System Administration

There was much excitement this week when Sun released a version of Java under a license that is supposed to allow Linux distributions to legally package it.  Debian almost immediately made it available in their non-free package repository.  However, it seems no one actually checked the license.  The much vaunted new license is actually very hostile to redistribution, completely useless to the very Linux distributions it is supposed to enable packaging with.

Hopefully this is just a mistake and they have an actually usable license to be released soon.  If not this is a huge mistake by Sun which is going to backfire in their faces quite loudly.

I have seen a depressing trend lately towards full-gloss laptop displays and computer screens.  It is hard to find screens anymore at retail outlets without a mirror-like glossy shine.  Although they look pretty at first glance, you can tell in seconds how unusable they are when you can see a perfect reflection of yourself and/or the store lights superimposed on the screen.  Now even Apple is in with the trend; just look at their sample image on that page; half the screen is unusable from glare even on their promotional page.

I was thrilled when LCDs came out that we were finally rid of the horrible glare problems of shiny glass CRT displays; however now the industry seems determined to bring mirror-like reflections back with a vengeance.

I like OS X's X11 implementation.  It allows X applications to rather cleanly mesh with the OS X environment.  However, when setting up X11 apps for end users X has a habit of popping up a terminal window.  Instead of making users close this window all the time, place a plain text .xinitrc file in their home directory with this line and only this line:

exec quartz-wm

This will disable xterm from starting when X starts.