An opportunity presents a problem

I have a good friend who is 100% Linux in her home.  She uses Ubuntu; her husband still uses an older version of SUSE (although he’s planning to change when his schedule permits).  One question she has asked me is, “Who else uses Linux?”

I was about to e-mail her a link to this article when I noticed something troublesome in the last paragraph.  Here’s a guy who is installing literally thousands of Linux PCs, but his biggest concern is that Linux “really needs to come together” with a single API and installer.  Whoa!  Wait just a minute.  What he’s really advocating here is that the Linux world of choice become a Windows/proprietary OS clone:  no choices available, a single way of doing everything.

The key to his comment comes from the first paragraph.  20,000 students are using computers running “various flavors” of Linux.  Ah, no wonder.  It’s free choice gone amok.  No wonder Mike Huffman thinks there should be a single installer.  He’s probably running all the available installers.

So how can the Linux community keep this from happening again?  The first thing to do is likely to stress the fact that choice, at least in corporate/institutional environments, should only come from a few people.  When running a deployment of a new office suite, nobody seems to have a problem deciding on a particular version of Microsoft Office, but when running a deployment of GNU/Linux systems, the same people seem to think that each user should decide what (s)he wants to use.  Admirable, but it dooms the project to failure.  Eventually all those systems are going to become a headache to administer, no matter how virus-proof or how easy-to-manage they are.

So what to do?  Ubuntu isn’t quite there for enormous deployments yet, although in the next version or two it almost certainly will be.  Debian, Ubuntu’s parent distribution, is widely used in large deployments.  And then there are the two big, corporate monsters:  Red Hat and SUSE.  These two are designed for easy deployment and maintenance across large organizations, although their pricing reflects that.  There are also free clones of Red Hat available that will give most of that manageability without the high price of entry.  In any case, Mike should pick one and stick with it.  Any one of the distributions I mentioned, and several others that are available, would give great manageability and a uniform packaging tool.

It’s great to run a different distro on every computer in your home.  When running a statewide network, however, there’s a lot to be said for uniformity.

Yea, lady, so God must have chosen somebody else

Katherine Harris has put her oversized foot in her oversized mouth again.  This time she says that if you don’t vote Christian, you vote for sin.  Besides, according to her God chooses our leaders.  Good thing God is ensuring that Harris has no chance at winning.  Hmmm… she could actually be right about that one.

He’s innocent

Yep, we all guessed it.  He’s probably nuts, but as CNN reports, John Mark Karr didn’t do it.

A user chooses an outdated OS over Ubuntu

Well, there’s one person who has used Ubuntu (we know not for how long) who decided to switch back to Windows.  The funny thing is that he says the “Ubuntu fanboys” will be chiding him for his choice.  Judging by his report of exactly what happen, it’s clear that it falls firmly under the heading of user error.  I know of absolutely no scenario in which using Ubuntu could “crash” a motherboard, resulting in replacing the entire board.  I do know of scenarios where some idiot, who really should be calling Dell, builds a computer and doesn’t do an adequate job with heatsinks and the like, causing irreparable damage to hardware (which, of course isn’t likely to be realized until some sort of software is running on the machine).  I also generally find it funny that these are the same sorts who claim loads of computer-building experience by citing the 20 or 30 machines they’ve built for family and friends, without bothering to mention that half of those are likely turned on less than an hour a day and the other half have probably already died.  It’s fairly obvious this guy falls firmly into that camp.

As a penalty for no longer using a real operating system, good ol’ Brent now has to maintain (his admission) anti-virus software, anti-spyware software, a firewall, and an up-to-date HOST (sic) file.  Meanwhile all the Ubuntu users just get on with actually using their computers to do work, play games, fling music onto their portable players, or whatever.  (Note to Brent:  it’s HOSTS file.)
Check out the last sentence of the article; it appears he’s using Windows illegally by not owning a license for the software.  Wouldn’t it be ironic if Microsoft ended up suing him for using Windows?

Who you calling Macaca?

You can now buy t-shirts asking, “Who you calling Macaca?” and, “Call me Macaca!” at this CafePress store.  It’s a way to publicly display your outrage at Virginia Senator George Allen’s thoughtless comment.  The store claims that 30% of profits will be donated to Jim Webb’s campaign.