Joe's Random Ramblings

In the apparently never-ending SCO saga, the judge has dealt SCO another blow that hopefully puts this zombie to rest once and for all. They don't get a new trial, and Novell can shut down their lawsuit against IBM.
Ars Technica has the details in their article aptly titled "SCOwned"

My favorite piece of the ruling:

Finally, while SCO’s witnesses testified that the copyrights were “required” for SCO to run its SCOsource licensing program, this was not something that SCO ever acquired from Novell.

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In their lawsuit against Novell, the jury ruled that Novell and not SCO owns the Unix copyrights. The verdict, from Groklaw.

Some links/reactions:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100330152829622
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700020711/Jury-sides-with-Novell.html
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/03/sco-loses-again-jury-says-novell-owns-unix-svrx-copyrights.ars

Now, hopefully SCO can finally roll over and die for good. This ridiculous crap has been going on for way too long.

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I called Barnes & Noble digital support today to get the source for the GPL-ed parts of the B&N nook eBook reader.
They used to send out CDs from what I have read, but it turns out that they recently put the sources up on their website, at http://nook.com/legal (redirects to http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/legal/).
The B&N support people had a hard time finding this out, but they called me back and provided me with the link.

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Earlier this year, Yahoo changed the login protocol for the Yahoo Instant Messaging service.
This resulted in Kopete, the instant messenger tool for KDE, to no longer being able to log into the Yahoo IM service. The background is explained in detail here.
There was a quick fix for KDE 4.x available, but people like me who are using KDE 3.5 and don't think KDE 4 is ready for primetime yet (or who just don't want to change an otherwise perfectly running system), were left out, essentially forcing us to use another IM client, like Pidgin.
Eventually, though, somebody created a patch for KDE 3.5 for Ubuntu, which solves the login issue.
I am using Slackware, not Ubuntu, though, so I used the Slackware build system to create a kdenetwork package for Slackware 12.2 that contains the fixed Kopete.
I used the source code from the Slackware 12.2 DVD, just adding two files in the source/kde/kdenetwork directory: a shell script which applies the patch during the build process, and the patch itself.
The final Slackware 12.2 kdenetwork package is here (12MB.) It can be installed in two steps:

1. Remove the old kdenetwork package: removepkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2.tgz
2. Install the new kdenetwork package: installpkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2-yahoo-login.tgz


Update: The ICQ protocol also is broken in the latest kopete for KDE 3.5.
Using the patch from here, I have now created a new Slackware 12.2 kdenetwork package that re-enables both the Yahoo and the ICQ protocols. It is just another patch that gets applied to the normal source package. The resulting binary package, with both patches applied, is here. Similar to the instructions above, it can be installed this way:

1. Remove the old kdenetwork package: removepkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2.tgz
2. Install the new kdenetwork package: installpkg kdenetwork-3.5.10-i486-2-yahoo-icq-login.tgz


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In my ongoing quest to get IPv6 tunneling working with my AT&T DSL connection, I stumbled across more stupidity...

In an effort to resolve the 15-second DHCP renewal time I was seeing on a D-Link DSL modem that I tired (mentioned here, I first contacted D-Link tech support about the issue. Unfortunately, the technician couldn't help me, so I ended up returning the DSL modem.
I now got a Motorola 2210-02 DSL modem (originally developed by Netopia, which apparently got bought by Motorola.)
This modem has the AT&T firmware installed. This firmware allows modifying the DHCP lease time, just like my old Speedstream did.
However, and that's a BIG issue, the 2210 does not respond to pings, i.e., ICMP packets. This prevents me from updating the IPv6 tunnel at HE's tunnelbroker service. They try to ping the IPv4 address entered...
I can go through the universal Ipv6 tunnel at 192.88.99.1, though, so this modem at least doesn't block IPv6.

I was on the phone with AT&T level 2 tech support for quite some time, but this didn't go anywhere, except for trying bridge mode, where the PPPoE handling is done on the computer. For a variety of reasons, a major one being that this would prevent me from just plugging in another computer, e.g., for testing, I do not particularly like bridge mode.
The last time I set up PPPoE on my Linux box was about 10 years ago, when I still had connectivity through ISDN... I had assumed that we are past that unfriendly setup by now

And for completeness, I also tried a Motorola 2210-02 with a non-AT&T firmware. While that didn't have the ping issue and let ICMP through fine, it was only marginally better than the D-Link in that it had a DHCP lease renewal time of 2 minutes, non-changeable of course
Why can't the modem manufacturers not just provide a firmware that isn't crippled???

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