes and neither Debian (which I would prefer) nor Gentoo (which a colleague prefers), I couldn’t simply install Sarge on this box although I would have chosen that option if it would have been available.

Since my former SuSE experiences told me that this would mean a lot of trouble, I took notes from the beginning, once for the blog and once for my boss to show him, that most trouble doesn’t come from me being a power user used to being allowed to touch any config file (like I am on Debian).

Preparations

So I begin with the preparations: Starting the 400 MHz Debian Woody box on my desktop (whose operating system is more than a year older than SuSE 9.0 and still has security support, yeah!) I usually need to build custom Debian packages for customers. There I could chat in IRC and took notes while trying to upgrade and get the whole thing working again.

When everything was ready, I put the SuSE DVD in — just to notice, that it’s just a CD-ROM. So I put the SuSE 10.0 CD1 in the CD-ROM drive and typed “sudo shutdown -r now” in the shell. The box starts shutting down and tells me:

Please stand by while rebooting the system…

But it didn’t reboot. I waited for several minutes, nothing happend. Well, seems as if the SuSE upgrade already starts as I expect it to end: Horrible.

Read more…

Software Freedom Day 2006 //at 02:07 //by abe

Today, well, yesterday was Software Freedom Day and the Chaostreff Zürich organised an information booth with support of the Linux User Group Switzerland at the Orell-Füssli Bookstore at Zurich and giving out Ubuntu CDs — and only Ubuntu. (Ok, and also Kubuntu CDs, but that doesn’t make a big difference.)

After writing a Symlink article about the Software Freedom Day, I went to Orell-Füssl, of course equipped with my 10 years old Pentium-I-ThinkPad bijou which is though running Debian Sarge and the latest Linux kernels, namely 2.6.17.13 and 2.4.33.3, both only about one week old.

Onsite, I tried to get access to the WLAN, but it didn’t work. Asking the network responsible guy from the Chaostreff, the reason was found quickly: The WLAN was WPA secured and older WLAN cards don’t work with that. No problem that far, but what I found very inappropriate was that this guy then told to put away that old computer since we only want to demonstrate on recent hardware.

First I still can’t understand why such intolerance happens even on a day having the word “Freedom” in its name and secondly I think that especially the ability to give old computers a second (or third) life is notable feature of Free and Open Source Software, Windows can’t offer at all.

So I did not feel like explaining someone the advantages of Free Software or Linux, since I’m not allowed to show some of it nicest features. I started folding some flyers which just had been printed. I accidently also started reading them and I found two grave errors in the content, especially in the context of a day about “Software Freedom” and not about “Open Source” or “Linux”:

1. Free Software and Open Source Software were declared as being the same thing.
2. Only the Open Source concept was explained.

So I used the rest of the event to chat with some of the SheGeeks I knew and a few people like Fabrizio who I just knew from mails and never met in real life before. I also had no guilty conscience to leave the event earlier since I didn’t like it — even if it probably was a huge success and I met there many people I like.

The late afternoon I helped a friend of mine moving. Well, actually I helped him transporting all the new furnitures he bought at IKEA to his new home with my CX Break.

And after returning home, I had to read on Symlink, that Rob Levin aka lilo from Freenode died yesterday after being hit by car while riding on his bike on Tuesday. May he rest in peace.

So somehow the Software Freedom Day 2006 was quite a sad day to me. :-(

Now playing (from compact cassette :-): David Hasselhoff — Looking For Freedom

RIP CitroNews //at 20:52 //by abe

CitroNews has closed its doors since there were no news for over two years. I liked the idea but it seemed to have neither that much readers nor many submitters. And since I’m not really that active in the Citroën or 2CV scene anymore, I seldom had something to send in.

Update, 20:37h: And no, this does not mean that I’ve sold or will sell any of my 2CVs. I just was on no 2CV meeting for IIRC nearly a year now. Too many Open Source events out there… ;-)

P.M. und die Aktualität //at 01:38 //by abe

Auf der Suche nach interessanten News für Symlink schaue ich hin- und wieder mal bei P.M. rein. Dort stieß ich heute auf einen Artikel “NASA kann Gedanken lesen”.

Klingt alles schön und gut, aber da ich bei den P.M. “Wissensnews” gewohnt bin, daß unter zirka jeder zweiten Story ein Link “Original-Artikel bei Freenet” druntersteht (welcher dann meist ein paar Monate alt ist), bin ich mißtrauisch und finde untendrunter auch prompt einen Link “ORF”, der zu einem FutureZone-Artikel verweist. Allerdings einem nach deren, seit Monaten nicht mehr unterstütztem, altem URL-Schema, das nur noch “Error in application futurezone — Object not found.” bringt.

Nun gut, Monate alte Inhalte in P.M.-Artikel ist man ja gewohnt, aber daß sie dann nicht einmal die Links dazu überprüfen, akaschiert das nicht wirklich besonders gut. Also machen wir uns auf die Suche nach der neuen URL der FuZo-Story.

Aber bei der FuZo gibt es keinen Suchen-Link mehr. Sehr verwunderlich. Dafür gibt es auf der ORF-Startseite an mehreren Stellen einen Link zu http://suche.orf.at/. Dort präsentieren sich einem tausend Suchfelder. Das erste hervorgehobene ist anscheinend “nur” eine Google-Suche, also nehmen wir das allererste, etwas dezenter gehaltene, neben dem irgendwas unleserliches steht und tippen ein “nasa gedanken”. Fehler: Ein Nickname darf keine Leerzeichen enthalten. Äh, hallo? Ok, nochmal nur nach “nasa” suchen: “1 Nick gefunden” *aufgeb* Der ORF will anscheinend nicht, daß man einfach und schnell auf den ORF-Seiten suchen kann.

Google hilft, wenn auch mit dem selben kaputten Link wie P.M., nur hat Google die entsprechende Seite netterweise noch im Cache.

Datum des FuZo-Artikels: 20.03.04 — Klasse, das sind bei P.M. also “News”?!? Ich glaube, das brauche ich echt nicht mehr lesen. Aber andererseits, was will ich auch von P.M. erwarten: P.M. fand ich eh auch schon inhaltlich selten so interessant wie früher das hobby Magazin der Technik (RIP) oder die nicht ganz so aber dennoch recht populärwissenschaftlichen Magazine Spektum und Bild der Wissenschaft. Nur eines muß man den P.M. Wissensnews lassen: Sie geben ihre Quellen an. Im Gegensatz zu z.B. Golem oder insbesondere Heise.

Ach, und bevor Klagen kommen: Ja, auch bei Symlink, Slashdot oder einem sonstigen Community-Ticker kommen ab und an mal etwas ältere Nachrichten, aber kaum so häufig oder so alt. Mal ganz davon abgesehen, daß P.M. das professionell macht — professionell bzgl. des Zwecks, nicht der Art und Aufmachung her. ;-)