I've finally hooked up bzr-dbus to bzr-gtk: When a local branch changes its HEAD, that notifies a background task 'commit-notifier' (when the branch can be read by that task). You need to be running 'bzr commit-notify' and have bzr-dbus correctly installed (see its README). Its only just working now, so will be tweaked and tuned a bit to have the commit-notify command started automatically by GNOME, have it read remote branches (not done right now to avoid issues with needing a login box). One nice thing is that this will notify on 'pull' commands too, so when a bzr branch or pull command completes, you get a notification.

I'm looking for inspiration - and for someone else with the same problem - to work out how to fix and/or report a long-standing problem with all Gecko-based browsers in Gnome with nvidia.

When editing text in a HTML form entry field, moving the cursor with the cursor keys results in horrid vertical lines: a b c 4 e which disappear when clicking elsewhere in the control but make editing VERY difficult. The vertical lines do not always appear between characters, they often overlay the characters, something I cannot represent here. I'll try a screenshot later.

It is definitely something to do with Gecko because Gtk does not suffer this problem (which is one reason why I use drivel for blog entries).

Galeon, Iceweasel and epiphany-browser are all affected.

One simple example is the Debian wiki - normal, uncomplicated text inputs, no special Javascript, but moving around the text in a control is almost impossible.

I've taken to cutting the text into gedit and pasting it back, which is a nasty hack.

Update: I've had comments since posting that indicate that this is likely to be a bug in the pairing of gecko and the free software nvidia driver which can be 'solved' by using the proprietary driver. I won't be doing that so a little more investigation is in order . . .

Adrian von Bidder made an interesting post in response to my post about Spanish wind power. He correctly points out that power sources that have seasonal variations and which may vary during the course of a day can not be used as the sole power source.

The ideal design would be to have wind power stations that are designed to have a peak power that is greater than the expected use for the country. Then when wind power is slightly below peak the entire use for the country could still be satisfied.

There are a number of power sources that can quickly ramp up, this includes hydro-electric and gas-fired power stations. Such forms of power generation could be used as backup for when wind and solar power are limited. Incidentally one thing to note about Solar power is that it is most effective during the day in summer - which is when there is the highest demand for electricity to run cooling systems. There is also an option for having the sun heat up rocks which can be used for generating electricity at night or at periods of peak demand. So eventually we could have all our energy needs supplied by solar and wind power.

If wind power was designed to exceed the demand at windy times there are a number of ways that it could be used. The first thing to do is to implement billing systems that vary the cost according to the supply. This information could be provided to customers via X10 (or a similar technology). Home appliances could take note of this information and perform power-hungry operations when it's cheap. Your freezer could cool itself to -30C when electricity is cheap and allow the temperature to rise to -5C when it's expensive. You could program your washing machine to start when electricity becomes cheap - usually a few hours delay before starting the washing is no inconvenience.

Ideally home power generation from solar and wind sources would be used. There is significant loss in the power lines that lead from power plants to the consumer, so there are efficiency benefits in generating power locally. A wind turbine for a home will give highly variable amounts of power, and the electricity use of a home also varies a lot. So batteries to store the power are required. When you have local battery storage you could use your batteries to power your home when electricity is expensive and use mains power when it's cheap. Also if it was possible to feed power back to the main grid then home battery systems could be used to help power the main grid at expensive times (if the electricity company reimburses you for putting power back in the grid then you want such reimbursement to be done at the highest rate).

Adrian also mentioned turning devices off when leaving home. It is common practice in hotels that when entering your room you will insert your key in a holder by the door which acts as a master switch for all lights and some other electrical devices (such as the TV).

This same idea could be adopted for home use, not based on key storage (although this would be an option) but instead on a switch near the front door. Push a button and all lights turn off as do human-focussed appliances such as the TV and DVD player turn off (not the VCR), etc. There could also be a night option which would turn off the TV, DVD player, and most lights. Obviously at night you want bedroom and bathroom lights to still work but many things can be turned off.

This is all possible with today's technology, small changes to usage patterns, and spending a little more money on technology. Currently you can get a basic solar power system for your house for about $10,000. That isn't much when you spend $300,000 or more buying the house!

Today's featured spam is from Digital Parts, Rowan House, Bricklehampton Lane, Pershore, Worcestershire, WR10 3JT sent via ukcompanydeals.com and reroute-all.com. They get a special mention for including the fully buzzword-compliant footer

"Marketing communications are delivered in accordance with EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications. [...] All communications are targeted to business users only."

and then sending their weasel words to one of my personal org.uk addresses, clearly marked as "UK non-trading individual" at Nominet. No real contact details included, so if you get the same spam, please link this to help them find themselves on search engines.

sudo su -
sharrow:~# /etc/init.d/sysklogd stop
Stopping system log daemon....
sharrow:~# echo 1 >  /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
sharrow:~# dmesg   gawk '/^[^( ]*\([0-9]*\): (READ WRITE dirtied)/  activity[$1]++  END  for (x in activity) print activity[x],x '   sort -nr   head -n 10
502 amarokcollectio(358):
3 amarokapp(359):
2 mysqld(18448):
1 io(358):
1 bash(31560):
sharrow:~# echo 0 >  /proc/sys/vm/block_dump
sharrow:~# /etc/init.d/sysklogd start
Starting system log daemon....

There are times when you want to track the bleeding edge of a particular project, and having a new laptop is often one of those moments... I've recently bought an HP Compaq nx6320 and while most of it is working, one of the reasons I got it was because of Keith Packard's work on the RandR extensions for X. Well, I was definitely seeing this bug but with a small patch I can get the latest (experimental) packages for xserver-xorg-video-intel to work, and now with a few magic tweaks to my xorg.conf I can make my desktop expand to another monitor when I unsuspend at work, and contract back to just the laptop screen when I resume somewhere else. The Magic Expanding X Config First of all, when I got the driver to actually work, xrandr explained to me that my maximum resolution was 1400x1400:

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1400 x 1050, maximum 1400 x 1400
VGA disconnected (normal left inverted right)
LVDS connected 1400x1050+0+0 (normal left inverted right) 305mm x 228mm
   1400x1050      60.0*+
   1280x800       60.0  
   1280x768       60.0  
   1024x768       60.0  
   800x600        60.3  
   640x480        59.9  
TV disconnected (normal left inverted right)

Using a few clues from Ross Burton I managed to get that "maximum 1400x1400" to increase. The trick is to add a "Virtual" setting for screen size into your "Screen" Section, like so:

Section "Screen"
        Identifier      "Default Screen"
        Device          "Intel 945GM/GMS/940GML"
        Monitor         "Laptop Panel"
        DefaultDepth    24
        SubSection "Display"
                Depth           24
                Virtual         2680 1050
        EndSubSection
EndSection

The downside of this is that if you set the width greater than 2048 (as I have here) then DRI won't work, so you won't get 3d stuff. I guess I can manage without ice-cream, just so long as I get my cake! Once I have the "Virtual" setting, when I resume at the office I can:

xrandr --output VGA --mode 1280x1024 --pos 1400x0

And then when I resume somewhere without the external monitor, I can:

xrandr --output VGA --off

Quibbles All of these features are kind of under development, but Xorg 7.3 will support this stuff, and then Gnome and suchlike will have to start thinking about how to deal with it. The dynamic screen changing is not something these environments are completely ready for. One example is that while I know that monitor is always on the RHS of my docking station, X wants it to be the primary monitor and Gnome moves both panels onto that screen. Perhaps that's not a choice that can be made automatically. Someone who had an external keyboard plugged into their docking station might want the opposite behaviour, and there is certainly no way the environment can magically know whether that monitor is left or right of my laptop screen. Eventually I expect that Gnome will recognise this monitor, and will make the panels and location automatically set the RandR environment to match the way I set it last time. It is also somewhat annoying that I have to actually choose the virtual size. No doubt this configuration will disappear in due course and it is not really surprising to see it for something which is admittedly quite bleeding edge! I noticed at LCA that Keith had his own screen set for a Virtual size of 2048x2048, and now I know why: that's the maximum size that is supported for DRI, so if I expand my desktop onto a 1280x1024 screen I'm going to have some overlap. In fact I could almost configure my external monitor to be above my normal screen and use it that way, but it would feel pretty weird I think. In the meantime I've gone back to "blank screen" for my screen saver which admittedly is currently the only application for 3d acceleration on my desktop. Remaining Problems with this Laptop The only outstanding issues for me with this laptop are:

• Suspend/Resume to RAM does not work (I use suspend to disk)
• Fingerprint Sensor does not work (AuthenTec say Linux support will be available later this year)

That's about the best Linux compatibility I have had for any of my last five laptops within a month of buying it. Most of them have had much more significant stuff less supported even after three years of use!

For those who care about kids... I recently blogged about TMBG s marketing genius in releasing kids albums that adults who grew up to TMBG will love and buy. Another good example of kids music that you, too, can enjoy is Ralph s World. It's not quite as ironic or odd as TMBG, but still a good listen. Check out, for example, the RealAudio clips for Clean-Up (much better than the Barney version!), Baa-Baa Black Sheep, and The Coffee Song. Speaking of Barney, apparently his music has been used to torture Iraqi detainees. Technorati Tags: Children's Music, Music

I figured this new shiny OpenID thing was cool enough to start using it. There's just this one problem: I didn't want to have to go through the "register on a website and remember yet another password" dance once more; and since I have this marvellous Kerberos realm set up which works for authenticating against my webserver, too, why not use that? So I downloaded the JanRain PHP OpenID library, and went hacking. It's not all that hard, really:

diff -ruN ./lib/actions.php /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/actions.php
--- ./lib/actions.php	2006-12-08 23:56:22.000000000 +0100
+++ /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/actions.php	2007-03-08 14:18:32.000000000 +0100
@@ -88,17 +88,24 @@
     if (!isset($input['openid_url']))  
         $errors[] = 'Enter an OpenID URL to continue';
      
-    if (!isset($input['password']))  
-        $errors[] = 'Enter a password to continue';
+    if (!isset($input['password']) && !isset($_SERVER["REMOTE_USER"]))  
+        $errors[] = 'Enter a password to continue, or log in using an ' .
+			'apache logon method';
      
     if (count($errors) == 0)  
         $openid_url = $input['openid_url'];
         $openid_url = Auth_OpenID::normalizeUrl($openid_url);
-        $password = $input['password'];
-        if (!checkLogin($openid_url, $password))  
-            $errors[] = 'The entered password does not match the ' .
-                'entered identity URL.';
-         
+	if(isset($_SERVER["REMOTE_USER"]))  
+	    if(!checkUser($openid_url, $_SERVER["REMOTE_USER"]))  
+	       $errors[] = 'The apache user does not match the openid URL';
+	     
+	  else  
+           $password = $input['password'];
+           if (!checkLogin($openid_url, $password))  
+               $errors[] = 'The entered password does not match the ' .
+                   'entered identity URL.';
+            
+	 
      
     return array($errors, $openid_url);
  
@@ -166,4 +173,4 @@
     return sites_render($sites);
  
 
-?>
\ No newline at end of file
+?>
diff -ruN ./lib/render/login.php /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/render/login.php
--- ./lib/render/login.php	2006-12-08 23:56:22.000000000 +0100
+++ /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/render/login.php	2007-03-08 14:53:56.000000000 +0100
@@ -3,6 +3,7 @@
 require_once "lib/session.php";
 require_once "lib/render.php";
 
+if(!isset($_SERVER["REMOTE_USER"]))  
 define('login_form_pat',
        '<div class="form">
   <p>
@@ -31,6 +32,33 @@
   </form>
 </div>
 ');
+  else  
+define('login_form_pat',
+       '<div class="form">
+  <p>
+    Enter your identity URL into this form to log in to this server. This
+    server must be configured to accept your identity URL. Since you already
+    logged on through an Apache method, entering a password is not required
+  </p>
+
+  <form method="post" action="%s">
+    <table>
+      <tr>
+        <th><label for="openid_url">OpenID URL:</label></th>
+        <td><input type="text" name="openid_url"
+                   value="%s" id="openid_url" /></td>
+      </tr>
+      <tr>
+        <td colspan="2">
+          <input type="submit" value="Log in" />
+          <input type="submit" name="cancel" value="Cancel" />
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+  </form>
+</div>
+');
+ 
 
 define('login_needed_pat',
        'You must be logged in as %s to approve this request.');
@@ -62,4 +90,4 @@
      
     return sprintf("<ul class=\"error\">\n%s</ul>\n", $text);
  
-?>
\ No newline at end of file
+?>
diff -ruN ./lib/session.php /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/session.php
--- ./lib/session.php	2006-12-08 23:56:22.000000000 +0100
+++ /svr/www/openid.grep.be/data/lib/session.php	2007-03-08 14:34:49.000000000 +0100
@@ -129,6 +129,16 @@
  
 
 /**
+ * Check whether the logged-on user matches the specified OpenID URL
+ */ 
+function checkUser($openid_url, $user)
+ 
+    global $openid_user_urls;
+    return isset($openid_user_urls[$openid_url])
+        && $user = $openid_user_urls[$openid_url];
+ 
+
+/**
  * Get the openid_url out of the cookie
  *
  * @return mixed $openid_url The URL that was stored in the cookie or
@@ -202,4 +212,4 @@
 
  
 
-?>
\ No newline at end of file
+?>

It expects an array in config.php like so:

openid_user_urls = array(
	"http://wo.uter.be/" => "wouter@GREP.BE"
);

(in the case of kerberos; if you use a different authentication method, the syntax of that array will most likely be different, too) It's still not perfect; all my changes really do is bypass the password check if it notices that apache has already authenticated the remote user; but I still need to "log on" at the PHP level, which also requires me to enter my OpenID URL. A somewhat cooler implementation would pre-enter the OpenID URL in the form. A really cool implementation would not even show me the logon form, but go straight to the "logged on" state, using the OpenID URL as given by the consumer, and the information apache provides us on the remote user. But it's a start. Adding OpenID capabilities to my blog comment entry script is proving slightly more challenging, however. More on that later.

Hobix There were some issues concerning Hobix and the new Ruby (1.8.6) that entered Sid recently. I’ve solved the problem, as you can see, and uploaded a Subversion snapshot package to experimental. Update: It seems that hobix 0.5~svn20070319-1 accidently was uploaded without share data. This was spotted and fixed by Arnaud, thanks! A new version (0.5~svn20070319-2) is on its way to experimental! Ruby D-Bus A few weeks ago I wrote to Arnaud Cornet about the fact that it is quite amazing that there is no up-to-date implementation of D-Bus for Ruby at all after such a long time. This resulted a few days ago in our Ruby D-Bus project. Some stuff is working already, quite low-level still, but really nice. I’m looking forward to designing the high-level API. I found out that other people had the same thoughts as us and also started to work on an implementations on their own without telling anyone. So, it seems there are three implementions now (as far as I know) that all have specific features working. I hope we can merge everything into one project. We’ll see what happens… OpenID I have taken some interest into OpenID, having to register some accounts on arbitrary forums. I ran into the fact that Rails recently got OpenID support and that support for phpBB is coming up, which is nice. Finally it could be over with all the logins and all the password. At the moment I haven’t found a statisfactory identity provider yet, so I started working on my own service. Ruby OpenID has an example server implementation which I am working on to become FLOIDS: the Free Luon OpenID Service. Koditoj Recently, I inventoried all the programs I authored or co-authored in the past 8 years. There is some stuff in there that maybe deserves a second life or at least some description. So, in a series of posts that I’ll call ‘Koditoj’ (free translatable from Esperanto to ‘things that have been coded’) I want to go over all these programs and libraries and give them some attention. More to come soon…

I'm now a Gnome contributor; not a foundation member, but I have an account and a SVN Repository for Dbus-inspector at Gnome now. Thanks go to Riccardo for following up on the SVN and account creation! I've just committed my current version of dbus-inspector. It doesn't differ from my previous blog post on dbus-inspector; it does include the hotfix for working around python-dbus vs. tracker incompabilities (by just skipping tracker if the python-dbus version is known to crash). There is still a lot of things I need to find out (e.g. how to setup a proper project web page, how to properly offer tarballs for downloading); and I don't know when I'll find time to search for the appropriate documentation on everything. A repository for my "dbus-hook" project was also created, however I don't have any code (except the dbus-inspector stuff) that is ready to be shown yet. It's mostly an idea of mine so far, and I'll need to sit down and properly plan it's implementation.

A Business Week Article points out that Ethanol fuels in the US face opposition because of rising corn prices. Since 25% of the US' corn supply winds up going to Ethanol, that apparently leaves less for livestock.

Last year at Opus, someone had brought along signs that said "Support Your Soybean Farmers", followed by a URL http://thankachicken.com/. While it was funny, it was an interesting reminder that vegans really *aren't* the target of North American soybean producers.

According to a the Wikipedia article on Environment Vegetarianism, "the inefficiencies of meat, milk and egg production range from a 4:1 energy input to protein output ratio up to 54:1". Perhaps the solution to driving our cars as much as we want on clean fuel is to go vegan? What do you suppose would give first, our car addiction, or our meat addiction?

Uwe and Gunnar have been talking about using flash aka. solid state disks. So far, every USB memory stick I had has died after a fairly low number of write cycles... sometimes doing a low level format helped, but the errors resurfaced again later on. Interestingly enough, I never had such problems with digial camera media, just with USB thumb drives. The wikipedia article on Flash RAM is also rather vague:

Another limitation is that flash memory has a finite number of erase-write cycles (most commercially available flash products are guaranteed to withstand 1 million programming cycles). This effect is partially offset by some chip firmware or file system drivers by counting the writes and dynamically remapping the blocks in order to spread the write operations between the sectors.

And where do they store the write count without doing extra writes? :-) (Note: you can do some simple counting with programming cycles only, i.e. by doing only NOR/NAND operations and no resets) Note that there are also filesystems designed for flash, e.g. JFFS2, that have built-in wear leveling at the filesystem level. It might also make sense to not use a media with wear leveling, but instead do it yourself in software. However you most likely won't have a choice here unless you build your own hardware and want to skip the extra controller. You should however try to keep the number of writes low, so e.g. disable atime for ext2/3 (I guess JFFS2 doesn't support atime by design), reduce the frequency of flushing buffers to disk ('laptop mode') and use RAM filesystems where possible (e.g. /tmp). Anyway, go and read above Wikipedia article, it has some good information on it. And in half a year, many laptops will sell with hybrid drives, because of Microsoft pushing that technology. (I remember having read that in fall, having a hybrid drive will be a requirement for Vista gold compability or so?) It would be interesting to work out how Linux can benefit most from such a hybrid system. I can imagine using a USB thumb drive with my laptop both as access key and for rapid boot (my harddisk is encrypted anyway, and it would make sense to not have an unencrypted bootloader on the disk, but only on the flash drive. The flash drive would not contain the key, but the kernel, decryption software, i.e. cryptsetup etc., and maybe some services to be loaded on boot for fast startup)...

Thanks for the continuing comments on this topic. Added: ANZ Bank, Berliner Volksbank, Mint, Tesco Updated: Cooperative Bank, Deutsche Bank, NatWest, Sparkasse, UBS Are there other national lists of these that I should link to? Anyone want to start some?

OK. Here we go:

To select a devkit when you are setting up a scratchbox target via sb-menu, the target MUST NOT BE in the list for it to be selected (Pressing Enter should remove it from the list for it to be active!!!).

And I had to spend days wondering why is the cpu-transparency list empty even though the cputransp devkit is there in the devkits selection menu!

/me is really pissed off.
read more

Awhile back, one of my favorite bloggers, Philip Dawdy of Furious Seasons, deviated from his usual posts that place a big fat critical magnifying glass under the marketing (and other shady) tactics of Big Pharma and wrote a very thoughtful, (also furious) account of Web 2.0 claiming:

this whole Web 2.0, social networking, virtual community business is essentially a pornography of the self a projected, fictionalized self that is then worshipped by the slightly less-perfect self.

It is a little off the top at times but makes some really good points that I agree with (and generated a really interesting discussion). It merits reading alongside Danah Boyd’s recent rumination on the very same topic, fame, narcissism and MySpace, where she seeks to address narcissism but she deflects blame the suite of technologies and places it instead on the broader set of cultural practices that sustain this accentuated inward focus:

My view is that we have trained our children to be narcissistic and that this is having all sorts of terrifying repercussions; to deal with this, we’re blaming the manifestations instead of addressing the root causes and the mythmaking that we do to maintain social hierarchies. Let’s unpack that for a moment.

These two read nicely with an older piece in Harpers Attack of the superzeroes: why Washington, Einstein, and Madonna can t compete with you . The author, Thomas de Zengotita claims “Being famous isn’t what it used to be” because new technologies of mediation and reflexivity (and by new, he means a lot more than web 2.0, it includes reality shows, focus groups, karaoke, the hyper-representation of the real stars, alongside the usual suspects) and concludes that we life as if we were always on stage, concluding somewhat disparagingly “We are all method actors now.” Of course, this is an important part of the story but not the whole story. There are times, for example, these social technologies help to patch up what is arguably as common in North America as is this narcissistic self, which is the fragmented self, that comes into being, for example because many of us, migrate here and the, for example, for work. So a social networking site like Facebook, provides somewhat of a stable point of reference, where there are individuals collected, in the same place, even though the people are no longer really in the same place. It is at least a recognition of certain relationships whose “local” face has now passed but instead of completely completely fading into the realm of memory, the past lives on, albeit in transformed ways, within a virtual space. This facet of social networking is not particularly narcissistic, but is building new technologies of memory that I think works somewhat against the conditions that fragment the self. And while the patching up of the person may make an individual “whole” and “individuated” it seems it is a form that is much more mundane than the “pornography” or “narcissism,” explored above, though of course, they do abound–but karaoke, that is always pornography of the self. But… porn can be fun.

This article got me thinking about some new ways we could dramatically improve Debian. We had a lot of success in the past because good packaging helps people get over the fearful hump of installing and setting up new software in order to learn it. We're great at that, and the battle is pretty much over there.

Afterwards though, I don't think we're so good at helping our users through the scary parts. We include a lot of documentation, but that's not really cutting it any more. I set out to work on X because the scariest thing for a lot of users is getting X up and running, and I wanted to help them (and myself!) do it. We still don't have that nailed, but it's in the pipeline, so I think the next stage will be to help people do cool things with X that they wouldn't have done before. In the past, this would have involved doing things like setting xrdb settings, but these days such things aren't really useful. I'm going to continue brainstorming this, but to this end I've started a page on the wiki that's expressly for helping users get over some of the more difficult and interesting things that people might want to do with, or to, X.

Currently the only tip is on building packages using upstream's git HEAD and our own packaging, but I'm looking to put more stuff up in the nearish future. While we haven't been maintaining it so well, the XSF FAQ has a lot of these sorts of tips too.

I think we can push harder and be more clever about giving our users and ourselves cool things to do with Debian beyond packaging. The XSF move to git opened up the opportunity to easily track the X.org HEAD with the Debian packaging, and I think that sort of thing is indicative that we can be clever about enabling people at all stages of the development process, not just through the packaging itself. If you guys have any ideas for more X tips you'd like to see documented, please edit that wiki page or at least drop me or debian-x a mail so we can write it up for you. I want to see how far we can push this.

This is what I just wrote on Mark’s blog about Ian’s move to Sun:

“To some extent I m quite excited by what this might mean for OpenSolaris going forward, but Nexenta have been pushing the OS/Debian (or Ubuntu, more accurately) integration kick for some while without actually seeming to get any (public) traction within Sun
I ve also been disappointed by how little Ian seems to be in touch with how linux development works these days, but that s mostly from what he s been writing in public, rather than any particularly interaction with him, so hopefully that s not a fair summary.
I really hope that Sun can actually make this work.”

I thought I’d expand on this a bit, especially in light of my past moaning about Solaris and the installer and package management in the installer specifically.
What I really, really want, is a modern OS, which has an easily extensible and controllable installer, with good visibility and debugging infrastructure, which is very easy to manage on a grand scale - by which I mean hundreds or thousands of machines up to date, secure and consistent. At present, Ubuntu comes closest:

• d-i is a superb installer that is very easy to drive in an automated fashion – far easier than either kickstart or jumpstart in my opinion, even though both have been around far longer!
• People say apt-get, but that rather misses the point – or rather, it’s the icing on the cake. As most Debian or Ubuntu developers will tell you, the real strength of packages on the platform is in the underlying metadata, and the well maintained and enforced packaging Policy.
• Every packager is a specialist – more or less, if you’re packaging something in Ubuntu or Debian it’s because you use it, either professionally or personally, and have an interest in, and knowledge of, making it work as well as possible.
• The FHS – until my $PATH on Solaris is shorter than the next Harry Potter tome, Ubuntu has this won hands down.

However, there are some definite areas where Ubuntu or Debian (or Linux in general) struggle compared to Solaris – the sheer engineering resources that Sun can throw at a problem, and the talent they have available to them do result in fantastic results when they correctly identify a problem space. They also “own” Solaris – there’s no need for them to try and build awareness of a problem, and the correct solution, over a number of disparate communities.
ZFS and DTrace are the hackneyed and obvious projects here, but from a sysadmin perspective I think FMA, while far less sexy, is one of the best things Solaris10 has. And this is what I mean when I say operating system visibility.
The integration of Zones is also far better than Zen on Linux can offer currently, although both Red Hat and skx are working hard to fix this.
I’m really looking forward to the day when I get an OS that solves all these problems…

Icedove, Iceape, Evolution, Sylpheed, Sylpheed-Claws and Mutt. Is your favorite mail client missing? Does your mail client accept URLs in mailto-format? If yes, please drop me a note containing the name of your mail client, if it needs a terminal (like mutt) and an example call which starts the client with address, subject an body already filled in. Examples:

• Icedove (needs no terminal)
  icedove "mailto:mail@example.com?subject=foosubject&body=foobody"
• Sylpheed (needs no terminal)
  sylpheed --compose "mailto:mail@example.com?subject=foosubject&body=foobody"

I’ll use this data to include more clients in Reportbug-NG. Please double-check if your mail client really supports mailto-URLs with subject and body. KMail for instance accepts such a parameter but silently drops subject and body.