Linux

Sun has confirmed that Solaris will be released under an Open Source licence.

This is only some days after Computer Associates has decided to release Ingres under the same type of license.

OSS rules :-)

I’ve been using Gentoo Linux for about a week now and I can say that I’m rather impressed.

In fact, Gentoo is a breath of fresh air for me, a (previously) die-hard Redhat (and then Fedora) fan.

Having to build your own system from scratch and then install exactly what you want is great. Compiling everything from source also gives a great sense of satisfaction except that you must be patient… but you get optimal performance in the end. Another nice aspect of Gentoo is that the downloadable ebuilds (sources + build scripts) are very up to date : Linux kernel 2.6, Gnome 2.6, KDE 3.2, Mozilla 1.6 etc.

So, for me, Gentoo is a winner ! I give it 10/10 :-)

As you know, I’ve been working on Advisare for some time now. It’s a program which does two things, (1) connect to Canal Satellite’s website to fetch the TV program of the day and (2) advises about what to watch.

While doing some research the other day, I found out that part (1) is the aim of an existing project called xmltv. xmltv has grabbers for each country but unfortunately not for Mauritius. So, I think I’ll write one. So watch out for tv_grab_mu in the coming weeks :-)

Then, I found out that xmltv is used internally by many PVR software (aiming to replace the VCR, the DVD player and the game console) to show the TV program of the day. I discovered that MythTV for example uses xmltv and by writing tv_grab_mu, I’ll be able to use MythTV to record my satellite programs.

So I’m pretty excited right now. I’ll think I’ll have a go at tv_grab_mu. I’ll keep you posted.