Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

During the early 1990s, a number of developers had the opportunity to use a NeXT system. Of those people, some were lucky enough to get to actually develop applications for such systems. NeXT brought us what was essentially a revolution at the time. Objective-C began to truly make Smalltalk-style OO accessible and practical. Their well-architectured class libraries were a real masterpiece, especially compared to the cobbled-together utility libraries used in many existing C libraries. And their UI was, of course, superb.

About a month ago, I considered the factors that were holding back one open source project with much potential, Parrot. Today I will do the same for another open source project: .

In recent discussion at Slashdot about “refocusing” the development of Linux, it was suggested that the various distributions should standardize on a common software package installation and management system. If that were ever to happen, which is quite unlikely, then pkgsrc would probably be the best option.

One computing myth we hear quite often is that of Microsoft Windows offering a “common UI”. That is, one toolkit or framework that is used by all applications, thus giving an experience that is well-integrated and shared. But anyone who has used Windows recently should know that this is clearly not the case.

Those of us who are serious users of UNIX or UNIX-like systems have no doubt looked at

Thanks to an article on DesktopLinux.com, I was reading about the Asus Eee PC 701 system. One interesting thing about this system is that it will reportedly run a variant of Xandros Desktop Linux.

I’m sure that most people who follow developments within the open source community have read about Mark Shuttleworth’s high-end, free-software-only laptop idea. While his focus appears to be more ideologically-driven, I think such a laptop would be useful for those of us with more pragmatic concerns.

Understandably, his writing about this topic focuses mainly on the use of Ubuntu-derived distributions on such a laptop. But I think it would also be very valuable for users of systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and even Haiku.

There is currently an article at Yahoo! News that takes a look back on how the market has so far reacted to Microsoft’s Windows Vista. It covers a lot of the problems that many people have experienced when using Vista. And after reading the article, I find myself asking a pretty important question: Why would one subject himself or herself to the problems of Windows Vista?

Today I was reading an article about the One Laptop per Child project. It suggested that Linux was not a suitable OS to use on such systems. Now, I don’t know whether that is true or not. I’m more interested in what was said in this portion of the post: Don’t get me wrong - I know that stuffing a full version of Windows or OS X on one of these machines is difficult due to the hardware that’s contained within, but with that said, light embedded versions of these products could have been a possibility, and Steve Jobs even offered OLPC free usage of OS X on the laptop!

I felt the need to clarify some things with this article that discusses so-called “Ubuntu Web Browsers”. The fact of the matter is that those browsers are in no way tied to Ubuntu. Likewise, Ubuntu supports browsers other than those.

Browsers like Firefox and Opera run on many different operating systems, from Windows, to Linux, to Mac OS X, to Solaris, to FreeBSD. Check out the Opera FTP site for proof of this. Look at the wide range of platforms they support. And don’t forget that some of those directories, like the “unix” directory, themselves contain several platforms.