Colin Charles Agenda

Last week, Dell was getting in bed with Ubuntu, this week there’s a Microsoft/Novell deal. The terms are interesting: Dell purchasing SLES (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server) certificates from Microsoft. Then, there’s the existing Dell Linux customer base - this deal is meant to market and offer services to migrate them to SLES!

Two platforms of the future - Microsoft Windows and Linux. These are also the two platforms for today. Dell will focus on interoperability workshops, migration proof of concepts, and provide migration services. I wonder how much of these will hit Dell or Novell partners, offering similar services. Watch the video-blog on Dell’s blog.

Questions that remain to be answered, and will be interesting to see unfold:

• Where does this leave Red Hat? Is something interesting going to be announced at the Red Hat Summit happening May 9-11?
• HP is a big supporter of Linux, with Debian. Where is the synergy with them to move the Ubuntu or even the Novell way?

A lot of folk have predicted many years in the past were the year of desktop Linux adoption. I think 2007 is the year of desktop Linux adoption. More importantly, I think I’m right.

Technorati Tags: dell, novell, microsoft, sles, pre-loaded, migration, ubuntu, windows

After visiting the Canadian embassy to get myself a visa yesterday (yes, I’m going to Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) - see you there?) I decided to take a trip to Low Yat, and the surrounding area to take a gander at computer hardware out there.

I ended up picking up a bunch of disks and external casings, and a USB webcam (cheapest Logitech, I wonder if it’ll work with Linux - RM80 down, the salesman looked at me funny when I said Linux, but I have faith). Then I decided to scour the place for Microsoft Windows XP Starter Edition. To my dismay, I found it for sale, nowhere.

The cheapest I was going to get was a RM300 copy of Windows XP Home. However, most of the retailers were quite happy to point me to the RM5 pirated copy of Windows XP Professional.

These pirate shops also sell Fedora Core 1, Ubuntu PowerPC edition, and more, for RM15/CD. I wonder why Linux costs more than Windows?

It brings me back to thinking about Software Freedom Day (maybe last year or the year before) where Aizat, Khairil and Ditesh stood at Low Yat and distributed free CDs, that were Ubuntu based. After all, Canonical do ship it for free, why not give it away for free?

Malaysians love free gifts, and a Live CD, that can be installed and distributed, for free, just sounds like a winner.

After years of abstinence, I actually loaded Windows XP Home on my Thinkpad. Reason really being I found my recovery disks from IBM, and figured that I might as well pop the Windows license back on it, so that I can experiment with this OS that’s oh-so-popular.

Man, Windows took the better part of the afternoon to get installed. If that’s not bad, it rebooted only like four times. Its funny how the whole install happens in FAT32, and then to make my life miserable, it converts it to NTFS on its final reboot. Why?

Installing all the updates, and getting up to Service Pack 2, took the remainder of the afternoon. One thing I’ve found interesting, and a must install is: Google Pack. For good protection from all those Windows virii, AVGFree seems to make the most sense. And OpenOffice.org 2.0.3 is just out, and is the smallest download of all the OSes it would seem.

Then I reboot to find that Windows XP SP1 support ends on October 10th 2006. I believe there are some benefits to becoming genuine (or Microsoft is trying hard to sell me that). Its a good thing the upgrade to Service Pack 2 just takes time (in the form of a download) and is also completely free.

Now to figure out backups…

It doesn’t just work if you load up all the default software updates. The Boot Camp page is really useful, and pay particularly close attention to getting the latest firmware update. Don’t just assume that SMC Version 1.2f10 is what you’re after (in System Profiler) - download MacBook Pro (early 2006) Firmware Update 1.0.1 which weighs in under 3MB, go through the firmware update process and only then, will Boot Camp start.

Once it starts up, all seems to sail fairly smoothly. It asks to either create a Macintosh Drivers disc or if you’d like to skip it, pop a CD into the drive, it burns away, and then it asks if you’d like to install a bona fide Windows XP SP2 or not. I say sure too quickly even before inserting the CD, and it throws a helpful error message telling me to wait till the disc is initialized! Thats what I call good UI design.

On my 100GB disk, I notice E: Partition1 (200MB), F: Partition2 (83968MB) which is where OS X is sitting, a usual 128MB of unpartitioned space and of course, C: Partition3 (11100MB) which is where Windows should go. But what is Partition1, at 200MB? Is this like the Apple Bootstrap partition of 1MB on PowerPC?

I decided to quick format the 10GB partition as a FAT filesystem, as opposed to NTFS. Since the Windows installer doesn’t recognize HFS+, it assumes that both Partition1 and Partition2 are actually empty! That can actually be confusing for newbies, that don’t read the relevant documentation.

First gotcha after installing Windows is the eject button didn’t work. Remember, read the manual. The one thing that does amaze me is that my Mighty Mouse works - both the left (obviously) and the right clicking!

800×600 on a widescreen display does look really ugly - once the ATI drivers are installed, 1440×900 is fully supported. The sound driver (SigmaTel) installs in a DOS box! The Bluetooth drivers don’t get automatically installed, so some manual intervention is required. I find it funny that by default, Windows XP decides to take over booting!

What’s with Windows XP asking me to activate their product? It does seem lame. Apparently I’ve already activated it. i find that odd, since I only installed it with Parallels yesterday. I am now activating this via a telephone. Bloody 9 sets of 6 numbers (installation ID) is what you need to enter over the phone. It believes its already been activated on another set of PCs, which I find funny.

So I call the number. They give me a new code. And then I say, “so, do I have to do this everytime I install Windows?”. And drum-roll, she answers me, “Yes. We’re sorry about that Sir.” Why on earth would anyone actually want to run Windows XP? Its so troublesome. I honestly don’t think this is the trouble you’ll go through to get a RHN key, for instance.

It just goes to show that Microsoft still can go suck on a bucket of c***s, and I honestly can’t see why anyone would buy a Mac and use Boot Camp to run Windows. Maybe to transition away, but eventually, you’d not want to run this crap. Heck, with a little more testing, I shall wipe this away and go for Linux.

Its pretty amazing. Download, get the trial key, and use the Wizard to create a virtual machine. Defaults to 8GB for Windows, which does seem sensible. When booting it, there will be an error (doh, Windows isn’t installed); fix this by popping the Windows XP CD into the SuperDrive and it’ll pick it up. Very smart. It takes about 40 minutes to install Windows XP, which does seem rather long.

VM -> Clone VM is something I think is a winner! I just made a pristine Windows XP install and if it needs to get blown away, I’ll have the actual VM image sitting around. However, it seems to have hung when I ran it. Redoing it seems to have made the clone. I can’t reproduce why it hung, however :-(

Another interesting feature is using full-screen guest OSes - the switching is very “fast user switching” like. I’m impressed. However, moving around from full-screen to not, and accidentally hitting the Expose button on the Mighty Mouse, renders all windows to resize in a way it feels like. There’s no defined behavior and its kind of annoying.

Some quick notes:

• Ctrl+Click isn’t right click anymore - its Shift+Ctrl+Click. Seems it conflicts with other applications and is possibly valid in Windows.
• The image format is nice. It doesn’t take 8GB of space up-front, but instead grows space conservatively as and when you use it.
• The .pvs file is a text file, and has a lot of configuration options.
• My network (wireless) beyond having a WEP key also has a MAC address authentication module. It however, by default, conflicts with my MBP’s MAC address when the WinXP guest wants to get access.

• alias skedit='open -a skEdit' is highly useful. Now I can do skedit foo.php and it opens it up. What joy with such simple things.
• Great to see Mono go into Rawhide, meaning FC5 Test 2 will have it. Now I can’t hardly wait. On PPC, if we had Xen working (upstream), life would be the ultimate breeze.
• I will not be making it to linux.conf.au 2006 in New Zealand. Despite all good attempts to get a flight leaving KL, I can’t. Well, affordably (hello coach class). Registrations however are still open. There’s a Red Hat/Fedora meetup, and Joshua Wulf would be a useful person to contact if you’re rocking up for it (email discussion still has dates
• Is there a reason Fedora disabled updatedb running by default? Now users actually need to specify yes, in /etc/updatedb.conf. Why? Was this for laptop users?
• FreeBSD ports has this nice advantage that yum/apt doesn’t get right. Multiple installs! I’ve got mysql5-server and bash being installed in parallel now, and there’s no locks and what not.

• For fun, it seems like there are a bunch of people here huddled around the lone Windows XP box, trying to make a movie. It’s amusing when you find bugs like these: Movie Maker 2 Stops Responding when you try to save a large movie file. iMovieHD seemed to have a better chance. What are our good Linux tools?
• To annoy me today (its been happening fairly regularly), OS X will give me a spinning beach ball everytime I move networks and have a share mounted. Here’s my situation: samba share running some ancient RHL version, mounted via the Networks panel. I am on WiFi at home, and when I go out, sometimes I turn the WiFi off (say I’m in a “lousy” cafe, or a “silly” airport), and if my share was mounted, it will just go ape shit on me. Restarting the machine seems to be the only way out. Point to remember is that Safari (which I occasionally use) doesn’t even have a save all these tabs feature on next reload. Who said Linux wasn’t more feature-ful? Never happened on Linux this has (sure df will hang, as will mount, but a quick sudo umount will solve it for me).
• Thunderbird: anyone use this and realise that for IMAP accounts, the filters seem to disappear sometimes? I can’t quite reproduce this well, but its getting significantly annoying to find my Inbox grow.
• Otherwise, caught Flightplan, and the 40 year old virgin. Former was an excellent show, latter was, err, bleh.

Been busy with random work, trying to run the company and get us more business (i.e. money). In lieu, I’ve been deploying more PHP goodies, and am now looking at Django and Ruby On Rails. I think I’m jet-lagged and in recovery now…

In the Fedora front, some useful goodies: Diana stepped up to give Planet (fedora people) more heads; and if she’s too busy, Nicu Buculei will step up. Matt Frye is our Fedora Rewards man - so if a developer thinks someone in the community requires some free items (mainly a t-shirt, cap, or bumper sticker), sending FedoraRewards@fedoraproject.org a little mail is all that’s required; swag request will be fulfilled. Please don’t send personal requests - they should be ignored.

Mpackage.org is being sorted. Sindre (foolish) will be doing the website. I tried to get the lists working, but I think it needs more love from Pix. Sorry folk. Sent out a whole bunch of FUDCon III invitations and am hoping for good positive responses (in terms of papers) soon. I want to make sure this is something marketing does a lot more too.