Pain and Glory from the Trenches of the IT World

Every so often I hear somebody come along and compare the fragmentation of the various Linux distributions today to the “UNIX Wars” of the late 1980s and the early 1990s. I find it somewhat funny when that happens, as I think that the situation is quite different.

First of all, the article mentions there being over 300 different Linux distributions. There were nowhere near that many UNIX vendors in the late 1980s. So the scale of fragmentation isn’t even remotely close.

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.

Those who follow GNOME have probably read about the GNOME Online Desktop. After reading about this concept, I find myself very confused at what it is they’re actually trying to accomplish.

Take what is, at the time of writing, the second paragraph under the “Philosophy” section: Imagine an OS that keeps all its information online, so you can use a live CD as easily as a full installation. When you start up a newly-installed computer, or visit a friend’s house, your whole environment will be waiting for you, with no setup to redo. For the techies, think Stateless Linux Desktop; your files and settings are somewhere else.

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.

At far too many companies I have witnessed the effects of homogenized enterprise-grade networks. While many claim that it’s easier to support such networks, I often find that difficult to believe. The benefit brought on by the widespread similarity is often overshadowed by the severe negative consequences when things go wrong.

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?

As has widely been reported, Ubuntu 7.04 is now available. While I know a great many people use Ubuntu as their primary GNU/Linux distribution, I have usually avoided it as I prefer KDE over GNOME. Because of that preference, I have leaned towards Kubuntu instead. Kubuntu essentially takes Ubuntu, and replaces the GNOME desktop environment with KDE. And when there’s a new version of Ubuntu released, soon after we get a new version of Kubuntu. In this case, that version is Kubuntu 7.04.

Sun’s ZFS is truly a remarkable filesystem. A while back I had read that it was going to be integrated with FreeBSD. And apparently that integration of ZFS into FreeBSD is now essentially complete. I was also reading some time ago that a port of ZFS to DragonFly BSD was being considered. So with Solaris and future releases of FreeBSD supporting ZFS, it’s no doubt in my mind that it will become widely used.

Earlier this month I wrote about how the Ubuntu release names can get rather confusing. An interesting reply of sorts was made to that posting.

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.