[Mon Oct 31 11:55:02 CST 2005]

While reading Linux Weekly News I came across this old email from Bob Young sent in 1998 explaining why they chose Linux instead of BSD to power the Red Hat products. There is nothing earth-shattering here, but it is still an interesting read. It all boils down to the following reasons:

1. The perceived openness of Linux versus BSD.
2. Linux had more momentum... and more drivers.
3. The GPL license protected them from Microsoft's embrace and extend strategy.

The first reason may sound strange, but it makes perfect sense:

We perceived that we would have to ask someone's permission to work with the BSD developers, but Linus was so public about his lack of interest in attempting to control, or even influence, what anyone did with Linux that it just seemed easier.

What I find interesting about this comment is that what convinced Bob Young to go the Linux route was then precisely what most BSDers despise in it: its freewheeling approach to development. As for the second point, anybody who runs Linux and BSD (and I do) should be able to attest to it. Finally, what can we say of the licensing issues? BSDers can shout as loud as they want that their license is more free than the GPL, but in reality it does absolutely nothing to prevent abuse from the likes of Microsoft. It should not surprise anyone then that Bob Young & co. chose Linux. {link to this story}

[Sun Oct 30 19:35:01 CST 2005]

A glimpse at the near future. Kansai Electric has developed a technology to transmit a two-hour movie in 0.5 seconds using fibre-optic cables. Although they have not decided to commercialize this yet, according to their estimates it may be possible to use it by the year 2010. The world of movies that are downloadable via the Internet and realistic online sex games, among many other things, is quickly becoming a reality. There are still plenty of changes the Internet will bring about in our daily lives. We only have to give it a few more years. {link to this story}

[Sun Oct 30 18:57:00 CST 2005]

Sun has just released yet another attractive sub-1,000 workstation. The Sun Ulta 20 Workstation, starting at US $895, offers a 1.4 GHz AMD Opteron processor capable of running both 32-bit and 64-bit applications, 256 MB of RAM, an 80 GB SATA hard drive, on-board ATI Rage graphics and a DVD/CD-RW drive. Yes, it all sounds great, and the price is quite attractive. Still, neither Sun is a manufacturer specializing in the desktop market with the necessary structures to produce in volume nor does it count with the reputation in that segment at all. Let us face it. Sun has tried this before. I seem to remember the Sun blade was their most recent attempts, just three years ago or so, and it failed. Sure, back then the low-price workstations could only run Solaris while these other boxes can also run Linux and even Windows. Still, I find it difficult to believe the company will manage to turn the tide by selling lots of these machines when, in reality, there are plenty of similar workstations out there for the same price and even cheaper. The Ultra 20 will be useful, I think, to offer a high-end low-price workstation to existing Sun customers, so that they can continue their Solaris from the low-end to the high-end mantra, but not so much to get them new customers. In other words, this is not the miracle product McNealy & co. have been searching for in a desperate attempt to reverse the company's fortunes and may just, at the very best, fill in a vacuum in their product line. {link to this story}

[Wed Oct 26 15:39:35 CDT 2005]

Well, well, well, it looks as if the Debian folks have finally put together a nice GTK frontend for their installer. Mind you, I am one of those who thinks that their old curses-based installer is just fine. Still, these screenshots look nice and simple, as it tends to be the case with Debian software. There is no need for all that glitzy stuff when you are a community-based distro. I especially like the way it is so easy to gain immediate access to any part of the installation process by simply clicking on the left-hand menu. That is a nice detail, I think. {link to this story}

[Fri Oct 21 09:21:39 CDT 2005]

PHP is making it to the news quite often lately. Zend Technologies has announced a new PHP collaboration project to put together a new PHP web application development and deployment environment to compete against the likes of .Net and Java while Mark Andreessen, of Netscape fame, touts PHP's strenghts to the world. It looks as if I may have to brush up on my PHP skills after all. I had been using Perl for all my most recent projects, in part because I find it more stable, it enjoys the support of a larger community and it is more versatile (i.e., it can be used for other things that web development). However, to be honest, I must acnowledge I only use Perl for web development, since good old bash scripting is good enough for small tools and I like Python better for GUI programming. So, it may make sense to use PHP for web development then, especially since it is rising pretty high which gives us a guarantee of stability. {link to this story}

[Fri Oct 21 08:54:26 CDT 2005]

Steven Vaughan-Nichols writes in LinuxWatch about the paranoia in the Debian community over the whole controvery regarding the use of the Debian word by the DCC Alliance. It is quite interesting to see some of the very same guys who cry foul when Red Hat defends its trademark now actively pursuing the same goal when it is their turn. Yes, I understand the issue is not nearly as clear as Vaughan-Nichols portrays it. Simply put, it is not OK to allow anyone out there to use the term Debian for whatever it is they have in mind. Actually, even if they do base their own distributions on Debian, that is not good enough to allow them to use the term in order to name an organization where the Debian community itself is not participating. I can see that. Still, there is no reason to let loose and start a witch-hunt against the Alliance either. There are times (way too often, as a matter of fact) when the Debian folks just take things completely out of proportion, and that does nothing but to damage the reputation of their otherwise excellent product. {link to this story}

[Fri Oct 21 08:43:26 CDT 2005]

While helping a customer with a question he had about the maximum filesystem size for XFS and ext3, I came across a great chart comparing different filesystems with detailed information about them all: FAT, UFS, HPFS, FFS, ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, XFS, JFS... you name it. The table includes information about their limits, metadata, overall features comparison, allocation and layout policies, etc. It is a great resource. Incidentally, it appears to be a ripoff from the Wikipedia website. I know, licensing allows that to happen. Still, it amazes me the amount of sites out there that are just taking information from them and "selling" it on their own. {link to this story}

[Thu Oct 13 11:51:42 CDT 2005]

Project Tango has been announced today. It is a collaborative effort between different open source designers and artists to build an unified visual style for the free desktop. To get an idea, check out their icon gallery. {link to this story}

[Thu Oct 13 11:30:58 CDT 2005]

Neil McAllister writes an article in InfoWorld suggesting Linux vendors to think different. I must say I find his comments about the troubles he ran into when installing SUSE Linux 10.0 and Ubuntu on his home desktop quite excessive. I have been installing Linux on home desktops and laptops for years now (at the very least since 1998) and, while at the very beginning it was almost always an issue, it has been a long time since I have run into any major problems getting it to install and run. Now, it could perfectly be that McAllister has a lot of nice toys attached to his system, but then it would not be fair to draw conclusions from that and blame it on Linux. In any case, his suggestion is intriguing:

With the Mac OS, Apple sticks to a tightly controlled upgrade path that emphasizes backward compatibility. But more importantly, Apple has the advantage of owning the hardware. A Mac always knows how to work its graphics card and its speakers, because Macintosh computers ship with a very limited selection of hardware components. No matter how many people still clamor for mac clones, it's a strategy that has always paid off for Apple in terms of customer satisfaction.

Could it work for desktop Linux? Suppose a single vendor took the big gamble and offered the whole ball of wax: a complete desktop Linux distribution pre-installed on certified customer hardware. I don't mean a budget white box, either, but a well-crafted system designed with usability in mind, fully supported, but with the built-in cost savings of open source. Would you buy?

I am not convinced it would necessarily work out very well, but it is true no single hardware vendor so far has had the guts to put it into practice (in part, I assume, out of fear about what Microsoft might do). As I said, the idea is intriguing. {link to this story}

[Thu Oct 6 07:36:10 CDT 2005]

Ah, the joys of managerialesse (i.e., the peculiar and highly rhetorical language generally used by managers and marketing deparments all over the world)! Today, I received an email from Novell announcing:

As you may know, Novell has embarked on a process to migrate the SUSE Linux offerings into the Novell web experience in order to serve you better. (...) As part of the overall migration process, some dramatic changes to the SUSE Portal are about to take place, and you will need to take a few steps to prepare for that.

Wow! They are making "dramatic" changes to the "web experience". The revolution is coming! Take cover! It's the end of the world as we know it! Do we truly need to be so silly? Do we truly need to use such new-ageish rhetoric to announce a simple redesign of a website making it sound as if we are announcing a new revolutionary technology that will come to erradicate poverty from the world? The answer is an emphatic no. Take, for example, a similar email sent by the FreeBSD folks also announcing the redesign of their website:

The FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the launch of a new website today. Please visit http://www.FreeBSD.org and let us know what you think. The new design was created by Emily Boyd, a student at Smith College that we had the pleasure of working with through Google's Summer of Code program.

That is all! No need for a highly charged rhetoric, no need for the pretentiousness of the language used by Novell's marketing types. I know they are convinced it makes them sound kewl but most people just think it is too stupid. {link to this story}

[Tue Oct 4 19:37:47 CDT 2005]

We all know how much the media industry loves (I mean, absolutely loves!) exaggerating things. So, it should not surprise us that Computer World recently published an article about "the decline of the desktop". However, I have the feeling this time they may be right, at least in part. Let us see, first of all, what the main claims of the article are:

The laptop, once a corporate status symbol, has already gained acceptance as a mainstream device. Now laptops are poised for a corporate takeover as enterprise use widens beyond its traditional constituents: traveling executives and other "road warriors".

(...)

Laptop use is being driven by changes in work habits as much as by advances in technology. And work habits are changing because wireless technology is breaking the link between location and connectivity. Increasingly, users expect to carry laptops with them on the road, at home and into meetings across campus, using wireless connections to facilitate collaboration as well as to keep up with e-mail.

The price/performance gap between laptops and desktops has narrowed considerably, led by a rapid decline in the cost of LCD panels, which account for 60% to 70% of a notebook's cost, according to Forrester Research Inc. Some low-end laptops now sell for well under $600. Forrester predicts that display costs will continue their fall through 2005.

The key here is the word mobility more than laptop, although the author of the piece does not appear to have that so clear in his mind. Why do I say this? Because the world of mobility goes well beyond the laptop, and it is already extending (and will extend even more in the near future) to many other devices: PDAs, iPods, intelligent phones, and many other devices that are barely starting to appear now. And let me tell you that Bill Gates knows this fully well, which is why he already started a few years an internal push at Microsoft to port their OS to mobile devices (yeah, apparently they could not come up with anything better than the outrageous Windows CE, at least at the beginning), and then flood the market with a bunch of Windows Mobile solutions. I am not so sure Linux is doing a good job at spreading to that market too, where Java appears, at least for the time being, poised to be Microsoft's main competitor. In any case, there is little doubt this will be the battlefield of the near future, although I am also convinced this by no means represents the end of the desktop. {link to this story}

[Tue Oct 4 19:32:27 CDT 2005]

A co-worker recently told me about GenUx, a small company that offers technical suspport for Gentoo users. I ignore how many enterprise users are actually running Gentoo on their servers and workstations (my guess is that not many, taking into account its reputation as a difficult distribution to install as well as the fact that is geared towards people who have the time to compile it and build it from the bottom up), but I still think the idea is pretty good. They have different packages, depending on the amount of technical support incidents and whether the support is carried out over the phone or via email and IRC chat. {link to this story}