How to annoy RedHat’s Legal Department

Posted on 18 July, 2005 by steevithak

Interesting Trademark news today. I’ve been trying out CentOS 4.1 on one of our production servers as a possible replacement for Red Hat Linux. CentOS is a compiled from Red Hat Enterprise source RPMs, patched to remove any Red Hat logos. I ran into some problems with CentOS related to selinux and posted an email to the selinux mailing asking about it. Someone from Red Hat answered my question and helped me out. In my email I said, “I’m running a CentOS 4.1 (Red Hat EL) box with an Apache…” Today, I got this email from Red Hat regarding my post on the selinux mailing list:

From: Trademark Enforcement, tme@redhat.com

Dear Mr. Rainwater:
Red Hat appreciates your interest in supporting and providing open
source technology. We recently became aware of your email below in
which you state that CentOS 4.1=Red Hat. Of course this is not true
since CentOS does not provide the stability, security and manageability
that Red Hat provides, CentOS is not equal to Red Hat. Red Hat would
appreciate in the future that you please refrain from equating CentOS to
Red Hat.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation and your support in open
source technology.

Sincerely,
Red Hat, Inc.

It then quoted the body of my post to the selinux mailing list. Weird. I guess I need to be careful to say CentOS 4.1 is compiled from the same source as Red Hat Enterprise Linux instead of saying it’s “the same as” Red Hat Enterprise linux. I’m curious if there are any real legal implications to this? Can I get into legal trouble for saying “kleenex” instead of “facial tissue” in an email when refering to a brand that doesn’t use the Kleenex trademark? Isn’t this the same thing? I’m even more curious about the really weird sentence structure used in the third sentence of their email. Somehow I think they meant that to be two sentences.

Apparently, the CentOS folks heard from Red Hat’s legal department earlier this year.

Linux on the Dell Inspiron 8600

Posted on 21 February, 2005 by steevithak

Since I last posted about this, I’ve received my new hard drive and now have Fedora Linux installed on the notebook. A suprising number of things actually worked right out of the box. I’ve been slowly getting the other bits and pieces of hardware working as I have time. This process has been made easier by others who have already documented the process. One of the best sources of info is the Fedora on a Dell website.

As it turned out, the driver for the NVidia GeForce is included with Fedora and the display worked at least in a low resolution mode immediately. With some minor tweaking, it is now working at the full 1920 x 1200 resolution. The missing piece of the puzzle was the lack of a monitor type for the Dell LCD 1920 x 1200 display. This looks like it would be trivial to patch but I can’t tell yet if the thing needing the patch is X or the display configuration program in Gnome. If anyone knows, please email me, I’d happily submit a patch so this worked for the next person who tries it. There is apparently also a non-free, binary-only driver for the NVidia that is a bit faster but I don’t plan on using the video for anything important enough to make it worth switching to a proprietary driver. I’m quite happy with the nv driver.

The sound hardware and ethernet hardware worked with no changes needed at all. The battery monitor and CPU speed controls also worked without needing to do anything special. The CD/DVD hardware worked as well, though I needed to download some extra packages in order to view movies on DVD. Intel offers a GPL’d 2200 BG WiFi driver (though the firmware itself is still proprietary). It seems to work fine with the exception of monitor mode which apparently isn’t quite functional yet. I also added the latest version of Network Manager so I can switch seamlessly between wired and wireless connections. It’s working very well too so far.

So what’s left to tinker with? I’d like to get gi8k set up so I can monitor fan speed and CPU temperature. Also, I haven’t had time to get the suspend to RAM or disk functions working yet, so I have to manually shut down before closing the notebook. And finally I picked up a little USB to serial adapter at Frys, the BAFO BF-810, because I frequently have to interface with microcontrollers that use a serial port (the 8600 doesn’t have any old-style serial ports). I’m hoping it will work without any special tweaking but you never know. Overall, I’m quite happy so far with how well my Dell Inspiron 8600 is working with Linux.

Dell Laptop Saga: Part 2

Posted on 26 January, 2005 by steevithak

My Dell Inspiron 8600 finally arrived, no thanks to Dell customer service. When it failed to show up on time and UPS couldn’t find any record of it, Dell concluded that it had been lost internally prior to the handoff to UPS. Customer service claimed they would have to cancel my order and create a replacement order. But a few days later the package showed up. It turned out UPS had it all along but, for some reason, it wasn’t showing up in their online tracking system. Despite promising to call me back several times, Dell customer service hasn’t called to let me know what’s up with the alleged replacement order. Will I end up with a second Inspiron? I doubt it. Dell’s online status doesn’t show any sign that customer service ever did anything.

I also picked up one of those really fast Hitachi/IBM Travelstar 7200RPM drives on eBay to replace the slow one in the Inspiron. I’ll keep Windows XP on the Dell drive and swap it back into the notebook if it needs to be serviced. But the real drive will have Linux on it. Anyway, the brilliant eBay seller put the fragile little notebook hardrive into a USPS priority envelope with no packing, no anti-static bag, nothing; just the bare drive in a paper envelope. Guess what? The drive was DOA. Hmmm… I wonder why that could be? The good news is that it was a new drive and still under a 3 year warranty. Hitachi agreed to replace it at no charge and I shipped it off to the factory (in an antistatic bag and several layers of bubble wrap).

It’ll be worth all the trouble to have a fast laptop running Linux. And the widescreen on the Inspiron looks great.

Dell Laptop Saga: Part 1

Posted on 13 January, 2005 by steevithak

My ancient IBM Thinkpad 750C (a 486 CPU and tiny little 10″ LCD) is finally going to be retired. I wanted something reasonably fast with a widescreen that would run Linux. If money were no object I would’ve opted for one of the G4 PowerBooks with 15.4″ screen. Unfortunately, they cost way too much. So I ended up ordering a Dell Inspiron 8600. It’s not as cool looking as the PowerBook but was about half the price and has a higher resolution 15.4″ screen (WUXGA 1920 x 1200, at 13.56″ x 8.76″ that’s 140 dpi). After doing some research, I was able to spec a combination of parts that others have reported to work pretty well with Linux.

What I’ve found so far is that Dell’s service has continued to deteriorate. They used to have first class tech support until they outsourced it all to sweatshops in India. We’ve bought servers from them for years and they were always high-quality products. So I thought I’d take a chance on them for a notebook. But, looking around on the web, there seems to be general agreement that Dell customer service sucks. I’m hoping I’ll never need their customer service but things aren’t off to a promising start.

After placing an order, Dell’s website reports order status. In my case it said my notebook had been shipped on Jan 10 and provided a UPS tracking number. The UPS status webpage showed they had recieved paperwork for the package but not the package itself. After three days with no change in status, I called Dell customer service and spoke at length with someone for whom English seemed to be a second language. Dell said they handed the package off to UPS but UPS claims they never got it. I’m not entirely sure what happened after that but as best I could understand from the broken English of the customer support person, Dell has cancelled the lost order and issued a second order for a replacement notebook to be built and shipped. Who knows – maybe in another week or so I’ll have my new notebook.

Anyway, I’m still hopeful everything will work out alright. I’ll probably install either Ubuntu or Fedora when it arrives. I wasn’t able to order a notebook with no OS (which is odd because we do it all the time when we order servers from Dell). I may investigate getting a refund for the Windows XP Home license but I don’t hold out a lot of hope for that. I think I may remove and store the hard drive shipped in the notebook and install a new one to put Linux on. That way, I can swap back in the factory installed OS if I ever need to get it serviced by Dell.

Kenneth Brown and the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution

Posted on 19 May, 2004 by steevithak

I’m sure everyone is aware by now that Kenneth Brown, and the other dim-wit lackeys of Microsoft at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution have published a book claiming that Linus didn’t write the original Linux kernel. We’ve come to expect poorly researched, badly reasoned crap from the pen of Ken Brown, but this isn’t even up to Brown’s usual poor quality. Perhaps AdTI should go back to writing bogus pro-smoking FUD for the tobacco companies.

Glowing Lizards and Libertarians

Posted on 5 May, 2004 by steevithak

I ran across another odd eBay action: One dozen lizards that glow in the dark. Everyone loves glowing lizards. They’re educational and fun! But be careful – no tech support is provided. I wonder if these are anything like the stink lizards from Futurama?

Since I stumbled across the site meetup.com a while back and signed up for a few meetups. So far most have been cancelled due to less than five particpants. Two have actually happened but weren’t anything like I’d expected.

Last night was the second of the two; the Linux meetup. I had skipped the weekly DPRG get together to attend. I showed up and thought I was going to be the only person there for a while but after a half hour or so three other people showed up. Nobody had been to a linux meetup before and after introducing ourselves and agreeing that Linux was generally a good thing we were all at a bit of a loss as to the point of the meeting. I suggested that next time the North Texas Linux Users Group might be a better choice since they general have some sort of a plan for what goes on at their meetings. There was one suggestion that we play blackjack and one guy wanted to talk about video games. Fortunately another DPRG member showed up and brought along some robot hardware we’d been working on. We got the usual, “Robots? You mean like that battlebots show?”. We patiently explained that the “robots” on Robot Wars and Battlebots were just mechanical props (albeit very clever and expensive ones) being operated by remote control from off-camera and not real robots. We talked a bit about the applications of Linux for autonomous robotics so I guess it wasn’t a total wash-out as far as being a Linux meeting.

The first meetup, a week or so ago, was a Libertarian party meetup. A total of four people showed up. Three of them (including myself) were just curious and not actually members of the Libertarian party. The one person who claimed she was an actual libertarian said real libertarians would never join a political party, libertarian or otherwise. At some point in the past I vaguely identified libertarians with Robert Heinlein. I’m not sure where I got this idea but it seems entirely incorrect. After looking at the libertarian’s official platform and talking to the folks at the meetup, I’ve concluded they’re distinguisable from anarchists only by a slight Ann Randian self-importance and seeming lack of empathy for others. Ironically the one Heinlein idea that most resembles Libertarian ideals is Coventry.

Maybe the Dumpster diving or Zippy the Pinhead meetups will be more interesting. Hmmm…