Colonos are hibernating, but shall one day return – perhaps – meanwhile we have come across a new blog just the other day, which is worth a look if you are interested in “Property, Commoning and the Politics of Free Software” and “philosophical and political inquiries into the material nature of the immaterial“. The essay featured in the blog has an interesting critique of the work of Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig, as well as the politics of Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, turning on the concept of property relations.
Many have decried the removal of XMMS from the Ubuntu repositories – it has been absent since Gutsy – despite it being the preferred music player for a lot of people and remains the only media player that – to my knowledge – can handle 30-40k+ collections. Not only is it the only player capable of very large collections, it also handles such collections with very little resource use. It’s the canine’s testicles, mate!
The colonos blog has provided some detailed explanations for installing XMMS in Intrepid (see this entry for an overview) and now the time has come for installing XMMS in Jaunty Jackalope, also known as Ubuntu 9.04. Read the rest of this entry »
The problem concerning the X Multimedia System (XMMS) is really a test for the wider community. It seems to affect users of Debian, Ubuntu and openSuse directly, but essentially it concerns all GNU/Linux users and the rest of the Free Software community, because it is a test of our social organisation: when and why can tribes be excluded and left to their own devices on the prairies of cyberspace?
This is written from the perspective of an Ubuntu user, but as you will see users from the Debian and openSuse communities also protest against the discontinuation of the XMMS. There might be other communities that have the same problem, but the Fedora leaders continue to give their users XMMS.
If the Debian, Ubuntu and openSuse leaders won’t put it back in, it is a great loss for their respective communities in terms of their social organisation. No one was asked and after consistent complaints since Feisty in the Ubuntu world nothing has happened.
To provoke, excluding XMMS users in this manner is not unlike, by analogy, the forceful evictions that slums and shanty towns are subjected to: just get out of the way for progress?!?!
That’s no way to talk to people! And there are many of us.
All you need to be able get XMMS up and running in Intrepid (or Hardy), incl. FLAC, WMA, mp4, can be found in this zipped file.
UPDATE: THE LIBFAAD/M4A/MP4/AAC DIDN’T COMPILE (SOURCE IN THE ZIP) AND I COULDN’T SOLVE THE ISSUE, BUT THEN – AHA!! – I FOUND A .DEB HERE AND IT WORKS IN INTREPID:
If you need information about how to use it, look here, here, and here. So now I have XMMS running in Intrepid with all needed plugins – wouldn’t it just be nice if the olden golden player came back into the repos?
In some foreign language there is an expression that goes, more or less, like this: “Don’t cross the river for water“, since often times you can find what you’re looking for, if you could only see the wood for all the tress, in a different manner of speaking, as it were. So what’s the point of all of this?
Colonos’ interface to cyberspace has been updated to Ubuntu 8.10 and here are the first impressions – with more to come.
So far most things look fine (the default wallpaper is surprisingly nice), lm-sensors configured painlessly, but getting my favourite music player, XMMS, to work proved a right hassle – basically you have to be Intrepid to get it compiled in the Ibex.
Increasingly proprietaryevil software companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe are pushing video and audio formats that restrict access and restrict software developers, but there is an alternative that can be played on all computers without restriction — Ogg. Ogg provides professional grade multimedia formats. Ogg is used extensively by free software projects, artists and a growing number of music and video distributors.
There are two things that bug me about Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron – the one is the new “feature”, which changes the System / Administration / Network window to pop-up without asking for a password, as it used to do, but instead offeriing an “unlock” button after which a new password dialogue appears – and this does not keep the setting for a a pre-set time as the previous password dialogue did. Instead you have to fill it in again. Now, I wouldn’t call up that window without wanting to change something (so there is now one more click and repeated password hurdles to changing my network settings) – notice the perfect red circle:
These two issues are enough to prevent me from fully, happily embracing Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 – it feels like my freedom to choose has been downgraded ….
“Some people say that if you play a Windoze Vista install DVD backwards you will hear demon voices commanding you to worship Satan. But that’s nothing. If you play it forward it will install Windoze Vista.”
Hardy Heron is a Long Term Support release (supported until 2011 – quick overview here) so the focus is on something durable, yet commencing with a severely crippled beta release of Firefox. But the Heron is smHardy and flyes on strong.
This is thoughtful posts in which Michael Gurstein contextualises his (much needed) critique of the Open Everything movement of – as he puts it – Ubergeeks. That is, the already empowered, highly technoliterate and most commonly white, Euro-males or their … Continue reading →
This is a good, informative piece revealing some important foundations of the jurisprudential (or legal and political philosophy) properties of property. All property relations are conditional – the concept of absolute ownership is an idea that serves a logical function … Continue reading →
The GNU General Public License is a very interesting document from a jurisprudential point of view and from a commoning perspective. It gives structure to a software commons through its articulation of (conditional) reciprocity in perpetuity. Free Software is therefore … Continue reading →
There is a widespread misunderstanding that “property” – the term – refers to nouns, such as “house” or “car” or (piece of) “land”. That is not the case in law and philosophy, where property most commonly is understood as social … Continue reading →
Two Volume Special Issue of The Commoner: Property, Commoning and Commons Call for Contributions to Volume 2: Download a PDF of the call. Introduction. In legal and philosophical terms the organisation of a commons is encoded into property protocols, which … Continue reading →
This is an excerpt that introduces Garrett Hardin’s influential fiction about a tragedy of commons and reveals its misappropriation of Aristotle’s concept of distribution of care. While there is little of philosophical interest in Hardin’s fiction, it has had a … Continue reading →
In a discussion on the P2P Foundation’s mailing list the question concerning the Free Software Foundation’s view on property and how they see copyright in relation to property has come up. Below I reproduce a section from the essay, which … Continue reading →
The concept of property is obviously central to the essay. Here is an excerpt from the conclusion that sheds some light on the position developed in the essay with respect to the relations between property and cyberspace, as well as … Continue reading →
Another academic hoop to jump through is making very explicit the way in which a PhD thesis is going to unfold. This can be done in a variety of ways, but I chose a pretty standard, straightforward “map of the … Continue reading →