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Computer sales in the pre-Christmas season (starting with the Thanksgiving-weekend) are below expectations. This trend is nothing new, since 2000 this is the main story of tech news agencies before the holidays. New about these whinings is that the notebooks no longer get the blame.

Even without having hard facts such as sale figures, this is a very foreseeable development. For average consumers, computing power no longer justifies replacing the current hardware. The focus has shifted towards energy consumption, noise and other secondary selling points, fields where notebooks have been historically strong.

But this year, something changed. Starting with game-consoles and dvd-players, gadgets took over the living-rooms. This has been watched with envy by the IT industry and they demanded their share of it.
So the “personal entertainment centre” was put together (in great haste) and advertised as the ultimate electronic device for your living-room. This experiment failed. The devices lacked usability, where loud and the issue of how to get content onto (or out of them) was not addressed.
As a result, the gadgets not only kept their market share but by broadening their appeal with producing slim streaming boxes, further lowered the sale rate of classical computers.

To sum things up, it has been a bad year for the boxes under your table, but it could have been worse. The key areas are still not lost, such as gamers (you simply can not put a high-end graphic-card with an high-end processor and an ultra-fast monitor into a notebook) or businesses. The next enemies are at the gates though: thin clients as a replacement for your day-to-day work (text, e-mail, internet).

Let’s see, what next Christmas will bring!

Today’s blog is going to state something obvious, but I would like to emphasize the fascination the power a simple command can give you. I’m talking about ls, the most widely used command on any CLI.

Of course, every senior Unix user should be aware of the huge amount of command line options ls sports, but integrating this power into your day to day usage is somewhat harder.
Here, from the man page, the complete list of possible options:
ls [-ABCFGHLPRTWZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]

The key to mastering all the possible and practical combinations is to arrange them into something easy to memorize. For example, you want to have a detailed listing of all files sorted by time-stamp. The following two lines achieve the same thing, one being somehow easy to memorize (spoken, it sounds like “later”):
ls -latr
ls -trla
And this is already the whole secret: the easier to speak/spell the options, the easier you remember them! Additionally, if it sounds like a word which gives you a hint of the function, you will learn it in no time.

Ken Smith, the release engineer in charge, has today announced the availability of the first release candidate (RC) for FreeBSD 6.2. I’ve already posted about the delays and problems this release faces, but now the worst issues has been fixed and the normal process can go on.

Since this is RC1, there are open issues, though:

• sysinstall doesn’t get the Linux package right
• gnome2 fails to package if installed off the distribution media
• no documentation is included in the distribution media

But this does not affect people upgrading (test)-systems with cvsup.

The announcement can be found on the mailing list archives.

Robert Watson, founder of the TrustedBDS project was interviewed by Federico Biancuzzi on SecurityFocus about FreeBSD Security Event Auditing.

The auditing mechanism will be part of the upcoming release 6.2 of FreeBSD, although being marked as experimental and hence not included into the GENERIC kernel.
It uses SUN’s BSM API and log file format (the industry standard) and is based on Apple’s BSD licensed implementation. Since significant improvements were made during porting, the OpenBSM project was created to host the code. The project builds on Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Linux.

The key advantage the new auditing has above syslog is the finer granularity, configurability and reliability. This is achieved by putting auditing functionality into the kernel and hence being at the level where system calls are transformed into direct instructions.
And the team made a good decision in keeping the configuration syntax as close to SUN’s as possible, giving the new project direct access to an already mature basis of examples and best practices.

Finally, I want to emphasize the impact this has for the FreeBSD project, since having a full blown auditing system is the requirement for any operating system to be used in security aware environments such as defense departments or financial institutions.

Since Novell announced its agreement with Microsoft, it has been under constant attack from the open source community and some of its competitors (see this opinion on linux.org and the article on linux-watch.com).

Most commentators are citing past agreements with Microsoft which have turned bad for the other side; it has been the kiss of death for OS/2 from IBM and the Windows Phone from Sendo. But I don’t think that the future perspective is that dire for Linux in general or Novell in particular.

The main reason for my optimism is the nature of the deal. Neither is Microsoft embracing Linux unanimously, nor is Novell giving away anything serious, as one can see from Novell and Microsoft Agreement FAQ:

• Microsoft will sell (exclusively, at least for the next three years) SuSE Enterprise Linux Systems.
• Novell will not get any sort of secret knowledge from Microsoft in order to improve the interoperability between Linux and Windows.
• Both will cooperate in virtualization, so SuSE will probably become the recommended guest Linux operating system for Microsoft’s virtualization software.
• Novell will not drop out of Mono development.

By the way I wouldn’t give the patent issue such a weight, since none of the parties is interested in an SCO like legal battle.

All in all I think that the whole thing turned out to be a publicity nightmare but not much apart from that.

Google has released a Linux client for Google Earth, its geographic information system.
It combines satellite images from Google Maps, terrain information and a few 3D buildings together with Googles search engine.
While normal use is free (and adding a Linux client made it even more accessible), the company never made a secret of the fact that they want to make money out of it, not just by charging for “pro” versions but also generating revenues from location based advertising, the buzzword of mid 2005.

Apart from the fact that this cool gadget is now available for Linux, I’m pleased to see that Linux (and other Unix) users now have the critical mass to be an advertisement target (not only for geek stuff).

You can download the software here.

In my post official start of the FreeBSD 6.2 release cycle, I’ve reproduced a timetable alongside with the promise to post more informations on the availability of Beta1.

Both failed. Today, Ken Smith announced FreeBSD 6.2-Beta3, whereas RC2 should have been on October 29. And I never posted the changelog.

So here a short summary:

• Beta1 was announced on September 20, the main feature being the last minute include of FreeBSD update, the binary update mechanism.
• Beta2 was announced on October 5. Since not all problems could be solved, a Beta3 was planned.
• Beta3 was necessary because a break in the em(4) driver. Ken Smith looks forward for a RC.

The announcement can be found in the mailing list archive.