Krekar again..
onsdag, juni 16, 2004
Mullah Krekar's case in Norway was tossed out of court because of lacking evidence yesterday. The same day, the US said they were still convinced that Krekar was a terrorist threat. Interestingly, the judge said "it didn't make the case much easier" that one of the key witnesses which had 'evidence' against Krekar, had been tortured by PUK (one of the Northern Iraqi groups) while he was being questioned there by the US. Afterwards, he was taken to Abu Ghraib where he made his testimony to Norwegian police. Initially, he was very critical of Ansar Al Islam (Krekars group), but toned this dows as time went by. Norwegian police stopped this investigation once they learned about the torture, they didn't want to put their witnesses' safety on the line.
Suddenly out of the blue today,Krekar was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Jordan, this time for plotting terrorist acts and for having connections to Al-Quaeda. Notably, 7 others were sentenced in the same court at the same time, to the exact same punishment. The only person present got his sentence halved immediately to 7,5 years. Another 6 people were also on trial, but they have all died "in unknown locations under unknown conditions". This time it wasn't Krekar who was the leader of the group... Jordan has earlier failed in getting him extradited from Norway for drug smuggeling.
Norwegian police and the Justice department says they haven't heard a word from Jordan about the case until it came through in the press. (And nothing from them afterwards either).
American pressure or new evidence? - Neither Krekar or his lawyer has so much as heard about the case, nor has he been presented with his charge. Krekars lawyer says he isn't even hinting that the US is behind this, he says he is saying it is. No lawyer appointed, no time to present his version of the case, no nothing. Just: "You are sentenced".
So why 15 years? You see, Norway has this law that says it cant extradite someone to a country if there are even remote chances they will be sentenced to death. They need assurances of the opposite. That was presumably one of the reasons why he wasn't last time. (Along with missing evidence of course). Someone has probably been thinking a bit more this time around and thought that if they got him judged for anything less than death, he would be extradited. Many right-wing politicians in Norway still think he should be extradited, including a key figure Erna Solberg from Høyre (Right party) which is currently in position.
I wonder if Bush can use this in his champaign: "Ya seer, thees teerrrorist was seenteenced in Joordan for haaviing cloosee tiies to Osama, aaand he haaad cloosee tiieess with Saaadam as weell. Seee huw riight we weeree?"
Oops, where did lady Justice go?
Bergen Commune goes Linux
onsdag, juni 16, 2004
digi.no reports that Bergen Commune, housing the second largest city in Norway with the same name, is switching all its networks from Windows and UNIX to Novell Suse Linux citing millions of NOK in savings, better security, more options and higher stability.
The commune has two networks, the educational network with 36.000 users (32.000 students and 4000 teachers) and the administrative network with 15.000 users.
The administrative network switches from old HP servers running UNIX to new HP Integrity Itanium servers running Linux clusters with Oracle databases. The educational network will run Linux on IBM eServer BladeCenter servers.
They chose SuSE ahead of ie. RedHat because of Suse's leading technology such as support for 64bit architechture, their focus on KDE (they think KDE is "a generation ahead" of Gnome), and their European base which means they have better support for 'obscure' languages.
They underline that they are not "tossing out windows"; They will still use MS Office on most clients, and they are keeping some windows servers for backwards compatability.
Firefox
fredag, juni 11, 2004
I just installed Mozilla Firefox on my SuSE machine. It is the slowest program I have ever used. Period. It took between 5 and 10 seconds to open a new tab, sometimes it took just as long before a tooltip appeared.
I dont know why this is... Is it because it uses GTK instead of Qt like Opera does? I doubt it, other programs use gtk too, like the GIMP and gtk-gnutella. The gimp is relatively fast, but gtk-gnutella is also very slow, unlike qtella which uses Qt. Maybe there is something to it, but I also think the firefox developers need to clean their act before I can use it.
I think I'll stick with Opera.
Back to SuSE, 9.1 this time
mandag, juni 07, 2004
As you've read, I've gone back to Linux again, after doing some on and off with Windows XP. I found that going to Windows was faster (that time), but the Windows management has me frustrated. Its almost impossible to manage seriously without having some kind of schooling.
Linux on the other hand, has millions of user groups that, through figuring out things by themselves, has really learned how the system actually works. - Of course Linux is also completely open, so it is possible to figure things out. And it was made for managing etc, etc... I'm as comfortable on the command-line as I am in the UI.
Now. Speed. Linux kernel 2.6 still isn't as fast as Windows XP if you do very few things. But one place it really outshines Windows is in its memory management: It doesn't page to swap things that you are likely to use again anytime soon. Windows just put whatever it feels like in the swap when it needs to, resulting in an awfully slow return to the desktop for instance. Another thing is the 2.6 kernel improved resource prioritizing. I can do a lot of things at the same time wihtout even noticing it becoming slower. I can run KDE 3.2.1, listen to streaming mp3, run Opera with 30 heavy pages open, edit a big html file with colorcoding and instant scrolling. Even run a high-end screensaver on top of that without as much as a hickup. On a pentium 2 300Mhz with 256MB memory. So overall, Linux really IS faster.
Why Suse over fedora then? I loved my first suse installation, which was 9.0. When I recently installed Fedora, I found it to be lacking a lot of polish: Icons were missing, I couldn't specify port ranges in the redhat firewall config tool, it didn't recognize my digital camera as being 'a valid block device', it didn't automount my USB drive, it couldn't play video without installing extra packages, I had to manually configure the sound-card. - Granted, all these things are things that can be figured out, but I'm a Linux newbie.
Suse 9.1 does all these things. A welcome change from 9.0 is that it even configures my ESS es1869 sound-card properly.
There are some SUSE 9.1 reviews at desktoplinux if you want to read more about it: SuSE 9.1 review roundup
Update 11 june: OSNews is running an article on the slowness of linux, and people seem to have opinions on it there too.
Finally
mandag, juni 07, 2004
I dont know if its me or if it is the actual lack of skilled journalism out in the world, but I think I have found something quite unique: an article about the web as we know it, and why we must use standards to keep it.
It explains why you must use standard data in your website, or be forced to do the longhorn dance. It is us or it, we the people or microsoft. Open vs closed, freedom vs central command. It's your choice and you control it.
I hope more people will read this piece.
via exclipy.com
Sound, this time in Fedora Core 2
torsdag, juni 03, 2004
I have an old Compaq system, a presario 5030. This isn't very nice to Most linux distros when it comes to (at least) sound.
Making sound work was moderately easy in Suse 9.0, all I did was tweak some settings, GUI style in Suse's excellent YaST config tool. Turning off PNP detection worked there. With Fedora Core 2, things didn't go as smooth intitially. I did run Core 1 once, and using sndconfig to adjust some settings worked nicely. Sndconfig doesn't come with Core 2 though, it uses ALSA which sndconfig apparantly doesn't work with.
What I had to do was laid out to me by a Fedora user by the name of Linus Walleij. He had installed it on a Compaq Deskpro EN, which has the same soundcard, in an apparantly equal configuration as that of the Presario 5030.
Simple steps:
Log in as root, then edit /etc/modprobe.conf. My modprobe.conf looked like this before this edit:
alias eth0 8139too alias usb-controller uhci-hcd
There is my network card, and the usb controller.
I inserted these lines from the page linked above:
# ALSA portion alias char-major-116 snd alias snd-card-0 snd-es18xx options snd-es18xx enable=1 isapnp=0 port=0x220 mpu_port=0x388 fm_port=0x330 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0 # OSS/Free portion alias char-major-14 soundcore alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0 # card #1 alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
Now restart, and the sound works brilliantly. Just remember to run up the volume of PCM in the volume control.
