Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Today I was reading about the “Reduced Functionality” capability of Windows Vista. According to that article, Microsoft has now enabled this capability, which renders a “nongenuine” copy of Windows essentially unusable.

Frankly, I just can’t see why anybody would want to use Windows Vista. I’m sure the questionable nature of this sort of functionality is quite obvious to most. And it’s also pretty obvious how the misidentification of an installation as being “nongenuine” could be quite disasterous. A completely legitimate installation of Vista locking up accidentally because of such functionality could cost an individual or business a great deal of time and money.

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.

I’ve met a lot of end users over the years. Some I have quite disliked, most I am indifferent about, but some I will remember forever. One such user I met today at an insurance company. His job was to perform some actuarial tasks for the company. The work he does is apparently quite computationally-intensive, so he had some pretty modern, high-end Sun and IBM workstations at his disposal.

Sun’s Solaris operating system has numerous useful features that really aren’t found in other OSes, including Linux. Every so often I hear a Linux user say, “I’d love to be able to use that feature of Solaris!” One example is in this Slashdot comment, where the poster wishes that there was a ZFS-like filesystem for 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.

It’s often the most flashy and rapidly-developed open source applications that get the most attention. Most people focus on projects like Beryl, Metisse, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and Ubuntu. But we can’t forget the importance of the open source software an average user doesn’t see every day. This is a list of nine such programs and libraries.

When considering the present needs of most home users, Sun’s ZFS is no doubt overkill. Developed for Sun’s powerful Solaris operating environment, ZFS brings truly advanced filesystem technologies to the masses. For some background with respect to the benefits and capabilities that ZFS offers, I’d have to recommend an article I read today that briefly introduces ZFS. With recent versions of Mac OS X reportedly offering some degree of ZFS support, it will likely see increasing use on what can be considered typical home computers.

For many years now I have been a user of a wide variety of open source software systems. Linux, FreeBSD, and NetBSD have found a place on my home systems, as well as on numerous systems I have set up for various companies and individuals. And since the start of the OpenSolaris project, I have began to consider the use of NexentaOS and SchilliX. While most Linux distribution use the GNU tools and libraries, systems like FreeBSD and NetBSD have their own userland utilities and libraries. Nevertheless, such systems also use or support software like GCC, X.org and KDE.

I have seen a lot of different network setups in my travels and doings. And what I’ve seen has made me think about what I read today in an article speculating about the future of Linux. The article considers the idea that Linux is no longer considered a “winner”. It talks about what the word “winner” can be taken to mean, but the idea I get from the article is that people don’t think of Linux as they did in the past.

I know that Linux is a pretty popular system these days, and there are enough people out there who have tried one distribution or another at some point. But even among IT professionals, many are unaware of FreeBSD. The About FreeBSD page is a good, concise introduction to the system and what it offers: FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium® and Athlon™), amd64 compatible (including Opteron™, Athlon™64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC® architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley.