Technologists Notes

In ’93 or ’94, a friend began trying to interest me in Linux. At the time, my direct needs for UNIX(-like) systems were still satisfied by Dell SVR4. However, late in 1996 I needed to host a web server, needed it to be Linux-based, and the same friend recommended I try either Debian or Red Hat. Based on his comparison, I started with Red Hat 4.0. I continued to stay up with almost all of the Red Hat releases through Red Hat 9, and have continued with Fedora releases since then, putting almost all of the Red Hat & Fedora releases into some production use. From habit, history, and curiosity, I’ve felt compelled to continue evaluating new Fedora releases and (mostly) putting them into production for web/mail/name service once some minimal comfort level has been achieved.

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Initially getting VMware Server to work with Fedora 11 and kernel 2.6.30 was challenging, and then the roughly bi-weekly kernel builds to keep up with Fedora updates got tedious. Trying the same approach with Fedora 12 and kernel 2.6.31 didn’t work at all for me. I kept getting duplicate definitions of init_mm that caused link failures. I tried various #ifdef kludges to overcome the duplicates, but nothing seemed to work. All this proved to me was that I really didn’t want to be trying to build the kernel at all.

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After years of skepticism about Avistar’s patent licensing and litigation pursuits, I feel obligated to express admiration for Avistar’s transitioning away from those pursuits, as announced last week: Avistar Communications Monetizes Its Patent Portfolio and Closes Transaction with Intellectual Ventures Management, LLC.

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