"NVIDIA’s fully featured Linux graphics driver is provided as binary-only because it contains intellectual property NVIDIA wishes to protect, both in hardware and in software"

NVIDIA Statement

“The NVidia driver is the single component in a KDE4 / Free Operating system stack causing us most of the hard-to-solve problems. In other words, nvidia.ko has grave technical shortcomings.”

Sebastian Kügler, KDE Developer.

“The great advantage of the Open Source development model is that it is driven by considerations of technical excellence, so if you give people enough information, they’ll not only assist you writing the driver, they’ll even help you design it.”

“[...] binary drivers totally negate the shared support and maintenance burden which is what makes Open Source so compelling. Additionally, there is also a drag effect these binary drivers have on the rest of the ecosystem: for instance, Fedora was under enormous pressure not to release Fedora 9 until there was a solution that allowed it to run with the Nvidia binary driver (Fedora chose to ship with a pre-release of the X windows system which Nvidia refused to support and because the driver was binary Fedora couldn’t simply fix the problems and ship anyway).”

James Bottomley. Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board Chair and SCSI Maintainer. Linux Graphics Essay.

"We have shifted towards Linux because of Microsoft," … "Microsoft has a lot of power and it is going to be difficult, but we will be working hard to develop the Linux market."

Gianpiero Morbello, Vice president of marketing and brand, Acer.
[Link]

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is the HD-DVD processing key you can use to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux. Read about why I’m spreading this number.

Tonight I took a closer look at the ftp kioslave, I wanted to see if I could configure a maximum number of connections to use, as it opens multiple connections to the server and the server I want to use only accepts 3 concurrent connections. Unfortunately I didn’t find out how to achieve that goal, but I did find the following config options for it, which I’m making a note of here for my own reference and in case you find it useful. The file to edit is ~/.kde/share/config/kio_ftprc, if it doesn’t exist (and it probably doesn’t) you’ll need to create it.

To disable passive mode for the site example.com:

[example.com]
DisablePassiveMode=true

To do this for all sites not just example.com use [] instead of [example.com]

To force text mode, rather than binary mode transfers for the site example.com:

[example.com]
textmode=true


To login to a site automatically:

[example.com]
EnableAutoLogin=true
autoLoginUser=fred
autoLoginPass=secret


If anyone knows how to limit the number of concurrent connections I’d love to hear from you.