alan doyle

WARNING: Personal opinions abound …

After all the furor about Microsoft contributing 20,000 lines of code to Linux and Microsoft’s “Community Promise” regarding C#, a language I use professionally, I recently read this article and I have to agree with Linus, in particular “I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease. I believe in open development, and that very much involves not just making the source open, but also not shutting other people and companies out.”

Open Development were everyone is welcome, no matter who you are or who you work for, is the main reason I love the open source world. As a professional programmer I’m bound by “Trade Secrets”, NDAs, and closed source software. I realise there is a business need for such things yet even still we can deploy Linux servers and rely on the open source world to help us provide the best we can for our customers.

I’m not going to make any judgements as to whether Microsoft’s intentions are good or bad, I will say this being able to write C# at work on Windows XP and come home and continue to write it on my Ubuntu PCs is brilliant, that is the true beauty of open source. I personally prefer Ubuntu to any of Microsoft’s Operating Systems, even Windows 7, and  keeping my professional skills up to scratch is a priority.

So, until such time where all the nay-sayers triumph, please enough with the Microsoft bashing and the Mono slating, it’s not clever and not very productive. Open source lets many people, like myself, work freely and professionally on the Operating System of their choice.

… I’m sticking with Ubuntu.

Recently I’ve been trying out Windows 7 RC on my Samsung NC10 netbook, mostly out of curiosity. I have to say after being unimpressed with Vista it’s not bad. It’s new taskbar reminds me a lot of KDE 4, Aero Peek, Aero Shake and Snap are quite nice and the fact it was able to install drivers for all the NC10 hardware, even if some are quite basic. All-in-all it’s quite pretty.

Installing all the software I prefer took an awful long time. Finding the official websites, downloading the installers and finally running the installers. Compared to simply issuing an apt-get command this is hell.

After a few weeks of using Windows 7 as my main OS on the netbook I can honestly say I won’t be switching to Windows 7 any time soon. In fact now that I have tried it I want to wipe my netbook and try Alpha 3 of Karmic on this little netbook and see how she flies. I love the power and freedom that Ubuntu has to offer in automating daily tasks and neither the Command Prompt, PowerShell nor Scheduled Tasks can offer me the flexability, simplicity or power of bash and cron!

I’m pretty convinced now that Windows no longer has the features I require from an operating system and I’m happy I made the switch to Ubuntu over a year ago.

Aside: If you’ve got an NC10 then a good guide to update the drivers and software on the NC10 can be found on Ade Millers blog.

Today is a new day, a new year in fact, I don’t normally do “New Years Resolutions” and I’ve just realised that I’ve been working on new versions of my 3 websites ( Darkbyte, Osmium Consortium and My DVD Collection ) for over 2 years and still haven’t put anything on-line. I’ve reckon I’ve rewritten them 4 times during that time and still the old versions are on-line. So I’ve decided, seeing as its a new year and all, to complete each one this year, in fact I plan on taking my finger out and getting each one online over the next 12 months. 2008 is going to be the year I finally complete each project I’ve started.

So what gave me the motivation to do all this? Guilt? Partially. I’ve come to notice that over the past year or so I’ve become very lazy. My home server is currently lying in pieces under my desk waiting for me to rebuild it, it used to host My DVD Collection Website, hence it’s off-line, I’ve also got a couple of other Toshiba laptops, ( a Satellite Pro 4600 and a Portege 4000 ) still leaning up against the wall in need of a good re-prep *** SIGH *** But to be honest it was much, much simpler than that.

It was Windows Vista. Yep. I’ve been running Windows Vista on my laptop, an Acer Aspire 9303 since I bought it and I’ve been trying to like it but I can’t. I’ve used every other Microsoft operating system since Windows 3.11 and had been kind of happy with them, even though I thought WGA was a bit Orwellian. I had experimented with Ubuntu on my old Toshiba Satellite A30 and was able to get Beryl to run sweetly on the 32Mb (Shared Memory) Intel 852 graphics card, so I dual booted my Acer with Ubuntu but some software I needed to run at the time only ran well on Windows, unfortunately Wine couldn’t run it and I didn’t have time to work out why so I was stuck. Past tense.

Now with the new year I no longer need to use any Windows software so I’ll be wiping Windows Vista from my laptop and installing a variation of Ubuntu, probably Xubuntu instead. I honestly tried to like Windows Vista but it was incredibly slow, given it was running on an AMD x2 1.6 GHz Dual Core CPU with 2Gb of RAM, and Internet Explore constantly hung. It got to the point where I couldn’t work on it for more than a couple of hours before it hung and needed to be rebooted. So fair well Microsoft I’d like to say it was fun but it wasn’t. Roll on the Open Source experience.

Well I’ve gotten Windows Vista RC1 and well it fared no better than Pre-RC1.

Am I dissapointed? … Yes

Am I surprised? … No.

To be fair to Microsoft the problem is partly Toshibas fault but I can’t help but remember that I was at least able to install Windows Vista Beta 2 when it was released, so perhaps they both need to take their fingers out. Needless to say I’m no longer interested in Windows Vista and won’t be upgrading any of my systems to Vista for at least another year or two. Hopefully they’ll have sorted out their act or gone bust!

Well today I’ve downloaded Vista Pre RC1 DVD ISO and tried to install it on my Toshiba Satellite A30-104. Upon inserting the DVD and pressing a key at the prompt I got the standard black and white progress bar, however when it reached 100% and attempted to switch into the GUI installer I got a BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH!!! which said …

What the hell !!!! Even Beta 2 installed, wasn’t perfect but installed, see my first Vista entry. Things seem to be getting worse. I checked with Toshiba and I’m running the latest BIOS. Ack!

Being a paranoid kind of individual I tried the pre RC1 DVD on a Dell Optiplex GX240 and it booted into the GUI installer fine so I knew the DVD was OK. I must backup all the stuff on the GX240 and try Vista on it until Microsoft or Toshiba sort out this BIOS STOP. Maybe I’ll be lucky.

For the moment the bottom line is I’m seriously unimpressed with Vista and shan’t be wasting my money buying a copy when it hits the shelves whenever.