Friday, March 7, 2003

Urpmi Revisited -- 8:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

urpmi is a handy tool in Mandrake that adds apt-get functionality to rpm (in other words, it takes care of rpm dependencies automagically). The problem is that right around Christmas an updated package from Mandrake managed to mangle my urpmi settings. Tonight, I finally got it fixed.

First, I typed urpmi.removemedia -a to remove all the media sources. I also had to delete one by hand that was still in /var/lib/urpmi. After that I mounted the each of the three Mandrake installation discs in order and issued these commands:

urpmi.addmedia Disc1 removable://mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS/
urpmi.addmedia Disc2 removable://mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS2/
urpmi.addmedia Disc3 removable://mnt/cdrom/Mandrake/RPMS3/

After that I visited the Penguin Liberation Front site and used that page to add the information for the Mandrake contrib and plf packages.

Once I was through with that, it actually worked! It prompted me with whatever disc needed to be inserted and took care of mounting or unmounting the drive. Very nice. Hopefully they won't break it again :)

GTA For Free! -- 5:10 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Rockstar Games is now offering the original Grand Theft Auto as a free download. You do have to fill out a form for a download link. It's a 328M download. The page is very slow loading, but my download is going at a relatively decent speed. Thanks Blue's News.

Perens on the SCO Suit -- 3:37 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Bruce Perens has given his two cents on the SCO suit on Slashdot. Basically he feels that there is no way this suit will fly. In fact, he thinks that there are other motives involved:

So, I think the claims I've heard are specious, and not enforcible in court. Why, then, is SCO doing this? They want to be purchased. This is the exit strategy for their investors, Canopy Group. IBM can buy them just to shut them up. Or Microsoft can buy them to use them to FUD Linux. And Canopy Group management figures they'll play the two against each other to drive up the price. But IBM management is smart enough to poison this particular well, by bringing counter-claims against SCO.

This wouldn't surprise me in the least. It probably would cost IBM less to buy SCO outright than to fight the suit.

MS To Buy Bioware? Apparently Not. -- 3:35 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Computer and Video Games is reporting that Microsoft is in the process of buying Bioware, the makers of the Baldur's Gate games as well as Neverwinter Nights. I hope this is not what has been delaying the NWN Linux client . . . Thanks go out to Sir-Tez for the tip.

UPDATE! Bioware Communications Associate (P.R. Guy?) made this post on the NWN forums basically ending this rumor with a rather terse reply:

Microsoft is not buying BioWare.

Here's to hoping that's true.

Flash Player Flaw -- 11:01 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

CNN is reporting that there is a serious flaw in Macromedia's Flash player, potentially resulting in everyone's favorite exploit: a buffer overflow. Rah! Macromedia has a new version available and they are encouraging everyone to upgrade. Thanks Blue.

Thursday, March 6, 2003

SCO Sues IBM For $1 Billion -- 10:41 pm CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Well, the other shoe has dropped. SCO has filed suit against IBM, claiming that Big Blue has dumped Unix intellectual property into Linux. One analyst pretty much hit it on the head:

"It's a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company," said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst. "Really what beat SCO is not any problem with what IBM did; it's what the market decided. This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can't get by winning in the marketplace."

From the "unintentional comedy" file: I don't think IBM has much to fear, judging from the track record of SCO's legal counsel.

Representing SCO is David Boeis of Boeis, Schiller and Flexner, the attorney who prosecuted the U.S. Justice Department's antitrust case against Microsoft and represented Al Gore in the vote-counting controversy in the presidential election.

Granted, IBM has the cash to fork over, but the danger for SCO is that they also have the cash to fight this forever and drive SCO into bankruptcy. Funny, people liked to call Red Hat the next Microsoft. Looks like it really was SCO/Caldera. Thanks Slashdot.

<editorializing> You know, it's stories like this that remind me of just how full Hell is going to be. </editorializing>

UPDATE! here is some updated information on the suit:

• The Register gives some background information on SCO, IBM, and the suit.
• Eric S. Raymond condemns the suit as a "strike at the heart of our [open source] community".
• You can view the complete text of the lawsuit here.

Thanks go out to Linux Today for those three links.

J.t.Qbe comments: Not a surprising move by SCO--there were rumblings about this a few months ago, though there wasn't any indication whom they'd be suing. I should've figured they'd go for the big payoff. It's also not surprising given SCO's immense lack of market share. SCO's out for a payoff: they're either going for one last cash grab for the stockholders and execs, or else they're looking for someone to pay to shut them up.

Personally, I don't know that they really have the basis to win this. We'll have to see how it goes.

Mozilla Cache Fix -- 11:28 am CST, Update by A.T. Hun

Apparently by fiddling around with so many Mozilla builds, I messed up my disk cache to the point where Mozilla would write stuff to it but be incapable of reading back from it. I dove into my .mozilla profile and nuked the Cache directory altogether. Once Mozilla restarted, the directory was recreated and everything was fine again. Clearing the cache in Mozilla wouldn't do it; I had to delete the directory.

Past Two Days' News

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