The supposed new pricing scheme Microsoft is considering is ridiculous. A Slashdot article today reports that they are thinking about putting a 3 application limit on the Home Basic version of Windows 7. This is based on research findings that show that basic users usually only run two applications at a time.

This is the biggest load of crazy talk I’ve ever seen. And it’s one of the best ways to drive users to Mac and Linux that Microsoft has ever come up with! When a company starts concentrating on ways to force users to upgrade rather than producing superior quality software, you should know they are in serious trouble. Microsoft has been fighting Google, and Mac now for a while and it’s taking a toll. With a terribly designed Windows Vista, consumers are looking for a glimmer of hope in the software giant.

If Microsoft goes ahead with this plan, they are sure to put a bad taste in just about every average consumers mouth. Why? Let’s say you are an average user. You check email (Outlook – 1), you surf Facebook (IE – 2), and you listen to music (Winamp – 3). Well, what happens when you have to open a word doc you just received in an email? Home Basic will tell you to make a choice I guess. Do you want to lose your music in favor of work (fail), disconnect from your social networks to do work (again, better for you, but fail on forced limitations), or save the document, close your email client, edit, close, reopen email, etc etc…

As a power user I won’t run into this in my own environment. I never run anything below Home Premium, and usually go with Professional versions for things like remote desktop. However, I do some consulting and I’m sure to hear about this as people buy new PCs with Home Basic on it. Overall, it’s a terrible move and one that will take a flagship Microsoft product and make it a driving force for users to find better alternatives.

A while back I wrote a series of blog posts about trying new Linux distributions. I finally settled on one that I actually picked up at OSCON 2008. The OpenSUSE guys were handing out CDs and since I had just formatted my laptop for the trip, I decided to fire it up in a VMWare Virtual Machine. The installation is a breeze, and it comes with a minimal amount of packages (which is something I like). It also gives you the choice of desktop managers, and before today I had been choosing KDE (because honestly I liked the Windows look/feel).

Last night however I was trying to do some development work in a VM running OpenSUSE 11.0 and KDE that I had dedicated 1 GB of RAM to and it was visibly lagging and impeding my work. So last night I started a fresh install of OpenSUSE 11.1 and decided to give Xfce a try. My friend Chris Weldon spoke highly of it, so I thought why not.

Well, I’m happy to report today that my choice was a good one. Xfce runs noticeably faster that KDE 3.5 or 4.0 and the transition from another desktop manager is easy. Eclipse (always the hog) runs faster because the desktop manager is not taking up as much memory as it was previously. And almost everything else I’ve been doing (from terminal windows to configuration settings) has been running quicker as well. Now they shocker – I only gave this VM 768 MB of ram instead of the full gig given to the last VM.

If you’re not comfortable with your current desktop manager and you think Xfce might be for you, I suggest giving it a try.

I recently started working on a PHP project using Eclipse as the IDE. I typically use OpenSUSE on my linux machiens but I was given a development machine with Gentoo on it and started setting up the window manager to work on the project. Emerging eclipse worked fine and installed eclipse. However, once I started trying to add PDT and Subclipse plugins I started running into problems.

Eclipse fired up just fine but then the find and install plugins menu option was broken – it simply would not open. A simple fix got around this, but then it failed to resolve plugin dependencies automatically. With no search feature, finding these necessary packages became quite the chore. Once I finally got all the dependencies resolved and my plugins installed, I ran into an even bigger problem. None of the plugin perspectives or views were available! Also, none of the plugin preferences showed up in the preferences menu.

After several remove/install cycles I just pulled down the tar/gzip copy and installed it into my home directory instead of using the version packaged into Gentoo. Once I did this everything went well and I was able to pull in the necessary plugins, resolve the dependencies automatically, and have them immediately available on a restart of eclipse. I don’t know what the Gentoo folks did to mess up Eclipse so badly but they really need to take a look at how they set it up and correct the mistakes.

I have been meaning to blog about this for a while now (~2 weeks) but I haven’t had the time to get around to it. Someone recently told me about a Dreamhost deal for a hosted Linux server for 2 years for $47. Now that’s a heck of a deal I thought, but I wasn’t so sure I would get all the functionality I needed. Still, not wanting to pass up the good price, I signed up for a 2 year account. I have two domains I currently use (dataplex.org and dataplextechnology.net). My .org domain is more for personal stuff and my .net domain is more for my consulting work. I have my .org account hosted on a friend’s system with CPanel and it is a nice setup. However, I switched my dataplextechnology.net site to Dreamhost…

…and wow. This hosting provider has their stuff together. They have automated everything from subversion repositories to popular open source projects. It’s very easy to manage domains, and they even tie into Google Apps if you want. I chose to do that because I trust Google’s uptime more than most services (and definitely more than anything I could host myself) and I’m used to their interfaces.

Seriously, if you need some linux hosting this is the place to look. Take a look at the Dreamhost Blog and their Support Wiki if I haven’t convinced you!

As I mentioned in the previous post I’m current installing Debian 40r3. So far I am pretty excited just by the installer alone. It has already detected all my hardware and configured my wireless card and that was all before it got to partitioning. In the partitioning, it actually had an option for Guided full disk usage with an encrypted LVM! Right off the bat!

That right there is mixing the best of security and usability. This is especially important on my laptop because I will be traveling with it soon and plan to take some of my development work with me. I don’t want prying eyes or stealing hands to get that data and a setup that addresses that situation from the get go wins in my book.

update

After getting the installation done I tried to use the system. This is where the problems began. Appearently the Debian team itself is not updating its packages and relies instead of users to use systems based on the Debian base. This would include Ubuntu, and some others.

The system was nice and I liked it but again, the updates killed me. If I can’t update the system (ex: I couldn’t install the latest php through the apt system), it’s a deal breaker. After finding this out, I removed it from the system and didn’t pursue it any further.

Well, I gave it a shot and I just couldn’t do it. Slackware’s install was familiar to me, but it has not really gone through much improvement since I last used it (8 years ago?).

The security was excellent – nothing turned on by default, and base configurations for anything that was already on. This leaves a lot of power to the administrator to make sure they have the server configured exactly as they want, and nothing more.

The kernel was a bit fat but I cleaned that up (and learned a lot about the new kernels in the process). However, the base set of modules did not have support for my wireless card (Broadcom B43), so that was a bit of a pain.

There is also not a decent package manager on slackware and I found myself at a slackware package site that takes other packages and converts them for use with the pkgtools set of utilities. For productivity and usability this was a major buzz kill.

I also had a difficult time getting apache and php to play nicely together. Again, productivity buzzkill for a developer laptop.

As a server I still think slackware holds its own. However, if they do not take the time to update the package management system a bit, this will quickly change in favor of distributions such as Gentoo and SuSE. Even Redhat with their Fedora and CentOS server platforms are moving ahead of Slackware in the game.

I can still see Slackware being used a lot in embedded systems also. It is so lean in the beginning that it’s hard not to think embedded when you first install it!

So that it. Slackware has been removed and I’m currently in the process of installing Debian for the next part in this series.

Slackware

Well I went back to what I thought was my comfort zone and pulled down Slackware 12.1 iso’s last night. I installed it this morning and was greeted by the familiar dialog based installer.

Installation

I enjoy the dialog installer because it really tells you what is on the system, how the system is going to be configured, and gives the advanced user a lot of flexibility in choosing what they want in the system from the get go. I removed a lot of unnecessary packages (Japanese fonts?) and services (rsh is a thing of the past!), and still got a lot of what I want in the system (svn, apache, php, KDE, etc). I was also able to setup the wired network through the installation and have it ready for me on bootup.

One thing that I did notice was that the default kernel now put on the slackware installation CD is huge! In fact, I believe it is called kernel-smp-huge. This makes sense because it supposed a lot more hardware for the initial setup, but I’m rather interested in rebuilding my kernel immediately to remove a lot of the excess.

FIrst Boot

My first boot did not go well. I got into the shell fine and then I ran into a problem – my wireless card was not detected, and when I fired up KDE for the first time the system totally froze on me. I have not tried to use KDE since and have concentrated on making the system work from the command line (this is why I love linux anyway!). Using dmesg, lspci, and lsmod (and some help from the folks on IRC), I was able to get my wireless card detected and setup rather quickly.

Security

Slackware is wonderful in that it really does not turn anything on by default unless you tell it to. The only network related stuff open on the machine at this point are ssh and httpd, and that’s because I told it to start those up. One drawback is that the installer does not prompt you to add a default user account. So the first login is as root, and as we all know that can lead to trouble quickly. Still, being a distribution built for power users this makes sense. I quickly added a user account, visudo’ed it, and logged out.

Documentation

The slackware project has come a long way in terms of documentation. Ten years ago I would have gone to the OLDP for anything I needed to do. Today I went to www.slackbook.org and started reading. It is short but informative, up to date, and well organized. It also has highlighted on the front page several sections that may be of interest to new users so I skipped past a lot of the stuff I already knew.

Update System/Package Management

I am disappointed in this area. pkgtool is old and getting older and it really does not hold its weight compared to apt. There is even an ongoing movement by some people (SlackBuilds) to port or maintain packages for slackware. This, in my opinion, means time to change.

GUI

As I stated earlier, KDE completely froze the system on me. I have not fired it up since so I’m not sure how it’s going to go the second time around. Slackware does offer several current window managers however and I did choose KDE, so in part this may be my fault. I am also tempted to play with a project called Ion3 that is a really lightweight GUI geared towards keyboard users. If I can get things like Eclipse to work in this WM, this may become a non-issue for the final chosen distribution.

Tweaking and Customization

The sky is the limit with slackware. The system is very well layed out and there are not a lot of bells and whistles to remove or consider when making changes to the system. An interesting side effect is that it does take longer to administer things. For example, I had to explicitly read up on the httpd.conf configuration options for Apache to turn on PHP and user directories. However, it was a simple matter of uncommenting the options. I do like how SuSE and Debian do this better however. There is a base config and then symlinks to enable/disable modules and configurations. I will heavily consider checking my configs into svn from this point on to make sure I remember how I did it!

Summary

Well, that’s it for now. I’m going to tweak this system out, get back into the swing of things, and then slap another distribution on here in a week or so. Overall, Slackware has scored really high in the security and customization areas and low in the initial productivity and GUI abilities.

Well I decided last night that if I’m going to get back into security, serious open source development, and other things, I should get back to my roots. I started out loving Linux and hating Microsoft, and while I have respect for Microsoft now I think it’s time I return “home”. As such, I’m going to be researching Linux distributions for a couple days and figuring out what I want to put where on my network.

It has been about 10 year since I had linux as my primary operating system, and to be honest I miss those days. Windows XP was wonderful, but Vista has really pushed me into wanting more from my OS. I was always a huge Slackware fan back in the day so there’s a good chance it will end up here again. But I have different requirements now for my operating system, and I expect more from the Linux community than I did then. Below is a list of some of the things that will influence my decisions:

GUI – Web Development Requirement

As a web developer, I have to have a nice GUI platform (KDE/Gnome/etc) that does not hinder my ability to be productive. It has to be easy to install the utilities and tools I need to be an efficient, productive developer. This includes things like VMWare for running a Windows OS (I still love .NET and will continue to develop using this platform). Web browsers are a must – firefox and opera at the very least. Flexibility in hardware – I use an HP laptop as my primary machine and I need support for all the hardware there. I’ve had trouble in the past with monitor and video card support and that just can’t be the case anymore.

Sure I could use vi and command line to do php but for HTML and CSS a graphical view is a must.

Update System

Back in the day (10 years ago), I was all about pulling down tarballs and running config process myself and fixing errors myself. These days, I’m looking for improvement. I’ve used the apt system and I love it. I don’t think tarballs have gone away but a serious platform needs a serious, consistent way for distributing updates, patches, and new software.

Security

Security is obviously a primary concern. WIthout the knowledge that the environment is as secure as possible, there is always a voice in the back of my head screaming at me to do more. Security first and foremost is a user awareness issue. I tend to think – from my past experiences on the dark side – that I’m pretty conscientious about this stuff. But the maintainers of an OS need to be a resource as well. This includes: documentation on the platform specifically considering security, an update system and a vulnerability notification system maintained by the community, and active security build into the environment from the get go.

I used to rag on redhat a lot because they turned on all the bells and whistles from the first time the system was booted. Well, I don’t need that and neither does anyone else. A distribution that considers quantity of service over quality will never have my vote. I want my operating system maintainers to consider least privilege and smallest attack surface first and foremost, and everything after that is a measured risk.

Customization and Tweaking

Having said everything above, I am sick and tired of Vista telling me what I can and cannot do on my computer. Linux already has an advantage here, but I do not want to jump through hoops to tweak stuff in my environment. I do not want to dig through a ton of documentation on a fragile setup only to find out that the tweak I need to make is not available. I better be able to kick every tire and build my own if I don’t find the tire suitable for my needs. And the car better still run with my tire!

End Rant

That’s about it. Over the course of the next couple of days I’m planning on making several more parts to this post covering the OSes I’ve looked at, the pros and cons of them, and a final post on my ultimate decision.