GoboBlog

GoboLinux 014 RC1 is go!

2007-04-14T16:58:00.000-07:00

Announcement: The first release candidate for the next version of GoboLinux is now up for download. In this version:

Better printing support
Massive update for packages
Bug fixes post-013

Here's the ISO, the MD5, and, as always, the Bugworks. Have fun!

First packages, then recipes, now "flavours"?

2007-01-04T13:05:00.000-08:00

Benjamin Bruheim suggests a third dimension to GoboLinux, called "flavours".

Have a Gobo New Year, folks

2007-01-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

So its New Year's Day, and........there's nothing to do.

Universally, all the effort towards partying went into last night's festivities, and now its time to clean up. Hopefully for ya'll, it ain't much. :-P

Anyway, I didn't even know that screenshots of GoboLinux 013 are available, but they are.........

......at Softpedia.

Strange thing is that the GoboLinux site's screenshot gallery is still showing screenies from 012 desktops at the most recent.

My favor to ask ya'll: pleeeeeeeze post some of your 013 screenshots to the main site's gallery.

Thanks.

And once again, Have a Gobo New Year.

My thought on Linux and the GPLv3

2006-12-27T07:23:00.000-08:00

I thought about this a few nights ago.

I think this is the point where the FSF and Linux Kernel Team might part ways. Considering that folks on the LKML were considering banning closed-source, non-GPL drivers beginning in January 2008 because of a violation of *their* copyright stipulations, and Torvalds has virulently opposed any such move on the premise of restricting the freedom of the user (namely, in the graphics driver department), the collision of interests may lead to a fork of the kernel under the GPLv3, which provides for exactly what the anti-closed-source-driver folks on the LKML want, and have wanted for a long time.

My views on the GPLv3, though?

Forced evolution.

If Linus Torvalds was right when he said "Linux is Evolution, not Intelligent Design", then the GPLv3 will only force that evolution further. As the hardware companies (Nvidia, ATI, and all) are bound to spurn this version, a Linux kernel under the GPLv3 will have to include hacked, homemade drivers without the support of the semiconductor companies.

Hence, it will have to evolve through a trial-and-error basis unlike any other that it has faced since Linus's project first began in 1992.

It should be interesting.

Yes, I'm late with this...

2006-12-16T12:31:00.000-08:00

From the GoboLinux site:

New versions for Scripts (2.6.0), Compile (1.8.0) and Manager (1.1.3) were just released. The main highlights are the improvement of the scripts option parser, and introduction of support for recipes and packages revisions. Our recipe store is going to be updated really soon to use this new scheme, so, go ahead and update those tools at your system.

Note to whom is still using Glibc 2.3.2: This package for Scripts is the last one being linked against Glibc 2.3.2. If your system is based on GoboLinux 012 (or older) and you haven't updated your Glibc yet, please do it: just install this latest version of Scripts ('InstallPackage Scripts') and run 'InstallPackage Glibc' afterwards.

This, of course, was dated from the 16th. Sorry for the lazyness on my part.

Have fun!

Windows and Linux: Two journeys in opposite directions

2006-12-03T18:52:00.000-08:00

Thought of the day:

Everyone banters on about Windows and Linux (x 300?) and how the two are "competing" over the desktop computer market.

However, has anyone noticed a trend over the last decade and a half?

Windows, according to the Wikipedia article (Security section), was originally intended, and created (1987), as a single-user PC operating system with little to no need for network capabilities. Today, though, you have Windows in the enterprise server room.

GNU/Linux (1992), on the other hand, was inspired by Unix, an operating system made (1969) specifically for the server room. Today, you have over 250 distributions of GNU/Linux made for the desktop PC (not to mention that Apple now uses a Unix-like operating system for both its desktop and server computers).

So think about it: Windows started out as a desktop OS, but has evolved into a server OS, while GNU/Linux was made to be compatible with a proprietary server OS, but has now evolved into a desktop OS.

So I'm wondering: will GNU/Linux end its evolution (often referred to as "reinventing the wheel") once it gets to the exact same position of usage as the first Windows? Or, better yet, the Amiga, Macintosh, or Atari ST systems?

And will that be the day when the PC makers of the First World, such as Lenovo or HP, decide that "Hey! We could create our own tailor-made operating system for our PCs using one of these here....... Leenooks deestroes? I hear they're a hit with the creative crowd!"?

I mean, if Michael Dell could ask Steve Jobs if Mac OS X could be licensed to Dell, then why not imagine GNU/Linux desktop distribution being licensed to run on some high-end setup from VoodooPC?

Just a thought.

Drag-and-Drop, or, The application as a document

2006-12-02T07:24:00.000-08:00

Now, this may not be directly associated with Gobo, but I'm sure that, in that Digg story that I mentioned in the last post, it was brought up more than once.

So, what am I talking about today?

"Drag-and-Drop", and why no one's addressed the lack thereof from the common Linux desktop (at least, as far as a comparison between KDE/GNOME/etc. and Apple's Mac OS X is concerned).

OK, let's say that, in Mac OS X, you've just heard through Digg about a brand-new stick-it-note app just released to Beta (which is free, until it comes out for a full-fledged release; then your PayPal's gonna have to cough up some chunks of change, but OMG! This app is so awesome, and you want to support the developer's hard work!..........But anyway...). So you go to the site of the app, download the dmg/pkg/etc to your hard drive, and then you have 2 options: run the app without installation, or install it by Dragging-and-Dropping the app to the Applications folder.

Meanwhile, in Ubuntu land........

You've just heard about a release of Democracy Player for Ubuntu (among a number of other distro-specific packages, including RPMs for Fedora Core 5 and 6, and a redirect to the Terminal window for both Debian and Gentoo users). Anyway, you're somewhat lucky: you can download the packages right now (wait a minute, is that a plural noun? YES. There's a data package and a player package to download. On Ubuntu, apparently, one can't work without the other being installed.), then you can run "sudo apt-get what-the-hell-ever" in the Terminal. I guess that means that you're less lucky than your Fedora Core equivalents; too bad, so sad.

OK, enough of the examples.

The above is only a piece of my total argument: The user interfaces for GNU/Linux have not mastered the art of Drag-and-Drop.

As the desktop distros will become slimmer, smaller, and more sophisticated for the stereotypical Average Joe, so will (and should) the user interfaces for those distros. And as we've seen with the neverending Beryl video submissions to YouTube, the Average Joe loves to see whatever's on his desktop screen as accessible, "Real-World" objects rather than some esoteric command-line tomfoolery.

He would want to treat the app as an object that he can drag into any folder, be it to blah-folder or the Trash bin. He would also want to know exactly which folder in which he put the app, just as he would with any document.

Wait a minute, I think I've got it!

The app should be a document.

If you open a document, be it a video file or PDF, what do you expect it to do? (Open) And what do you expect it to do it in? (In a specific player or app which can display the document)

Where do you expect to store that document? (In a folder or directory where I can easily find it whenever I need it)

And what do you expect to do with a document once you no longer need it? (Drag it into the Trash bin and Empty the bin when it gets too full)

The same should apply to any application.

Do most applications need to be installed? Not really, especially if said application does not pose a vital role for the overall operating system or its function.

They just need to be opened, used and closed. That's it.

Democracy Player doesn't play a key role in the operation of Ubuntu, neither does an MP3/OGG file. Therefore, they should be treated as if they don't.

They should not have to be **installed**.

Hmm, maybe the folks at Autopackage DO have a point after all.

The Gobo Way: Depends Upon Your Perspective

2006-11-30T05:26:00.000-08:00

Surprise, surprise. James from Project Opus (an Indie music site, of all things) posts his own take on GoboLinux. Even better, his post gets Dugg.

I wonder, concerning the Digg story, is it always the tendency for the mention of GoboLinux to get the masses in a tizzy?

The argument usually goes along these lines:

A: There are reasons why things are the way that they are.

B: No, I don't like the way things are. They're archaic and Neanderthal-ish.

A: Hey, if I wanted Windows, I would know where to look.

B: Windows? Looks far more like Mac OS X to me.

A: Average Joe shouldn't even be looking at his filesystem.

B: Why not? What if something goes wrong with it?

And then it extends into such things as how Apple hid a traditional UNIX directory behind an especially simplified GUI and so on. Well, if Apple was able to do that, then why not Ubuntu, which also aims for the desktop?

But anyway, its good to see that GoboLinux sparks such lively debate. Always tood to know.

Amid the dancing monkeys and Beryl wankings on YouTube...

2006-11-21T04:56:00.000-08:00

Hisham has announced to the Gobo-devel list his intention to remove "CompileProgram" from CVS.

CompileProgram has been considered deprecated for a while now -- all
it does can be done better with MakeRecipe and Compile. I think it's
about time to take it off the Scripts package and remove it from the
documentation as well. I briefly considered turning it into a wrapper
script that calls MakeRecipe and Compile, but I don't think this would
be very useful.

What do you think?

================================

In other news, remember those comments by Microsoft's Steve Ballmer concerning Linux distributions containing Microsoft's "intellectual property"? Well Novell's Hovespian has hit back at both Ballmer's comments and the round-the-clock anti-Novell diatribes that have been Dugg over and over and over again in an open letter.

More from Techworld.

OK, now please tell me that Techworld's titling ("Novell fumes at Ballmer's balls") is kinda....well....off?

And for those who have been waiting on 64-bit Linux for a good (I mean, FOSS is good, but at least *something* that can play Flash video, since Adobe's code monkies can't pull out a 64-bit player even for Windows......sad) Flash player, your wait in line has been cut a few steps short. Gnash, the GNU Flash player project (one of 6 "top priority" goals of the GNU project at present), has just reached second-alpha release stage (0.7.2).

Get it now while its still funky fresh.

EDIT: OMG, they have Gnash for Win32.

I'm stoked.

Recent Gobo Items, and Linux on the PS3

2006-11-12T15:43:00.000-08:00

1) The GoboLinux site is now available in French (thanks to Marc Falzon).

2) Thanks again to Viola Zoltan, GoboLinux has a new Hungarian wiki.

Oh, and while the PS3 was released in Japan over the weekend, Power Developer released the kernel patches and documentation for the much-anticipated Linux-on-PS3 (which was probably much more anticipated than the actual PS3).

However, Sony hasn't released the kboot binaries to enable one to boot a Linux distro on the PS3, at least, not yet (from this thread). They've made a commitment to allowing and enabling other operating systems to boot on the PS3, and TerraSoft Solutions (the folks who first ported Linux to the Old World Macintoshes) has already announced that their upcoming Yellow Dog (5.0) release will run on the PS3.

What makes Linux-on-PS3 so newsworthy is that a new architecture - the PowerPC-based, eight-core Cell architecture - will become the most recent microprocessor to be introduced to a Linux distribution. There are so many architectures to which Linux and BSD distributions have already been ported - from m68k to PA-RISC to s390 - and its always a major event when a GNU/Linux distribution is ported to even the most-seemingly-insignificant processor architecture. Furthermore, considering that the non-IBM-PC-compatible computers of yore (pre-2000) were (and the gaming consoles still are) often manufactured in a way where the hardware and operating system were welded together via the Firmware, and the specifications for the Firmware were kept under lock and key so as to keep the default OS installed. The Amigas from Commodore were like that, the old Macintoshes from Apple were like that (at least until Steve Jobs became the CEO), and, as parenthesized earlier, so are most big-name gaming consoles (hence the wait for Sony to release the Firmware specifications to the public).

Thus, the reason why a port to some brand-new or dirt-old computing architecture is such a hit with the enthusiasts is because there is a feeling of gratification that comes with having "conquered" a new computing architecture, especially if specifications for the Firmware are not open to the public. To these folks, no computing hardware architecture should be locked into a monogamous relationship with just *one*, single, proprietary operating system.

So, even if most people won't even fathom what they could do with Linux on a PS3 (maybe a media center?), more power to the folks who are pursuing this goal.

GoboLinux on Digg!!!!!

2006-11-07T12:57:00.000-08:00

I tried getting GoboLinux onto Digg when 013 came out last week, but it went by unnoticed.

Here's the Digg.

Hungarians are hungry for mo' Gobo! j/k

2006-11-06T22:13:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the efforts of Zoltan Viola (the owner of the Magyar-language GoboLinux forum), Hungarian has been added to the language module for v013+.

Gotta love them Hungarians, man. I don't think the US can get their own President to have the same amount of balls to oh-so-bluntly (even in private) confess that he and his party had lied to the public "morning, noon and night" in order to receive their governing mandate.

I mean yes, the following public rage and disorder in Budapest should've been seen from a mile away, not to mention that they were quite fitting for a commemorative anniversary year in Hungarian history, but damn! That was something else!

(Yes, I'm a history/social science nut.)

Anyway, check the above out if you're interested.

Gobo and major-league Linux

2006-11-05T20:22:00.000-08:00

NOTE: This is a rambling treatise.

Like the lovefest between Israelis and Palestinians, there seems to be an eternally-resounding question which has been asked for the past several years: "is this the year of Desktop Linux?"

For the past two years, Canonical's Ubuntu Linux has been increasingly seen as the answer to such a question. Books on Ubuntu have come out, every release is anticipated with a blog-marketing blitz that sets the servers of Digg, Slashdot, and ZDNet aflame with "fanboy" passions and daydreams of penguin-shaped sugarplums served to order, and "Switch" testimonials (not unlike the Apple commercials of the same name) crop up like corn in Missouri. This, by the way, happens every 6 months or so.

Of course, there are other companies and organizations which contend (and *have* contended) for the title of GNU/Linux's "Killer Distro". Novell with SuSE, Red Hat with Fedora, the list goes on. They all have their own respective, vibrant user communities teeming with support forums, mailing lists, IRC channels, LiveJournal communities, etc.

Now, lagging behind everyone else with their RPMs, Debs, and ebuilds, is a distribution which crops up from time to time in forums for almost every FOSS operating system community - from that of Haiku to that of Gentoo - known as GoboLinux. It's an interesting distribution: one that makes the filesystem and package manager one and the same, one that reorganizes the file system heirarchy into one that is much more human-readable, one distribution of GNU/Linux that stands out from the crowd of cookie-cutter distros which feature on the front page of Distrowatch.

It doesn't have a forum (well, it did until recently), doesn't have any O'Reilly "Gobo Hacks" books, doesn't have a PR department or legal team on standby, doesn't have any Gobo-centric blogs (except for this one. Trust me, this is a personal work of the heart for which I'm not being paid), and I don't think there have been any Digg stories on a new release for GoboLinux (yes, I've searched through Digg's archives top-to-bottom). None of these lackings take away from the quality of the system, though.

Who has GoboLinux attracted? To whom is GoboLinux suggested regularly?

The people who are tired of the conformity to which most Linux distributions adhere: the same package managers, the same file system names, the same esotericism that verifies or reinforces the stereotypes about Linux distributions.
Those who may want a system which reminds them of the ease of application installation which they may have encountered whenever they used a Mac.
Those who just want to be a little adventurous. :-)

It's not all that complicated of a system. Not really a system for so-called "n00bs", but its got the basics for a very useable, very understandable system.

It doesn't profess itself as a "desktop Linux", but its not all that bad on the desktop with KDE (I'd wonder what it would look like with GNOME, though). Plus - gracias a dios! - you can forget about configuring that xorg.conf to unlock your screen resolution from 800x600 with Gobo: automatic detection by the LiveCD from the getgo!

It's a young distribution that has alot ahead for it in terms of application, usage, and portability. In alot of ways, its like Gentoo, a wildly popular distribution that preceded Gobo's development by a few years, but which also emphasizes scalability, portability, and modularity by self-compilation of applications from source code (known as "Portage").

So will Gobo ever be a major-league distro? Dunno.

I guess there's more to the "killer distro" equation than just what's been mentioned above. Maybe it needs to be pushed with excessive marketing (anyone's seen that HeadOn commercial that's been playing nonstop on TV for the past year or so? Yes! "GoboLinux! Run directly from the LiveCD!" times 3).

Or maybe there's that proverb that could be applied to GoboLinux's position: "Never make an OS that you can't lift."

Hey, maybe there's no such thing as a killer distro, and all that we've been hearing about the penguin stomping a hole in Bill Gates' face and smashing Windows is all a bunch of hooplah that's been virally generated by an overactive (non-profit) press?

..................

Nah, Gobo doesn't need any of that.

It just needs to work.

Finally!

2006-11-03T03:03:00.000-08:00

GoboLinux 013 is out and about, people.

Here are some release notes and an iso download, if you want.

Thanks to the developers and user community. Hopefully, we'll see some screenshots posted to the site's gallery or to OSDir soon.

013rc3 is out

2006-10-29T20:36:00.000-08:00

....And its up at the downloads page.

On a related note, does anyone remember Maxxus and the OSx86 craze from earlier in the year, and then how Apple had refused to release the source code for the Darwin kernel on i386? Of course you did.

Well, despite Apple having put an intricate legal padlock on the source code for Mac OS X on x86 after v.10.4.4, someone (we don't know who) was apparently able to re-extract the source code for 10.4.8 and even make it available as a DVD image!

Digg is obviously knee deep in tech-speak right now as everyone's trying to grab a bit of that torrent (haha! get it?! oh......nevermind). Well, that, then maybe wait until an SS2 extension is made available (this DVD is primarily for SS3; you can find out exactly which either one you are by Googling "CPU-Z"), then burn it to DVD, and throw caution to the wind. You know the deal.

The Digg story.

OK, scratch that last post...

2006-10-24T20:18:00.000-07:00

rc2 will not be the final release candidate, as announced on the gobolinux-devel list by Hisham tonight. Instead, an rc3 LiveCD will be written and released by Andre on Sunday, October 29.

A few bugs related to Compile will be fixed, but the developers are aiming to change as little to the contents between the second and third RCs as possible, so no package upgrades will be included. One new utility will be included (Mdadm, for CD compatibility improvement), but it is planned to have as little interaction with the other packages as possible.

The announcement.

Another RC for Gobo 013 released yesterday.

2006-10-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

New to this latest development: Fixes being done on a few packages, particularly Firefox, Pinto, TeTex, and Udev. Bugs can be sent to the new bug tracker.

Unless another round of bugs are discovered, this may be marked as a final for 013 by Thursday.

Meanwhile, Mozilla has also marked their own RC2 as final, and is expected to officially release Firefox 2.0 on Wednesday.

And that's your Four-Day Open-Source Forecast! I'm Rayne Van-Dunem. ;-)

New forum for Hungarian Gobo users

2006-10-19T09:26:00.000-07:00

Check it out!

"My Dream Operating System" @ OSNews

2006-10-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

Decent article by Michael Reed at OSNews.com

Among the suggestions in the replies to this article include AmigaOS/AROS, BeOS/Haiku, Plan9, PC-BSD, and, of course, Gobolinux. :-D

Bugzilla is up

2006-10-18T19:36:00.000-07:00

Need to report a bug? Want to suggest a feature?

Now's your chance.

Firefox or Iceweasel?

2006-10-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

Andre brings it up.

Iceweasel on Wikipedia

GoboLinux 013rc1 is out!

2006-10-15T18:58:00.000-07:00

Yes, it most certainly is.

The next and final RC will be made available next week. Then its time to *partay*!

Oh, and if you're on Orkut, Gobolinux has communities on there:

in English

em Portuguesa

GoboBlog Intro Post

2006-10-15T17:48:00.000-07:00

Hi, and welcome to the Gobolinux Blog. This will be a weekly blog on the development and progress of Gobolinux, a Linux distribution that is different from other distributions in that "the file system is the package manager". It does away with the traditional Unix file system heirarchy (although it maintains links with it for sake of compatibility and application portability), instead opting for a simplified, human-readable file system that some have compared to the likes of such operating systems as Apple's Mac OS X, BeOS, and AtheOS. Furthermore, the package management has been likened to that of Gentoo, a Linux distribution that aims for flexibility and customization by package compilation from source (hence, being known as the first major "metadistribution").

However, it wouldn't have made a dent in the world of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) if it wasn't for head developer Hisham (LodeRunner) Muhammad's 2003 paper "The Unix Tree Rethought". It was greeted with both welcome and controversy by commenters on Linux.com, Slashdot, and Kuro5hin, rangeing from sheer applause and chants for the downfall of the oldened heirarchy to damning shouts of criticism and blasphemy against the time-tested laws of Unix. Of course, the pervasive rancor eventually died down, and shifted to other, more "important" things (at the time of writing, the subjects of such rancor are copyright/trademark issues between Mozilla and Debian and the forking of Beryl from Compiz). However, Gobolinux has plodded along in its development and growth with new packages and recipes being made available periodically, and is now preparing for its most recent release, 013.

Just yesterday, the Gobolinux website was redesigned in preparation for the release, and just tonight, RC1 of Gobolinux 013 was made available for release.

On a personal note, let me add that I've tried this distro on LiveCD, and it works *very* well, from what I've seen. It was the first Linux distro that didn't restrict my screen resolution to 640x480 (unlike Ubuntu and SuSE, among others), and I would've installed it if it wasn't for the fact that the LiveCD had been burned incompletely (mental note: need *Nero*).

So anyway, I will continue to update this blog, hopefully on a weekly basis. I'll keep you posted.....