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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

The system I chose as a guinea pig was my trusty Toshiba Satellite A30-104 notebook, it needed a reprep because I also wanted to do a fresh install of Ubuntu 6.06 now that my CDs arrived, so I thought why not dualboot Vista and Dapper. It’s a pretty reasonable system with average specs, i.e. no funky hardware, but above all it’s very stable and has NEVER crashed in XP or Ubuntu.

FYI. Toshiba A30-104 Specs

• Intel Celeron 2.6 GHz
• 768 Mb DDR333 RAM
• 30 Gb ATA5 Harddrive
• DVD/CDRW Combo drive
• Intel integrated 852GM Graphics ( 32 – 64 Mb )
• Realtek AC97 Audio
• Realtek 8139 10/100 NIC
• v.91 winmodem
• Ralink RT2500 PCMCIA 54Mbps Wireless card
• 2x USB2 ports
• 1 x Firewire 400 port
• External 320Gb USB Harddrive

Nothing particularily spectacular I know, I didn’t expect Vista Aero to work but thats OK because I’ve got a Dell desktop with a 128Mb nVidia to test Aero on. Being a big Linux fan, I’d run Ubuntu 5.10 ( Breezy Badger ) on this notebook which installs all the drivers out of the box, with the exception of the modem because it has a proprietry binary driver which when I manually installed it worked fine, by comparison I need to install every driver manually for Windows XP but thats OK Ubuntu came out in 2005 while XP came out in 2002 so it’s to be expected. To set up my wireless in Ubuntu I just need to enter my SSID and WEP key et voila I’m surfing the ‘net through my 4Mb cable connection. I’ve even created an unattended version of XP Home, using info from Microsofts website which can preinstall all my drivers. And this was my biggest issue with Vista. Drivers.

The Saga

The installation routine was slightly reminiscent of Linux installers. It booted up into a “live” Vista and asked for only a couple of details before proceeding. I won’t bore you with installation details as it was very simple and went smoothly. My problems began when I tried to use Vista.

After booting into Vista for the first time I have to say it looked really pretty, even it’s “Basic” theme was good looking but underneath it hid a nasty secret.

First thing I did was to open Task Manager and check the Performance tab to see how big a hit it was on the system when idle … 417Mb in use!!! That’s more than half of the available memory. When XP and Ubuntu are running they use about 120 – 140 Mb ( depending on whether AntiVirus is running ). Whew, glad I can upgrade my laptop to 2Gb of RAM, looks like I’m gonna need it. Next I found Device Manager to see the state of my hardware and what a state it was. Both the Firewire and Realtek 8139 NIC had exclamation marks and there was an “Unknown Network Controller”, my Ralink RT2500 wireless card ! Upon investigating the exclamation marks in Device Manager informed me that it was “unable to allocated enough resources to the device. Please disable some hardware …” or words to that effect. So I disabled the Parallel Port, Firewire Port, Modem Port and PCMCIA Port and rebooted. No dice. No matter what I tried I couldn’t get enough resources to enable the onboard Realtek 8139 NIC nor could I get my Ralink RT2500 to work so after wasting 3 days trying desperately to connect to my LAN and the internet I gave up. I don’t think it’s really worth the effort to continue trying to get a bog standard NIC up and running in Vista just so I could continue testing it. To me the problems with such a simple piece of kit has disheartened me. For now I’ll stick with XP and Ubuntu on my notebook. Who knows when my new DVD Writer arrives next week I may try my luck with Vista on my Dell Optiplex GX240.

In conclusion, this has been the most disappointing release from Microsoft to date. Previous companies I’ve worked for were involved with beta testing Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows XP. In all cases their beta releases at least worked on Realtek 8139 NICs. I know this because I generally use only Realtek 8139, 3Com 3c905 or Intel 82559 NICs in my systems because they “just work”, haven’t managed to go gigabit yet. I even used an 8139 in an old PowerPC Mac running OS 8! Come on Microsoft surely you can do better than this!