Open Source

In light of Redhat droping support for RH9 and neither being willing to buy a software subscription, nor switch over to Fedora, I decided it was time to switch to another distro. As is the case with the reason I ended up with Redhat to begin with, there was someone in my community that was pushing a distro that seemed to fit for me. I decided a while ago that I wanted a more desktop centric distro and Mandrake 10 appeared to fit the bill. This is a beta version and I have run into a few problem with patching and my sound card with some apps, but I have been very happy otherwise. Mandrake forked from the Redhat code several years ago but it feels enough like Redhat that I was able to make the jump without too much hassle. I did have to be root several times to get specific applications to install correctly, but these packages were not upto being 1.0 releases so I'm not suprised. I will say that even though Mandrake 10 is still in beta testing, it fits together a lot better the RH9 which always felt a little klunky.

This weekend I upgraded my Zaurus 5500 up to OpenZaurus 3.3.5 and I have been very impressed by it. The quality of the GUI apps is impressive and the Checkbook program is very nice, better then any that I have seen for PalmOS.

I do have a few complaints,
1) I only end up with a 14meg / partition. Hopefully I can move and link some of the binaries to /mnt/cf, otherwise I'm going to run out of / space very quickly.

2) Getting the spreadsheet up and running was a little difficult and I currently don't have the disk space to install the wordprocessor.

3) Opera doesn't seem to be available for OpenZaurus, hopefully I'll find another option.

Thanks to two wonderful opensource projects, OpenZaurus and MultiSync I can sync my Zaurus SL-5500 with Ximian Evolution on my RH9 Linux Box. I still have to get the Handcomm Office apps (mini-Word, mini-Excel, PowerPoint viewer) up and running using the older libraries but it's nice to have my Zaurus working. It still messes with my head being able to SSH into my PDA, now I just need to get a wireless and/or LAN ethernet card and a SD card and I'll be set.

Since switching to Linux (about three years ago) I have been mostly using Gnome as my GUI of choice because that is what the people around me were using so if I had any questions, I could ask them. It worked quite well for me and I particularly liked apps like Evolution, Gnumeric, Mr Project,.... However I have mostly been using Linux as a bootstrap for OpenOffice, Mozilla, TextMaker (I really, really like the Outline function) and Oracle 9i as a tool for studying for the OCP.

In the last few months I have been venturing out and customizing/tweaking how applications launched, and configuring the menu bar,... and the more I tweaked, the more I started getting slightly put off at Gnome. I knew that all the applications I use (OpenOffice, Mozilla,...) would run just fine under KDE so I figured I might as well give it a shot.

After using KDE for the past two weeks on my RedHat 9 box, I'm starting to realize what I have been missing. I'm not tyring to put down Gnome, I'm just impressed by KDE 3.1. The application Konqueror, a web browser and file manager (kinda like Windows Explorer combined with IE, sans the virus, crashing, and bloat) is truly amazing. I'm really looking forward to the day when Konqueror is officially released for MacOSX, hopefully it will not be too long now that they have a running proto-type.

Another KDE based application set that I'm intrigued by is KOffice which appears to have some additional features then OpenOffice and runs faster then OpenOffice. The next version of KOffice (1.3) will be able to read OpenOffice files and hopefully also be released for MacOSX in the not too distant future. I'm not sure which Office app I'll use the most, I'm leaning toward OpenOffice because it runs on Windows (which I still have to deal with) and I know the application quite well.

Having said all this, Gnome is a very nice GUI that is serving the Linux or BSD desktop effort very well and it is a very nice problem to have that I have to choose between Gnome & KDE for my GUI/Window Manager. It is wonderful that I have to choose between office suites like OpenOffice and KOffice. It is very nice that these two office suites have to compete against two very good word processing programs (AbiWord and TextMaker) and a very nice spreadsheet app (Gnumeric).

The key part about all this competition is that all this applications are able (or will shortly) to read and write to each others file formats. If KOffice starts 'winning' I can easily switch over and still be able to read all my data with out issue. If Gnome starts putting together a feature set that beats KDE, I can move back with very little pain. If I buy a MacOSX laptop in a year I can copy my data over with minimal fuss and can keep my Linux workstation. Which for the foreseeable future, will be running KDE.

I have to wonder how long it will be before SCO buckles under the combined pressure of IBM's legal muscle, Novell's copyrights and the very united front of broader Open Source Community.

SO QUIETLY several months ago, Novell set SCO up the bomb. Novell did this by registering its copyright ownership covering UNIX(tm) System V Releases 2, 3.0, 3.1, 3.2, 3.2/386, 4.0, 4.1, 4.1ES, 4.1ES/386, 4.2, and 4.2MP. SCO had previously registered copyrights on some of these.

To understand why these conflicting copyright claims are important, just reflect that on December 5 SCO promised to add copyright infringement to its claims against IBM. It recently published a list of over 65 C header files in Linux that it claims infringe its supposed UNIX(tm) copyrights. And earlier this week, SCO also threatened to sue companies using Linux for copyright infringement. Novell's quiet registration of its copyright ownerships threw a railroad spike into the spokes of SCO's red wagon.