Nigeria dumps Linux, or: Mandriva in bed with the wrong people

It's all over the news, Mandriva closes a deal to deliver thousands of laptops to schoolchildren in Nigeria with Mandriva Linux preinstalled. Then suddenly the customer decides to replace Linux with Windows. Mandriva CFO cries "foul" and the usual frenzy ensues.

A sad day for Mandriva? Certainly. A sad day for education in developing countries? Not particularly. For their project, Mandriva chose the Classmate PC, a laptop project which was envisioned by Intel after the latter missed out on the OLPC educational project and had to hack together something cheap. The folks at OLPC however realized from the very beginning that selling stripped-down ordinary computers below cost would bring them nowhere.

Now the whining is all about how hard it was to coordinate everything, how much work went into it, and so on. But they chose an inferior and unsustainable platform. The OLPC's visionary design required a clean software design to complement it, something Microsoft has had a hard time to achieve. Making the Classmate PC run Windows doesn't cost Microsoft a thing, so it's hardly surprising that they opted for piggybacking into Nigerian classrooms.

I hope Mandriva have learned their lesson and stop being bad losers. They have interesting products in the pipeline. Had their laptop been based on the same CPU as their upcoming Loongson Box, they wouldn't be in that position now.

How to recover dial-in passwords from broadband/dsl/cable routers

Ever got into the situation where you need the dial-in password for your ISP and you either lost or forgot it? And it won't be shown in the router's configuration interface or you lost that password as well? And the router configuration is obfuscated when saved into a file? Well, here comes the solution (at least if you run Linux):

1. Install rp-pppoe (emerge rp-pppoe on Gentoo, apt-get install pppoe on Debian or the equivalent command on your distro)
2. Create the file /etc/ppp/pppoe-server-options containing the following lines:
   

   debug
   require-pap
   show-password

3. Add the following line to /etc/ppp/pap-secrets

   "your ISP login name" * "some bogus password"

4. Connect the router's uplink port to your computer's network interface and run the following command as root (assuming eth0 is the name of your interface):

   # pppoe-server -I eth0 -F

5. Now the server should tell you that it's waiting for incoming connections. Trigger a dial-in on your router. When that happens, the password will be printed to the system log in plain text.

Obviously, if your router has an integrated cable/DSL modem, it needs to be disabled first. If the PPTP protocol is used for dial-up, install PoPToP instead of rp-pppoe (adjust the name of the configuration file and the startup command accordingly).

Frst OpenMoko Phone Goes on Sale

The Neo1973 is now available at the OpenMoko website. It is the first totally open and documented phone. I was planning to get one, but sadly the shipping costs are prohibitive. It is a good thing that this phone can be ordered worldwide, but depending on where you live, you pay up to 50% extra. FIC has so many offices world-wide, a shame they did not have more concern for the development community outside the US.

So I'll wait for the next revision, announced for October, which hopefully will be distributed from Europe as well.

The Inquirer goes multilanguage. Well, partly.

So it seems that the Inquirer will now provide content in several languages, including German. My first impressions were mixed however.

While I consider offering several languages to visitors a good thing, the way it is implemented here obviously just serves the purpose of diverting traffic to an inferior site with mediocre translations and spelling.

At least the following things leave room for improvement:

• Upon visiting http://www.theinquirer.net/ you may get redirected to one of six weblogs, based on your IP Adress. This is not optimal. The redirector should rather use the browser's language settings if present. Google does this better.
  
• The weblog you are being redirected to contains only articles the respective publisher has considered important enough for translation. No references to untranslated content are given. The publisher even suggests that you bookmark both the localized and original sites. This is a serious shortcoming. There should not be six incomplete versions of the Inquirer, but (at most!) one English and one international version. The international version should contain all articles. The articles should be displayed depending on available translations and the order of language preference as specified in the visitor's browser. The international version should aim to eventually replace the English one.
• If you follow a direct link to a story from elsewhere, you get redirected to your local language's main page. This is awful. You should be redirected to the translated article instead, and if no translation exists, no redirect should be made at all.
  

Having had my say, providing content in other languages besides English is a great idea which the Inquirer deserves to be commended for. I'm all for the localization efforts to continue. It's just that this great idea deserves a better implementation.

Free Mac mini in return for personal data

There is a new GratisNetwork site that will give away free Mac minis. To get your hands at one, you have to enter some personal data and persuade 10 others to do the same. Too bad they don't offer this in the area where I live.