Deep Green Crystals: Linux Archives

April 28, 2005

Novell will own open source (says them)

Have been in NYC for last two days for the RRE annual meeting. At cocktails I had a chat with Jack Messman, CEO of NOVELL. Two worthwhile comments:

1. Most of his staff would say that Google is their #1 competitor, although he would prefer Microsoft. Jack believes Google could whip up an OS anytime they wanted. I tend to disagree, but interesting perspective.

2. Open source stack support companies like Spikesource (KP funded) and SourceLabs (Ignition funded) will have a tough time getting to market (I agree) because Novell (through Suse) and others (Redhat) will just implement partner programs and the need will be gone. Jack argues Vendor consolidation around trusted brands. Now we can argue about if Novell makes that cut, but I would tend to agree in principle.

I guess we have some work to do.

Posted by Martin at 4:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 19, 2004

Installing SUSE Linux Pro 9.1

Well I finally got rid of my last Win 95 box. I have a Sony DPP55 dye sublimination printer (an old one). Until Jan of this year there was No Win 2K driver for the thing so I had to keep a Win95 dedicated box just to print. Now that is understandable since Sony doesn't sell the printer anymore, but I am glad they finally got the message that units were out in the field and wrote one. So I had a PIII with 1GB RAM, a 4GB system drive and a 30Gig SCSI storage drive and lots of video and audio cards (circa 1997). I thought, hey Install Linux and see how it goes: So here is how it went.

I really bought SUSE on a whim. Was in Office Depot cruising the gadget isles and oogling the flat panels. Not really looking to buy software, just checking what is new. In the OS isle, SUSE had cool packaging and the Pro version had a web server and lots of extra utilities, so I snapped it up. Decided to pay for the user manual and the install script and graphical UI.

Back at home, I started at 7:30 at night last thursday during a re-run of Friends. The first thing I noticed was that the user manual was written by Brits and they mispelled lots of things and used funny sentence structure. I already had Windows installed and there was no clear installation procedure for that. The documentation leaned toward a clean install. It did talk about "repartitioning" the windows partition, but didn't explain what that was and how that would work. So they ask you to boot from the CD. Well if you already have a boot drive, your BIOS has probably been reset to not boot from the CD (as mine was). So first thing you gotta do is enter the BIOS editor, find the section to turn on Boot from CD, and reset that. Not exactly user friendly behavior. But the manual did address this for the Aladdin BIOS that I had, although they had the wrong screens and menu options so I had to hunt and peck a bit.

After I got the machine to boot from the CD, it started a nice grey screen and the installation process. The quick start manual encouraged me to "just accept all the defaults". But being somewhat technical, I was a bit hesitant to take the defaults when it asked to resize my windows partition and some other stuff. But I plowed ahead anyway. Just before I had started this process, I deleted everything of value from the machine. Leaving only the Win95 OS and some apps. I probably deleted over 20,000 files and a couple hundred directories. Basically majorilly screwed with the FAT tables. So when the installer came to resize my windows partition, it choked and complained about inconsistencies in the FAT and admonished me to defrag and chckdsk. Gee, wish they had told me that sooner. So I started that on the 30GM file disk (where Linux was being installed).

2 hours later the tasks finished. So I restart the install. Again same error "resizing error shrink it by other means" and suggested using something called LBA which it left undefined. So the chckdsk and defrag had not done something right. By now it is 10:00 and I am watching the Last Comic Standing (betting on Scott Heefferman). Rather than trying to figure out what LBA is, I decided to just reformat the damn drive to get the tables in sync. By 10:15 with the reformat done, I restarted the install. It hung for 10 minutes. Hard reboot. Hung again. Hard reboot. 10:40 install of disk one completed. 10:45 it asked for Disk 2. Apparently it shrunk the windows partition fine. Progress! at 11:00pm I recieved an "updates failed" message as the set-up tried to go out to the internet to look for updates. "path problem". The dreaded path problem is what Rich had warned me about. Not really caring about updates, I rebooted and at 11:05 the system came up just fine. It asked me if I wanted to boot windows or Linux. I choose Linux. It boots fine, it recognizes all the hardware, I get the internet browser going fine. I decide to put off application installs or more testing till morning.

Done. So 3:35 hour install of SUSE. Not bad for an OS. Keep it here for stories of how the apps work.

Posted by Martin at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 4, 2004

DRM is really an attack on Linux

Reading Linux, digital rights on collision course | CNET News.com I had one of those rare Ah Ha moments. Maybe I am just slow to make the connection, but it is now obvious that DRM is a back-door attempt by Microsoft to lock out Linux. All the major DRM schemes are exclusively Windows client compatible. The very way DRM works is in conflict with many of the open source licenses out there. The VP of Linux at HP is so worried about this that he used his keynote at LinuxWorld to talk about it. DRM is one more Windows platform lock. And it is gaining traction. Ouch.

Posted by Martin at 6:57 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack