Recently the mainstream press has been covering the recent legal action the SCO Group has brought against IBM regarding the alleged transfer of licensed Unix intellectual property into GNU/Linux. Given the complex historical ownership of the genetic Unix code, the prior legal settlement over the AT&T / BSD lawsuit and the subsequent recognition genetic Unix incorporated a good deal of BSD code, and the seemingly bizarre actions of SCO since the start of the case this has the making of both a very lengthy and complex legal battle.

Fortunately for the average Joe someone has taken the time to summarize the recent events in the context of the Dukes of Hazzard in an effort to make them easier to understand. I think this is extremely funny – perhaps Court TV has a new show concept.

You can find it here.

Enjoy!

After wrestling a bit with GTK+, I was able to get Phoenix installed on my Gentoo box. The problem ended up being portage hiding the GTK+ 1.2 ebuild since I already had GTK+ 2.x installed. After some digging on the Gentoo forums I found you can in fact have both GTK+ 1.2 and GTK+ 2.x installed, you just need to implicitly call the GTK+ 1.2 ebuild in order to get it to install.

Now I just need to figure out how to get some AA fonts working so Phoenix doesn’t look like ass when it is running.

I run my Gentoo box headless, however, it is convenient to be able to be able to fire up a desktop session (VNC tunneled through SSH) remotely on occasion. TWM isn’t exactly my idea of a great desktop environment so after some consideration I decided on Fluxbox. So far I am impressed – it is small, lightweight, fast (even over a tunneled VNC session), and didn’t take hours to emerge.

Hell, after playing with it for a few hours I am considering trying to get it working on my SPARC box at work. It seems like a much nicer day to day desktop environment than the Sun Gnome Beta – all I typically need are some terminals and Netscape.

I spent a few hours pulling out my hair trying to figure out how to self-sign SSL certificates for use with Apache & mod_SSL on my Gentoo GNU/Linux box. The mod_SSL FAQ describes the process, however, it is not applicable for the default Gentoo configuration of mod_SSL. I couldn’t find sign.sh in order to use my private CA to sign my CSR.

Fortunately some searching of the Gentoo forums found the answer.

/usr/lib/ssl/mod_ssl/gid-mkcert.sh

This script will create the CA certificate, generate a CSR and use the newly created CA certificate to sign the CSR creating a real SSL certificate suitable for use with apache.