Slashdot posts: “Opera 7.10 Released (First Opera 7.x For Linux).” Cool! I like the MDI interface of Opera on windows, I wonder how it will perform on Linux. Have to download a copy and try it out.
Tag Archives | Linux
Microsoft gags MVP and ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ winner
Whil Hentzen, Microsoft Support Most Valuable Professional and the first winner of the FoxPro Lifetime Achievement Award, traveled to the West Coast to present “Expanding your VFP Skillset with Linux” to the Bay Area Association of Database Developers, which included a demonstration of Visual FoxPro running under Wine on Linux. He was prevented from making the presentation. Here’s what happened:
—–Original Message—–
From: Chet Gardiner
Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2003 2:47 AM
To: profox@leafe.com; prolinux@leafe.com
Subject: VFP under Linux – Not
FYI:
I attended the BAADD (Bay Area Association of Database Developers) VFP sig meeting this evening. It was to be something very special since Whil Hentzen was coming in to talk to us about developing with the Fox under Linux.
Whil made some very good points about the growth of Linux and the fact that it soon will be a very viable solution for the desktop for people who don’t (or can’t afford) microsoft’s extortionate policies, practices and prices. I’d have to agree. I had very little problem installing a workable version on one of the machines on my network. For instance, Red Hat 8.0 comes
with a complete office suite, email clients and servers, web server, samba network file service, etc, etc. You can download the images for free and try it out.
The most interesting point Whil made was that there was a group of people who really knows database applications (us) who could fit right into the Linux world if we got VFP running under it. They don’t need the apps now but soon and there’s no other viable 4GL language for Linux and Windows on the near horizon.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Whil got a call this afternoon from a semi-highly placed person from M$ who warned him that he would be in violation of the EULA for VFP if he demonstrated (or ran) VFP on a Linux OS. that he might run into some trouble from their huge stable of lawyers. There has been some discussion of letting M$ know how we feel about this attack on our potential livelihood. I intend to do just that.
I’ve seen this before, back in the late 70s/early 80s when IBM had 85% of the computing market share.
Chet
Whither Novell?
An interesting article in IT Week titled “Novell Takes Linux Exit; To Drop NetWare?” I was a Novell CNA (Admin not CNE, Engineer) for Novell 3.x, and it was a powerful, scalable network OS. It was absolutely swamped by Windows, though, and seemed to muddle through a number of initiatives that were unclear. Their directory services, though, I hear, are the crown jewel of the company at this point. Not connected with the news in that part of the world, I missed the Cambridge Technology Partners acquisition – those are sharp guys. It will be interesting to see which direction the company takes from here. Thanks to the post on OSNews
Migration: Not for the Faint of Heart
Migration: Not for the Faint of Heart is an editorial response to yesterday’s OSNews article on the failings of one person to successfully switch to Linux. As I said, I thought their expectations were too high, and that they failed to consider resources that could help. Posted at OSNews
Red Hat Linux 9.0
Upgraded the intranet server from Red Hat 8.0 “Phoebe” to Red Hat 9.0 “Shrike” yesterday. The slow part was the downloads – each CD takes about an hour over broadband (okay, that’s not much to complain about!), but disk 5 had to be downloaded 5 times before I got a clean copy. (Hint: use MD5Sums.exe to test the .iso without going to all the hassle of burning a copy that Linux tells you isn’t valid. Hint2: then run “linux mediacheck” on startup to make sure you’ve got a good copy).
Installation was smooth as silk: boot from the CD, tell it to upgrade the install it finds, confirm you want to upgrade all packages, walk away. Drop by two more times to insert CD 2 and 3 and you are up and running. All settings transferred, all(most) all software running. I say almost, regretably, because it looks like changes to the threading model (a real performance improvement, I hear) break Wine. There’s a workaround already, and the Wine folks are hard at work at a solid fix. Details and a good review of RH 9.0 are available here and here:
http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review.html
http://www.winehq.com/index.php?issue=163#Making%20Wine%20Run%20With%20glibc%202.3
The Clueless Newbie’s Linux Odyssey
Here’s a sad story, one sure to be used by Linux bashers for more material. The evil side will summarize this as “somewhat clued-in tech writer can’t get Linux to work on her machine.” The other side might view this as “somwhat clued-in tech writer tries
- Out-of-date distributions,
- On older hardware that was running 95
- Without asking for help from more clued-in Linux help
- Requiring a dual boot, difficult under most OSes.
There were a number of things she could have done differently, such as: search out a Linux User Group for some friendly free advice and perhaps an installfest, bought a new machine with Linux installed, or sought out a friend with more experience.
She probably would not have had a more pleasant experience trying to install Windows XP Home on the machine, either.
Get to Know the Other Linux Distributions
A good summary of the top nine players, and references to others in the field: “Get to Know the “Other” Linux Distributions” from OSNews
Microsoft’s Linux Strategy, according to Gartner
Gartner’s opinion of Microsoft’s strategies against the open source movement are in this ZDNet article. Bear in mind that Gartner does not have a 100% batting record. Of course, neither do I :).
Enterprises will see major changes in Microsoft’s competitive strategy as Linux and other open-source software continue to erode Microsoft’s traditional sources of income. Don’t expect Microsoft’s bundling strategies to continue as before, and don’t expect it to support Linux before 2006 at least — if ever.
Wine Update, Part III: Wine Locks Okay, Samba doesn’t
Extensive testing by Paul McNett seems to indicate that:
- VFP running under Wine locks tables and records properly,
- Multiple instances of VFP or other applications under the same instance of Wine respect each other’s locks,
- VFP clients on Windows can properly lock records and files on a Samba share or a native Windows share,
- VFP clients under Wine do respect locking when sharing files via NFS,
- VFP clients running under Wine will not see locks on SMB (Samba or Windows) shares because the outgoing SMBClient does not understand locks.
So, all is not lost, nor is it won, just yet. Wine is doing it’s thing properly. Samba needs to learn the Windows Way of locking. So, if you are looking at transitioning existing Windows systems to Linux:
- Consider moving to client-server, which eliminates all the locking issues, and gives you increased scalability, reliability and other – ilities, OR:
- Put the DBF files on a Samba share, and access them via SMB (the native networking) from Windows clients, and via NFS from the Linux clients.
With the rich assortment of data servers available for Linux, I’m inclined to strategy #1 for new systems, but strategy #2 for existing DBF-based systems, to simplify the transition. Once the existing systems were working without a hitch under plan #2, I’d propose plan #1 for the next major upgrade of the system.
VFP runs on Linux
Paul McNett has been leading the charge to get VFP working on Linux. Here’s his website, and here’s an article he recently published in FoxTalk. There are still some limitations, like the locking issues in the last post, but there are work-arounds to those, too (using client-server data rather than local files), but the Wine project is still in alpha and the progress is exciting.
Click the little picture on the right for a large (1600×1200, 320kb) screen shot of VFP running on the Linux desktop.