“Open Textbooks” is a powerful idea; in some ways I think it even exceeds Free Software. “Open Source” has shown remarkable efficiency in the market, even to those antagonistic to the principles that make it so.

If the idea of “Open” – and the more important, if downplayed, foundation of Freedom - can make headway in the market, imagine the impact it might make in Government and Education. In those areas, once can at least mention concepts like Freedom and Public Good without being accused of being a communist.

KDE in General

I’m very glad to see this sort of thing, for I have long lamented that KDE is not getting out good information on all the advances they are making.

I’ve been on KDE 4.5 on my laptop since it was released, and just updated to 4.5 on my desktop last night. With only one issue[1], I’ve been very pleased with what I’ve seen. KDE continues to firm up as an integrated whole that have an over-arching sense of continuity, and the level of polish is very high.

People that are still knocking KDE 4 or are hestant to try it based on what they have heard need to give KDE another chance.

Explaining Stuff

For reasons I don’t fully understand, KDE faces a PR problem. When compared to a project like Ubuntu, where the slightest change is fawned over by a hundred blogs, KDE seems to have a very hard time getting the word out.

Mr. Kügler does a great job breaking down Akonadi, clearing up some misconceptions, and showing how it will be used across many KDE applications. Even though I am not a KMail user, I found myself quite interested in that application, as it served as the primary example throught the article.

I’m also especially liking the new plasma email notifier:

I hope this style propagates, because I prefer the fully enclosed bits of information here in contrast to the “faded out folder tabs” of the existing style.

Keep Doing This, Please

Someone please break down NEPOMUK like this - I still don’t understand what that is all about.

[1]KWin keeps locking up on my laptop if compositing is enabled. This is slightly different from the KWin issues I’ve read others are having, so I disabled effects for now until I can delve deeper.

http://martin.iturbide.com/?page_id=114

There are 3 categories:

• Individual Contribution
• Open Source Project
• Open Source Government Deployment

Rules and guidelines here, but the main point is that nominees should support OFSA’s mission:

• to effectuate changes in U.S. Federal government policies and practices so that all the government may more fully benefit from and utilize free and open source software;

• to help coordinate these communities to collaborate with the Federal government on technology requirements;

• to raise awareness and create understanding among federal government leaders in the executive and legislative branches about the values and implications of open source software. OSFA may also participate in standards development and other activities that may support its open source mission.

I’m liking the White House on Drupal in either of the last two categories actually.

I’m actually fairly excited  about the OSFA and their mission, because I think the argument for Open Source and non-Proprietary standards is even stronger for public records than it is in the private sector (and I think it’s pretty damn strong in the private sector to start off with!)

The US Gov’t could close Bug #1 virtually overnight if it standardized on an Open Source platform. I know that won’t happen, but the American government is so influential, it is a very effective target for Free Software and Open Source promotion.

Why are you doing this!?

I like trying out different distros. I usually keep one distro on my desktop and “play around” on my laptop. It’s a good way to see different approaches and better than just reading about how some distro does it.

You don’t get much lower-level than LFS, and I thought it would be a good place to focus on some “core” GNU/Linux stuff.

Be Gentle. It’s my first time.

This is what I’ve told everyone I’ve talked to about installing LFS: Plan on doing it 3 times.

1. Throw away the first attempt because you basically have no idea what it going on. You’ll be copying the book instructions exactly (or you won’t make it through), so this is just a familiarization phase. Also a good time to learn exactly what you need in your kernel here!
2. This is what you think you are going to keep, so decide what deviations from the book you like. Maybe you want eglibc instead of glibc? Maybe a newer version of GCC? Maybe zen-kernel? Go hog-wild. And then be ready to throw it away because you left out something crucial, like package management.
3. Huzzah! This is the keeper. At this point you can go all into BLFS and more.

Major Points

Follow the book directions exactly. Especially the first time through. From spending time in #lfs-support (and shameful personal experience) the overwhelmingly vast majority of LFS problems are either typos or not following directions exactly.

You will need a package manager. This is a very important, but conditional, point. If you intend to use your LFS install like you would a “regular” distro, you will need some sort of package manager. If you are just going to do this for a “one-shot” learning experience, it’s not so critical.

The first point is stressed  a bit in the book, but the second is a bit glossed-by. I suppose it’s because some people associate package management with downloading binaries and therefore missing the point of LFS. This is actually backwards, because if you are doing the packaging, you’re hands-on. In the LFS sense, you are the packager as well, so it’s not like you are getting these from some other dude and missing on the fun stuff like tracking down (or making) patches and keeping up-to-date on releases and so forth.

Time sink

Be prepared to invest some time in getting this thing up and running. If you want to make it time well spent, try to understand what you are doing rather than blindly cut-and-pasting the book’s instructions. You’ll have plenty of time while stuff is compiling to surf the net on a second machine.

Don’t come into the thing thinking this is something to knock out on a Saturday afternoon. I can’t overstress the importance of proceeding carefully with attention to detail.

Take notes, especially anything at all you had to deviate from the book on for whatever reason. It’s common to have to re-do or re-start, and notes are a life-saver.

Something I really found helpful was to read DIY Linux along-side LFS, comparing and contrasting the two approaches. They are quite similar, so not a difficult undertaking.

Benefits

For me, the benefits were:

Learned a lot. There were lots of areas where I had vague awareness, but became comfortable with like init scripts, patching and packaging,  and the nuances of login/non-login bash shells.

Experimented. And not the sort you did that one time in college, either. I mean trying out things that I wouldn’t have bothered with on my “normal” desktop. Some of which have now made it into my “normal” environment.

Baseline. I feel like I have a more pure “Linux baseline” to compare against other distros. For example, it’s more informative to me to think in terms of LFS compared to Gentoo and LFS compared to Ubuntu, than Gentoo compared to Ubuntu.

Bespoke. That being said, the “last pass” of LFS offers the ultimate in customizing. Not only can you play with each application’s settings, but you can even replace or select major components that aren’t in the LFS book (because you should have enough understanding to do so at this point). And, of course, you get to compile everything exactly for your machine, so performance is maximized. 

Tons of fun. Hey, if you like that sort of thing it’s fun. If what excites you is a new wallpaper and shade of grey on a dialog box, maybe not so much.

Drawbacks

Going in with the right expectations does wonders here: if you think this going to be a one-day undertaking and you come out the other end with Ubuntu, Jr. then you are setting yourself up for disappointment.

I tried to go in eyes open and feel like that saved me from seeing many things as drawbacks.

Time sink. So big, had to say it twice. There is an enormous time cost involved, mainly around all the packages you’ll need. I think my LFS had somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 packages, and that’s a lot of time and effort.

You can mitigate this a bit in various ways – but there’s no getting around the fact that with LFS you are basically a one-user distro. All that massive packaging work that is distributed in another distro rests on your shoulders.

No man is an island. When you run into a problem, it’s a bit trickier to get support.

There are a few sources of Linux support that are outstanding enough to be ”cross-distro” – mainly the Arch Linux and Gentoo Linux wiki/forums.

Beyond that, you usually have to patrol the relevant mailing lists – another task that is distributed in other distros.

In Summary

I enjoyed the hell out of LFS and consider it time well spent.

Beyond the obvious lessons learned, I took away a new way to evaluate a distro for my personal use: packaging and technical support.

See, most of this I can do and I enjoy doing. So, a distro basically needs to “take over” those areas that I don’t want to bother with – and, by contrast, get out of my way in those areas I do want to bother with.

As a result, I finally settled on a new distro on my desktop – replacing (K|X|U)buntu, which I had on there since Dec. 2007.

But that’s another story.

LXF: Some people have accused Ubuntu of mimicking Mac OS X – what’s your take on that?

DS: I don’t take a position on every silly little thing that people say, but if forced to take a position on the matter, I would say “haters gonna hate.”

Mr. Humphrey’s particular post is so chock-full of ignorance that it deserves a proper dissection.

Let’s begin!

[Edited to Add: Mr. Humphrey has since posted an apology.]

Step One: Mischaracterize and dehumanize the opposition

Mr. Humphrey leads off with the old tried-and-true one-two punch of the anti-Free Software crowd: first, stereotype your opposition and second, blame them alone for all failings.

Stereotype. “Extremist diehard Linux geeks” - according to Mr. Humphries – refer to Linux as “GNU/Linux”, use the terminal window, and only exercise once a year by walking their dog.

So we have – in reverse order:

• attacking people based on their physical habits and/or appearance (anti-Free Software people simply adore pointing out flaws that are in no way whatsoever relevant to the subject at hand),
• attacking the way people work (despite of the fact that if you know how to use the command line it is vastly more efficient than a gui in many, if not most, situations)
• attacking the way people speak (note that Mr. Humphrey doesn’t even raise the canard about people “forcing” other to say “GNU/Linux”, he won’t even stand for those who say it at all)

Here’s the important point – and it must be important because it’s right there at the start: these are not “normal” people:

The simple fact is that everyone on the “other” side of the chasm, you know, normal people, don’t care about freedom so much.

People that care about freedom are not “normal”. What are they then? Abnormal? Deviants? Zealots? It matters not, because the important thing to remember is they are not normal – and since they aren’t you can lie about them, you can misrepresent them, and you can ridicule them. Because you are “normal”, and they are not.

This is Step One.

Step Two: Blame them for “the problem”

These people are ruining free software’s chance to ever become mainstream and they’re annoying as hell.

It is “these people” that are “the problem”.

• It is not proprietary software companies that have massive resources to lie about Free Software.
• It is not legitimate difficulty in breaking into an already saturated market.
• It is not inherent challenges with marshalling diverse and largely volunteer resources.
• It is not a difference of opinion on what the actual “goal” or “problem” is.
• It is not a combination of all these things and many many more…

No, it is these people, these abnormal people – not like you or I! - that are the problem.

This is Step Two.

Step Three: Blather on about anything you like because any one still taking you seriously must be a total moron and so will accept literally anything you say

If you’ve made it this far, anything you say will be alright. If your target audience is willing to overlook (or even embrace) steps one and two, they are all yours!

This is where you can get some good stuff going!

You could explain that since it’s popular, slave labor is A-OK and quite similar to genetically enhancing fruit as well!

 Check out this reasoning by Mr. Humphrey:

1. The “worst kind” of people are those “who refuse to use Twitter, Facebook, or even any Google product due to privacy concerns”.
2. But! “Look at how many people use Facebook or Twitter”.  That’s because “their friends use it” and “it’s cheap”.
3. Which is “exactly the same thing” as “clothing manufacturers who utilize slave labor”.
4. “or companies that genetically enhance vegetables and fruit”

Nonsense. Absolute drivel. What the hell sort of argument is that?

Is it a defense of slave labor to justify it because it’s popular and cheap? That’s the argument made here. Inane drivel.

Step Four: Dig deeper

Listen if you’re going to let it all hang out, then let it all hang out! Now is the time to release every fallacious argument you can. Remember, if someone is still taking you seriously, you can literally say anything and they will support it.

For example, you can further misrepresent the opposition:

I also dual boot with Windows 7 because I use Photoshop for design. Does that make me a bad person?

Of course, you won’t need to show that anyone has actually called you a “bad person” – and you can misrepresent the point that perhaps designers should be dogfooding as a personal attack! It’s two for the price of one!

Or, you could be (deliberately?) obtuse:

Do you really, really believe that Android is in widespread use because it was marketed as being free as in speech?! No, of course not! It’s mainstream because it works, looks good, and offers consumers a choice other than what Apple has on offer at a cheaper price.

This way you can ignore the point that it is because large portions of Android are free as in speech that Android works, looks good, and offers consumers a choice other than what Apple has on offer at a cheaper price.

You can also further misrepresent the opposition by pretending they are going around saying “Android is winning because it is marketed as free as in speech!” Who is making that argument?

Just because marketing doesn’t think “free as in speech” makes an effective selling point doesn’t mean it isn’t important. Companies use all sorts of hoo-doo to market products. Sometimes they “pull the curtain back” a bit and talk about manufacturing details to impress customers, sometimes they don’t.

It depends on how they want to market things, but it doesn’t change how important the manufacturing process is. Judging the manufacturing process by the marketing message is truly ignorant.

Step Five: Keep digging

Don’t stop now!

You could flip the entire community on its head:

If the product benefits as an end result, who’s complaining other than this small vocal minority who put off the rest of us? The worst thing is that this minority is usually the same people who are in a position of responsibility or decision-making.

One of the major, major, points in Open Source development is that of a meritocracy. In fact, a favorite tactic of Open Source proponents is to immediately shut down any criticism by asking something like “Well, what exactly have you contributed?”

But here, Mr. Humphrey is upset that “the opposition” is in a position of responsibility or decision-making!

If they are so damn harmful to the project’s success, then how did they get there? How do they stay there? How did the project become successful at all in the first place with such bad people at the helm?

Step Six: Don’t acknowledge the elephant in the room

If you read about these wide internets, you might see some comments along the lines of “Mr. Humphrey has a point, he just made it poorly”.

I agree, there is an underlying point, but it has nothing to do with the philosophical differences of Free Software and Open Source, or even finding the best way to promote a project.

Here’s Mr. Humphrey’s point: I don’t like people that think differently.

That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

It’s not surprising because no one likes hearing a conflicting opinion – feels like we are being told we are wrong, and no one likes to be wrong. (God forbid if someone comes out and actually tells you “You’re wrong!”).

That’s human emotion, natural and understandable.

The thing is, intellectually we should be able to suppress that annoyance, listen to an argument and re-evaluate our opinions. That happens sometimes, but more often than not, a person will tie themselves into knots to ignore a contrary opinion.

Step Seven: Reader participation

Out of mercy and the length of this post, I’ll stop here – but there are several other fallacious and irrational threads I didn’t pick out. (xkcd comics, vegetarians and religious folks lumped in with “extreme views”, Ubuntu being Free Software is “nothing but a bonus”, “fail to see free software taking off on principle alone”, and so so much more)

Add some in the comments if you like!

Something worth discussing?

Listen, there is a valuable and needed discussion to be made on how to best promote Free Software, Open Source, GNU/Linux and all that to different targets.

There’s also interesting ground to plow in how much marketing should influence development.

And, there’s the always nifty question of what “winning” means.

All of the above will have different answers depending on whose asking: a project like KDE has different concerns than a project like Ardour.

Nothing wrong with that. In fact, I’d argue that suggesting there is one set of “right answers” for everyone – and the inverse of identifying the “worst kind” - show a lack of understanding of difference and nuance; suggesting the One True Way or the One Worst Thing is the exact sort of black-and-white thinking one might accuse zealots of engaging in.

I hope that these questions are what Mr. Humphrey was trying to raise, and I really hope that those who “agree with much of it” are reading between the lines to find.

They must be reading between the lines, because there is no rational argument from Mr. Humphrey.