With Ed Snowden's NSA-leaking, the need for L4 as a modular, transparent operating system becomes even more obvious, and Linux with its monolithic/oligarchic architecture (and culture) becomes increasingly dangerous, and Windows might capitulate to the ultra-quick buck. Link below-right leads to my "crucible" on oddmuse where I do my "status updates."
About
The goal of the Linux-Society (LS, dating back to the mid-90s as a professional club and tech-mentoring group) has been a purely-democratic Information Society; many of the articles are sociological in nature. The LS was merged with Perl/Unix of NY to form multi-layered group that included advocacy, project-oriented learning by talented high school students: textbook constructivism. Linux has severe limitations such that it is useless for any computer that will, say, print or scan. It is primarily used for webservers and embedded devices such as the Android. (Google is high-invested in it).
Technology is problematic. During the heyday of technology (1990s), it seemed it had the democratic direction Lewis Mumford said it should have in his seminal Technics and Civilization.
Today, we are effectively stuck with Windows as Linux is poor on the desktop and has cultured a maladaptive following. Apple is prohibitive, and all other operating systems lack drivers, including Google's Android, an offshoot of linux.
In the late 90s there was hope for new kernels such as LibOS and ExoOS that would bare their hardware to programs, some of which would be virtual machines such as Java uses. Another important player was the L4 system that is a minor relation to the code underlying the Apple's systems. It was highly scientific but fell into the wrong hangs, apparently, and has suffered from having no progress on the desktop. There is a version, "SE" that is apparently running in many cell phones as specialized telecom chips, but is proprietary. SE's closed nature was only recently revealed, which is important because it is apparently built from publicly-owned code as it is not a "clean room" design it may violate public domain protections, and most certainly violates the widely-accepted social contract.
Recent attempts to enjoin into L4 development as an advocate for "the people" have been as frustrating (and demeaning) as previous attempts with the usual attacks to self-esteem by maladaptive "hacks" being reinforced by "leadership" (now mostly university professors).
In short, this leaves us with Windows, which is quite a reversal if you have read earlier posts here. But, upon Windows, we have free and open software development systems in the forms of GTK+ (the windows usually used on Linux) and the Minimal GNU Windows (MinGW and MSYS) systems. It is very likely this direction that development should go (that is, on Windows) such that s/w can then be ported to a currently-valid microkernel system that includes a driver system that can be adapted by hardware developers to reuse of their windows and apple drivers.
From a brief survey of L4, it appears that the last clean copy was the DROPS system of the early 2010s, was a German effort that used the Unix-like "OS kit" from an American University.
If we are going to be stuck on Windows, then it seems that a high level approach to free and open systems integration, such as creating fully transparent mouse communication between apps so that they can seamlessly work together as a single desktop (rather than deliberately conflicting). This would be very helpful for GIMP and Inkscape, both leading graphics programs that are strong in the special ways, but suffer from an inability to easily interrelate.
Another important issue is the nature, if you can call it that, of the "geek" or "hack." Technology is formed democratically but "harvested" authoritarian-ly --if I can coin a term that Mumford might use. Authority is plutarchy: a combination of aristocracy and oligarchy that is kept alive after all these millennia by using, or maligning, the information society as a part of the civilizing (or law-giving) process that embraces the dialectic as its method. Democratic restoration, that is to put humanity back on an evolutionary (and not de-evolutionary) track, I think, will require the exclusion of the "geek" from decision-making. As is, the free/open s/w culture attempts to give leadership to those who write the most lines of code --irrespective of their comprehension of the real world or relationship with normal users. We need normal people to somehow organize around common sense (rather than oligarchic rationalism) to bring to life useful and cohesive software and communications systems.
The "art roots" are sculpture made from roots systems found in the forest that I have "brought in" and preserved with varnish. They are not meant as stand-alone sculptures, but to help create an environment for other art. Together they can be a conceptual or environmental piece. For instance, there is a yellow chick combined with the roots in the photographs that is an antique toy and life-sized; I added it to create the feeling of a forest.
The roots themselves are very powerful abstract "expressions." They are mono-color, and made from a single material, wood, and are purely abstract, yet show all the artistic power of nature, or mother Earth.
One of them is fairly big, about four feet tall, and was supposed to be exhibited in a gallery in NYC, but the varnish did not dry in time for the opening. (It is dry now.)
I have restored marble bases for the roots to give them a classic "feel," to draw attention to the sophistication of nature's own creative power in its simplest forms. One of the marble bases is table-sized.
I had originally hoped to be able to rent them out for displays of nature-based jewelry, but I think that the continually failing economy has hurt the natural jewelery economy. I have attached pictures below, but I have a gallery of the pictures which may be easier to view:
According to the Gospel of Judas, a genuine document of the gospel period--the 2nd Century--Judas did not betray Christ, but was asked by Christ to bring the Romans, perhaps to have a "show down." (If so, this certainly changes the meaning of the "kiss of death," as an anti-empathic construct.)
Christ was charged with sedition or treachery, which he could not have been guilty of because of his pacifism. The Roman leader, Pontius Pilate, did not want to kill Christ and may have passed the case to a man named Herod, who likewise did not want to kill Christ.
So who killed Christ? It seems the mob may have, in the sense of the chaos of the French Revolution--Jeruselum of Christ's time was purely chaotic. Christ may have been lynched by the types of moral defectives who did the lynching in our American history. The Christian Jews seem to say in their documents that Christ may not have died on the cross, and instead was taken down, possibly with the help of Roman Centurions, and brought to a cave to be nursed back to health by Mary Magdalen. Christ may have been protected by the centurions on his way to Calvary, and then saved by them after the Crucifixion, allowing him to return, and then ascend into Heaven.
Roman Centurions helped Christianity as more Gentiles joined Christ. James, Christ's brother, liberalized Jewish law on their behalf so that they could more easily be Christian. For instance, he removed the requirement of circumcision. This enraged the more orthodox Jewish Christians who then attacked the early Gentile Christians. The centurions then stepped in to protect the Gentile Christians, often called Paulists. Perhaps the centurions were rewarding the Christians for Christ's forgiveness of their actions against him: Christ's power of forgiveness.
Centurions were soldiers and not cops. This is significant to me as I have always had good relations with American soldiers where I have met them, often in party environments, yet my relationships with policemen have nearly always been frightening, especially in party environments. It may be that the cops of the time were from the local government, which was not Roman but Jewish. During Christ's time, Judaism was still thriving under Roman colonial rule: the period of Hillel, a true empathist. It was not until much later in the first Century that the Jewish rebellions resulted in their final suppression under Roman rule. This happened long after the initial Christians had passed on--an interesting us of the term for death, especially considering Christ's eternal status.
All this information is derived from the Wikipedia.
Frankly, I am wondering why all of you are working so hard to create virtualization for Linux, when this has been done in so many ways ranging from IBM mainframes to PC emulation, and especially on L4.
Linux suffers from being a monolithic kernel, making it very difficult to support by hardware and peripheral manufacturers, which has kept it from being a mainstream OS allowing it to be a true alternative to Microsoft, and also Apple, of the benefit of the vast majority of humanity.
This fault goes back nearly two decades to the debate Linus had with Andrew Tannenbaum. Time has shown Linus to have been very, very wrong, as every other popular OS is a microkernel OS.
The social implication is that society can determine democratically what kind of intelligent devices it wants in its future. So far, all these decisions have been made by corporate executives, including decisions for Linux: IBM. When we saw the Linux culture drop support for legacy hardware, which especially hurts the third world, we knew that there was a problem in the initial social model, perhaps better defined as a scheme with hindsight. Further inquiry shows fault in Linus' initial thinking, and that the popular support he received leading to the success of the Linux kernel was at best a successful social phenomena, as it failed as a beneficial and purely democratic implementation of technology in our present phase of the Information Society.
What we need in the world with respect to communication is free communication, which implies IP communication, the only free packet transport that is available. All politicians have worked to make IP communication proprietary, claiming that they seek to "stimulate" economies, but in fact have simply been handing over valuable resources to the most selfish people. Al Gore, the supposedly-liberal politician from the United States is the most guilty of this. When he said "I invented the Internet" what he really meant was "I took the Internet away from the people, and gave it to the most greedy, the corporate executives and board members."
These ideas can easily be extended into an extremely well-supported argument showing nearly sociopathic control over technology, and most of the Information Society back to the beginnings of civilization (Mumford: Technics and Civilization), by the operators of our society who are guilty of such much more, such as endless environmental and social exploitation, not to mention a perennial tendency to genocide. (We had hoped that Obama would be an exception, but, again, with hindsight, that was unrealistically hopeful.)
All in all, it is time to dump the corporate-centric paradigm, which if you understand that the capital model that we have inherited nearly intact from Rome (Durant, Mumford, others) comes with a semi-democratic political system actually called Fascism. Sixty years ago we had to defeat Fascism in an exceedingly violent world war, but back then we failed to recognize that our own semi-democracy is built upon the same Roman political, financial, and hence information model. I am not proposing a world war (I never would, I am a pacifist) but something has to be done; there is an extreme need for radical change in the technical aspects of the Information Society (I am a realist.)
I strongly support your efforts to create the "hooks" necessary to start building computation and communication libraries and modules, which can then be absorbed into an independent and unified data manipulation paradigm, available to all devices small and large, to replace the "server centric" model that has only served to increase corporate control. Or as in the case of Linux, some other yet-undefined (and apparently unsuccessful) "open systems control" scheme.
When I moved my laptop to another domain, and then back again, I found that none of the emulators, VirtualBox, VMWare, and Qemu, were talking to the laptop, and only VirtualBox was talking to the outside world. My immediate conclusion is that there was no virtue in virtualization, at least the way things stand right now.
I was working with two "JEOSs," (yet another stupid computer acronym pronounced "juice"), Ubuntu and rPath. A JEOS is just a stripped-down Linux installation for appliance and other small server use, and to it's credit, rPath predates this acronym. All small Linux operating system distributions do as well, such as "Damn Small Linux" which has been around a long time and has its own complaints about Linux (you get the tone, I suppose).
Seeing that VirtualBoxwas still talking to the outside world, I went with it, and since it has the Ubuntu in it, I searched using the words "jeosubuntuvirutalbox resolve.conf" to get some clues--I found a blog, kefakya7obi, supporting Wordpress in an emulator. For the /etc/networks/interfaces file , the author (thanks!) suggests the following configuration:
You might notice the "auto" line in the file which refers to the boot-up process. Without it you have to use the "if-up eth0" command.
And reminded not to forget resolve.conf. The network information for the Vista laptop connection is in the icon in the interfaces section of the Vista networking windows, and I figured I would have to adjust things, but I didn't. I also ran the Vista text window commands ipconfig for IP information and nslookup, for DNS information which produced similar information, but much more quickly.
Update: Things stopped working again, so I went back to the default configuration in /etc/networks/interfaces, and it worked. It should be noted that with all this fiddling, I have not actually gotten to where I can actually work "wget" the digitalus and Zend software! (We do indeed live in a hell--technology--within a heaven--Nature.)
Final Update (I hope): This is a funny way to write a how-to page. I started to familiarize myself with the different virtual network concepts through Qemu docs, and then looked into the VirtualBox PDF. The paper explained how nothing works for everything and how NAT was the best for Internet access, but "local host only" was best for communication between guest and host.
Then I realized that Virtualbox allows for a few interfaces as emulated NIC cards, and reasoned that I might try running both modes on different interfaces. I tested eth0 and eth1 for both NAT and host-only configurations on VirtualBox, and then tried them together. Trying them together failed initially, but when I started host-only first (on eth1), and then added NAT (on eth2) I got an open Internet connection with domain name service, and also a good performance for a complex X11 client, Xemacs.
The host-only interface (eth0) in the JeOS /etc/networks config file is this:
Still... it may not work in practice, and I will be testing it. But for the moment (at nearly 2am) this looks like a good solution. I checked to see if this was an orgininal suggestion by google searching using the words"virtualbox two interfaces nat host only" and found only trouble tickets and purely hypothetical examples. Seems I am the first offering this as a way to create a WWW development environment, which really seems odd to me knowing that Linux stands purely as a server, and that the only practical desktop solution (for me and most people) is still Windozer.
With time... it is working pretty well. There was one instance that it did not come up right, but the Windows components are still probably a work in progress, and things have to be just right for it to configure properly, and hence a possible need for a couple of reboots.
Virtualization Performance VMWare is reputed to be the best of the best, but a table of benchmarks by a Linux gamer shows that these three emulation systems are the same within a single factor in every category.
I installed the X11 window server, Xming, and allowed for access from all hosts in the "launch" window (not a necessarily a secure way to go, but there was no granular configuration in the launch window to specify hostnames), and I was very happy to see an rxvtwindow generated from the Linux living in the emulator. I was also excited to be able to cut+paste text between Windows and Linux's rxvt. You have to "export DISPLAY=192.168.56.1:0.0" from the ipconfig command on the laptop to direct the windowing instructions from the Linux in emulation to the Xserver on the laptop.
Then I tried an Xwindows editor: Xemacs. This started but failed to perform after starting, so I won't be running any fancy IDEs, such as Eclipse, for instance, at least with this arrangement. Perhaps I am short on memory (though all this GNU/Linux confligerationcame back to me quickly ;) ). I have a gigabyte coming in the mail: ebay for $3.00 + shipping.
Perhaps WWW-based program editing tools, if they exist in a usable format, will satisfy though they usually don't (such as this one on blogspot doesn't).
Why virtualization is important to me I am tyring to create an environment on my laptop that will allow me to access Linux from Vista, the system I am stuck with because of the laptop builder, SONY. My strategy is to run a LAMP and Zend framework appliance in an emulator (a more realistic word for what is called virutualization), and connect to it with X windows.
Connection to the Laptop The connection to the laptop is important so as to have a decent window to work in, or possibly to use with editors such Emacs or an IDE such as ZEND Studio. I have found that there are a lot of problems with Windows LAMP installations such as WAMP; it seems like it is a matter of learning how to run virtualization on Windows, or de-bugging WAMP. Building in a Linux environment is helpful because nearly all web servers are Linux and I have found that migration from windows to linux is difficult enough to take up someone's time full-time.
So what is the problem? Since the problem is with the virtual "network" within the laptop, Qemu seems to be the best choice, or perhaps path, because Qemu seems to have the most network control. It is unfortunate that the free software community has not resolved and documented solutions for this obvious issue for the two open emulators, Qemu and VirtualBox, or that community members are not sharing the details of the solutions. They just give hints that the problem can be solved but no actual script code. Perhaps they feel that you should suffer as they have; I actually study this phenomena about the open community as part of my work on the Information Society.
Other alternatives The other path is simply to work on Linux full-time or in a dual boot machine. The problem here is that more time has to be invested into making Wifi work on Linux, as the Linux community as made hardware support nearly impossible for the manufacturing "community" by adhereing to a monolithic model rather than migrating to a micro-kernel. If you remember, Linux was born as a debate between Linus and a professor named Andrew Tannenbaum. Tannenbaum's system, Linux, was (or is) microkernel, as is every other major system: all of Microsoft since Win95, Apple's OSX, and of course the up-coming L4 micro-kernel foundation.
L4 Microkernel as a virtualization solution, and as a solution period On the topic of L4, the approach is run machines on top of the L4 microkernel, rather than emulate PCs as processes, which if you think about it, is a pretty lame way to do things.
As of a few years ago, L4 ran Linux on top of its microkernel factors faster than linux runs as an independent monolith, which implies that not only Windows sucks, but Linux as well. So much for Linus' fame!
The obvious thing to do is of course look at the needs of the world of systems users, something like 6 billion members of the Information Society, and design a system that suits it as a aggregation of individuals, families, and communities.
Thinmanis a model I created nearly a decade ago (before my whole industry got shipped to Bhopol, India !?!?) where I applied knowledge gleaned from the Perl CPAN distribution system with my experiences managing large networks as if each of these network systems, and their supporting network servers, had Perl VMs that received by both data and code instruction to implement the data, or to collect data and form it into a generic complex structure binary format (and not deliberately crippled XML). The Perl community was supposedly building a VM, and it was the most brilliant design imaginable, and it was to be the basis of my Thinman design, but it never came to fruition. I attempted to explain the underlying problem in my article here "Linux and Perl, Both Hands Tied."
