OSNews links to a review entitled “Can a Geek Love Xandros?” reviewing the distribution formerly known as Corel Linux. Overall it sounds like it could make a user-friendly desktop replacement. Pretty impressive, considering it is based on Debian, a distribution with a reputation for solidity but not user-friendliness.
Tag Archives | Linux
Microsoft ad: Linux is a competitor worth evaluating
CNET News.com – Front Door reports Microsoft ad campaign digs at Linux. “The software giant launches a marketing assault on Linux, in a sign that the open-source solution may be a mounting threat to its server system sales.”
The Register responds with its usual ascerbic Microsoft ad push cranks up the ‘get Linux’ volume. “Would you buy a used fact from this company?”
I think it is great for Microsoft to name names and make it clear what alternatives their customers should be considering. As a vendor, it’s only reasonable that they highlight those facts that bolster their case. While the Microsoft studies do show some advantages in some situations for their solutions, I hope this encourages customers to do their homework and consider the many other information sources out there, too.
Not If, But How?
In an article in CIO Insight, Mike Perlowski maintains “The religious wars over open-source software÷especially Linux÷are over. What lies ahead is a steely-eyed pragmatism about the software’s pros and cons.”
*POINT – COUNTERPOINT SPECIAL* What’s Wrong with the Open Source Community?
LinuxWorld has an amusing “Point-Counterpoint” debate with two editors decrying the same features as bad or good. The complaint that “there’s too much stuff” ignores the opposite problem of there being much too little. This debate is an interesting contrast to the article I pointed to earlier this week, arguing the cultural underpinning of the two sides are fundamentally different. It reminds me of a debate between a liberal and a reactionary where the liberal believes the reactionary is entitled to their beliefs, but the reactionary doesn’t believe the liberal has the right to believe what they do. Perhaps “what we have here is a failure to communicate.”
Windows to Linux? Check out the roadmap.
Hentzenwerke Intergalactic points out this 9-part series on the IBM DeveloperWorks called Windows to Linux Roadmap.
Intranet Twiki up and running!
Finally, after a few weeks of occasional hacking, I’ve got a Twiki running on the Linux intranet server, running Fedora, Apache 2.0 and Perl 5.8.0. The intranet Twiki at Ted Roche & Associates is for note-taking, internal project tracking and experimentation.
If you haven’t worked with a wiki, you owe it to yourself to try it out. A wiki is a simple interface: a web site with an “Edit” button on each page. Any web user (or a secure, limited, logged-in user) can edit the page, and change whatever they are allowed by the webmaster. Voila! Community-maintained web sites! Most wikis I have worked with are set up as knowledgebases, although their use is only limited by your imagination. A superb example (though in FoxPro, not a Twiki) is the FoxForum wiki at http://fox.wikis.com.
Twiki is one of my favorites wikis: it is cross-platform (Windows and most Perl-supported web servers, Linux, OS X, IIS, Apache, etc.); the code is Open Source and fairly readable Perl. I have Twiki deployed on the internet on a W2k IIS configuration (using RedHat’s CygWin) for a private client wiki, and also deployed a temporary one on a Linux laptop for a small conference last year in Toledo.
The sticking point in getting this instance running was a name resolution problem and matching configuration. The Twiki web site provides copious documentation (in a Twiki, of course!), but because they support so many configurations (BSD, Linux, RedHat, Mandrake, Windows, IIS, Apache 1.3 and 2.0), that it can be tricky to separate out the current suggestions from other people’s troubleshooting issues from older issues. My “solution” was telling the twiki it was running on neresus.tedroche.com and then adding the IP address of the Neresus box to the HOSTS file of the client. This is a kludge, of course, that I should be able to remedy with a DNS in-house. I’ll add that project to the list… maybe on the Twiki!
Onward and upward! The next project for the intranet is a CVS configuration, and I’ll also be trying to convert the Twiki from interpreted, CGI-driven to a module mod_Perl (faster) configuration.
Microsoft Linux?
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has these two columns (“MS-Linux? It Could happen” and “2004: The Year Linux Grows Up (or Blows Up) “)proposing that Microsoft could ship its own Linux distribution. Microsoft’s Services for Unix product is a foot in the door. I just have a hard time seeing them reverse their poisonous FUD diatribes against the “viral,” “un-American,” anti-Constitutional Open Source.
I prefer the parody http://www.mslinux.org site. Check it out for a good laugh.
Court rules for IBM in preliminary SCO hearing
Good news from ComputerWorld in this piece: http://www.computerworld.com/softwaretopics/os/linux/story/0,10801,87945,00.html?f=x10
More transferring to Linux made easy
A simple mini-HOWTO on converting Outlook to Unix Mailbox format was as easy as it sounded. Running Mozilla mail on the same box with Outlook on it was all it took to pull over the data. Pretty cool!
Balmer on Windows vs. Linux security
Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, spoke recently at a panel discussion of a Gartner-sponsored conference, and was fascinating to watch. He blundered and spouted and was nearly incoherent. The one allegation he said that stuck with me was the claim that, in the first 150 days of release, one version of Windows had less security flaws than Red Hat Linux 6 during its first 150 days. It sounded fishy and artificial and contrived.
“Ballmer Says Commercial Software is Better Because Someone’s Rear End is on the Line” is an article in response.