Practical Technology

for practical people.

May 27, 2008
by sjvn01
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Going out of business sale! Buy XP before it’s too late!

“Last Chance!” Read the e-mail ad from Dell’s small-business division. “June 18th is the last day you can choose your operating system: Windows XP or Windows Vista.”

That’s not true at all as Gregg Keizer points out in FAQ: XP deathwatch, T minus 5 weeks, but there is enough truth in it that Dell’s not being shy about saying “act fast, because after June 18, Windows XP will no longer be offered on Dell laptops and desktops.”

I don’t recall ever seeing any company advertising the ‘old’ product over the ‘new’ product so strongly before, but Vista’s stink has grown so strong that it makes good business sense to promote XP over Vista. Has anyone ever been actually able to make a solid case for using Vista over XP? I haven’t seen one.

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May 25, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Vista selling well!?

Whatever drugs Steve Ballmer is on they must be very, very good.

That’s the only explanation I can come up with for Ballmer telling the Australian press that he’s “amazing pleased” with Vista sales.

Unlike arguing the virtues of XP vs. Vista, or, as has increasing become the discussion, Linux vs. Mac OS vs. Vista vs. XP, where personal preferences comes into play, no CEO could possibly be happy with their main product’s sales if it were Vista.

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May 24, 2008
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Testing the new SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2

In Novell’s new SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 SP2, announced yesterday, you’ll find only small, but useful, improvements, most of them for better interoperability with Microsoft protocols and formats.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP2 includes support for fully virtualized Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003. Novell claims system administrators can also migrate these Windows Server guests across physical machines in real-time. Because of the Microsoft/Novell partnership, SLES is the only third-party virtualization solution offering full Microsoft support for its Windows Server guests. In return, the Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V hypervisor, now a release candidate, also supports SLES as a virtual guest.

SLES also includes the Xen 3.2 virtualization hypervisor.

The new SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 SP2 continues the Microsoft interoperability theme. For example, SLED 10 SP2 now supports read and write access to local NTFS drive partitions. This functionality is also available in other Linux distributions thanks to the open source NTFS-3G driver.

Both the server and desktop versions of SUSE Linux also have better Active Directory (AD) integration. This is also an area where, thanks to Microsoft being forced to open its network server protocols to open source groups like Samba, other Linux distributions will be able to offer similar functionality. That said, for now Novell offers the best Microsoft network integration, and SUSE Linux is likely to be the only Linux that receives official Microsoft support for its AD network integration.

On the desktop, I put SLED 10 SP2 through its paces on an IBM ThinkPad R61, which had come with SLED 10 SP1 pre-installed. Installation was not as straightforward as I would have liked. For example, you can’t simply tell YaST, the SUSE administration tool, to automatically upgrade to SP2. Instead, you must be certain that you’re up-to-date with your previous patches, then update with the “Update to Service Pack 2 patch,” manually set YaST to use the new SP2 Installation Source server, then apply the product-sled10-sp2 and slesp2o-sp2_online patch and reboot. It’s easier by far to simply download the media, which is available both as a set of CDs and a DVD, and boot from your optical drive and just follow the instructions for an update. For the details of the process see the Novell SLED 10 SP2 deployment page.

Once installed, you will find it easier to get SLED to work with an AD-based network. I had less trouble than I had ever had in integrating the laptop into my Server 2008/2003 hybrid AD/domain network. I also took the network down and brought it back up as a pure AD network and, again, working with SLED 10 SP2 on it was painless.

Perhaps the most significant changes in the new software, from a user’s viewpoint, are the upgrades to OpenOffice.org 2.4 Novell Edition. I was able to run several moderately complex Excel spreadsheets in OpenOffice.org Calc, thanks to its improved Visual Basic for Applications macro support. Impress can also now show Microsoft PowerPoint presentations with embedded audio and video.

Writer can both read and write documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in Microsoft’s basic Open XML (Office 2007) formats. This functionality is also available in a standalone program, OpenOffice.OpenXML Translator 1.1.1. This program will only work though with Novell’s 2.4 version of OpenOffice.

In the minus column, SLED 10 SP2 has a surprising hole. This desktop doesn’t come with a working Novell client. If you’re still using NetWare on the back end, you’ve got a real problem. A patch should be out shortly so that the SLED 10 SP1 client will work properly. There’s also a fix you can put in yourself if you don’t mind a tiny bit of code editing.

For the most part, SLED 10 SP2 worked well for me, though I found more “fit and polish” problems than I would have expected from a major release. Still, on the server side, anyone who needs to get their Linux servers to work hand in glove with Windows servers should start testing SLES 10 SP2. As for the desktop, I’d wait a few weeks for the minor bugs to be shaken out before upgrading.

A version of this story first appeared in NewsForge.

May 23, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Security is futile!

Surrender now! All your base are belong to us. Exterminate! Exterminate!

Well, that’s probably not what Cisco’s chief security officer John Stewart meant when he told attendees at an Australian security conference that malware is growing so fast that, “If patching and antivirus is where I spend my money, and I’m still getting infected and I still have to clean up computers and I still need to reload them and still have to recover the user’s data and I still have to reinstall it, the entire cost equation of that is a waste. It’s completely wasted money.”

On second thought, maybe that is what Stewart meant!

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May 22, 2008
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Those Dumb South Africans

Those dumb South Africans don’t just get it seems to be Microsoft’s senior director of interoperability’s Jason Matusow message in his blog posting of May 19th.

In this piece, trying to present a case for proprietary software over open-source software because people don’t understand that free software isn’t free as in ‘free beer,’ Matusow does an amazing job of putting his foot in his mouth.

Matusow starts out well enough, “South Africa has taken a most unfortunate position of late – the government has sought to put a political mandate in place for the adoption of open source software. I am against all technology mandates, and this one is no different.” OK, I can agree with the idea that technology mandates aren’t a bright idea.

Then, Matusow moves into Microsoft FUD-land, he makes some rather wonky claims about how Linux, Ubuntu in particular, trap people into an operating system. He states that “There is absolutely no comprehension that the Linux they will deploy on an enterprise scale will be completely locked down by commercial services agreements and version controls by the apps vendors (e.g. SAP).” Excuse me, the last I knew Linux wasn’t locked down by any ISV (independent software vendor). If you want to talk about ‘lock-down,’ then you want to talk about Microsoft. But, OK, this is still from the Microsoft FUD playbook. He hopes to get people thinking that open-source an proprietary software are essentially the same thing. Dumb, to people who know better, but then he’s not talking to us.

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May 22, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Is Microsoft Office in trouble?

At first, when I learned that Microsoft was not quickly supporting its own Open XML, but ODF and PDF instead, I thought it was a great joke. Microsoft went to all that trouble to make Open XML an ISO standard, but then they can’t even support it themselves! Better still, Jason Matusow, Microsoft’s senior director of interoperability, and Doug Mahugh, Microsoft Office’s senior product manager had to ‘fess up to its customers wanting ODF and PDF. So much for Open XML and Metro!

What ever happened to Metro, Microsoft’s PDF killer anyway? Did it just die of neglect like Microsoft Bob?

Getting back to the point, I started thinking more about what Microsoft odd document format moves could really mean. Pamela Jones, editor of Groklaw, suspects that Microsoft wanting to work on the ODF ands PFS standard so that it can foul them up with what Matusow called “Engineering tradeoffs.”

I can buy that theory. It’s right out of the Microsoft playbook.

But, still why is Microsoft doing this? Why aren’t they, at least, promoting their own standard?

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