Okay, so technically no CPUs were harmed in the making of this Linux kernel. And at least according to Linus Torvalds, this was a good thing, not a bad thing. Your mileage may vary, of course, but it comes down to this: 80386 CPU support has been completely dropped from the latest Linux kernel.

With all the fanfare of this Git commit title, “Merge branch ‘x86-nuke386-for-linus”, the 386 backward compatibility was finally dropped from Linux. Ye Olde Torvalds states in the comment, “This tree removes ancient-386-CPUs support and thus zaps quite a bit of complexity,” further adding, “… which complexity has plagued us with extra work whenever we wanted to change SMP primitives, for years.” And he signs off with a heartfelt, “I’m not sentimental. Good riddance.”

In all seriousness though, the 386 support was only there for legacy embedded systems. While the 386 may have been all the rage when it was introduced in 1985, it wasn’t long before it was replaced by the 486 in PCs. But it stuck around all these years in various embedded systems, from early BlackBerries to aerospace microcontrollers because sometimes that just happens. But even that couldn’t save it forever, and Intel finally gave up manufacturing 80386 CPUs for embedded systems in 2007. But it took until 2012 for Linux to finally let go of the past.

Of course if you actually still use an embedded 386 microcontroller then you’re probably grinding your teeth right now. But let’s face it, maybe you really should have upgraded at some point, eh? Three decades is an awfully long time to continue support for any computer, and five years notice is enough time for even the most dysfunctional government agency to have found and tested an upgrade. So if you still need 386 support in Linux, you only have yourself to blame for being SoL at this point. It’s not like the writing wasn’t in big bold neon lights on that particular wall. Maybe you’ve heard of ARM?

Things just aren’t going so spiffy for Sony lately.  They’re losing to Microsoft in the sales race for motion controls.  The Xbox Kinect seems to be outselling the PS3 Move.  Which probably has a lot to do with the fact that Microsoft’s Kinect doesn’t use some gimmicky controller you have to hold.  Well, that and you can plug it into your PC.  Unofficially at the moment, though Microsoft claims they’re going to make it official.

Then add to that Sony’s Playstation 3 master encryption key has been leaked.  Sony is desperately trying to wage legal battles to keep it from spreading.  In the US that means attacking George Hotz, AKA GeoHot.  But now a German hacker freedom fighter, Alexander Egorenkov AKA graf_chokolo has also been releasing his own PS3 3 hack-o-rama in the form of a hypervisor being called the “HV Bible” which helps folks hack their PS3s to install Linux.  Sony is not amused, and has been trying like mad to close down websites and confiscate equipment.

But even that’s not all.  No, Sony is also facing a losing legal battle against LG in Europe over Blu-Ray patent infringement.  The courts have officially approved a ten day ban on the import of Playstation 3s and Bravia TVs.  Sony will likely appeal the ruling, but on the opposite side of that coin LG could peruse continued legal action to extend that ban.  So if you’re across the pond, expect to see the store shelves getting bare.

The dual boot: it’s the answer to all of life’s mysteries.  Well, okay, so maybe not all of them.  But the biggest one, of how to enjoy the security of Linux whilst still being able to use all of your Windows apps and play all of the latest games.  Because as good as Linux is, it just isn’t gaining any popularity, so most software is still in the demesne of Windows.

Well, okay, so in theory there’s also Macintosh in there somewhere.  But honestly, who cares about that?

And, again, another theoretical solution is to use virtualization, like VMware, to run one OS natively and the other on virtualized hardware from inside the native OS.  Except that’s not really the solution that it should be.  If you run Linux native and Windows virtual, it’ll work, sure, but the point of a lot of people of running Windows is to play games that Linux can’t, and even though VMware has made some great strides in graphics virtualization, now that they actually virtualize the 3D acceleration as well, there’s still a significant performance loss running on virtualized hardware.  Which rather defeats the purpose.  Who wants to play their games slowly? But the alternative, running Windows natively so that you get full performance, and virtualizing Linux, is frankly even more useless since you’ve just thrown the whole Linux security advantage out the window.  And really, what can Linux do that Windows can’t?  So then what would be the point of using Linux at all if you were going to make your base OS Windows?  You could just use Windows.

So the answer is to dual boot.  Install Linux and Windows side-by-side and choose which one you want to load at startup.  It’s supposed to be easy.  And solve all of your problems.

Except for when it isn’t, and doesn’t.

Frankly, Linux (and all things related) is really starting to piss me off.

To start with, I decided to try a distro I’ve never touched before, because I’m old school I guess: Ubuntu.  It’s cute.  It’s snazzy.  Shame it couldn’t properly recognize my RAID0 array and trashed it each and every time I tried to install it.  Having installed Windows first in the process, that meant a lot of re-installing Windows, drivers, etc.  It was a royal pain in the asterisk.

But I’m nothing if not persistent.  I switched from using my Intel Matrix RAID controller to the dinky JMicron one that I don’t trust worth a darn, and voila, Ubuntu stops trying to access the component drives separately and treats the RAID0 array as a single disk.  Windows, mind you, had no problem properly using either.

That settled, move on in time.  To a procedure I’d put off perhaps a little too long: making my first backup.

Here’s a freaking rant in and of itself.  Windows Backup in Windows 7 can’t be used because the Linux bootloader partition used by GRUB I stupidly partitioned and formatted for Linux.  You might think “duh” there, as what else would you do?  Well Windows 7 has a stupid shadow copy technique used when backing up drives.  This is poorly programmed, and requires so much free space on each partition.  And yes, you guessed it, Windows both is smart enough to recognize that it needs to backup that bootloader partition, but too dumb to know how to read any Linux-formatted partitions.  So unless you were smart enough to make that bootloader a FAT32 or NTFS format, Windows Backup fails each and every time because it can’t shadow the bootloader partition.  Never mind that you could have literal terabytes of space free on your drive.  The shadow has to be on the partition being copied, and if the partition format can’t be read by Windows, you’re SOL.  And, in fact, I can’t even be sure that making that partition Windows-readable will fix this Windows Backup woe, because I have yet to try it.  It’s only a theory that it might make Windows Backup usable on a dual-boot box.

But honestly, it’s no big deal.  That’s okay, because Windows Backup is a PoS anyway.  There’s so much better software out there, right?  Comodo, for example, is free and does a much better job.  I would have just used my old copy of Norton Ghost, like I have on so many Windows XP boxes past, but it’s not compatible with Windows 7.  Oh, sure, some newer version is, but I’m not going to stump-up cash for that if there’s a free alternative that meets my needs.  And besides, I don’t want to just back up my Windows partitions anyway.  We’re talking dual boot.  We’re talking Windows and Linux living side-by-side.  So a Windows-only backup would be darn stupid anyway.  Just as a Linux-only backup would be.

So let’s try bringing in something truly multiplatform, that can read NTFS and Linux formats equally well, and will respect the whole of the hard drive, the master boot record, the partitions, everything exactly as they are.  Why not try something like Partimage Is Not Ghost (PING) then.

And then watch during a routine backup as PING totally destroys the Windows partition so badly that no Windows or Linux tool can restore it without reformatting the whole NTFS partition Windows used to be using before it was slaughtered by bad programming and heavy Linux hands.

Honestly.  Can anyone tell me why anyone would think a typical Windows user would, at this point, having had his Windows install raped and slaughtered repeatedly by Linux, be even remotely interested in trying to use Linux at this point?  At all?  Ever?

I can’t think of a single reason.

In fact, I feel pretty damn stupid for even giving Linux this many opportunities to nuke my Windows install.

I honestly have no idea why I’m so determined to use Linux at all.  Dualboot is just not working here.  I don’t know why not.  It’s a freaking simple concept.  I know Linux works just great on its own.  And Windows, well, is Windows.  Can’t live with it, can’t live without it.  So…

…I keep on trying.

But if anyone has ever wondered why Windows users don’t switch to Linux for the better security, lower overhead, and easier access to a plethora of wonderful free software?  There you go.  It’s because of all of the bad things that Linux does, that Windows doesn’t.  Like happily deconstruct a RAID array and then write to the drives individually, destroying the array.  Or blithely nuke Windows during a routine hard drive backup, when it should only be reading from the Windows partition in the first place.  Not many Windows users would be happy to reinstall everything from scratch because “oops” we had a little bug.

I’ve decided that I really don’t like Ubuntu though.  So maybe I’ll go back to openSUSE.  Or Fedora.

But later.  Much later.  When the seething anger has gone back down to a dull ache and I can burn a distro to DVD without wanting to throw it across the room, grind it into pulp, etc.

I really never thought I would cherish anything Microsoftian this much.  But I’m about damn ready to mount my Windows 7 disk on a wall.  With those holograms, it’s even kind of shiny…

In the PC world lately it’s update madness. But as many are flocking to upgrade to Microsoft’s Windows 7 and for the most part impressed that it’s a smoother process than Windows Vista was, there’s another update that’s also important to note: Linux distro Ubuntu 9.10 – Karmic Koala.

In a perfect world Linux would be as easy to install (or upgrade) as well as use as Windows.  That, and software compatibility (with Windows) are without question the two reasons why no Linux distribution has as of yet been able to seriously challenge the market of Microsoft.  Linux is, for better or worse, still an operating system for experts.

And Ubuntu’s Karmic Koala is by no means an exception.  In fact, it seems to be taking Linux back to the dark ages.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala - Some Bad JuJu

Even the Linux experts are running into insurmountable problems with this new distro.  More so than ever before.  And many of the problems (like with the video drivers) are causing the “upgrade” to render the computer unusable.

To give you an idea of the numbers involved, a poll on the Ubuntu forums gives you some idea of just why many PC users still prefer Windows to Linux.  At the time of writing, of the 734 people who upgraded to Karmic Koala, only 190 – 26% – had absolute success.  That means less than one third of all upgrades to Karmic Koala actually worked right.  Fortunately, Linux being the OS of experts, 275 upgraders – 37% – were capable of solving their own problems.  So even with experts behind the upgrades, only 63% of Karmic Koala upgrades are actually running right now.

The funny thing is that anecdotally a lot of Karmic Koala supporters are saying that clean installs are going better than upgrades.  The poll’s numbers however don’t back this up.  There of the 596 people who tried to do a clean install of Karmic Koala only 144 – 24% – managed to do so without problems.  That’s 2% less clean success than the upgrades.  Likewise only 178 of the clean installs – 30% – could solve their own problems when things didn’t go smoothly.  For a total of only 54% getting the clean install to Karmic Koala to work.  That’s far below the 63% of those who upgraded instead of doing a clean install.  So then how can anyone say that you’ll have better luck with a clean install then when the numbers show you’re actually 9% more likely to fail?

Don’t get me wrong.  I love free and open source software.  I have great respect for people who devote their time to writing code without thought of compensation, simply for the betterment of mankind.  And when running a server I’d almost always choose Linux over Windows.  But if you want to know why Linux isn’t setting the world on fire and replacing the Microsoft Monopoly, well, there’s your problem.  Could you imagine if a Microsoft product had success rates these low with any of their Windows installs or upgrades?  Or even Apple?  IBM?  Sun?  And then imagine what those numbers would be like with the common person buying a Karmic Koala box off the shelf and trying to install it instead of Linux users who already know what they’re getting into!

It’s moments like these where you’re reminded just why things are as they are.  If this is Ubuntu’s idea of karma, then Karmic Koala must have been a mass murderer in a past life because Ubuntu 9.10 is not the shiny happy reincarnation that we were hoping for.  In all too many cases, it’s flat out deadly.

If Linux contributors and users want the world to embrace the FOSS dogma then they’re going to need better karma than this.

It’s not often that you actually hear about a security hole being found in Linux.  Most of that is because Linux is eminently more secure than most operating systems.  Part of it though, is something of a conspiracy to downplay Linux vulnerabilities as a “denial of service” and not a “security hole in the kernel”.

Still, bugs do happen.  Security holes do pop up, even in Linux.  And Brad Spengler of grsecurity has found himself one.  It’s the “Null pointer dereference” bug, and it’s found even in versions 2.6.30 and 2.6.30.1 of the Linux kernel.  Strangely enough, it seems that the exploit only works when SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) is enabled.  Turn on security for insecurity?  So it seems.  Though it has been also found when other features are installed, like PulseAudio.

The basic bug comes down to just what the name suggests.  When compiling the kernel there are places in the code where it is supposed to check to ensure that a variable doesn’t point to NULL.  Such as in net/tun.  However, when compiling with optimizations as is so often done, the compiler removes the code to perform these checks.  Thereby creating a nice security hole where the kernel can be made to access code in forbidden places in memory.

The odd thing is, so far, most of the Linux community, including Linus Torvalds himself, is unimpressed as to the danger of the security hole.  And perhaps they have some bit of a point, in that so far it can’t actually be used for remote access, and the only proof of concept that Spengler is offering involves using Setuid, which is itself a rather embarrassing gaping security hole in Linux.

But it of course brings up a lot of tricky security questions which the Linux community rather doesn’t want to admit or answer, like why holes such as these aren’t immediately and permanently fixed, as is so often done in the open-source community when bugs are found?

Sometimes you almost feel like everyone is Microsoft these days…