Category Archives: OSS

Open Source related

So it was D-day for MS Vista

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Yesterday Microsoft officialy released Vista to the wider public. So why would one upgrade?

From the little bit I seen about Vista and read about it, I can find no reason to upgrade. Firstly you would probably need a new faster CPU, more memory and a much more powerfull graphics card with lots of memory. And what do you get for this .. juts more bling. You will still write the same documents, fill the same spreadsheets, play most of the same games and all this will probably be slower than on your existing Windows XP.

Rather than upgrade to Vista, why not switch totally to some Linux distribution. No hardware to spend money on, no OS to spend money on and your machine will in all likelyhood be faster so you will be more productive in the end. And you would have access to thousands of software applications for FREE — let me say that again FREE — it is going to cost you nothing.

So what is the ultimate goal why Microsoft want you to upgrade to Vista — make more money. You as the consumer will not get much value for that hard earned money you going to give Microsoft. So use the money rather to enjoy life and change to something thats not going to cost you any money and give you freedom of choice, ie Switch to Linux.

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Building Second Life on Linux (Ubuntu)

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This one is for for Andy who is looking for a stable Linux version.  Now that the SecondLife client code is released as Open Source, he can do it himself. 

Allison Randal has build it on both Mac OS X and Ubuntu. Seems that the Mac build was a bit easier than the Linux one … Linux one build successfully but crashes when trying to log into the live SecondLife world.  Well I am sure you coding geeks will get it working, I will just wait till a good working Linux build for Ubuntu is available before I go down that road.

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SPAM and what to do …

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I have a couple of email accounts (that does not include my work [IBM] address) which I have to monitor on a daily basis.  Over the years these accounts have landed up in the clutches of Spammers which meant that I receive close to 500 SPAM emails each and every day.

I use Thunderbird as my mail client which work well in catching all this Spam but it means that I have to download all the email from my email servers.

Since a couple of weeks ago I started using MailWasher Pro from FireTrust.  What a difference this has made .. basically you can setup as many email accounts in it and then it will download only the headers and first couple of lines of the email.  It will then apply all its build-in SPAM rules and any other rules that you might have defined to mark the mails as either SPAM or Legitimate.  It support Whitelists, Blacklist, Blacklist Servers and Friendslists. When it is done marking all the email you just process it and MailWasher Pro goes and delete all the unwanted Spam and Junk from your email server. So when you use your email client (Thunderbird in my case) to download you email, all that is left over to download is Legitimate emails.

Here is some stats from my use of it:
mwsummary - 2007-01-04

And how the SPAM was classified:
mwspam - 2007-01-04

The Pro version is a Shareware version and if I do not find anything else with the same capabilities over the next week or so I will register this.  I prefer to use Open Source software but have not come accross anything with the same features as MailWasher Pro.  If anybody know of a Open Source/Free product with this features then please let me know so that I can have a look at it.

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No Mark … this is not on …

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We all know about the Novell/Microsoft stuff that is going on and most if not all OSS/Linux supporting people does not agree with it.  But Mark, it is not on to use this to try to entice/convince openSUSE developers and community member to join your team.  One thing that is so great about OSS is the freedom it allows us to choose.  Whether that may be  openSUSE, Ubuntu or heaven forbid Windows, we still have that choice and for somebody like you to use things that you do not agree with to entice people to your side is not on. 

If the product/solution/service you provide is good enough, then people will come.  And I think Ubuntu is good enough to stand on its own legs.

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Will IBM be an orca or a penguin?

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Now you may be wondering what I have been drinking by asking a question like that … well wonder no more — see this article.

It is a very intriguing question which side IBM is going to take.  Join Microsoft and stay away from legal battles or stand up for freedom and openness.  I genuinely hope the latter.  My view is that MS has no leg to stand on when it comes to Linux infringing MS intellectual property.  All they after is pocketing some money from somebody for nothing … just a lot of FUD from MS.

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Sun open source Java under GPL

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One of the best pieces of news in a long time.  I quote from ZDNet:

After years of requests and debates, Sun Microsystems is ready to release Java source code under a Linux-friendly license.

On Monday, it plans to put the code for the programming software under the version 2 of the General Public License (GPLv2), which governs Linux and many other open-source products. The Sun-hosted Java.net Web site will provide access to Java Platform Micro Edition (Java ME) software for mobile phones and Java Platform Standard Edition (Java SE) software for desktop applications.

This is good for everybody and in particularly the Linux community where distributions like Ubuntu is now free to re-distribute the Java platform.

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Firefox is the talk of the town

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And I quote

Within 24 hours of the official launch on Tuesday, there were over 2 million people using Firefox 2, and we were seeing a peak rate of more than 30 downloads per second from our website.

I love it to see IE and in particularly IE7 being beaten and I cannot wait for the day that Firefox is used on more user desktops than IE (wishfull thinking on my part, I know)

Update: Christopher Blizzard said it a lot better than me …

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Ubuntu 6.10 released

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I totally forgot to say something about the release of Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft) yesterday.  There is a lot of great things in it and go and download your copy.

Also earlier this week Ubuntu walk away with the award for the best Linux distribution.  Congrat to Mark and all the guys and gals that have worked on Ubuntu.  Wish I could have joined them later next month at Googleplex for the next Ubuntu summit.

Now onto Festy Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) 🙂
Update: It is Feisty and not Festy

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