…is a Samsung NC10, quite an interesting machine, lighter than my laptop (Dell D630).
I was trying to stay clear of these netbooks, but I did not resist. The little one (“atomino“) is currently running with Fedora 11 Preview + updates. Installed without a hitch (not the same with the beta…), only video performance is sub-par and actually under investigation.
I will post my findings. Stay tuned.
Last week the nice guys at Fedora released the tenth (X in roman numerals) version of Fedora.
In the previous weekend, I already had installed the preview release on my notebook, as a clean install. It all worked perfectly, marking this version of Fedora the most interesting Linux Distribution release I ever tried.
Fast, beautiful (thanks to Byte-Code colleague Samuele Storari and his Solar theme), this version, while looking similar to older 9 release, feels definitely more polished and performing.
After the release, I yum-upgraded my home server (the Atom 330 I mentioned in the past), and it worked out really fine, with no issues at all. It’s a simpler environment (no gnome, and a initlevel at 3), but everything (iscsi, samba, DNS, DHCP) continued working as before.
On a side note, my iscsi disk is one of two USB disks attached to the server, so I was wondering how to ensure the block device naming and availability. After contemplating custom udev rules, all that was necessary was a look at /dev/disk. I discovered I can access block devices (like disks) through the /dev/disk/by-id, for example.
Really interesting.
So now I have this lan only home server in place.
What I provide is a bunch of services for my internal network, allowing me to have incremental backups (BackupPC), DNS services, iSCSI disk to the Mac (see the previous post).
With all this setup, next in the list in Media Serving. The difficult part here will be the XBox360…perhaps I’ll buy a PS3….who knows 
Advanced Card Systems ltd is the manufacturer of the smart card reader I bought last tuesday. They have an RPM for Fedora 7 (bit old, isn’t it?) which, when queried, says:
rpm -q -i -p ACR38UDriver-1.8.0-1.i386.rpm Name : ACR38UDriver Relocations: (not relocatable) Version : 1.8.0 Vendor: (none) Release : 1 Build Date: Sat 15 Sep 2007 06:25:45 AM CEST Install Date: (not installed) Build Host: localhost.localdomain Group : Smartcards/Driver Source RPM: ACR38UDriver-1.8.0-1.src.rpm Size : 105333 <strong>License: GPL</strong> Signature : (none) URL : http://www.acs.com.hk Summary : Driver for ACR38 PCSC in Fedora Core 7 Description : ACR38 PSSC Driver for Fedora Core 7. Compatible with MUSCLE API version 3.0.
So my understanding is that the driver is still GPL licensed. When asked about providing the source code, I received the following answer:
Hello Luca Botti,
Thanks for your email.
We do not release the source code for Linux version 1.8.0.
Please use those of version 1.7.9 for development.
Tks & B. Rgds,
xxxx
Account Manager
Mmh, smells like a licensing violation. I sent an email to FSF which properly directed me to GNU. I sent a recap to GNU organization, along with a polite mail to ACS. Hope to sort it out easily and friendly.
We’ll see…
On a side note, i re-checked and the smart-card reader in my Dell is rightly working with Fedora. Anyway, I am still interested in packaging the thing for F9.
I have found that a partially, x86 only package exist for the ACR38 smart card reader. Also, looking on DAG repository, there is some packaging for RH5. So here start my first shot at packaging for Fedora….stay tuned.
Luca Botti at LinkedIn