Dissociated Press

This may be the most awesome thing I’ve ever seen… a Tux-shaped mini case. It doesn’t look like it’d be terribly useful in and of itself (more for development for embedded devices) but it looks awesome.

I’d like a Tux-shaped case large enough for an mATX motherboard. I’d definitely lay down some cash for that.

A story I wrote a while ago has just been posted on Linux.com, about running Linux on older hardware. The idea came from an eWeek article about Microsoft trying to debunk the idea that Linux runs well on older hardware. I spent quite a bit of time loading various distros on a PII 233MHz with 64MB of RAM. the results were a bit surprising, even though I’ve been using Linux for years.

Though Linux is perfectly usable on older hardware, I have to admit, I prefer to have a lot of horsepower available for my workstation. I have no patience for waiting for a computer to respond. I do a fair amount of compiling software, for example, and there’s no way I’d want to compile something like GNOME or KDE on a Pentium II with 64MB of RAM.

However, if all I was doing was a bit of Web browsing and writing in Vim, I think it’d be perfectly usable.

If you need a DNS server, but would prefer to avoid BIND, MyDNS is one alternative that I’d recommend. I’ve written up a short piece on MyDNS over on Linux.com. I’ve been using MyDNS for some time now, and I find it to be really easy to administer and use, and it’s been rock-solid stable. (Knocks vigorously on wood to avoid jinxing it…)

The first time I reviewed Mac OS X, I was impressed by the migration feature — I didn’t actually try it out, because I didn’t have a Mac to migrate from, but I thought it was quite impressive all the same to offer users an easy and no-nonsense way to move their data from one machine to another.

As a Linux user, I do two things before each upgrade — whether it’s a fresh install, or an apt-get dist-upgrade — I back up my home directory to a different machine or external drive, and I always have /home on a separate partition that isn’t overwritten during the install/upgrade.

But, if you’re moving from Windows to Linux — as I hope many people are — it can be a bit more complex. That’s why I wanted to check out Versora’s Progression Desktop. It’s a program that allows users to move data from one system to the other, with an eye towards preserving features and so forth.

My review is up on Linux.com. As usual, someone had a negative comment about the fact that Versora isn’t open source. It seems every time I do a review of a product that’s not fully open source, at least one reader has to complain about it.

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So, I stumbled on this column by a Stan Beer, wherein the reviewer attempts to try out Linux, but successively burns a bunch of coasters that won’t boot. Here’s a hint, Mr. Beer — if you burn eight CDs of various images and they don’t boot — that’s probably not a Linux issue, but an issue with the way you’re burning CDs.

Today, Beer discovers that the Windows CD burner doesn’t handle ISO images. Does he place the blame on Microsoft, or himself, for not knowing this? No, he entreats Linux distros to make up for his lack of knowledge:

Meanwhile, Ubuntu and all other Linux distros who haven’t done so, please, for the benefit of Windows users who want to give you a try, document fundamental issues such as this on your site.

Mr. Beer, if you’re going to play software reviewer, you should at least have a fundamental understanding of whether or not your CD burning program can, in fact, burn ISO images. This is after Beer claims to be an expert at, well, something:

I don’t exactly know what my real worth is on the open market, but at my rapidly advancing age, I reckon $50-100 an hour is a very conservative estimate. I personally think my time with family, friends and clients is worth a lot more than that but let’s not split hairs.

While I’m reluctant to judge Beer’s worth to his family and friends, I wouldn’t spend $5 to $10 an hour on his services as a writer or IT expert, much less $50 to $100. A competent journalist would have done a bit of Googling to find out whether or not he was doing something wrong, rather than simply blasting Linux because he can’t figure out how to create a viable install CD. A competent IT expert should have known whether or not Windows could burn an ISO image, for goodness sakes. A quick note to the Ubuntu users list would, no doubt, have yielded some assistance. Instead, Beer chose to use this as an opportunity to take a misguided swipe at Linux (and the community).

Apparently, it’s not enough to produce a usable operating system for free — but the Linux community needs to provide educational services as well. And, yes, a lot of Linux users are happy to help educate new users, but it greatly annoys me to see new users who are unwilling to take even the slightest personal responsibility for learning anything and then blame others for not teaching them. This is the equivalent of giving someone a car, and then they complain because it’s a stick and they don’t know how to drive it.

Desktop Linux isn’t perfect, but it does annoy me to keep seeing this type of “review” where the reviewer flogs Linux in general for the failings of one single distro or (even more common) their own failings.

I admit, I’ve flubbed on reviews as well — but nowhere near this spectacularly, and I’m willing to fess up when I screw up rather than blaming the vendor/project for failing to spell out the obvious. (I realize that “obvious” is in the eye of the beholder, but there’s obvious, and then there’s obvious.)

Another piece up on NewsForge, about Firefox and Thunderbird extensions. I spend far too much time online, so Firefox extensions are of great interest to me… anything that makes life just a bit easier is a good thing.

As a side note, I know the article will get tons of commentary about people’s favorite extensions that were overlooked. I’m always happy to hear about new extensions or what people like, as long as it’s understood that an article is a finite thing, and one can only cover so much. Theoretically, I could cover 50+ extensions (or whatever) to try to be thorough, but it would take about a month and a half to compose the article, and my editor would be less than thrilled at seeing a 20,000 word blob land in his inbox.

One of the great things about my job is that I get to try out lots of fun software. Case in point, I spent some time with PC-BSD recently and it’s quite a nice OS, overall. I’m not quite ready to ditch Linux yet, but if I did, I might just consider PC-BSD instead. Big kudos to the PC-BSD dev team, and I’m really curious how it’s going to turn out in the long run.

Check out my review on NewsForge, and if you’ve had a chance to play with PC-BSD as well, I’d be curious to hear your comments on it as well.