1.- Format a USB pen drive as FAT32 (this erases all the data on the drive).

2.- Use the program UNetbootin to copy a FREEDOS system to the USB pen drive.

3.- Download the socflash tool from Aspeed: http://upload.aspeedtech.com/SOC/1117450218540864.zip and extract it somewhere (extract also the rar file corresponding to the SocFlash tool).

4.- Download the IPMI firmware file from Tyan: http://www.tyan.com/support_download_IPMI.aspx?model=S.S7025 and extract it somewhere.

5.- Create a new directory in the USB pen drive and copy into it both the SocFlash executables and the firmware file.

6.- Reboot and, while memory checking, press F11 in order to be able to choose the booting drive, when prompted choose the USB drive.

7.- Type C: and go into de directory where you have the firmware and the flashing tool (dir to list files and cd to change directory).

8.- Type socflash 70250102.i01 backup.old (replace 70250102.i01 with whatever your firmware file is called).

9.- If there are no warning messages you are fine. Reboot.

USUAL DISCLAIMER: This method worked for me and it is in this blog just as a reminder for myself. I do not suggest anybody else should try it and if you do so you do it at your own risk. The important bit was taken from this comment.

When Oracle bought Sun almost 2 years ago, the future of OpenSolaris became uncertain and so the community decided to fork OpenSolaris while trying to keep the new system compatible with the enterprise-grade product Solaris. The results of these efforts concentrate mainly in the Illumos and the OpenIndiana projects. The first official development released of OpenIndiana, 151a,  has been recently seen the light and here I will share with you some preliminary impressions.

1.- LIVE-DVD. I have chosen the LiveDVD Desktop Edition image which is slightly over  800 MB. It is a multi-arch image that will automatically install the 32 or the 64-bit kernel as required (the command “isainfo -kv” will let you know which kernel was chosen in your case). The LiveDVD takes a while to boot and, while in the process of booting, it will ask you to define your keyboard layout and your language. You are welcome by a sober professional-looking Gnome 2 desktop environment (there are no other options at the moment apart from a server version with no DE at all). I personally like the looks of it.The LiveDVD feels a bit slow with 4GB of RAM but it is perfectly usable. Deactivating the Visual Effects helps a bit (it think it is not very wise to have the visual effects activated by default in a LiveCD).

2.- INSTALLATION. The graphical installer is very straighforward. GParted is available in case you want to manually partition your drives. I used the entire hard drive. As it is Solaris, the file system of choice is ZFS. The installation took some 20 minutes. Booting into the newly installed system is not particularly fast, but that is not something I really care much about.

3.- HARDWARE SUPPORT. All my hardware was auto-detected and auto-configured. This includes the graphics cards (NVIDIA 8800M GTX), the sound cards and the network cards. For the graphics card the 280.x proprietary driver is used. By default, the wired network is used whenever available, if unplugged, the system switches automatically to the wireless connection (once added to favourites and configured with the corresponding WAP password). Among the excellent administration tools that come with OpenIndiana, I found the Device Driver Utility to be particularly useful. It provides the user with a list of hardware devices and the respective controllers in use. It informs of any conflict and offers the possibility of installing new controllers (in theory, at least, but I did not really try this feature because I did not need it).

4.- SOFTWARE. Both the Update Manager and the Package Manager are very nice tools. I installed a few things and everything ran smoothly. The collection of software installable from the Package Manager is is rather reduced, though. There is no office suite available, not even Abiword. It can be enhanced by adding the SFE repos (both encumbered and unencumbered), this will make available Abiword, VLC and other multimedia stuff, certain compiler and locales,… but not much more. To the best of my knowledge, there is no Solaris version of LibreOffice. However, one can manually install OpenOffice by downloading from the Internet. The same goes for the Adobe Flash Player, Sun’s Java (now Oracle’s, in fact) and the latest Firefox and Thundebird, for instance.

5. PERFORMANCE & STABILITY. To be evaluated. The system feels responsive enough and I have not experience any bugs or issues this far.

6.- FINAL REMARKS. In summary, lack of software is the only problem that I found with this otherwise excellent operating system. I guess that software availability in the future will depend mainly on two factors: i) Popularity; and 2) The commitment of Oracle with promoting Solaris beyond just supporting existing customers (Oracle is largely a Linux-centered enterprise that develops its own RedHat clone, known as Oracle Linux).

There are some interesting projects such as Nexenta and StormOS, the former server and enterprise-oriented and the later desktop oriented, aiming at combining a Debian/Ubuntu user-land with the Solaris kernel. This obviously makes a much larger deal of software available. I will give StormOS a try when available. My main concern has to do with the Nvidia proprietary drivers and other kernel modules. For instance, when I tried the excellent Debian GNU/kFreeBSD I soon realised it was not possible to install the Nvidia proprietary drivers.

This is how I came to the realisation that some of the hardware in my laptop seems to be deprecated in the most current GNU/Linux distributions. For instance, my sound card (ALC883) does not work well with any kernel above 2.6.32. In addition, the NVIDIA proprietary drivers above 275.x, which I need for proper 3D acceleration and CUDA computing, fail to work with recent kernels and/or versions of XOrg (I have a 8800 GTX card).

I think I will stick to Squeeze for a while, but, in order to prepare for the probably distant time when it will be unsupported or just to old, I have been doing a few incursions in the BSD word. After having tried a few BSD-based distros within virtual machines, I decided to give PCBSD an opportunity in real hardware. I used PCBSD version 9.0 Release Candidate 3 in its 64-bit version. I had already reviewed a beta version of this very same distro within a virtual machine, and therefore I will try not repeat here the points that have been already addressed before.

1.- INSTALLATION. Easy and smooth even using the ZFS file system. The only issue I found this time was that the user defined during installation was not correctly registered. I therefore needed to login as root and create the user again. Score : 8/10 (assuming that the bugs will be corrected in the definitive release version) .

2.- DESKTOP ENVIRONMENTS. I found the KDE and XFCE versions to be pretty stable, whereas the LXDE flavour seems quite buggy. I have not tried GNOME as yet. XFCE and LXDE are just default installs which does not appear to be customised at all. About KDE4, I am not so sure, but it looks good anyway. KDE feels responsive enough. Score : 7/10.

3.- HARDWARE SUPPORT. 100% of the hardware in my laptop was correctly detected and auto-configured, including the wireless card (Intel PRO/Wireless 4965 AG or AGN) and the graphics card (NVIDIA 8800 GTX), which works like a charm with the latest proprietary drivers 290.x. The sound card also works perfectly and switching between sound cards is quite easy in FreeBSD. Score : 10/10.

4.- SOFTWARE. PCBSD offers several possibilities for installing software: i) Compiling manually from source, as any other UNIX system; ii) Using the FreeBSD ports collection (compilation from source with automatic handling of dependencies); iii) Installing FreeBSD pre-compiled packages; and iv) Installing PCBSD-specific PBI packages.

How this hybrid system work in the long term still needs to be assessed. My, limited, experience with Gentoo GNU/Linux indicates that compiling ports can fail every so often and that system updates can break the system. The first issue was confirmed with PCBSD, for I have not been able to compile all the ports I needed.

The easiest way of installing software in PCBSD is using pre-compiled PBI packages. In order to to so one can use the so called AppCafe, accessible from the excellent PCBSD Control Panel. The AppCafe is easy to use and quite fast. However, one of the packages failed to install and for LibreOffice I had to try twice. The collection of software that is available through AppCafe is limited to the few most commonly used applications: LibreOffice/OpenOffice, Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, MythTV, etc. For most of the users, this may be more than enough. If you need to install more “exotic” software, though,  you most likely will need to get acquainted with FreeBSD ports and  compile everything from source while keeping your fingers crossed.

Score : 6/10.

PERFORMANCE & STABILITY. In order to address this questions I would need to run some benchmarks and to use the system for a longer period of time. This far, the system seems responsive and stable enough (as it should, for it is FreeBSD). As I mentioned before, I experienced systems breakages with Gentoo when installing and updating system ports and also when performing systems upgrades. Maybe this was due to my ignorance and maybe FreeBSD is a more more robust systems. If I ever migrate to PCBSD, I will let you know. Score : ?

CONCLUSIONS. In summary, PCBSD is an easy-to-use desktop-oriented FreeBSD derivative which, allegedly, is fully compatible with its parent. I guess that for most users it constitutes a reasonably good replacement for most popular GNU/Linux distributions and even for proprietary systems such as Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS X. In fact, PCBSD offers a better out-of-the-box experience than most other systems I had tried this far.

The main limitation I see right now, apart from potential issues with hardware drivers that may not be FreeBSD compatible (this was not my case, though), concerns software management. AppCafe is great but the spectrum of available applications is still limited, whereas the FreBSD ports, being almost as comprehensive as Debian or Ubuntu (over 20.000 packages for FreeBSD and over 30.000 for Debian and derivatives), proves to be still tricky to use for the novice.

That said, if my laptop gets deprecated by Linux, I will definitively put PCBSD in this machine as and excellent plan B.

Semplice and Siduction have in common the fact of being derivatives of the unstable branch of Debian GNU/Linux, codenamed Sid. They therefore target people who like/need to live at the edge and to use the very latest version of code at the price of certain instability and occasional breakages. This also implies that the user needs to have or is willing to acquire a certain knowledge on the insides of the system. That said, today we are going to compare, in a rather shallow manner, how easy these two distros make the life of the user in terms of installing the system and starting to work and/or to have fun with it:

1.- Live CD. Both distros are made available in the form of a Live-CD so that they can be tested without installing them or otherwise modifying the computer. Semplice’s iso image is just 556 MB, whereas Siduction LXDE is a bit larger, with 674 MB. This is due to the fact that Siduction includes kernel headers and development tools  such as build-essential and also a full LXDE Desktop Environment. Semplice brings no development tools and comes just with the OpenBox window manager enhanced with some ROX and Gnome stuff. Both live-CDs boot quite fast and run smoothly with as little as 512 MB of RAM memory (maybe even less, but I have did not check). Network connectivity  is available in both cases.

2.- Installation. Semplice comes with a console-based text installer with few options. It is not hard to use for someone who knows what he is doing. Siduction uses a html front-end, option-wise is not very different from the Aptosid installer. In both cases, the tricky part is partitioning the hard drives. Even if the Siduction GUI is more user-friendly, Semplice offers the possibility of automatic partitioning the drives, an option which is absent in Siduction. Once the configuration is complete (an advanced user should be able to do it in a couple of minutes), copying the system to the HD takes just 4 minutes and 20 seconds for Siduction and not much longer for Semplice. We are now ready to reboot in our new systems.

3.- Semplice welcomes the user with a minimalistic but elegant OpenBox window manager with a Tint2 panel containing a few applets. No menu is available in the panel but the main menu is accessible by right-clicking anywhere in the desktop area. Siduction displays the plain (ugly) default LXDE Desktop Environment except for the custom wallpaper.

4. Semplice comes with a carefully chosen collection of relatively light-weight applets, configuration tools and applications. The software selection does not intend to be comprehensive but covers the most usual tasks an average user may wish to carry out. Siduction LXDE provides, on the other hand, an inconsistent and not very useful set of tools.

5.- Semplice includes the main, contrib and non-free repositories as well as the Adobe Flash Player, thus allowing the user to enjoy a reasonable multi-media experience right out of the box. Siduction includes only the main repository and the user can forget about playing any proprietary audio or video formats out of the box.

6.- Restricted hardware drivers are not available in Siduction, but they are in Semplice.

7.- Siduction seems to be more current than Semplice (even after distribution upgrade). This also may mean that Siduction is closer to plain Sid than Semplice is.

8.- Both feel fast and responsive and use little RAM memory and CPU. Maybe Siduction is a bit less resource hungry and more responsive, but a fair comparison would require adding the applets that Semplice brings by default such as the network applet.

As a conclusion, the current Siduction LXDE release candidate delivers a user experience similar to installing plain Debian. It sticks quite strictly to the  Free Software Foundation rules and expects the user to be able to configure the system prior to using it. Apart front the html installer GUI and the availability of the LXDE environment, at this stage, it is hard to tell the difference between Siduction and Aptosid. Both provide a convenient way to installing a “stabilised” plain Debian Sid system. Maybe the situation is different for the KDE or XFCE flavours.

Semplice, in turn, appears to aim to providing a reasonably pre-configured system. In spite of it light-weight and minimalistic approach, I found the collection of configuration tools, applets and applications to be wisely chosen. The trade-off between usability and respect for the free-software philosophy also seems reasonable. Some enhancements I may dare to suggest to Semplice’s developers in order to make the distro even simpler:

1.- A more verbose and intuitive installer’s GUI.

2.- A main menu in the panel.

3.- Replace Google Chrome with SRWare Iron (an open-source,  spyware-free and more respectful with user’s privacy fork of Chrome).

4.- If possible, include Debian Multimedia repositories (or an easy way to add them).

5.- If possible, VLC as multi-media player.

Venho de descobrir o fantástico filme cubano-soviético Soy Cuba (Я Куба), dirigido por Mikhail Kalatozov em 1964. A verdade é que fiquei sem palavras para descrever esta maravilha cinematográfica. Filmado em branco e preto, o filme usa por momentos película infravermelha e tanto a fotografia como os planos e o movimento da câmara são realmente espetaculares.

A narração tem intres de grande lirismo e as interpretações e a “coreografia” fazem-me lembrar do expressionismo alemão mas também do cinema chinês e, nomeadamente, de Kar Wai Wong (In the Mood for Love).

Que dizer da música? No vídeo podemos apreçar a enorme versão em castelhano do Crazy Love (Paul Anka, 1957). Loco amor…

Evidentemente, tudo bem adubadinho dum realismo social revolucionário que faria abanar o mesmíssimo Ken Loach.

Obra mestra.

Fragmento da excelente série de televisão Breaking Bad (Temporada 4, Episódio 12) que ilustra o dilema entre seguridade e liberdade. É legítimo obrigar um indivíduo a fazer algo que não quer fazer sob o pretexto de proteger a sua vida?

CONTEXTO: A DEA (polícia anti-droga dos EUA) recebe uma chamada anónima segundo a qual o cartel mexicano teria enviado assassinos para matar o agente Hank Schroeder. A DEA envia agentes para proteger a vida de Hank e a sua família, mas o cunhado de Hank, Walt, recusa a proteção e fica na sua casa.

Fica claro que o BNG anda a precisar duma outra folha paroquial desde que mal-vendera A Nosa Terra ao tijolo.  Por mim, quando menos, sei dizer que o meio de comunicação que eu quero não se chama Sermos Galiza. Como também não se chama A Nosa Terra, nem Novas da Galiza, nem Diário Liberdade, nem Galiza Livre, nem  Mundo Galiza, e muito menos ainda Galiza Nación. Com isto não quero restar méritos a cada um desses projetos, os quais imagino que cumprem ou cumpriam a função para a qual foram criados. Particularmente interessante e corajoso entre todos eles estimo ser o Novas da Galiza, para além do seu marcado viés ideológico. Mas eu, preferir, preferiria um Xornal, sem as suas servidões económico-políticas e as suas auto-censuras; ou um Galicia Confidencial se for quem de ultrapassar os personalismos; ou até um Tempos Novos, tornado diário.

No económico, o modelo a seguir é o modelo comunitário do Gara, pois é o único que garante verdadeira independência informativa. No editorial, não avonda informar do que outros não informam, embora seja muito necessário. Cumpre criar um meio que ponha no centro do debate as questões realmente importantes (para a cidadania, não apenas para o nacionalismo revolucionário/institucional) e que seja ponto de confluência para qualquer contributo racional sem excluir ninguém. Sem reservas, como na camisola do índio reintegrante que tanta graça lhe fazia ao Ferrín.