Stopping Linux Desktop Adoption Sabotage

Mark Brunelli, News Editor writes "Outspoken IT consultant John H. Terpstra believes that Microsoft and electronics manufacturers are working together to hinder the adoption of Linux on the desktop. In a three part series, he tells a story about how two guys trying to buy Linux desktops found they were overpriced, and lacked certain tools. He then describes how Microsoft uses its considerable resources and the law to create such roadblocks. (Part 2, Part 3)"

Missed something...

[coastin]

Good set of articles that point to some real issues but, I think he missed this:

Linspire List of vendors

(http://www.linspire.com/featured_partner/featured _partner.php?sent=1&country=1 [linspire.com])

Re:Genius? Who knows. Smart experienced guy? Yes.

[UnderScan]

That opening line was written by the editor of the piece. John Terpstra [phptr.com] is a good author and more importantly, a long time contributor to FOSS, namely samba. See "Samba-3 by Example: Practical Exercises to Successful Deployment" [phptr.com].

Re:Has made it? O.o

[Soko]

This is not true. In fact, the distros are each trying to beat the others silly by making package management such a breeze.

All Debian derived systems (like ubuntu [ubuntu.com]) use apt/dpkg, Fedora/RedHat uses yum (or apt4rpm), Suse uses YaST and Gentoo uses portage. All of these will find dependancies for you and generally do the right thing - if the package is available, it will be installed and configured properly.

The only place where this is not true is when there are legal roadblocks (like DVD playback) to using the software in a free OS. Most commercial distros are able to bypass this however, since they pay a fee to the IP rights holder for the use of that IP.

In any event, you can't have checked software installation very recently. Today it's easier on linux than it's ever been on Windows.

Soko

Complaints

[Tribbin]

People for who I installed linux, say the following is missing:

Good MSN with all smileys, filetransfer, videochat.
Support for all streaming media in your webbrowser.
All multimedia files supported (without having to add (unofficial) repositories to have support for win32codecs and such).

Oh yeah, for the transition, full NTFS writing support.

Apart from that, my friends, mother, sister and girlfriend really like linux.

FUD alert! BullShit!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fud fud fud fud. Consperiacy bullshit, I figure.

I LOVE Linux. Long time Debian user, I know that I simply couldn't use computers and be as happy with them if I was stuck with only choosing Windows and propriatory applications.

I am a GNU, Free Software, ra-ra-ra type of guy. I probably seem like a nut to many people.

But I don't beleive that it's a consperiacy against Linux. I beleive it's just complacency, laziness, apathy, and other crap like that.

It's not that they care and conspire, it's that they don't give a shit and MS nudges here and there very rarely.

Hardware manufacturers work their asses off making sure the everything works with Windows well. They generally dont' do jack shit about Linux because it doesn't contribute to their bottom line. (it could if they felt like it. No linux support = no Linux-related money = no reason to support linux = no linux support, etc etc etc.)

This is why it's important to support hardware manufacturers that support Linux. Stuff like Ralink-using Wifi cards that use the rt2500 and related chipsets. http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page [serialmonkey.com]

And specificly requesting Linux support is the only way to go. Seriously. Buying random hardware and expecting it to work in Linux or expecting that your Dell laptop will work 'just because' is foolish.

This guy is spreading fud. There are certainly hardware companies that dislike the idea of free software. They dislike having to tell end-users how to use the hardware or releasing minimal REAL documentation on the hardware. Well then, fuck them. Don't buy their shit and if you do don't cry when you can't get it to work with ndiswrapper.

PS. Don't buy wifi cards with Conextent, Broadcom, Texas Instruments using chipsets. Avoid them like the plague. Modern 802.11g that work in Linux well are Intel Wifi setups and Ralink rt2x00 based chipsets. Intel 'Sonoma' platform with Intel Video and Intel wifi should work well in a modern Linux setup. Avoid ATI and Nvidia if you can, and if you can't and need the 3d horsepower always choose Nvidia.

What Linux needs for the 'average' user however is pre-installed support from a major manufacturer. The most likely canidate would be HP right now, but it seems to me that it's going to take a relative unkown to realy break through and start making buckets of money from this sort of thing. Maybe a successfull company that produces hardware specialized for Linux clustering or server work can step up to the bat and do it. (not talking about IBM.)

It is certainly possible to get a very nice computer for inexpensive that will work in Linux without having to resort to e-crappo hardware to make it cheap.

Re:HP Website not all that linux-friendly

[NatteringNabob]

[ ...Sun to do a 64-bit verison of Java]

There is a 64 bit Linux version of Java available at the bottom of this URL.

https://jsecom15.sun.com/ECom/EComActionServlet;js essionid=DA5B35C261DED503304CFE10857DC842 [sun.com]

I couldn't get the installer to run on FC4 when I tried but the package clearly does exist.

Re:Genius? Who knows. Smart experienced guy? Yes.

[suso]

I'm sure John is a great and intelligent guy. I was just making fun of the comment that seemed so silly to say on Slashdot.

Re:Complaints

[bersl2]

Everything except for the second item is extremely difficult, because they rely on proprietary formats and protocols. The NTFS support we have to date only exists because people undertook the Herculean effort to reverse-engineer the way it stores information on disk. Some formats of media files are also proprietary; and so that we don't have to reverse engineer them immediately, we use modified binary libraries; however, we cannot officially package these with distros, because any distro doing so is a big fat target for a lawsuit, as the licenses of the codecs usually prohibit it. Any support for MSN messaging also exists only because someone reverse-engineered the protocol. Tying MSN into existing free file transfer and video chat facilities is something no-one may have gotten around to yet.

In case you don't notice a pattern: the half-complete capabilities mentioned here were attained through reverse engineering, a very laborious, time-consuming process; and in the cases where a shortcut has been taken, there are usually legal disincentives and prohibitions to doing so.

Re:Complaints

[Aequo]

Good MSN with all smileys, filetransfer, videochat.
I think these people must have missed Kopete [kde.org].
Using a nifty script [kde-apps.org] you can download the official icons from the MSN server and use them without a problem. It has had file transfer support for ages now, and has acquired webcam support quite recently.

Support for all streaming media in your webbrowser.
Mplayer-plugin [slashdot.org] is a Mozilla/Firefox plugin that lets you display Windows Media, QuickTime, MPEG, Ogg Vorbis, and Real format movie clips in your web browser. Works perfectly for me.

Oh yeah, for the transition, full NTFS writing support.
Moving from NTFS to ext3 or Reiser shouldn't require NTFS write support, should it? With that said, Captive [jankratochvil.net] has been providing this for a while.. never used it myself, but I hear good things about it.

Happy?

Re:Not Forever

[LiquidCoooled]

XP is up because they stopped "selling" the other Windows operating systems.
Most "sales" of XP come from pre-installed setups.

People go out to buy a computer that can run all the software in the local PC world or game store - at the moment, that is a Microsoft OS.

Times are changing though, and more space is being given to the alternative OS's.
Its kind of like the time when "PC" software was nowhere to be found and all the stores were filled with Amiga/ST stuff.

Windows will not be dominant forever, it will be replaced just like everything else.

Re:HP Website not all that linux-friendly

[jitterysquid]

Off-Topic, but you might want to check out:
http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/system-configuratio ns.html [sun.com]

It lists Linux 64-bit operation on AMD64/EMT64 processors as of Java 5 update 2.

Re:Has made it? O.o

[Derek Pomery]

I couldn't disagree more. DLL hell in windows is precisely because of lack of DLL versioning as well as a variety of other reasons forcing apps to install their own DLLs.

The advantage of shared system libraries ain't "disk space is cheap" - it is being able to rapidly and efficiently incorporate new changes.
If an exploit is discovered in zlib, I update it once with the patch. Done.
I don't have to update every single friggen app across my entire system and replace their hundreds of "disk space is cheap" separate files.

Might as well statically link at that point. Hah.

If you set aside libraries, unix apps actually are fairly consistent. All configuration files under /etc makes it easier for filesystem maintenance and indexing. Windows registry is a lousy solution to a non-problem that eliminates easy editing. You have a filesystem, use it.

$HOME .config files also end up having their parallels even if you install a massive app bundle. You need to keep configs *somewhere* and the registry, well. Enough ranting.

Re:Not Forever

[Taladar]

Do you get technical support for getting a free os? I think not.

I got approx. infinity times more support from the Linux community than I got from Windows and that is mainly because Microsoft does not support Windows in any way.

Well put!

[iamacat]

I don't see how a company can risk using Microsoft for any mission-critical task. If Linux or Apache break, that bug can be fixed at a trivial (for a business) cost of hiring a consultant. If Windows/IIS breaks, they are dead in the water unless they are the size of Dell and can actually make an impact on Microsoft's revenues. Even home users can type some stuff into bugzilla and have a reasonable chance of getting their problem fixed after a while.

Re:Short version of this story

[killjoe]

"but we still can't get drivers installed. I'm likely to agree with the author that there are roadblocks not of our making that is causing this."

In most cases it's illegal to try and write drivers for hardware you don't have specs and permission for. DMCA sees to that.

If you have problems with drivers then you need to yell at the hardware manufacturer.

Re:Not Forever

[geomon]

My niece began with XP at age four. Windows is in her home and in her hand every day. Something she can touch.

Get her a copy of Knoppix and by age seven she will be knocking out bash scripts.

Linux is what my daughters started with and what they prefer to use. One is sixteen and the other is eleven.