rozzin's journal

Linux has won--without needing anyone to notice.

Someone in my local LUG remarked:

So, while I've been slaving away in the world of corporate IT, it appears Linux has quietly won the OS war. I just didn't notice. Linux may already be out-shipping Microsoft Windows. </blockquote>
... noting that it's actually quite difficult, if not impossible, to buy a TV that's not running Linux internally anymore.
Another member further remarked on the general prevalence of Linux in the embedded market--wondering, quasi-ironically, if maybe even his microwave oven might be Linux-based without him knowing. It's actually not beyond the realm of believability--Electrolux does actually have a fridge that's Linux-based</a>.
Several years ago, I was at the movie-theatre down in Lowell, MA, with a friend who had a thing for photo-booths, when I discovered that the photo-booth there was running Red Hat Linux.
`Embedded Linux' was already pretty pervasive, even at that point-- having worked its way into a lot of types of devices that people don't even expect to be `digital' inside, let alone be `computers': photo-booths, A/V amplifiers and other stereo equipment, batteries, telephones (well before Android), the telephone network....
Now it's also refrigerators, televisions, toys for small children, e-Books, motorcycles</a>, guitars</a>, personal audio-players, video games....
As Mark Weiser wrote in `The computer for the 21st Century'</a>:

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. </blockquote>
They're the things that happen without anyone noticing that they happened--changes that become visible only in retrospective.
And it's by design, actually.
Part of what's going on here is that more and more `mundane' objects are advancing technologically and becoming `smart'; and, when they do, they use Linux--because Linux is the thing that's making that advance possible in the first place. Develop your own thing from scratch? Pay to license something more obscure, and get a smaller talent-pool? Linux is a commodity. You're not supposed to notice when it gets used, just like you're not supposed to notice when 5-volt circuits (with connectors made by... what manufacturer?) get used.
At least, that's my perspective from the inside--that's why my groups have been shipping Linux for the past decade.
The amazing thing is that Linux-uptake just seems to keep accelerating....

Completely-unmaintained packages that YOU USE...

On Ubuntu</a>, you can get a list of packages that are installed on your system but completely unmaintained by running this command:

dpkg --get-selections | grep '\Winstall' | cut -f1 | xargs apt-cache show | egrep '^Filename: pool/(universe|multiverse)/.*' | sed -re 's:.*/([^_]+)_(.*)_.*:\1:' | less -N</code> </blockquote>
Packages in this list have not had time allocated to them forintegration</a> or QA prior to release, and they do not receive regular security-updates or bug-fixes following initial release</a>.
As one moves further off-centre from Ubuntu's primary target-audience, the number of items in that list increases, and which items they are becomes more unsettling.
For example: I prefer to use the official GNOME web-browser, Epiphany</a>--for reasons nicely summarised on Daniel Bo's weblog</a>. Ubuntu shipped no updates for Epiphany</a> during the lifetime of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala), despite there having been several provided by Ubuntu's upstream community</a>--with the first update making its way into Debian just 2 weeks after the initial (random?) snapshot was made for Karmic. That's no updates for the GNOME web-browser available through Ubuntu until the next release, 6 months later. If you stick with Ubuntu's Long Term Service (LTS) releases, then you can expect to go 2 years with no updates for this or any other package in the `universe' or `multiverse' sections of Ubuntu.
Having my web-browser, or anything else that faces the network, go without security-updates should be unsettling enough; but there are other items in my list that are even more unsettling: packages like gnutls-bin</code>, which is supposed to be a security tool. And there are enough other `minorly-unsettling' items in my list that the sheer number of them all together is itself unsettling.
A friend was surprised to find that the "OTR" plugin for Pidgin, which he used to keep his IM conversations secure, is in universe</code></a>-- which, again, means that he cannot expect security updates for it. So much for his secure conversations.
How many items are in your list, and what are they?
Love Bug(fix): libvisualid 0.2.1 It's Valentine's Day</a> and libvisualid</code> 0.2.1 is out</a>, to fix some bugs that managed to escape with version 0.2.0</a>; changes include: Automatic complexity-limiting is actually enabled.</li> A divide-by-zero bug affecting the rendering of line-glyphs with exactly one `rib' sub-glyph has been fixed.</li> Under-reporting of the complexity added to Line-glyphs by multiple `ribs' has been fixed.</li> Two issues in the best-common-substring logic used to associate file-names with pre-existing VisualID-glyphs for other, related files have been resolved: memory-leaks have been fixed, and strings that were treated as circular are now treated correctly.</li> The VisualID Explorer now renders glyphs with a fixed 1:1 aspect-ratio, scaled without distortion to fit the available drawing-area.</li> </ul> Baby's Drawings The latest libvisualid</code> code produced this, during testing: [musca politica] </object> </div> When I asked Jay what he saw in it, he said, "three houseflies forming a political party". I printed it out and brought it to Pam, who responded, "what's with the flies?". I told her that it was a VisualID. She trimmed it and hung it on the refrigerator.