Odds and ends

Holiday

Daniel — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 21:33:00 +0200

My holiday has finally started (actually, it did last week, but I caught a fever): I have finished my Master's thesis, which was the last thing I had to complete for my Master's degree (pfew). Unfortunately, Liselotte has to finish a paper within a short time, so we had to postpone travel plans until the Christmas holiday. Things I am planning to do:

Late spring cleaning.
Catch up with the growing stack of albums I recently bought or got (Lumpy Gravy/Roxy & Elsewhere/One size fits all by Zappa, Trout mask replica by Beefheart, The Jewels/Grundstück by Einstürzende Neubauten, Modern Guilt by Beck, Double nickels on a dime by The Minutemen).
Maybe visit some concerts at the Noorderzon festival.
Continue my quest for regular climbing (mostly back to two times a week now).
Read the C++ GUI Programming with Qt4 book (I liked the Qt3 book).

Today I bought a new pair of climbing shoes. My previous pair was almost three years old, and it had not so nice holes. I'll snap a picture of both pairs ;). While I was at it I also bought 16 packets of chalk, oughta be enought for the next year :).

Buggy campaign?

Daniel — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:15:00 +0200

Microsoft is at it again with a $300 million dollar ad campaign to counter the bad reputation of Windows Vista. While I am not a Windows user, I guess they have received an amount of scorn that is slightly out of proportion. Anyway, I think their ad campaign is a bit entertaining. It shows a renaissance-era ship (though I am not an expert in history), with the text At one point, everyone though the world was flat.. While this may have been true in ancient times, that belief was quickly revised when the classical Greeks started to study the Earth's shape. The idea that people believed that the earth was flat in medieval times is in fact a myth. So, no, not everyone did believe the world is flat when they started exploring the world centuries ago. Though, I have to admit that the imagery and slogan is is nice, and probably effective because many people are not aware of the fact that it is a myth.

Jitar: a port of Sitar

Daniel — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:15:00 +0200

Between other work I have made a port of my Sitar (C++) tagger to Java, this port is named Jitar. I took the opportunity to redesign some aspects:

Simplify the training data: for lexicon entries frequencies are stored now, rather than probabilities. This will allow us to use the same lexicon for the known word handler and the unknown word handler (which relies on suffix analysis). Since the CPU calculations often beat disk I/O, this does not lead to a longer startup time.
Store the suffixes for the unknown word handler in a tree. This makes the handler use less memory, and is faster.
Apply some more tweaks for unknown word handling. With these tweaks, the unknown word accuracy for our test set seems to be at the same level as TnT.

The Java port provides some other nice advantages as well, such as easy integration with programs written in other languages that run on top of a JVM (Groovy, Scala, JRuby, etc.). Jitar is also licensed under the Apache License 2.0, which allows use in FLOSS and proprietary software.

Jasper Spaans has agreed to help with the maintenance of Jitar (thanks!). I expect that we can tag a 0.0.1 version soon, and provide precompiled and source archives. I'd like to move the whole tagger to another (more general) namespace, make the training parameters less specific, add more assertions, and preferably unit tests. In the meanwhile, the code can be checked out from the development project of the Jitar project.

Asking a Windows refund, and getting it

Daniel — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:46:00 +0200

This is an update to my previous post about getting a Windows license refund. In the meanwhile, some nice things have happened. First of all, my girlfriend was not the last to receive a refund for Windows Vista. Another Dutch Dell customer was refunded 220 Euro for Windows Vista Premium and Microsoft Works. In summary: he used a slightly modified e-mail based on the e-mail that we sent to Dell. I take my hat off for Dell Netherlands, they seem to grok their customers. Additionally, the Dutch "General Conditions" state the possibility to ask for a refund of the software (I am not sure if this paragraph existed as-is before). A quick and sloppy translation of the relevant part (please refer to the original Dutch text for an accurate formulation):

If you reject the conditions for the use of the software, and if you are a consumer, Dell accepts software returns within 7 working days after the delivery of the software, and Dell will refund the price you paid for the software.

Since many of these policies seem to be on a national (or maybe even regional) level, it often seems useful to provide region-specific information about refunds or the possibility to buy systems without Windows. For that purpose we started a Dutch site providing such information, eigen-pc.nl.

As a final remark: it may be even better to ask your vendor over the phone if you can order a machine without Windows, this may be less work for both sides.

First Eee PC experiences

Daniel — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:47:00 +0200

After some consideration and waiting until it was stocked at a local vendor, I bought an Eee PC. Although my MacBook is pretty compact, I wanted a machine that I can use for calendaring, checking mail, and browsing. Since my phone does not offer these options, and are not that cheap without a new subscription, the Eee seemed to be a good choice. I opted for the non-surf variant with 4GB of flash storage an 512 MB RAM.

The standard Xandros-based distribution seems to be user-friendly and snappy. I was surprised to see that even OpenOffice.org booted up fairly quickly. However, I do not agree with some of the policies of Xandros (yes, I know, by buying the Eee, I paid the Xandros tax), and I prefer a system that is easy to customize for my own needs. Since the Debian community has worked hard on making Debian work well on the Eee PC, and provides an excellent Wiki page. The installation was a straight forward Debian-testing netinstall (the Eee doesn't boot from my 8GB USB memory stick, but 512MB and 1GB works fine). One of the upsides is that a driver for the wireless NIC is included in the default install, as well as some useful ACPI scripts to get the special keys of the Eee PC working. Virtually the only thing that I needed to change was the X configuration for touchpad scrolling.

I was a bit worried that the small screen would not be comfortable to use a normal desktop environment. So, I initially used the IceWM window manager with the GNOME network manager applet to get flexible en easy wireless connectivity. I ended up installing GNOME as well, and it turns that it mostly works fine with the screen size/resolution, although some dialogs are too large, and take some guesswork to tab through properly. Another problem is that the battery/power applet does not work well, because the machine reports the battery state in percentage rather than mAh.

All in all, it seems to be a good purchase, but I haven't tried the battery time and some other things yet. But I did accidentally drop it on the floor, and it still works :).

Sitar: a simple part of speech tagger

Daniel — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:44:00 +0200

Recently, I wrote a part of speech (POS) tagger in C++. A POS tagger assigns morphosyntactic labels to words, that can be used in subsequent processing, such as chunking or parsing. The tagger uses trigram Hidden Markov Models (HMM), combined with suffix analysis for unknown words. On my Brown corpus-based training set, it achieves an overall accuracy of 95.5% (74.8% for unknown words). When two parameters are hand-tuned, I achieved an accuracy of above 76% for unknown words.

The TnT tagger, which Sitar is partly modeled after, is more accurate in assigning tags to unknown words. So, this is an area which can use improvement (though, Sitar scores better than many other taggers that do not follow this methodology).

If you are interested in tinkering with Sitar, you may want to know that the source code is available under the liberal Apache License version 2.0. This license also allows for use in proprietary software, although I hope improvements are contributed. I hope this is useful to some people :).

Impact of the Debian OpenSSL vulnerability

Daniel — Thu, 15 May 2008 23:23:00 +0200

We have posted a warning about the impact of the Debian OpenSSL vulnerability on the CentOS-announce list, but I think it is useful to repeat it here (for readers of CentOS Planet) as well:

A severe vulnerability was found in the random number generator (RNG)
of the Debian OpenSSL package, starting with version 0.9.8c-1 (and
similar packages in derived distributions such as Ubuntu). While this
bug is not present in the OpenSSL packages provided by CentOS, it may
still affect CentOS users.

The bug barred the OpenSSL random number generator from gaining enough
entropy required for generating unpredicatable keys. In fact it
appearss that the only source for entropy was the process ID of the
process generating a key, which is chosen from a very small range and
is predictable. As such, all keys generated using the Debian OpenSSL
library should be considered compromized. Programs that use OpenSSL
include OpenSSH and OpenVPN. Note that GnuPG and GNU TLS do not use
OpenSSL, so they are not affected.

This vulnerability can affect CentOS machines through the use of keys
that were generated with the OpenSSL package from Debian. For
instance, if a user uses OpenSSH public key authentication to log on
to a CentOS server, and this user generated the key pair with a
vulnerable OpenSSL library, the server is at heavy risk because the
key can be reproduced easily.

Additionally, all (good) DSA keys that were ever used on a vulnerable
Debian machine for signing or authentication should also be considered
compromized due to a known attack on DSA keys.

As a result of this bug, everyone should audit *every* key or
cerficicate that was generated with OpenSSL, to trace its origin and
make sure that it was not generated with a vulnerable Debian OpenSSL
package. Or in the case of DSA keys care should be taken that they
were not generated or used on a system with a vulnerable OpenSSL
package. Keys that are potentially compromised should be replaced with
strong keys.

The Debian Wiki[2] has a preliminary list of affected application. A
tool to detect potentially weak keys is also provided, but it contains
an incomplete list of affected keys and can give false positives.

The Metasploit project provides a full list of weak keys in various
configurations[3].

Questions on how this may affect CentOS users should be directed to
the CentOS users list. List subscription information is available
from:

http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos

With kind regards,
The CentOS Team

[1] http://www.debian.org/security/2008/dsa-1571
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/SSLkeys
[3] http://metasploit.com/users/hdm/tools/debian-openssl/

CentOS vendor support

Daniel — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 11:13:00 +0200

Official vendor support for an operating system contributes highly to the visibility of a system. Therefore it is very encouraging to see that VMWare is planning to support CentOS as a guest and host(?) system in its upcoming VMWare Workstation 6.5 product. Kudos go out to VMWare for planning to support CentOS, as well as releasing guest OS tools under a free software license.

Of course, we would love to see more vendors supporting CentOS. And given the fact that we try to be fully binary compatible with our upstream vendor, it should not require retraining of support personnel or much additional effort. It's surprising to see that some vendors do not support CentOS even when their infrastructure or developers rely on CentOS. Of course, many vendors will create their offerings based on customer demand. So, don't hesitate to speak up, and ask your software vendor to support CentOS. Maybe even drop a few lines on why you prefer CentOS over the operating systems that they do support (such as stability, long term support, etc.). Finally, let the community know if a major products starts supporting CentOS, other people may have been waiting for support as well (and as a kind "thank you" to that particular company).

C++ book recommendations

Daniel — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 13:54:00 +0100

After having completed an excellent C++ course, I have been on the lookout for good books to venture deeper into the language. The following books turned out to be must-haves that I always try to keep within reach:

The C++ Standard Library - A Tutorial and Reference, Nicolai M. Josuttis
Beyond the C++ Standard Library: An Introduction to Boost, Björn Karlsson
C++ Templates - The Complete Guide, David Vandevoorde and Nicolai M. Josuttis
C++ Template Metaprogramming: Concepts, Tools, and Techniques from Boost and Beyond, David Abrahams and Aleksey Gurtovoy

To people yet unfamiliar to C++, I have been recommending Accelerated C++, Practical Programming by Example by Andrew Koenig and Barbara E. Moo. I only had the opportunity to skim through this book, but it seems to be aimed at leveraging C++ features and the standard library right away, rather than building up to C++ from C.

Dell refunds Vista and Works license fee

Daniel — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 23:26:00 +0100

Update #1: since some flaming already ensued I'd like to state first and foremost that the Dell representatives were very helpful and polite in handling this. They were open to this customer's wishes, and she was very satisfied with her purchase and the subsequent refund.
Update #2: After some requests, I have put the e-mails that were sent online.

Recently my girlfriend bought a new computer. She was looking for a model that supported GNU/Linux, and opted for a Dell Inspiron 530, one of the models that can be purchased with Ubuntu in the United States. Unfortunately, in The Netherlands no consumer models are available with Ubuntu or any other GNU/Linux distribution yet. So, with no other options available, she ordered the machine, which was very affordable and had good specs.

Since she had planned installing GNU/Linux all along, and she is not particularly fond of the though of paying the Microsoft tax for software she will wipe out right away, we took care to read the EULA that is shown the first time the machine. The license said that if the EULA is declined, the customer should contact the manufacturer (or installer) about their refund policy. By the way, the EULA box seems to have been engineered to let people accept the EULA as quickly as possible: the box in which the EULA is shown is very small, making it an uncomfortable read. Additionally, there is only a button to accept the EULA, so we appropriately used the power button as a reject button ;).

After forcefully rejecting the EULA, we cleaned the partition table and installed GNU/Linux (which, as expected, works great on the Inspiron 530). Once everything was configured, she wrote an e-mail to Dell's customer support. Since this is an English blog, I translated her e-mail:

Dear sir/madam,

A few days ago, I ordered a Dell computer. It was delivered yesterday, to my full satisfaction. The computer was pre-installed with Microsoft Windows Vista and Microsoft Works 8.0. Since I have installed GNU/Linux and declined the Windows license, I would like to make use of the refund option as described in the Windows and Works licenses.

I would like to inform how the refund procedure works, and would like to start it if possible.

Thanks in advance, With kind regards,

After a few days she received a reaction from Dell that stated that a refund would not be possible without returning the complete machine, because the license is inseparable from the hardware. In her answer she referred to previous cases where Dell Germany and Dell UK provided a refund to customers.

In the next reply a Dell representative answered that she was indeed eligible for a refund for both Windows Vista and Works. The combined refund is Euro 70 excluding tax. My conclusions:

This provides no guarantee that Dell will give refunds to other customers. But at the very least they seem to be open to consumer choice for GNU/Linux (they have been providing GNU/Linux on servers and workstations for a longer time). They are slowly introducing some models with GNU/Linux in the EU, and in this case they also provided a refund.
In the meanwhile I have heard from others that if you want a machine without Windows, it is often best to place an order by telephone to see if it is possible to order a machine without Windows, rather than using the website.
From this refund and other stories, it seems that the per-machine "Microsoft-tax" is about Euro 70 (excluding tax). That's quite much, try to get rid of it when you plan to erase any pre-installed system anyway. Aside the fact that it's better for your wallet, purchasing or asking for machines without Windows shows that there is customer demand for choice.

CentOS Projects

Daniel — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 10:36:00 +0100

Those who are not actively monitoring the Wiki or project lists may be interested to hear that CentOS now more fornally hosts several subprojects with their own Subversion trees and ticket tracking. A list of projects is available on the Wiki. Currently there are four projects, which all potentially add a lot of value to CentOS:

The CentOS Live CD project will be creating live CDs of the CentOS system, starting with CentOS 5.1. The project is driven by Patrice Guay, who also created the CentOS 5.0 Live CD, and who has renewed the live CD infrastructure to use the Fedora livecd-tools.
Project Cranberry is working on a sysadmin toolkit, which will contain a specific set of packages aimed at system maintenance and recovery.
Dasha is a project that aims to bring more drivers to CentOS, which can either be drivers that were disabled in the upstream kernel, drivers backported from newer kernels, and third party drivers. Since CentOS aims at stability rather than being cutting edge, this project is a welcome addition for newer hardware.
Pandora is a project that works on a comfortable package browser for the CentOS repositories, that also aims to provide RSS feeds and future integration with the CentOS bugtracker.

Of course, we are always on the look-out for new contributors to the CentOS project and community, and working on CentOS projects is one of the possible ways to contribute. You can help projects by:

Testing code and packages produced by the projects, and submitting bug reports for problems that you encounter at the project's Trac site.
Contributing code to particular projects that you are interested in.
Proposing a new project and driving it, if it is accepted as a CentOS-hosted project.

A slight forum recommendation

Daniel — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 18:04:00 +0100

One of the nice things about the Libranet GNU/Linux distribution (I was employed by Libra Computer Systems Ltd. until its demise) was its friendly community. This could be witnessed on both the forums and mailing list, where people offered warm-hearted assistance to their fellow Libranet users. Unfortunately, this community mostly fell apart when Libra Computer Systems closed shop. Though, at that time Jeff Greer started the Linux Agora forum, which was formerly named DebianQuestions. Some ex-Libranetarians still frequent these forums, as well as newer community members. If you are looking for a kind, uncrowded GNU/Linux community, I can certainly recommend to check out Linux Agora.

The last day with OS X

Daniel — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 10:15:00 +0100

For the reasons outlined in my previous blog post, I have completely removed OS X and replaced it with Ubuntu 7.10. For my day to day use, modern GNU/Linux distributions are far more suitable. Besides that, the hardware vendor lock in and the loss of the possibility to fix bugs, make it even less attractive.

Five days with OS X: some frustrations, first reflections

Daniel — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 16:53:00 +0100

I have to get my usual opensource *nix-ish tools running to do my daily work. There are basically three options: MacPorts, Fink, and pkgsrc. All three projects provide a ports-like system. Yesterday, I gave all three of them a shot. Fink was quickly dismissed, because some of the ports that I'd require are at fairly old versions. Many packages didn't compile well with pkgsrc. I am fairly familiar with pkgsrc, and I really love it, and it has always worked great for me on NetBSD and also pretty well on Linux. Unfortunately, I currently do not have the time to fix all packages that do not compile. MacPorts worked fairly well. One package failed to build, because the original site for the package was down temporarily (manually downloading the tarball from another site did the trick). Some other packages failed, because there were overlapping files between ports/packages. Installing with force did the trick there.

So far, MacPorts seems to be an excellent choice for running UNIXish applications on OS X. Unfortunately, it has the downsides inherent with a port collection: compile time. E.g. compiling Inkscape and all its dependencies required a few hours. An additional problem is that the X11 applications don't integrate well with OS X: the GTK+ applications have their native themes (though, a Aqua/Leopard styled theme engine would probably solve that). Besides that the performance of X11 applications seems to be subpar. E.g. rotating images in Inkscape gives very noticable flickering. As said in my previous post: this all seems to be a huge step back from APT/yum, where applications can be installed very easily, within a snap.

To look further than OS X I decided to install a Linux distribution as well (my most favorite system since ~1994). There is a small problem though, after booting a GNU/Linux with rEFIt, the keyboard can not be used at the ISOLinux prompt. Most distributions require the user to (at the very least) press enter to continue the booting process. Ubuntu is one of the exceptions: the live CD boots automatically after 30 seconds (IIRC, some other distributions like SUSE also do this, but none of the distributions that I normally use). Ubuntu seemed very snappy, even from the live CD. Post-install this Mac Mini seems to run Ubuntu faster than my other Core 2 Duo machine, maybe partly due to the excellent Intel-sponsored video drivers. An additional surprise was power management: the Mac Mini seems to use about 23 Watt of power when it is mostly idle (which is about the same as on idle OS X).

I slowly start to believe that Ubuntu is more user-friendly than OS X. I am not the typical desktop user. But OS X seems to be great if you use the i* applications or Adobe software, and the integration between various components of the desktop is very good. But if you want automatic (security) updates for all your software, look beyond the small set of Apple and third-party applications, let alone run non-Apple hardware, Ubuntu seems to be much closer to the holy grail of desktops. Especially if you would like to keep vendor choice (both of your hardware and OS).

Am I disappointed? No! OS X is a nice system, and I would like to explore it further. But apart from that: it's hard to get better hardware at that price, with only a fraction of the power use of a normal desktop machine. So, even if I end up running Linux on it only, the hardware is a good deal!

Maybe I should try Vista to complete my comparison ;). (No thanks!)

Three days with OS X: the good and the bad

Daniel — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 22:24:00 +0100

A short update on my first experiences with OS X. I had some pretty urgent work this week, and the good news is that I had no real problems getting stuff done. First off was a presentation that I had to finish. I prefer the LaTeX beamer document class for presentations over anything else. It lets me work on the actual content of slides, rather than formatting, and the class defaults are very sane in that they create very nice-looking slides. The MacTeX distribution was easy to set up, and provides TeX-live, Ghostscript, and some related stuff you may need.

The first less surprise came up running Mercurial, my favorite distributed SCM:

$ hg
[...]
    raise ValueError, 'unknown locale: %s' % localename
ValueError: unknown locale: UTF-8

This can be worked around by setting the LANG variable to 'c'. Of course, this is a bad solution, I still have to look into this. Though this is a minor problem compared to disk images (dmgs), let's state it right away: disk images suck! For the non-OS X user: these are images that get mounted when you click on them. Most third party software vendors provide their software as these disk images. Installation is usually done by opening the disk image, copying the disk image to the Applications directory, and unmounting the disk image. Besides the fact that you have to download disk images manually, application upgrades seem to be manually (usually). E.g. a security update was released for the Camino browser. I had to download the new disk image, open it, copy the new Camino folder to Applications folder, close the disk image. This is many steps back from APT and yum, where you can not only install your applications from repositories, but upgrade them with a single command as well. With Synaptic wrapped around it, APT is even very usable for non-expert users.

Yes, I know of the existance of Fink. Once they offer binary Leopard packages, I'll try it, because I'd be very happy to have a decent package manager. At least for the opensource applications that are usually provided with Linux distributions.

My first day with OS X

Daniel — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:22:00 +0100

I have finally made a plunge that I had been thinking of making for some time: moving to a more effortless desktop operating system. I primarily use my computers for development and the usual stuff (mail, music, etc.), as such I want to spend less time on maintaining my desktop systems. I have a few additional requirements for a desktop system: it should have a UNIX kernel, shell, etc. and the usual development tools (Python, Ruby, C/C++).

The best candidate was OS X, so I bought the lowest-spec Mac mini. The first impressions are good: I am already getting used to the interface, installing TeX et al. was easy, and everything seems snappy. I had to print some stuff, just plugging my Laserjet 5M did the trick, no additional configuration was required. So far so good :).

How do you like your tea?

Daniel — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:13:00 +0100

IcedTea packages are now available for CentOS 5/i386. IcedTea builds upon OpenJDK, and replaces the few binary plugs with stubs or classpath code. OpenJDK is the open source Java JDK that Sun Microsystems generously donated to the free software community.

Currently, not all Java software included in CentOS runs with IcedTea (most notably, Eclipse, but the latest version from the Eclipse Foundation works well after setting the language level to 5.0/1.5.0). But for many applications it seems to work well and fast.

Slight yum-priorities breakage

Daniel — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 09:50:00 +0100

Some people using CentOS 5 with RPMForge may have bumped into a problem where perl-Compress-Zlib from CentOS is upgraded with the same package from RPMForge. What happened? The original priorities plugin excluded packages just by their names. So, even if a higher priority repo has a package for one arch (say i386) and a lower priority repo has a package with the same name but a different arch (e.g. noarch), the package from the repository with the lower priority was excluded.

One user reported a more exotic usage case (rhbz #227540), where he needed per arch priorities, where for instance, a x86_64 package does not exclude a i386 package with a lower priority. Upstream (yum-utils) made a change to make priorities per-arch. Unfortunately, this has hit us now that perl-Compress-Zlib has become a noarch package, meaning that it will not be excluded, and that yum offers to upgrade the package with the package from RPMForge.

This has now been fixed in the HEAD git version of yum-priorities, where per-arch excludes are made optional rather than the default. After proper testing, we will probably include this version of priorities in CentOS 5-Extras (CentOS 4 is not affected).

I'd like to post a slight reaction to Dag's recent blog entry as well: my experiences are quite the contrary. yum is one of the nicest package managers I have found, the code is very readable, it's easy to write plugins for yum, it's easy to embed yum in other software. Sure, there are some problematic things (like signal handling in some yum versions), but the yum developers have been very responsive to my bug reports and patches.

HP says: if you don't want Windows, maybe you should consider another laptop brand

Daniel — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 23:40:00 +0100

I am a happy buyer/user of a HP laptop (HP NX6110), and previously of a HP/Compaq Workstation. Often, I also recommend HP computers to others. Unfortunately, a recent post on a Linux Dutch forum makes me want to reconsider such recommendations and my future purchases. There have been recent cases where buyers went to court, and the courts ruled that they should be awared a fee upon rejecting the Windows EULA. So, at the very least, I am surprised, maybe even entertained by their reaction. Here are some snippets translated from Dutch:

''It is correct that we, as a manufacturer, can not return the money for the license, or give a price reduction for a product of HP or Compaq. Your salesman could have the possibility to handle this for you. I have to state clearly that not every salesman can offer this possibility for all products that they sell.

To clarify this a bit more, every HP or Compaq product is delivered with a License, and we do not have the possibility to remove this license or deliver the product without a license, so without an operating system and extra hardware. HP only guarantees that their products work properly with the original software that was preinstalled.

It could be the case that you, together with your salesman, have to look at the possibilities of a completely different product from another brand. This can be a bare system, or a system from another manufacturer that provides more opportunities for returning the license costs.''

Thank you HP for listening to your customers, your advise couldn't have been clearer :)!

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, so I do not know whether HP or someone else is required to return a free upon declining the Windows EULA. But their own recommendation is pretty entertaining.

Update: Let's be fair: some resellers do offer HP laptops with FreeDOS.

yum 2.4 for CentOS 3 is now in CentOS Plus

Daniel — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 16:40:00 +0100

After extensive testing on the CentOS-devel list, Tru Huynh has added yum 2.4 (and all its dependencies) for CentOS 3 to the CentOS Plus repository for CentOS 3. yum 2.4 has numerous improvements over 2.0, and the accompanying yum plugins (fastestmirror, priorities, etc.) add useful functionality. A backported version of the yum C metadata parser was added as well. This makes the metadata parsing phase much faster. Instructions for installing yum 2.4 can be found in Tru's mail to the CentOS-announce list.