This week sees David Hayward frowning at
Linus Torvalds, cheering at NVidia and enjoying a plentiful helping of Wine.
David Hayward has been using Linux since
Red Hat 2.0 in schools, businesses and at home, which either makes him very knowledgeable
or a glutton for extreme punishment.
Linux
- Harsh words
‘Kill yourself now’
Before you write in and complain, break out
the tar and feathers or begin to roll up your shirt sleeves, I wasn’t referring
to your good selves; I was merely quoting old Linus earlier this week. He was
directing the comment to the developer of OpenSUSE, which has seen it fit to
require a root level administration password for minor level operations within
the OS, such as adding a new wireless network, or changing the time-zone.
Apparently, his daughter ran into these
kinds of issues when at school, so Linus being, well… Linus, decided that it
was time to get on to Google+ and call the developer ‘mentally diseased’ for
its security measures. He didn’t stop there either, saying, ‘If you have
anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace “my
kids” with “sales people on the road” if you think your main customers are
businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or
to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings,
please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place.’
Now, we all get a little riled, ad a little
passionate about a subject once in a while, but to say ‘kill yourself’ to
someone is just pushing the line a little too far we think and so to did the
hundreds of comments that followed. Although they generally agreed with Linus’s
stance on the overly secure aspect of OpenSUSE, many had mixed feeling
regarding the actual wording of the rant.
Linus’s response to the comment and the
rant went as follows: ‘I could write another rant on the whole American “I take
offense with that” mentality. It’s political correctness of the worst kind, as
far as I’m concerned. Jokes are often offensive. If you get offended, the
problem is solidly at your end. Think about it for a while.’
Whether or not you agree with Linus’s
choice of words, you have to admit that whenever he opens his mouth, you can be
guaranteed there’ll be something to print in Linux News.
Welcome NVidia
NVidia has eventually decided to come into
the fold, and accept the brotherhood of that which is the Linux Foundation.
This of course now means that the foundation has some rather big names and key
players providing backing, along with AMD and Intel, which could bear some
tasty fruit in the future.
However, this doesn’t mean that NVidia will
pull its socks up with regards to the latest graphics drivers in Linux, but it
does mean that the shape of Linux will contain the best elements from the
hardware directors of the computing world.
Welcome
NVidia
A sweet glass of wine
WineHQ has just announced version 1.4 of
its Windows application compatibility layer for Linux. Yippee. The first stable
release in nearly two years, Wine 1.4 boasts a phenomenal 16,000 plus changes
to the code. Better graphics performance, more fonts, and support for .NET and
DirectX coding mean that more applications will have a chance of running under
Wine in Linux than ever before.
The release is dedicated to the memory of
Gé (Greg) van Geldorp, who sadly passed away early last year. Through his
designs, Wine has gone from strength to strength, and as this new version is
testament to that, showing Wine is far from being over.
As I’ve always said to other Linux users,
an ample helping of Wine is good for you. Until next week, folks.
A
sweet glass of wine
