First Post^M^M^M^M GPLv3 Relicense

To celebrate today’s release of the GPLv3, I’ve released updates of my two ODP-related programs, dumpcheck and odp2db under the GPLv3 license.

GPLv2 – Where the future begins tomorrow

My one complaint about the new license is the changed wording in the How-To section. The GPLv2 How-To section had a neat Thomas Pynchon / Buckaroo Banzai reference to Yoyodyne in the example copyright disclaimer. The GPLv3 How-To section drops the example disclaimer altogether. They also removed the reference to version 69 of the Gnomovision program in the example interactive mode copyright. Whatever happened to Gnomovision anyway?

Fedora 7 on my Dell Laptop

I updated my Dell Inspiron 8600 to Fedora 7. I debated about switching to Ubuntu this time around but a number of developments made me stick with Fedora. One particular issue for me is my laptop’s nVidia card. Ubuntu appears to be using proprietary nVidia drivers while Fedora is strongly supporting free drivers like nv and nouveau. Unfortunately nv was rather buggy and very slow on Fedora Core 5. It frequently crashed. It didn’t support any 3D acceleration. The best glxgears rate I ever got with it was 130 fps. The good news is that with the new version of nv and X.Org on Fedora 7, nv is completely stable so far. Even though there is still no 3D acceleration support, performance is twice what it was on Fedora Core 5. Glxgears reports over 300 fps and everything seems significantly faster. I don’t know if this is due to nv or X.Org improvements. Better still, the Fedora folks are working to get the nouveau driver in as soon as possible, which will bring free, 3D acceleration for nVidia hardware.

The install went smoothly and everything worked right out of the box; even things that required a lot of custom setup in the previous version like sound, 1920×1200 LCD resolution, and WiFi. Even suspend works. The only customization I needed was to turn on NetworkManager.

Which leads me to my one gripe so far. With both WiFi and Ethernet, odds are good that only one will be able to connect at startup. For some reason Fedora considers this a startup error and switches out of the nice GUI startup mode into the old-timey text-mode startup about half through the bootup. If it’s plugged into Ethernet, the WiFi usually isn’t needed and doesn’t connect. Fedora thinks this is an error. If I’m using WiFi, the Ethernet cable usually isn’t plugged in. Fedora sees this as an error too. Why not just assume that neither is an error condtion, stay in GUI mode, and let NetworkManager sort out which network connection to use after everything is loaded?

Anyway, I’m very happy with Fedora 7 on my laptop overall.