Jonesieblog

My feeling is that the Eee PC needs a touch screen to be the perfect 1-1 device. The chat online is that this is coming soon, for very little extra money, so I’ve been exploring how we migh use it, with the help of my wee Volito graphics tablet.

I installed the excellent open source xournal and plugged in the tablet. The Eee recognised the tablet immediately, and I rattled off a quick quadratic equation. Xournal can export to pdf, so you can see that here or just look at the screenshot (click on the screenshot for full size image):

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Dell have apparently always claimed that there is “no customer demand” for Linux to be pre-installed on their machines.

It’ll be hard for them to claim that now:

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/19/2212213 

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FUD - Fear Uncertainty and Doubt - was a term initially coined to describe the practices of IBM, but has over recent years been applied almost exclusively to the way that Microsoft attempts to undermine its competitors, and in particular the Linux operating system.

Rather than making verifiable claims that can be challenged, Microsoft executives make vague statements that imply things without exactly spelling them out.  We had a classic example of this today, when Steve Ballmer said:

In a sense you could say anybody who has got Linux in their data center today sort of has an undisclosed balance sheet liability, because it’s not just Microsoft patents. Because of the way open-source works, there’s nobody who’s been able to do patent coverage or patent indemnification behind that.

Now Steve Ballmer is clearly impying that Linux infringes Microsoft patents.  So why hasn’t Microsoft ever said which patents exactly are being infringed?  Perhaps because Linux doesn’t actual infringe any Microsoft patents?  Or because so many Microsoft patents are clearly unenforceable, given the prior art that the patent offices seemed not to notice in issuing the patents?

Read the full article here, and get a potted history of anti-Linux FUD here.

For more background on what a nice company Microsoft is, check out the Wikipedia entry on Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

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I’ve just spent a while trying to figure out why my cron job was throwing this error. Here’s the problem:

I had something like this in my user crontab:

1 4 * * * root command.sh

This is doomed, for several reasons. Firstly, it doesn’t make sense for a user to be able to run something as root without “sudo”. If that were possible, it would totally compromise root! Secondly, user cron jobs don’t have the “user” element in their syntax. So cron is trying to run the command “root” rather than running something as root.

The answer is to su then put the quoted crontab line into root’s crontab.

Job done Obvious once I took the time to think about it.

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