random neuron misfires

If you’ve tried installing VMware on a recent Linux distribution (such as Ubuntu Edgy Eft), you’ve probably seen the following:

Using 2.6.x kernel build system.
make: Entering directory `/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only'
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.17-5-686/build/include/.. SUBDIRS=$PWD SRCROOT=$PWD/. modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.17-5-686'
  CC [M]  /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.h:20,
                 from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:49:
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:37:5: warning: "VMW_HAVE_EPOLL" is not defined
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:43:5: warning: "VMW_HAVE_EPOLL" is not defined
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.h:20,
                 from /tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:49:
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/./include/compat_wait.h:60: error: conflicting types for â
include/linux/poll.h:62: error: previous declaration of â was here
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:145: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.c:149: warning: initialization from incompatible pointer type
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only/linux/driver.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.17-5-686'
make: *** [vmmon.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config0/vmmon-only'
Unable to build the vmmon module.

To fix it, follow this procedure (or grab the script I wrote to make it easier, here)..

Uncompress vmnet.tar and edit vmnet-only/Makefile.kernel as follows:

vm_check_build = $(shell if $(CC) $(CPPFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) $(CFLAGS_KERNEL) \
        $(EXTRA_CFLAGS) -Iinclude2/asm/mach-default \
        -DKBUILD_BASENAME=\"$(DRIVER)\" \ # add this line
        -Werror -S -o /dev/null -xc $(1) \
        > /dev/null 2>&1; then echo "$(2)"; else echo "$(3)"; fi)

Do the same for vmmon.tar in vmmon-only. mv the existing tar files out of the way and tar these two directories back up and re-run vmware-install.pl from the top-level directory.

It should complete cleanly and without any errors.

If you’re wondering why I didn’t just supply the 1-line fixes as a diff, its because Ubuntu Edgy Eft broke patch(1), and it doesn’t patch back in cleanly… so I used the Swiss Army Chainsaw; perl!

A couple of years ago, I purchased a Western Digital external combo drive to back up my laptops and a couple of the critical servers here. It was also partitioned for holding the digital images we take with our Minolta DiMAGE 7Hi. It was only a mere 120gb of capacity, but it lasted for quite a long time… but it was time to upgrade it.

The enclosure has two interfaces: usb2.0 and Firewire 400 (1394a). It works great, and has served me well for the couple of years I’ve had it. No complaints at all with it.

I recently went out and bought two Maxtor MaxLine Plus II 250gb drives; one for the main server, and one to replace the 120gb drive in the WD enclosure.

The upgrade of the external enclosure’s drive went pretty smoothly (full details of the disassembly), and recognizing the new drive went smoothly. I proceeded to back up 3 of the servers here to the drive, including making a duplicate copy of what was on the 120gb WD onto this new 250gb drive. I made sure to verify the backups to be sure things were intact. I’ve had a LOT of bad luck with storage and computer peripherals in general, so I was taking no chances.

The other drive went into the main server here, and that wasn’t so easy. I did an rsync of the existing running data to the Maxtor while installed in the primary slave location. So far, so good. I wanted to chroot to that drive’s mountpoint and just re-run lilo to create a working mbr on the slave, but that didn’t work so well.

Ok, second plan: switch the drives, boot the server to KNOPPIX and chroot from there, and run lilo. Nope, of course not. My KNOPPIX disks, which I use almost weekly were all no longer recognized in the CDROM drive in the server. In fact NO cdrom was recognized in that drive. Arg!

So I had to put the original drive back in as slave, switch the bios to allow me to boot to that second drive, and then re-ran lilo from there, which put the right mbr on the master. Whew. A few hiccups with some startup scripts, and I was back in business. The drive is pushing about 1gb/sec. over cache, and 49mb/sec. over disk reads. Not bad at all.

Once I wiped the servers after doing the backup, I stupidly decided to try to defrag the ext partition. It was ext3, so e2defrag barfed on it. I used tune2fs to take off the has_journal and dir_index bits from the drive metadata, and tried again.

This time it got as far as calculating the inode indices, then crashed. Ut oh. I ran e2fsck on the drive, and it segfaulted about 70% into the process. Double-ut-oh! I ran it several times, all segfaulting in the same place. Running it under gdb produced the following barf:

     0xb7fcf45b in ext2fs_unmark_generic_bitmap () from /lib/libext2fs.so.2

Rut-roh! So I decided to yank all of the data off of the backup drive onto other systems with enough free space to hold it, and reformatted it to XFS instead. After restoring the data across, all seems well.

Whew!

“..there are some 2.5 million servers running Linux and that SCO has ‘identified by name’ those companies running many of them.”

“We are in the process of contacting them about coming into compliance and taking a UnixWare license from us. If they refuse to do so, we will sue them directly and see them in court,” he said.

“In a nutshell, this litigation is essentially about the GNU General Public License and all it stands for. That license has not yet been challenged or tested in court, but it is now going to be. We are also firmly and aggressively challenging the notion that Linux is a free operating system,” McBride said.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,3959,1224000,00.asp

Does anybody else think that this charade has gone on long enough?

Where is the proof that any of this IP is actually in the code they claim that these 2.5 million servers are running? Are there really 2.5 million Linux servers running SMP/NUMA/RCU/JFS in the public internet? I’d be very surprised if that figure was true.

Has anyone (or their company) actually received a letter from SCO requesting (demanding?) a license to UnixWare, or face litigation from them? Wouldn’t this constitute mail fraud? If a company sends you a bill, through the United States Postal Service, and that bill cannot be proven to be valid, isn’t that considered fraud? Time to talk to the postmaster and see.

This game has gone on long enough. First it was a contract dispute case against IBM. Then it was an IP case against Linux (the kernel). Then it was an IP case against ANYONE using Linux (the operating system as a whole). Now it’s all about the GPL? There is only one company that spins FUD like this.. and it seems as though they are doing the actual speech-writing for SCO these days.

linux != Linux, and I think SCO and the media need to get straight on those facts.

Prove that my linux kernel is running your intellectual property, and I will remove the infringing code myself, and run it sans your IP. Period. This is how it works. If you can’t prove it, legally or morally, then I’m sorry, I (and everybody else) don’t owe you a damn thing.

My T23 is being shipped back to IBM for the 4th time in less than 35 days. More hard-lockups. Here’s how to cause it to happen:

1. Pull out IDE drive, leaving only laptop + RAM
2. Power up on AC or Battery power
3. Hit F1 to enter BIOS Configuration Screen
4. Select Config->Parallel Port
5. Hit enter on Enable/Disable option
6. Hard-lockup

The same happens on Serial, USB, PCI configuration options, and also happens with or without a drive in the laptop, and with two different sets of SODIMMs.

How many times do I have to send this back to them before I get a 100% functional unit?

DNS Expiring

At the suggestion of rasmus last year, I signed up for EasyDNS and grabbed a 25-domain block. They’ve been nothing short of stellar with their service, both in actively stopping spam coming through their backup MX, and DNS configuration issues.

Now that I haven’t successfully found gainful employment, and the renewal bill came in at $349.00, I can no longer afford to use them. I decided to learn bind, get DNS set up on a master and slave, and found out that EasyDNS doesn’t let me cut them off as my primary nameserver. Not cool, so I went to NSI and tried to change my entries there, and now NSI decides that it doesn’t know who I am.

I have 4 days, lest 18 of my important domains fall off the net.

Beach Assault

The caveman that jumped me at the beach on 6/30 and broke my nose in front of about 200 witnesses has plead guilty in his pre-trial, and has been ordered by the court to pay all of my medical expenses.

Since I don’t have a job, and hence no medical insurance, the broken nose healed before he was ordered to pay. Ideally it’s good to get the nose fixed within 2-3 days after the initial break, or it’s harder to work on. Since that 2-3 days was over the July 4th weekend/holiday, I couldn’t get in to see the ENT. Now it looks like there’ll have to be some very expensive surgery/reconstruction to go in and fix the breathing passageways.

Two attorneys I spoke with both assured me that the civil case is a “slam dunk”, and that the bidding starts at $50k for such an unprovoked brutal attack. Lucky for me just before I got headsmashed by this caveman, I took my sunglasses off, otherwise I’d have lost an eye, and that would have gotten him 20 years in prison and a $20,000 fine in Rhode Island.

pilot-link 0.11.0, 0.11.1, 0.11.2

Three releases of pilot-link in less than a month’s time. It’s good to see lots of contributions, patches, bugs reported. Thanks go out to everyone that has helped.

It definately helps to have good active facilities backing a project. I’ve set up HOWTOs, irc, the mailing lists, a search engine across the past 5 years of pilot-related lists, an active public CVS, and the bugtracker. They’re not as tightly integrated as I’d like them to be right now, but that’s going to change pretty quickly. Many users now are finding solutions to their problems without having to even resort to posting on the lists and irc services.

It’s a healthy metamorphosis from what I’m used to seeing in the newer linux and community contributors. I highly recommend it for those who are managing or maintaining projects that may involve community testers or contributors.

I should be releasing 0.11.2 on Wednesday if nothing else breaks in the meantime. This’ll be the first cut with native USB support for FreeBSD users. I still need people to help port the USB calls over to OSX, Win32 and OS/2, but if nobody steps up, that’ll stagnate for now.

Employment

Status: None, 253 days.

RoUS, VMware is something I know a great deal about, inside and out. I can probably help you.

I’ve gotten many unsupported USB devices working, regularly sync my Palms over USB, Ir, and serial into and out of vmware guest images, and have no problems with NAT or DVD playback.

Hit me up in email and I can help you out. I have some tweaks as well, that you may want to implement, which will speed up the performance of that NT image for you inside the vm.

I have about 12 images I use in vmware on nearly a daily basis (and as I type this, FreeBSD 4.3 is happily compiling gnome inside VMware right now on another window).

I rely on it quite heavily for my cross-platform work, where I need a “soft” box to test in.

Bug Tracking

ishamael, the bug tracking package you seek is called Mantis. I use it quite extensively now on my server, and it works very well. I had to change some of the UI a bit and move some things around, but generally, it’s rock-solid. You can see it in action on one of my bug sites. Another you can look at is called RoundUp, and is really good. I tested 11 separate packages before narrowing down on these two. I chose Mantis in the end because it was PHP, and I didn’t want to have to burden my box with Python code, runtime, in the browser. You may also want to go here and see the other dozens of alternatives.

I can’t post much, in the middle of too much hardware hackery, but I’ve been reading all the diaries today and yesterday regarding the whole certification and trust metric issue and have to make some points.

deven

deven, you realize of course that by removing your certification of others when you were certified as Apprentice, that you have lowered their ranking, just as I removed your Apprentice status altogether by removing my certification of you. This is how the trust metric works, and it works well. Your point regarding the “Good ‘ol Boys Network” is completely unjustified, since you clearly don’t understand why Advogato exists. Nobody here is refusing people access to Advogato. Anybody can join. Anybody can post their diary entry. Anybody can contribute.

Your comment of:

“..Since most of Raph’s writings here seem to focus on effectiveness in keeping out the bad people, it’s not clear whether he ever paid close attention to the flip side of the coin, letting in the good people…”

If this were nothing other than a web-based forum without a hint of any certification metrics, created solely to discuss open source projects, like Blogger, would you have the same complaints? I would guess not.

To quote George Carlin:

“…a radio has at least two knobs; one changes the channel, and the other… turns it off!“

The value of certs here is not linear. If 10 people certify you as Apprentice, and they themselves are not even holding an Apprentice certification, you do not get an Apprentice certification. However, if raph or lilo or alan or myself certifies you as Apprentice, at the next sync, you will now be holding an Apprentice cert, even if nobody else certifies you. There is a very logical reason for that (and I wish it was applied to Slashdot and other projects as well).

You are measured here by your peers for your contributions to the free software community (and sometimes, non-free contributions, as some people here have talked about before). You are not “given” certifications. You earn them.

Again though, my desire to post my diary here has absolutely no bearing on the color that my name appears in. I didn’t start coming here because I wanted to gain some sort of status. I wanted to have a place to share my contributions, let people know what I’m doing (and if you read my diaries, they can be quite personal, ugly, and graphic at times, I have nothing to hide).

There’s a lot of cool things I do, as well as other people. I like to see what’s going on in the community I’ve been a part of for over a decade, and I like to watch it grow.

In your July 31, 2000 diary entry, you decided to certify yourself as Master, and I’m still trying to see what “important” free software project you are the author of, or what groups you mentor. Can you help me find it?

Your comments regarding the certification of God, Satan and Jesus are important, because they point out the lack of clarity in the people who are certifying these accounts. Look at rms for a perfect example. People don’t take the time to really understand the accounts before they go and waste certifications on them (hint: That’s not really Richard Stallman’s account).

As raph points out, there is a bit of weirdness going on in the certifications right now, and you have seen the trend also, but it fits exactly into the model which works here. The more people who join, the more uncertified users will exist, who are then going to be certifying already-certified users (sometimes wrongly, in the case of rms and others as above). This must be how you determined the system to be a “Good ‘ol Boys Network”, since the new users are the ones creating the dilution as you call it.

Here’s a tip: Ignore the certification altogether. Simply post your diary as you would have for any other site, and talk about what you’re doing in the community, free software space, open source space, or whatever. Relax. Have fun. If people respect you, and feel you’re doing “the right kinds of things” (subjective), then you may find yourself with a certification… or maybe not, but who cares. This is not gaining you PayPal bucks, or being used towards grading your GPA.

I respect the fact that you are doing development, and that you have taken the time to report some Mozilla bugs, but at the same time, you blather on about certifications. The two don’t jive. Free Software advocates and contributors give of themselves selflessly, often sacrificing deep into their personal lives to do it, and many times, unrecognized and uncompensated. Keep up the work, push hard, advance the status of free software where you can, and ignore what people think of you. There’s a famous quote I live by:

“There’s no defense for the truth”

If this isn’t working for you, there’s always Badvogato and Blogger.

{very}Hard{ware}

I am having nothing but trouble with my hardware here, and right when I need it the most, it fails me in exactly the ways I require of it to be working.

I have a single bootable RedHat cdrom I found in the back of a book here (Out of all of my linux cdroms, the only one I found to be bootable was in this RedHat Bible book, pft! No, bootable floppies were not possible, since I had no floppy drive, and even if I could install one in this machine, there was no way to get the images onto the disks, ugly all the way to the bank on this one).

After having to gut a production machine to get a the build onto the drive, it neglected to install perl (apparently Perl is not part of a ‘Development Workstation’ according to their installer, gar!). I decided to mount the cdrom in another drive, and map it over nfs.

But wait, my 3c905 Vortex NIC decides to start spouting packet errors and ghosted frames. I rummaged through my storage and spare parts and found one lone 3c509 ISA card, and put it into the box. Try again, no video. Wiggle some cards, move some slots, now I get video, but the cdrom in the other system fails on one lone file… guess which file I can’t read from the cdrom: perl_5.005.*.rpm. ARG! I can’t get a break!

dyork, you’re not off of the XML/XSLT hook with me yet… I have quite a handful of questions to toss your way. I’ll try to keep them en anglais for you.

Enough for me for today. I’m just not going anywhere near hardware right now. Maybe a good movie will get me distracted enough to concentrate on this when I get back tonight.

Information Interchange

ldunbar, speaking as someone who is a master at Social Engineering (and some other skills not to be mentioned in a public forum ;-), I can say that this information can definately be used for maliscious purposes.

Let’s say for example, that I own a business and ship orders within 20 zipcodes locally to me (ground courier). I can whip up a script to pump their zipcode search engine daily with those known zip codes to see what customers are buying and at what frequency, and begin an advertising campaign to move those customers to using my services instead. I could also use that as a way to determine where my next new sattelite office should be located, based on who in the surrounding area codes is buying the highest volume of parts. Kudos to ucdweb.com for providing me with such a useful, public system for doing a demographic study for my business. Now I don’t have to hire anyone to do this for me. I could also drop a name into Four One One and get their address and telephone number. Call them on behalf of the shipper, request a work telephone and ‘best-time-to-deliver’, and use that as a means of exploiting the consumer (or rob their house)

I would use these examples when speaking to them again. They might have a change of face when they realize that they would be liable, and their records would be open to investigation if someone was murdered or something as a result of the information obtained from this type of “service“.

I was just reading a book by John Douglas called ‘Obsession; The Psyches of Killers, Rapists, and Stalkers‘ a week or two ago (mentioned in my diary here) and it details a few people who have gone to lengths like this to get information on people to exploit, torture, and murder them. One guy was stalking a female coworker in his office. He came in on the weekend, called “weekend” security and said he had forgotten his desk keys, and gave them the desk number. They gave him a new set, but didn’t realize he had given them the number to the locks on his target’s desk instead. He opened her desk, made an impression of her house keys, and made dupes. He would enter her house and leave or take things from the house, but she never knew. One day as tensions mounted, and she thwarted his advances, he left a copy of the key in an envelope under her windshield wipers. It got uglier from there, but I won’t go into the gory details here.

Never underestimate what people will do given access to information. The internet is making it easier for these things to happen, and become less and less traceable. A simple kiosk in an “Internet Cafe” can serve as a anonymous terminal to get information on anyone.

XML Tree Support?

To all the XML/XSLT gurus: Is there a tool out there which works under linux, either in a browser or standalone (even Java will do) which allows me to expand and collapse an XML document by branches, the way IE does it? I happened to stick my XML book’s cdrom into a spare Windows machine and go through the examples on it under Windows, and noticed that IE has a really nice method of displaying and manipulating the raw XML document with a nested tree view. I can collapse/expand any nodes at any level. It would be nice to have this in a linux flavor.

Advogato Search Engine

I’m not sure who mentioned it first, but the diary.xml function of Advogato is pretty nice. So here’s my idea, and others are welcome to pick at it. What if we grabbed all the diaries from the People section and indexed them by date and stuffed them in MySQL or ht://Dig so people could search on topics, keywords, or other criteria? lkcl, perhaps this would make a good addition to your new XMLvl site.

Anyone want to begin coding the beast?

Network Suffrage

I’m sure everybody has already seen, heard, or been a part of the noise regarding Andover.net being down a few times this month. VA is having financial troubles. All of this is sitting on VA-owned equipment and servers, AFAIK, and VA is supposed to stand up for the Linux community. SourceForge is supposed to be a service dedicated to helping developers in the open source community. OSDN is supposed to be a support network for these developers and services.

Tell me then, why is jobs.osdn.com running Microsoft IIS5 on Windows 2000?! (netcraft)

$ HEAD jobs.osdn.com
200 OK
Cache-Control: private
Connection: Keep-Alive
Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2001 21:23:47 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Content-Length: 26757
Content-Type: text/html
Client-Date: Thu, 05 Jul 2001 21:27:35 GMT
Client-Peer: 216.138.211.59:80
Set-Cookie: ASPSESSIONIDGGGQGNRK=MLAAGFMAHGGPCHLAGOLIFLMD;
path=/

My spoof domain, http://www.sourcefubar.net is now up and routing. I’m still working out some security issues, but it should go live soon.

The troubles with NSI continue. I have now faxed them copies of my license, my passport, initiated another printed request, this time on “company letterhead”, and made sure that the address of the domain owner (gnu-designs.com, Inc.) matches that on my CT license, my passport, and on the “company letterhead”. All four documents (passport, license, request, and company letterhead) include my title (CEO/Owner) and my signature, and all signatures match. There can be no confusion that this is indeed me. Next we resort to DNA and blood samples. I just want to point my domain to a new DNS!

/dev/null

I notice that my typing speed has increased (as have my errors), and my ability to “understand” problems and fix them is much faster than it was even a month ago. I think this has something to do with diet, and sleep. I’ll have to experiment a bit more with this. This is definately a place I’d like to remain. Find, analyze, fix, all in minutes. Success.

Does anyone find these two images a bit… scary? (remnants of the Nazi regeime where you were “encouraged” to turn in your neighbor):

Front of brochure for WindowsXP

Back of brochure for WindowsXP

Ok, back to this Embedded Linux Course. Almost done, only a few more days left to design and test the labs, and then I’m done.

VICTORY!

I have now tamed the 8-headed hydra of a beast which calls itself cross-gcc. After beating my head against the wall tracking down bugs deep into the guts and bowels of gcc and glibc, I figured it all out.

In the spirit of open source (“Release Early, Release Often”), I’ve whipped up a single-pass-build-script to make this all incredibly easy for anyone else to take advantage of.

Seems that every VA box I’m aware of (and many Andover boxes also) is/are down, except SourceForge. I would have personally preferred the opposite, but hey, that’s just my opinion (these include themes.org, linux.com, slashdot.org, newsforge.net, linuxgram.com, andover.net, OSDN.com and others).
Some people believe it has to do with VA’s recent financial troubles.

Personally, I don’t get into the politics of any of this, but here’s the official Quit Slashdot.org Today page for those who want a laugh.

I just tried to do a whois on each of these servers and noticed some interesting things:

# date
Sun Jun 24 05:41:54 EDT 2001

# whois slashdot.org
[whois.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.3
SLASHDOT.ORG.SUCKS.COMPARED.TO.JIMPHILLIPS.ORG
SLASHDOT.ORG

# whois linux.com
[whois.internic.net]
Whois Server Version 1.3
LINUX.COM.NEEDS.TO.RUN.FREEBSD.LIKE.HCCTRC.COM
LINUX.COM.IS.KINDA.COOL.BUT.RUN.FREEBSD.LIKE.JIMPHILLIPS.ORG
LINUX.COM.ALONETRIO.WAS.HERE.WITH.ALTAVISTWAP.COM
LINUX.COM

My current bet’s on more hacking going on. Nobody asked me to investigate this one though.

I ordered DSL finally, and will end up paying way too much for it. $99.00/month for 144k/144k of IDSL, not even real DSL. It’s all there is here, but that beats the 14.4k dialup performance I’ve been getting lately.

URGENT

1. 1. I need to find someone in the Bay Area with a decent solid network connection to allow me to colocate a box on their segment for a few weeks until I can find another colocation provider out here. Mine just folded and is giving me until the second week of July to get my box out and all DNS records routed off (about 20 domains). Does anyone want to earn an extra $100/month or so to let a box sit under a table on

1. 1. their LAN segment for a few weeks? The box supports open source project development and some other domains, nothing heavy-hit at all, nothing illegal, just web, mysql, cvs, ssh.

HELP!

“..there’s still more left to this weekend, isn’t there?…”

sneakums, I know what the GPL stands for, but I was curious why he generalized it in such a fashion, nothing more.

“our business” is in giving users a choice. I’ve had to correct dozens of people who view GNU/Linux as a competitor to Microsoft. We are fundamentally nothing more than an alternative, albeit a better one. Competing on a business or financial level is secondary to providing a more functional, robust solution for the users that use GNU/Linux.

Microsoft has a financially-driven business model, and clearly view the GPL and what it stands for as a threat to maintaining that revenue stream. (notice he did not use the term “Free Software” in his speech anywhere. It’s clear they want to keep pushing the “GPL == open == linux == that hacker that stole your password” mentality in the general user populous). The Free Sofware community is a socially-driven business model. It turns the whole monopolistic practices of a company like Microsoft on their head.

Education should be our next task. Educate the users, and not by slandering Microsoft, but with good, concise, down-to-earth examples of where GNU/Linux and Free Software is really benefiting the advance of technology, business, and the spread of information.

We’ve demonstrated that we can stand together to develop software to benefit the community, rallying together to advance the development of GNU/Linux. Now we must stand together as a non-technical community and begin our task of re-education where it really matters most.

The Saga Continues…

After the debacle with Sony and the GPL, I’ve been barraged with emails and many queries from reporters and other people who are apparently questioning Sony’s actions in other areas. I won’t reveal any names here, but it’s clear POSE is not the only place where this is happening. Apparently a commercial product developer on their PS2 Linux team (separate very well-known IDE development company) has patches he’s made to the gdb and gcc sources and was not allowed to put them back into their respective trees, back to the community from whence they came.

Let’s be clear though. I am not attacking Sony or their partners. I’ve already tried to clear that up over here.

I decided to seek out another hardware vendor to support the JogDial functionality and memory expansion slots. I find Handera and of course, Handspring.

So I’ve been trying to find the sources for the Handera modifications to POSE, as well as those from Handspring, and come up with some interesting results. I managed to find the Handera Windows binary of the emulator over here, and upon extraction, I see a ‘Handera Readme.txt’ (spaces in filenames, gar!) that states:

“..This is based on the Palm OS Emulator 3.1 sources and is also compatible with all ROMS the 3.1 Emulator from Palm is compatible with. The changes will be sent to Palm to be merged into their sources in a week or two…”

The original announcement of this Handera POSE release is here (May 2, 2001).

I asked for the sources over here (follow the thread from there, May 8, 2001).

Interesting points from Keith over here (May 8, 2001). Most important of which is:

“..So I couldn’t say when Palm will post a version of Poser with HandEra support. But it will be in the range of several months from now…”

I then tried a different approach since we can’t wait months to begin testing these applications, by emailing Handera from their Comments form on their website:

“..Comments: I’m looking for the sources to the Handera port of the PalmOS Emulator. I did not find a link on your website to download the sources. As I don’t run Windows, I need to build this under linux. Can you please let me know where I can download this, so I can build a version under linux? Thanks a lot…”

And received:

Thu, 10 May 2001 16:18:33 -0500

“..We will be making them available to Palm for inclusion in future versions of the source tree. The modifications will be included in all versions of POSE (and source) at that time…”

To which I replied:

Thu, 10 May 2001 14:27:44 -0700 (PDT)

“..Are these sources available now? I’d like to include them in my local version of POSE, so I can begin testing applications against it. I
do not run Windows, so I cannot use the Windows version of POSE. Thanks again for your time and a rapid response…”

And received as a reply to this:

Thu, 10 May 2001 16:50:51 -0500

“..They are not available at this time. If you have any other questions please let me know…”

Ok, so they’ve taken the sources for POSE, a known GPL project (who’s owner of copyright is
still unknown) and modified them for use in their own product (the Handera 330 and the POSE Emulator to assist developers in developing applications against it), compiled a version of this for Windows using these sources and modifications, but continue to keep those modified sources “in-house”. That would be ok, if you also kept the Windows binary-only version in house, and did not distribute it, however, you can’t have one foot in both kiddie pools.

Guys, I simply want the sources so I can support your hardware in the open source projects I help develop which may some day USE this hardware. This abuse of the community effort to help you develop your projects will not continue much longer. You don’t support the linux or unix community. We do. We do this in our spare time because we love this work. We don’t get paid to do this (however you reap the revenue rewards from our hard work, you’re welcome).

So I get frustrated and decide to go to Handspring‘s site and look for their POSE modifications to support writing to the Springboard slot(s) in their new devices from pilot-link directly. Simple task. I see that they have a link to the Handspring POSE sources here on this page.

The sources are for a VC++ 6.0 build environment. Ugh. I did receive this reply from them though in my query:

Tue, 8 May 2001 09:41:19 -0700

“..We don’t build POSE under Linux internally, so the Makefile might not be part of that package. The version from Palm’s 3.1 version should do it (we only added a few source files related to the Visor Edge)…”

I’m not really sure how this translates, I mean… these ARE sources (which fits into section 3(c)p2 of the GPL), even if they’re not sources which will build on a GNU/Linux platform from which their parent project was derived from, so I can’t get completely pissed, but I don’t have or know VC++, so I’m not about to port these over (back over) to linux.

So we have a few “issues” here. I’ve also had a conversation with a Palm employee who said that “..the GPL means nothing unless it’s tested in court…”. That may be true, fundamentally, but that doesn’t mean that this type of behavior can continue (Handspring is definately on the right side of this one, kudos!)

“Encryption via Obfuscation”

I was trying to sync my newly-flashed OS4-aware Palm Vx with the latest pilot-link before I release it out the door, and I noticed that with a password set on the device, it will no longer sync. The Palm complains that the desktop software doesn’t support the password on the handheld device, and to upgrade the desktop software.

So I sent an email to the list hoping to find an answer.

The answer I got wasn’t exactly reassuring, but it gives me something to work with for now (thanks Dave Fedor, another fast response). One disconcerting thing though:

“..So if you’re on a 4.0 device with a password, you need a 4.0 desktop if you want to perform a HotSync operation…”

There are some “encryption” issues which exist in this new OS version. Just be careful and aware.

I simply want to support these devices and the users who use them. I’m not trying to cut holes in your profit streams or in your business plans. We shouldn’t HAVE TO resort to reverse-engineering protocols on the port and sniffing syncs just to write a compatible driver to support these devices under non-Windows platforms.

We’ve helped you, now how about helping us for a change.