Atheros releases Linux drivers

Another yay for the Linux and OSS world. Atheros wifi adapters are notoriously difficult at times to run under Linux; though I enjoy wrestling with it as much as any geek worth his/her salt, it would make things a lot easier for noobs and frees up more time for us to focus on the job rather than on lower levels stuffs like drivers and such.

Read it at Atheros unveils free Linux driver for its 802.11n devices

Hate to say this but I do look forward to the day when the excellent ndiswrapper is no longer necessary.

MS showing love to OSS

Was reading through the feeds from Slashdot a moment ago and this caught my attention, Microsoft Blesses LGPL, Joins Apache Foundation .

So does it mean MS has finally become less evil? Can't help but think of MS' fundamental strategy Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

The fact that they are willing to pay money and contribute code is an admission of OSS in the world. Of course I would not bet on them using Apache as their primary web server anytime soon.

GPG Cheat sheet

Below are some of the more frequent GPG commands I use:

#Generate Key
gpg --gen-key

#Upload key
gpg --send-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com DEADBEEF

#Download key
gpg --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys DEADBEEF

#Export Public Key
gpg -ao something-public.key --export DEADBEEF

#Export Private Key
gpg -a --export-secret-keys DEADBEEF | gpg -aco some-private.key.gpg

#Import Public Key
gpg --import something-public.key

#Import Private Key
gpg --decrypt some-private.key.gpg |gpg --import

#Sign Key
gpg --sign-key ABABABAB
gpg --default-key DEADBEEF --sign-key ABABABAB

#Sign a file
gpg --default-key DEADBEEF --sign --detach-sign DumbSlides.odp

#Verify signature file
gpg DumbSlides.sig

#Sign a clear text
gpg --clearsign textfile.txt
gpg --default-key DEADBEEF --clearsign textfile.txt

#Create ASCII Armoured key file
gpg --export -a DEADBEEF > mykey.asc

GPG Rul35!

Key Signing

To sign a GPG key via CLI:

#gpg --sign-key ABCDEF10

This will use the primary or first key in your keyring to sign the ABCDEF10 key.

If you have more than one key and you would like to sign the ABCDEF10 key with some other key in your keyring you need to use the --default-key switch (e.g. assuming the DEADBEEF key is not my primary key or first in the keyring).

#gpg --default-key DEADBEEF --sign-key ABCDEF10

How to sign a file using GPG

There are several reasons why you would want to sign a file, one of it is to ensure that the file really came from the author. Well , I recently finished some slides for job and wanted to sign it.

$ gpg --default-key DEADBEEF --sign --detach-sign Some-Dumb-Slides.odp

(Note, DEADBEEF is the Hex ID of my key, the --detach-sign param is used, so that a sig file is created)

An additional Some-Dumb-Slides.sig file will be created.

To verify the signature:

$gpg Some-Dumb-Slides.sig

Gosh I love GPG.

Fedora 9 Update List

Just got this link https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F9 from KageSenshi via IRC. It has all patches issued so far for Fedora 9 with testers' comments.

Since the previous kernel release made my home PC's Wifi dead, guess I can try the latest one and see whether it works.

Fedora 9 64-bit

64-bit computing is the future, or so the chip companies and PC manufacturers are telling us. Well yes and no. I guess if you only use the computer as nothing more than a simple Internet box, a glorified typewriter and a music player, it really doesn't matter whether you run a 32 or 64-bit platform.

As more 64-bit CPUs are powering anything from notebook computers to servers, the need for 64-bit platform and software is growing by the day.

Linux and the OSS world has been 64-bit ready for quite some time now. For the server, no one can sensibly argue that Linux is lacking in any way. However on the desktop, 64-bit Linux has always been somewhat lacking. Though I am all for software freedom and openess, the fact remains that many stuff in the Net are still propreitary (Flash, Java etc); 32-bit Linux did and still does not have this issue, its 64-bit version has somewhat been the poor cousin, until now.

I installed Fedora 9 64-bit and so far, I have not seen any lack of software and plugins. In the office I listen to MP3s and CDs. I also on occasion do some "Youtubing" after hours. So far, it has stood up to the challenge.

All video plugins are available from the Livna repo. To install/enable the Livna repo, please refer to here.

The instructions also covers an easy how-to installation of the Flash plugin for the 64-bit platform (a frequent complain of frequent surfers running on 64-bit Linux is how hard it is to enable Flash plugin).

For Adobe Acrobat, I used the tarball to install.

Wammu which I use to synchronise my trusty SE W850i also works without a hitch. So far, I have been running Fedora 9 x86_64 north of 24 hours and I have yet to see any problems with it.