Short Tip: Get UUID of Hard Disks [Update]

There is an update to this post available: UUIDs and Linux: Everything you ever need to know.

The Universally Unique Identifier can be used to identify a device independent form its mount point or device name. This is more and more important as many devices today support hot-plugging or are external anyway. Therefore it makes sometimes sense to access a device (for example in fstab) not by device name but by the UUID.

There are several ways to get the UUID. The first one uses the /dev/ directory. While you are on is you might want to check other by-* directories, I never knew of them.

$ ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 11. Okt 18:02 53cdad3b-4b01-4a6c-a099-be1cdf1acf6d -> ../../sda2

Another way to get the uuid by usage of the tool blkid:

$ blkid /dev/sda1
/dev/sda1: LABEL="/" UUID="ee7cf0a0-1922-401b-a1ae-6ec9261484c0" SEC_TYPE="ext2" TYPE="ext3"

There you also get the label and other information. Quite usefule.

Btw., if you wonder how “unique” this unique is, here a quote from Wikipedia:

1 trillion UUIDs would have to be created every nanosecond for 10 billion years to exhaust the number of UUIDs.

Pretty unique.

Thanks to Linux By Examples for the initial howto.

Patent Lawsuit filed against Red Hat and Novell

The company IP Innovation has filled an “patent infringement claim” against the two largest Linux Distributors. The patent in question is about a “user interface with multiple workspaces for sharing display system objects”.

The battle has begun. The first patent infringement claim against Linux is out there and two big Linux distributors will have to defend in court. Groklaw has more information and the text of the complaints.
This comes only days after Microsoft’s Ballmer attacked Red Hat Linux users.

IP Innovation already made such claims against Apple this year. However, Apple settled the the patent dispute without any further details.

While it doesn’t sound good that there is now a patent claim against Linux there is hope that a court find these claims not valid. Keep in mind that in these days the US courts are slowly moving regarding stupid or invalid patent claims. Also, this process will now show how vulnerable the Linux ecosystem really is against patent claims – and how well it can be defended. I must add at this point that I’m somewhat happy that there have been the SCO claims in the last years. Due to SCO the Linux community now has a well working and well established community of people who know their way about laws and courts: Groklaw. I’m anxious to see which role Groklaw will play in this act.

Kopete Roadmap rediscovered

Some days ago I looked at the Kopete roadmap and saw that it was updated recently. It now states that full Decibel support won’t be there before KDE 4.2, but that Telepathy will be supported as a plugin in KDE 4.1

Some days ago I already reported that the Kopete developers decided to ship Kopete together with KDE 4.0. After posting the news I followed a link to the Kopete roadmap at Techbase and was happy to see that it is a up2date and very detailed roadmap about future development and planned features.

I didn’t knew that the Kopete team set that one up and must have missed it somehow (it exists for quite some months already), but I am now very happy that it exists – most FLOSS projects out there unfortunately don’t have such a list

The most important news is that the new version Kopete 1.0 will not make it into KDE 4.0 but into KDE 4.1. This means that KDE 4.0 will contain a mainly polished and ported Kopete while the new features will have to wait after that. However, the list of new features does look nice:

• Better protocol support
• Model/View for Contact List
• Improve usability
• Full Identity support
• Make use of the Command pattern for most tasks
• Kross integration
• Strigi integration

The first point includes an improved Messenger protocol and pluggable Decibel (and therefore Telepathy) support – for Video and Audio! I hope that Jaber Video and Audio is possible with Telepathy until then…
The last point would introduce the history to Strigi. Especially that point is something I’m really looking forward to since I often search the history for old discussions and often also for old links. I hope to have a well designed Strigi interface to get the Kopete discussion results neatly presented. 🙂

The roadmap also lists the plans for KDE 4.2. A focus of that new version will be a full Decibel integration, and I am really looking forward to that. Telepathy would definitely benefit from this move and this would in return bring the FLOSS managers out there closer together in terms of supported protocols.

Hm, now that KDE 4.0 slowly comes closer I start writing about and waiting for KDE 4.1 and even KDE 4.2. But well, that is software development for you.

Short Tip: determine current shell

To figure out the current shell you’re using, like bash, zsh or sh, just call ps -p $$:

ps -p $$ | tail -1 | awk '{print $NF}'

Pretty helpful if you’re playing with different shells at the same time.