ESR Leaves Fedora for Ubuntu, MP3 scare and Vraxx sleeps

On the OSS front, long time RedHat fan Eric S Raymond announced over the Fedora distribution list that he was leaving the Fedora community and RH in favor of Ubuntu.

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/02/22/207231.shtml

I can certainly understand his frustrations but at the same time I do feel some of his arguments towards a desktop Linux architecture aren't always on the mark. Case in point his issue with MP3 support.

Consider that MS itself just lost in their case against Alcatel-Lucent in a patent ruling to the tune of $1.5B, yep that's a B folks.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-6161480.html

Considering how messy the patent system is in the US I don't really blame a company like RedHat or Novell for wanting to avoid directly going into the support for these formats. With pockets that aren't as deep as MS and in an attempt to not

Now I too have been a fan of RedHat for a fairly long while, but I've also never had to deploy Linux for an enterprise so admittedly I'm more a general user. It works for what I do, that's not always going to be the case for other users. That's just the way software is. Granted the differences in package management systems and support process are going to vary from distribution to distribution but in the end no one is pointing a gun to your head saying you must stay with vendor A, B or C.

While its unfortunate that RH/Fedora has lost a proponent I don't think it necessarily means a death sentence. I agree however that RH needs to become more responsive and hopefully allow the community to make more of a meaningful and bidirectional contribution to the Fedora code base. We'll just have to see if this extra attention gets RH to move a little.

Oh and yeah sleep :) My fever is finally coming down.

Snort flaw identified by IBM security researcher

http://www.iss.net/threats/257.html

IBM's ISS (Internet Security Systems) Team release the details for a remote exploit in the popular open source intrusion detection system. While the implications are significant it should be noted that patches are being released very quickly.

I don't find these type of announcements all that new or earth shattering these days. Let's face it, the fact of the matter is software is flawed. The question isn't really if there will be an exploit its when and how quickly can a fix be applied.

It's definitely high risk when you consider the whole point of running snort is to identify incoming attack vectors, making it fairly ironic that Snort itself can be considered one.

So if you're out there and running snort to monitor your LAN/WAN be sure to check the Sourcefire updates to snort.

5-Min Review: Blackberry Pearl

Now if you've read my past rants you'll know that I'm not big on convergence devices for my personal use. Work however sometimes demands you make hard choices and for me in 2007, that choice was to either use a NeXtel BB or my own. I opted to buy my own and in the end that was Pearl. I've used the Pearl as my work phone for about a month now and though there's some aspects to the design that I think need work, for what I use it for it's been okay.

Let's face it the BB Pearl tries to shrink the form factor of previous models to that of a candybar phone and while the size is about right (easier to hold in my hand for long periods than my Samsung t509) it does bring with it several draw backs. The most obvious is that the screen is reduced, making reading long emails a bit of a chore. The reduced keyboard also makes thumbing a little more challenging. On the upside though I don't use my Pearl for outbound. It's about 80% inbound with the replies being often one or two lines tops. Detailed emails of a technical nature still require me to crack open my laptop.

Battery life has been OK, but in truth I've gotten most of my client base to realize that technical questions really should be going through my email since it gives me a good history of when the issues were reported and I can trace the conversation for details. Call quality is moderate though sometimes I think the normal headset volume falters. The speaker phone though is quite loud and very handy for conference calls.

Overall I think the Pearl can be helpful for folks who need notifications and integration with corporate network (Calendar, contacts etc) however for Joe Average the Pearl is just a glorified geek-badge :P