Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Dear Lazyweb,

how the .... am I supposed to tell GNOME to use or not use an HTTP proxy for specific applications?

Sample scenario:

• I want to use an HTTP proxy in Galeon (for anonymous browsing via Tor + Privoxy).
• I do not want to use an HTTP proxy in Epiphany (normal non-torified browsing).
• I do not want to use an HTTP proxy in Rhythmbox either. No need to tunnel all the Creative Commons podcasts and music I listen to through Tor.

Now guess what happens when I disable the HTTP proxy in Epiphany. It's disabled in Galeon, too. Enable it in Galeon, and Rhythmbox will use the proxy (thus slowing down huge downloads for no reason). Aargh.

Is it really so hard to have per-application settings? I mean, this isn't exactly rocket-science, right?

And yes, I do want to use all those applications at the same time. And no, I do not run a full GNOME desktop environment (I use IceWM, thanks), so I don't care about any GNOME-Desktop-Foo solutions — I just want each of those freaking applications to have their own settings.

Suppose you want to try out Xen for the first time, and you're a bit paranoid careful because, well, you don't want to break your system. No problem, just download the Xen 3.0 Demo CD Image (a live CD). Or so I thought; it took me a loong time to even find a download link for that beast. There seems to be no ISO image for 3.0.4, but only for 3.0.3 (gah!).

Anyways, the live CD seems to try to mount /dev/sda as my CDROM drive, which is... um... stupid, as that's a harddrive. A SATA harddrive to be more specific. A dm-crypt'ed hard drive to be even more specific. So there's no way the live CD can ever mount that. I was dropped into a minimalist shell, but couldn't figure out how to fix anything from there, and a quick look at the docs didn't reveal anything either.

So here's my fix:

• Boot the normal OS, insert the live CD.
• Start the live CD in QEMU: qemu -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d
• Done. I had some problems with graphics in QEMU, so I chose the command line boot option of the live CD...

Nice huh? QEMU's hard drive is an IDE drive, it's called /dev/hda (instead of /dev/sda), thus the live CD works fine.

(Yes, I'm sure this could be fixed "the right way" too, but this is a nice way to get quick results, i.e. a working Xen test setup)

Yet another Unmaintained Free Software update:

Thanks to Matthias (again), we now have a wonderful new main page in the wiki, which looks a lot better than the old one which I had created a long time ago...

The nice icons were created by David Vignoni for the Nuvola icon theme for KDE 3.x. They're available under terms of the GNU LGPL.

Many other things in the wiki are currently undergoing a long-overdue update and fixing phase. I plan to upgrade the MediaWiki installation we're using, and some new MediaWiki extensions will be added, too.

Oh, and I created and installed a nice favicon for the site, based on the project logo. If you ever wondered how those things are created, here's one possibility:

1. Create two PNG images, one 16x16, one 32x32 pixels.
2. apt-get install icoutils
3. icotool -c foo16x16.png foo32x32.png > favicon.ico
4. Place the resulting favicon.ico file in your DocumentRoot. Done.

I'm sure there are other and better ways to do it, but this was the first I came up with after a quick apt-cache search favicon.

A nice recent example of the benefits of open-sourcing software is Second Life, the well-known online virtual world. The Second Life client was released under the terms of the GNU GPL (version 2) roughly two weeks ago.

Since then a lot of community activity has been observed:

• A Solaris x64 port.
• A PowerPC port.
• A Mandriva package.
• A Debian package is in the works.
• Initial build notes for Ubuntu are available.
• OpenSL, an independant project not affiliated with Linden Labs, has been formed (I'm not sure what their exact goals are, though).
• Felix von Leitner (fefe) has done a cursory code audit and identified several potential security issues, which have also been reported on the Second Life development mailing list (I don't know whether they have already been fixed).
• Susan Wu mentions lots of other potential benefits of open-sourcing the client.

Most of these things (and others I might have forgotten) would certainly not have happened with the closed-source client anytime soon...

Is this just me or do we see a highly increased rate of (important and interesting) stuff being released (or announced to be released soon) under the terms of the GPL lately?

A few examples:

• VirtualBox — a VMware-like virtualisation solution
• Second Life — the client for now, but the server software might follow
• Fortress — Sun's Fortran replacement
• OpenSolaris — scheduled to be released under the GPLv3
• Java — this might have a huge impact...
• Sun UltraSPARC T1 — a complete, modern CPU

This is a great trend and good news for all of us. A special thanks to Sun for releasing more and more stuff under free licenses!