Bog Roll :: unix/foss

Yesterday was a joint Hampshire/Surrey LUG meeting at the Nokia facility between Fleet and Farnborough. For a mid summer meeting it was quite busy and most productive.

Using Nokia's fast and plentiful Internet connection we upgraded a friend's Ubuntu system to the latest version and fixed a number of Apache/PHP related issues. We also got Dovecot IMAP working on the system and moved email into it from another system.

There were quite a few new faces, which is always good too see and plenty of familiar ones. Someone brought along a tiny Viglen MPC-L computer, listen to the next ubuntu uk podcast for a full review.

posted 09:19 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

In many respects I'm quite conservative, just as everyone else was abandoning CVS I started to use it. Over the past few weeks I've decided to upgrade to SVN (Subversion) just as everyone else moves on to git...

posted 22:40 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

Glyn Moody makes some very good points in his blog: Sir Bill and Sir Tim: A Tale of Two Knights.

posted 12:26 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

I have an old SPARC 5 box in the loft running Solaris 2.5. We don't have enough space to have it out an used, so it's currently sitting unused gathering dust. My current AMD64 based desktop system is way more powerful and Debian Lenny is a vastly more modern and sophisticated operating system than Solaris 2.6.

This week I've been playing with various alternative operating systems on VirtualBox virtual machines. Today I thought it would be nice to give Solaris another go and OpenSolaris is a lot more modern than Solaris 2.6 so I'm hoping it will be a lot more useful.

At the moment OpenSolaris is installing it's self inside a virtual machine, a bit slow compared with Linux but still much faster than Windows systems which seem to take for ever and a day.

Once it's all up and running I'll see if Solaris still deserves the moniker "Slowaris", it really did have a reputation for being awfully slow as Unix goes...

posted 17:12 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

Microsoft has all but admitted that the existing ISO Open Document Format has won the current round in the file format wars. Not content with being ratified by the ISO first, Microsoft will also support ODF before they are able to support their own competing OXML standard and they now believe that ODF will probably be "the standard" going forward that everyone uses.

Their grudging support for the standard has been formally endorsed by them joining the committee that runs ODF. The cynics would caution that as they haven't been able to kill the standard from the outside they will now from the inside embrace, extend and finally exterminate the standard, a technique long practised by Microsoft. Thankfully they were not able to exterminate the world wide web and there is some hope that they won't be able to exterminate ODF.

With luck the various challenges against OXML from several national bodies will mortally wound OXML and Microsoft will really commit to using the cross-platform ODF format properly and OXML will quietly die.

• 'ODF has clearly won,' says Microsoft exec
• Microsoft Spokesman Says ODF "Clearly Won" Standard War
• OpenDocument format (ODF) - ISO/IEC 26300:2006 Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0
• Office Open XML (OOXML or OXML) - Ecma 376 (ISO/IEC 29500)

posted 13:26 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

Microsoft appear to be coming unstuck in their OOXML/OXML/Ecma-376 plans for world domination. Several countries have formally appealed against the decision to fast-track their ISO proposal, and in the UK, the UKUUG have taken legal advice regarding the BSI for their support of the Vole's plans. It looks like the ISO have even responded to the media attention by suspending the process while the appeals go through.

posted 19:20 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

Microsoft announced that they will support ISO standards for Open Document Format (ODF) and PDF next year. Most open source software already supports ODF and PDF.

After bullying and bribery to get their so called "OOXML" (now called OXML) standard to be accepted by ISO, it now turns out they can't actually support it and it will be the version of Office that follows before they can support their own standard.

Typical, they refuse to participate in the development of a vendor neutral standard, refuse to support the standard when it's deployed, then develop their own incompatible "standard", bribe it through ISO, then it turns out they can support the real standard in their own products before they can support the one they developed based on their own product. Microsoft couldn't organise a proverbial in a brewery...

posted 22:07 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

Yesterday was the May Hants LUG. It went very well, a friend solved several problems, I learnt a bit more about X.509 certificates and picked up 30 CAcert points.

posted 14:06 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

It is sometimes said that the lack of games keeps GNU/Linux back when compared with Microsoft Windows. It is true that there are not a lot of commercial games available for GNU/Linux, however there are plenty of free ones and some are of a high quality.

Someone one said that most people don't actually want to buy games. All they want are a few decent simple desktop games and one or two flashier games. Real gamers will have every console under the sun and very serious PCs and you don't use a PlayStation 3 as a general purpose PC.

There are a few nice open-source games that I like, Frozen-Bubble is good fun, and I like the odd desktop puzzle app, e.g KPat. Recently I've been trying out ports of old Commodore 64 games such as Nebulous and Paradroid (Toppler and Freedroid).

posted 21:44 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

Now and then I have requirement to edit files in various postscript formats: ps, eps and pdf. Some files can be opened and edited by various Adobe tools but as these tools cost a bundle and don't run on a sane platform I'm out of luck.

Today I spotted pstoedit which is available in Debian. It does a perfectly serviceable job at converting various postscript files to an editable format. It even opens up "locked" documents for easy editing. Cool!

posted 22:04 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

Today we were doing some graphics work in the Gimp. The Gimp is one of the poster children of the open source movement. It is quite a powerful application and it can do quite a lot, however it is not a drop in replacement for Adobe Photoshop, which is a better application.

You can compare many open source applications with commercial closed source equivalents and sometimes the commercial version is better, sometimes the open source version is better. When you consider retail prices though it's hard to justify buying many commercial applications for small business or home users, indeed except when the commercial offering is significantly better there is little additional value in many commercial applications for corporations either.

For example, consider:

I will admit that some tools like Gimp are not as good as Photoshop but Debian GNU/Linux is a vastly superior operating system to Windows and comes with about every conceivable piece of open source software imaginable, all easily installed. Debian cost me £zero, and while it may not be quite as good as a close source alternative in some ways it is a lot cheaper, indeed a comparable closed source commercial system to my current Debian system would cost around three times the cost of my current hardware platform.

Some closed source software may be better than open source but on the whole free and open source is a LOT BETTER VALUE FOR MONEY!

posted 21:13 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

Microsoft would have everyone one believe that it is impossible to buy a computer without a version of Microsoft Windows on it. Anyone who wants a computer without an operating system (OS) must therefore be a criminal intent on installing an un-licenced copy of Windows on the new PC.

This lie is one that Microsoft works very hard on. While it was once true that people could save £100 on a £1000 computer by not paying for Windows, the truth today is that the £5-10 that companies charge for Windows on a £300 computer isn't worth the effort to steal. If you want Windows it is easier to let the hardware vendor go through all the pain of making it work.

If you run Linux, or have a retail copy of Windows and enjoy the challenge of trying to get Windows to work then you may want to save the few quid that Windows is worth and buy a "naked" PC. If you are a large corporation then you don't care what's on the PC anyway as you deploy a standard build on it.

This week as French consumer rights group "Union Fédérale des Consommateurs-Que Choisir" is taking HP to court for refusing to sell a naked PC in contravention of French anti-bundling law. On LXer there is an interesting thread discussing the topic. HP contend that a computer is useless without an OS so they must provide one to make it work. Someone pointed out that the people who sell lamps don't provide a bundled light-bulb you have to buy one yourself, yet without a bulb the lamp is useless. You can just imagine the fuss if all light-fittings came pre-installed with one manufacturers light bulbs only...

posted 18:24 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

A friend asked me to help him set up his mother-in-laws computer so she could read email. I often help friends and family for free but I refuse to touch stolen software and I encourage the use of open source software whenever practical.

Today's question was how to set up Microsoft Outlook. I said quite honestly that I could not recommend it in any shape or form and more importantly I have never actually set it up, and only use it at work because I am forced to.

I now feel guilty for not helping, he did not want to install anything else - which I would have offered to help with. He feels that he must use Microsoft Outlook as it came with that from Dell and as everyone uses it, it must be the best? He trusts me enough to ask for my advice but not enough to actually follow through.

I would happily give him The OpenCD but I know that would not help either... By not helping I have driven him deeper into Microsoft's tar pit, but he really does not want to be helped out, which I feel bad about as he is a nice chap.

posted 18:13 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

After a long while I finally relased my Dynamic DNS article on Debian Admin. It was quite a few months ago that I actually got it working Dynamic DNS, turing it into an article has just taken a lot longer than it should.

posted 15:29 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^

In his recent, and by now very well read blog, Jonathan Schwartz a senior bod a Sun Microsystems talks about really opening Solaris with the new GNU GPL version 3. It's not a given yet, but it would infuse Solaris with a lot of more modern GNU code, and at the same time allow some really cool but isolated stuff from Sun to cross-fertilise the Linux universe. It would certainly make Debian GNU/Solaris a lot easier from a legal standpoint!

posted 18:24 :: /unix/foss :: permalink :: ^