Change-up

I have had a blog knocking about in the back of my head for a while. It involved the fact that nothing stays the same in tech: That one can not cling to Windows XP forever for example. It has been a general theme of most of my writing and teaching over the years that one can jump from MS Windows to Linux to OS.X and not suffer serious brain injuries. I came across this article today over at OSnews.com: Don't Blame Windows and KDE for Your Own Aversion to Change by Thom Holwerda

Well, for the most part, there is one post I won't have to write.

Change is not good or bad in and of itself of course. Change just is. It happens, and you deal with it or you don't.

I have famously not been a big fan of MS Windows for a while now, and my reasons have nothing to do with change per se. I just did not like losing large portions of my working life to fighting massive virus outbreaks, or rebuilding computers six months after I had last rebuilt them (Win 95 / 98), or dealing with the garbage that is the Windows Registry. These were all things that were the results of changes, that were, from my point of view, bad.

At the same time (and this will surprise some) I have also been watching Vista closely, and one of my office desktops is Windows 7 Beta. I even kind of like it (but not its registry: Still there). I do not understand the why of some of the changes. They seem arbitrary: What used to be in one place is now, from my point of view, randomly moved to another place. Not sure why. But can I learn where they moved stuff around to and become functional again pretty quickly? Sure. Besides, these days most of the OS is just there to run the web browser, and Firefox and it's brethren are also something that change over time. 3.1 of FF is working far better on my Mac than 3.0.5 was, so change is often very good.

Thom's points about KDE 4 are really well taken. Linus Torvalds famously left KDE for Gnome recently (and here is another post I won't have to write, because Bruce Byfield already wrote it, dang it), and with all the same kinds of bluster that Thom points out about Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols in his piece.

My problem with KDE 4 was not that it was different, it was that it was incomplete. Functionality was not moved, it was just plain missing. Stability, long a hallmark of KDE, was also gone. KDE 4.0 was a beta. KDE 4.0 felt like what Ubuntu 9.04 (last post) feels like right now: A work in progress.

In point of fact, I use Gnome more than KDE not because of anything about the environment and everything about one application: Evolution. This is a work related thing. Evolution is how I read my email and my calendar off MS Exchange, and Evolution is a Gnome project. Evolution, at the moment, works better under Gnome than KDE. That has changed back add forth many many times over the years. And if KDE had a working MAPI interface to their PIM environment (Kontact), I would switch back in a heartbeat.

Some things change, for better or for worse, but one thing that has not changed yet for me is my need to know when my meetings are at.

Ubuntu 9.04 Alpha 3 First Impressions

With Linux making slow, tiny, incremental inroads all over the place: In Netbooks, phones, embedded appliances, in the BIOS, not to mention Splashtop, and being credited (over credited I think, but whatever) with the recent malaise at Microsoft (although I liked this interview with Jim Zemlin about the issue), it seemed time to have a look at see what Ubuntu was cooking up for its next major release.

I rarely start this early in a release, but there are a few things cooking at I am very curious about right now. Issues in the current Linux versions that I want to see fixed or software features I need added.

DOSEMU

First up is DOSEMU. In Ubuntu 8.10 it is busted, and the problem is not actually DOSEMU but they way in the Ubuntu 8.10 sets up security (SELinux strikes) for the application. DOSEMU. See bug 216398 for details.

I wanted DOSEMU to work, because according to my benchmarking it is far far faster at running VBDOS programs than DOSBOX. One of my dad's programs (see previous posts) takes 20 seconds in DOSBOX takes 3 in DOSEMU.

As of Alpha 3, DOSEMU is fixed!

HP DV9000 Boot Hangs

Next, there is my dad's HP DV9000 itself. It does not boot well under Ubuntu 8.10. Poorly in fact. It appears that the AMD 64 bit Turion processors, a high precision timer, and the HP BIOS all get together for a timeout party that requires keyboard interrupts to get past. Like about 24 of them to finish a boot. Ick. Appears to be this AMD C1E issue, as documented over at Kernel Trap. The workaround is to add noipic noirqdebug, irqpoll, and perhaps some other stuff to the boot line in Grub. Nice guide on changing all that here. This nastiness appears to have entered around kernel 2.6.19, and is still there in 8.10's 2.6.27. Right now 9.04 has 2.6.28, and so I am hoping it will fix some of this without having to do workarounds on the boot options. I will, but that is not the same thing as it working the way it should.

Quick aside here: This DV9000 appears to have been a particularly problematic model of computer for Linux. In point of fact, it was recalled (at least some models) for BIOS issues, so it was no great shakes for anyone for a while. I don't know why Vista does not hang on boot like Linux does, but I assume without any facts to support this that it is because Linux is seeing hardware features (like the high precision timer) and trying to use them, where Vista does not.

I do not yet know what will happen on the DV9000. I installed it on a Dell D620, and there it boots in under 30 seconds.

Netbooks and MAPI

Those are all reasons I wanted to see where Ubuntu 9.04 was going for my Dad's sake. I have another couple. Netbooks. and MAPI.

As noted here, I have an Acer Aspire One, running Mint 6 right now. I like Mint and all, but there are now and again some issues with certain Gnome dialogs being larger then 600 pixels in length. The account set up for Evolution is one of them. Rumor has it that the new version of Gnome, 2.26, that will ship with 9.04 is more Netbook friendly.

The MAPI thing is for work, and revolves around the fact that we are moving to MS Exchange 2007. I will be losing WebDAV access to email, which means I'm back to using IMAP. That is fine as far as it goes, but my calendar will only be on the so-called Outlook Web Interface. So far, Microsoft has not looked at any lightweight web mail clients and ported them to MS Exchange, meaning I have to use the heavy client they supply for calendaring. Double Ick.

Fortunately the EU has forced MS to publish information about MAPI, and the Evolution folks are working hard on making its namesake work against MS Exchange using the same protocol as Outlook. All this is supposed to ship in Ubuntu 9.04, but as of Alpha 3 Evolution is still back level at 2.24.3. 2.26 (same as the Gnome release number these days) is where the MAPI functionality should ship. There will more about all this over at TalkBMCin the near future.

Other General Impressions

It would not be fair to deeply judge Ubuntu 9.04's current state at Alpha three as being totally indicative of what it will be in April when it releases. Everything that is in is working, and smoothly. The boots seem faster. I'll give it a whirl on the Acer Aspire soon, and see how it works there, but I expect that it will be faster than the current Ubuntu 8.10 based Mint 6 is.

I was slightly disappointed when Ubuntu 8.10 shipped without OpenOffice 3.0, and that has been fixed in 9.04. Firefox, at 3.05 is current, but since FF 3.1 is at Beta 2, hopefully it will be at 3.1 by Ubuntu release day. This is probably less critical on Linux than on OS.X. I have not had any real issues with FF on Linux. The Mac is a whole other story, and a whole other post...