[digital:meditation]

“Lustiger” Lesestoff via futurezone: “EU-Pläne bedrohen das freie Internet”:

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Bürgerrechtler schlagen Alarm: In einer konzertierten Aktion wollen internationale Medienkonzerne und ihnen nahestehende Abgeordnete noch im Laufe dieses Sommers dafür sorgen, dass das Internet in der EU gefiltert werden kann. Der Hebel dazu wird im Telekompaket angesetzt, mit dem der Kommunikationsmarkt in der EU neu geregelt werden soll.
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Insgesamt liest sich die Liste der Ansinnen wie eine Horror-Show, die vermutlich auch ein Ministerium für Staatssicherheit nicht besser hinbekommen hätte (dem zu solchen Schritten wohl nur die technischen Möglichkeiten fehlten): “legale” Rootkits (als Schadsoftware, die gegen “illegitime” Aktivitäten des Nutzers vorgehen soll), permanentes Internet-Monitoring gegen “unerlaubten” Traffic, Trennung von Nutzern, die gegen “Rechte” verstoßen, vom Netz, Verantwortlichkeit der Provider für die Inhalte, die über ihre Netze übertragen werden, … . Das Frustrierende an der Sache: Politiker, die vermutlich durchaus in ihrem früheren Leben für freiheitlich-demokratische Grundrechte eingetreten sein mögen, lassen sich (ob aus totalem Unverständnis für die Technologien und Werkzeuge der Gegenwart - siehe unseren internet-ausdruckenden Innenminister, oder nur aus völlig blindem Gehorsam gegenüber den Größen der Medien-Industrie, das sei dahingestellt) ohne nennenswerten Widerstand als willige Werkzeuge dazu gebrauchen, die technischen Möglichkeiten unserer Tage langsam, aber sicher in eine überwachte Welt par excellence umzuwandeln. Wohl dem nächstem Diktator, dem diese Strukturen dann vollständig und fertig zur Verfügung stehen, nur weil einige eingeschränkte Horizonte dies nicht im Vorfeld zu verhindern bereit gewesen sind…

Nachtrag: Einen interessanten Artikel hierzu gibt’s auch bei welt.de, mit einem treffenden Vergleich:

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Nachdem Gutenberg den Buchdruck erfunden hatte änderte sich so einiges. Informationen waren plötzlich freier verfügbar und damit für mehr Menschen zugänglich. Zumindest die, die lesen konnten. Einige Staatsführer und die Kirche sahen das gar nicht gerne und versuchten den Informationsfluss zu kappen, in dem sie den Druck von einer Lizenz abhängig machten. Dem Internet steht offenbar etwas ähnliches bevor.
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Ending a rather calm and productive week, I do have a rather clear impression of OpenSolaris 2008.05 by now. As to be expected, there’s some light, some shadow, some unresolved issues (I guess) and loads of room for improvements…

Light
Compared to recent Solaris 10 / Express, there’s of course a lot of good things worth mentioning about OS 2008.05 in my opinion:

• Both installer and overall desktop environment, practically everything “visual”, is way smoother and more “up-to-date” now. Despite somehow missing good ol’ CDE, the GNOME desktop is preconfigured rather well and, in any possible way, at least on par with an up-to-date Linux distribution in terms of usability and accessibility. Actually, from a desktop users point of view, you don’t that much notice there’s an OpenSolaris kernel and the related infrastructure working in the background.
• There’s a whole load of great features “under the hood”; ZFS and SMF the first to be mentioned, but I also enjoy RBAC and the Image Packaging system, altogether technologies which are quite a bit ahead of anything else out there in my opinion.
• The system plays along rather well with my notebook, supporting more hardware than any Solaris distribution before, and, considering this, the last couple of months have seen drastic improvements here at least regarding the devices used here.
• The system feels generally performing a little faster than a recent Ubuntu, but this is an impression entirely personal, I do not have any numbers to show on that…

Shadows

Some of them, guess, I mentioned already the last days:

• From a desktop users point of view, the thing to hurt me the most is the total absence of any “killer feature”, any real application (or application integration) to distinguish the OpenSolaris GNOME desktop from “just an arbitrary” GNOME installation on any Unix variant operating system. I could imagine quite an interesting set of features to have here (simulating Apples “Time Machine” in example, by integrating ZFS snapshot functionality with the GNOME file manager, or, to go even beyond that, an easy-to-use ability of sync’ing two (OpenSolaris) boxes, say, using zfs send through an appealing GUI… As long as there aren’t features like that, there aren’t many reasons to choose OpenSolaris as a desktop box…
• … because, overally and compared to Ubuntu or Debian, the amount of applications easily available (by simply “click-installing” them using a repository or an “add/remove software” assistant) is way too limited. Though I generally enjoy IPS, I guess Sun / the OpenSolaris crowd this way kinda has opened sort of a Pandora box introducing this idea: By now most people accepted Solaris to be a package-oriented distribution in that you had to fetch some .pkg file somewhere and install it to your system using pkgadd. Surely the “repository” idea is way more convenient but possibly also way more work as someone needs to keep these repositories (a) up-to-date in terms of security and maintaineance patches as well as in terms of new versions of applications available and (b) growing by adding interesting new packages to be available to the users. I hope that OpenSolaris community will be capable of comin’ up with enough resources and enthusiasm to keep this goin’.
• While we’re at the repositories: About OpenSolaris, I surely hope there will be a unification of, say, “OpenSolaris OpenSource”, “Sun Freeware” and “Blastwave”. Right now, in example, installing something via IPS off Blastwave is more than likely to get and install a whole load of libraries which are already installed in the core system. Having Blastwave packages for IPS rebuilt to instead of providing everything on its own depending upon “main” OpenSolaris packages would be a sane way (even though damaging the “standalone” idea of Blastwave, but I do not know how much this does matter in a “completely open-source” OpenSolaris…). Having GTK+ and its development headers installed in various prefixes and versions doesn’t make things easier…
• Another annoyance I experienced yesterday in the evening, dealing with my media collection for the first time, the outcome was amazing: MP3 playback? No. DVD playback? Nada. Playing the .avi files recorded with my digital camera? Nothing. Playing the strange .whatever files comin’ from my cellphone cam? Well, you know it… Playing a self-made DVD containing transformed clips off my digital cam? Nothing. Listening to an online radio live stream? Silence. Silence, also, because OpenSolaris can’t work well with my integrated sound card, but despite this is completely lacking most of the codecs required to provide any video playback. On Linux distributions like Fedora or GNewSense, things also are exactly like this (mainly due to the fact that most of these codecs are somewhat “flawed” in terms of redistribution and licensing), but Linux, here, does benefit from a rich repository of applications to be installed, be that from a “non-free” repository or simply as packages pulled off an FTP site. But maybe I just have to learn more about OpenSolaris to get the same done here, as well…

And now…?

So I’ve been using it for a whole work week… how to continue? Well, some next steps come to my mind: At first, the next server machine to be deployed here will be a Solaris testing system, while I am not yet sure whether OpenSolaris or Solaris 10, but I want ZFS and SMF there. As for my desktop… well I am slowly preparing a migration, being torn between enthusiasm and a certain feeling of still being a “stranger” in the OpenSolaris world. When I moved to Linux, this meant to render quite a bunch of features of my hardware unusable from now to then simply because, in mid-1990s, there weren’t that many devices working with Linux out there. Same way, I had to search for replacements of old Windows95 applications as these simply weren’t available on Linux. Moving to OpenSolaris, from that point of view, wouldn’t be a break that big as, as a fallback, at least using the same application still would be possible, and be that via manually building them. Plus, being a Java developer, I am not really “tied” to a given platform as far as my work is concerned so I could easily at least provide testing and (mailing list / newsgroup based) a little helping hand to others same as me being “newbies” there. Possibly all I need to do this is a little time to sort out data, to do extensive backups, and then to see what will happened. I am curious, at the very least, and I guess all that is missing for OpenSolaris now is a vivid, active community to make it grow. Let’s hope for the best about that…

Some readings…

… on that topic for the weekend:

• There is official “Getting Started” - documentation covering some of the essential aspects of system maintaineance, installation and getting to do work after having a running environment.
• The Observatory is a blog by some Sun folks dedicated to, as the name implies, watching the things evolve around OpenSolaris 2008.05, so far also providing a good set of hints to all those new to the platform..
• There is an impressive list of documentation and manuals to be found on opensolaris.org, well-sorted and -structured.
• For those seeking a good start to the gory details of the system, the university development documentation offers reading material to spend some quality time with.

more days of this week:

• day #1
• day #2
• day #3
• day #4

Recieved an encrypted e-mail today, just to figure out that, in course of installing / configuring Thunderbird on OpenSolaris, so far I missed installing any kind of tooling to handle these friends…

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Overall insight of this day: If wanting to use OpenSolaris on a daily basis, I need more disk space; 12 GB isn’t just enough so far…

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The second day of my “working-with-opensolaris” week mainly happened to be a day of almost undisturbed / uninterrupted work, not really reminding me that I am working with a different environment right now, just making me stumble across a few minor things I had to deal with but no “real” problems…

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Well, what do you know… Time has passed rather quickly it seems ever since I dealt with OpenSolaris here for the first time, and by now, the first “official” release, 2008.05, is available for you to be downloaded or ordered for free, waiting for you to get it started. And, which possibly comes as no surprise, all of a sudden the web is rapidly filling with all sorts of comments, reviews and “tests” of what might turn out to be the new incarnation of the Solaris operating system one day… Overally, given the fact that OS 2008.05 initially comes as an easily installable Live CD, one is tempted to actually go for a “quick-shot” installation, at very best using some virtualization application like VirtualBox, to then get along with a quick write-up on virtually anything to be discovered in just five minutes of playing around with the OS before attention span has found its end and some other shiny new toy is begging for attention. Given that this hardly is a good and/or meaningful way to making a sane judgement, this time I wanted to try something different: Given someone like me (who has been a Free Software supporter and GNU/Linux enthusiast for the last twelve years at the very least) spends a week doing productive work with a tool next to unfamiliar, what would eventually happen?

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Zum Wochenbeginn ein interessanter Beitrag, gefunden auf RP Online: “Deutschland ist keine echte Demokratie mehr”:

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Der Parteienkritiker Hans Herbert von Arnim ist der Ansicht, die Bundesrepublik sei keine echte Demokratie mehr. Tatsächlich werde Deutschland von einer “politischen Klasse beherrscht”, sagte der Staatsrechtsprofessor und kritisierte vor allem das derzeitige System der Parteienfinanzierung.
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Lesen gehen!

“All operating systems include stuff you’ll never use. For example, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS includes an easy uninstall feature.
We know - completely redundant. Ubuntu 8.04 LTS for desktops - you’ll never go back.”

8.04 “Hardy Heron”, the latest version of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution, has been released this week, in short sequence as a server version (supported to 2013) and a desktop distribution (supported to 2011), being the Long Term Support version to follow 6.06 “Dapper Drake” which (at least in our professional infrastructure) has proven to be an incredibly stable and maintaineable platform suiting all our needs. And, looking at it closely, it is obvious that 8.04 has seen an amazing load of work compared to its predecessors, seen both in overall stability, performance as well as in “small” details like the customized Firefox starting page or, as quoted above, a pretty cool marketing / product launch campaign which feels in a refreshing way ironic compared to what other companies tend to do getting their new releases out. Along with Ubuntu itself, there also are new releases of Kubuntu (offered as a “stable” version that comes with KDE 3.5 as well as a “bleeding-edge” version including the infamous new KDE 4), the education / classroom distribution Edubuntu and, of course, my personal favorite Xubuntu, including the lightweight XFCE desktop environment, and being great despite the fact that the default backgrounds in GDM and on the desktop itself just painfully suck. ;) Overally, I have been with Xubuntu 8.04 already for quite a few months, and the last few weeks it has turned out to be a stable and pretty usable machine ready for everyday use, addressing a few issues I had to manually deal with in earlier versions (like using the dual-screen setup on my notebook).

Asides this, however, I am whole-heartedly amazed to see Ubuntu turning into something I haven’t seen that often in GNU/Linux community the last twelve years: It seems to be a distribution which gets more and more approved by both community and companies / commercial providers. Maybe the “open” nature of Ubuntu and the fact that there are predictable, long-term supported releases is something that pays off in the end to help this distribution gaining acceptance all around, becoming a “real” all-purpose (including desktop usage) distribution without throwing away most if not all of the GNU ideas.

And, another thing notable to me, being a Java developer: Ubuntu 8.04 seems the first GNU/Linux distribution so far that includes a fully-fledged set of tools in its package repository:


[kr@n428 9:13:11] ~> apt-cache policy openjdk-6-jdk sun-java6-jdk glassfishv2 netbeans
openjdk-6-jdk:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:6b09-0ubuntu2
Versions-Tabelle:
6b09-0ubuntu2 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Packages
sun-java6-jdk:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:6-06-0ubuntu1
Versions-Tabelle:
6-06-0ubuntu1 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Packages
glassfishv2:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:2.0.1-0ubuntu5
Versions-Tabelle:
2.0.1-0ubuntu5 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/multiverse Packages
netbeans:
Installiert:(keine)
Mögliche Pakete:6.0.1-0ubuntu2
Versions-Tabelle:
6.0.1-0ubuntu2 0
500 http://archive.ubuntu.com hardy/universe Packages

So, we do have both OpenJDK and Sun’s “regular” Java SDK in its recent versions, along with the current version of the open-source Glassfish application server (V2u1, at least until Monday, April 28, it seems…), and the recent stable version of the NetBeans IDE, so far my favorite Java/all-purpose development environment. Honestly, installing any of these applications using the “vanilla” installer without relying upon apt and the package repository ain’t that much more difficult, but at least this way getting started doing serious work in Ubuntu 8.04 is easier than ever before, and, considering the idea that Glassfish on Ubuntu 8.04 even might become a configuration officially supportable by Sun, this also might grow the acceptance of Hardy Heron as a server distribution compared to, say, RedHat or SuSE Enterprise Linux. Now I (a) wonder whether the packaging folks will be up to keep packages current when, in example, NetBeans 6.1 is about to be released soon, and (b) whether, talking especially about the Java and integration thing, Sun and the OpenSolaris folks are likely to get (Open)Solaris distributions on par with Ubuntu also in terms of desktop usage and package installation / update procedure, or whether Solaris is rather left for the server usage while Sun folks do focus on supporting Ubuntu as main desktop system environment. Let’s see what will happen…