Is Microsoft trying to sabotage Linux?

My life has been a technology hell this past month and a bit. I appear to have become one of those people who causes technology to explode when I walk past.

First one of my server hard drives went. The RAID saved my butt and it was then a matter of ordering replacements from the States via eBay. They finally arrived, but to do the capacity expansion (I ordered bigger hard drives) I had to back up all the data, replace the drives and then retsore the data - not a trivial task for a few hundred Gigs of data. This was made more difficult because my DLT drive is still busted (it will cost thousands to fix). However, although time consuming, the drives are in. They are reconditioned drives and two failed on start up - which is where I got lucky because I ordered two extra.

The new laptop I bought to replace the stolen one arrived with Windows Vista for Business. I resized the partition to install a dual boot of Debian Linux, and disaster. Vista would no longer boot. So I've been working exclusively in Linux for the last month while I've tried to sort out the Vista problem. This has allowed me to develop an appreciation of key migration issues. The biggest? For me, tables in Powerpoint. Almost all my consulting documentation ends up in Powerpoint (roll on the consulting jokes). Tables are critical for formatting data on a slide. And Impress (the OpenOffice.org equivilent) doesn't do them. No. Kidding.

Solving the Vista problem has been a ball-ache of note. The recovery disk will not boot if you have resized the orginal install partitiion and IBM suggested I buy a copy of Vista - at a few thousand rand - to replace the OEM version on my machine. This after much efforty including a trip to the East Rand to the Laptop distribution and support warehouse.

I finally found documentation on the issue here after arriving at a similar conclusion.

The key is being able to run "chkdsk" on the affected Vista partition. You can either boot with a NTFS-capable start disk and run it from there, or you can run ntfsfix from Linux and then boot your Vista partition which will launch "chkdsk".

This a pretty huge issue - most Linux installations now make use of partition resizing in order to turn a Windows machine into a dual-booting machine. This issue results in a broken Windows installation. Sabotage?

As if the above pains were not enough, I dropped my cell phone into some water. With my old laptop stolen, I was contactless! I have a backup on my LDAP server, but with the transition to a new eGroupware this had also got broken. Yup, I certainly have become Karma's bitch (taking over from Devil).

Anyway, much more about all of the above incidents, workarounds and fixes on my technical blog.

After a week of drying out, I tried my phone yesterday - et voila! It works. Together with the Vista fix, the arrival of my new wireless router (after six months of fighting with Digital Planet) and my new UPS, does this mark a change in my techinical fortunes. Please God let it be so.

How do you technically recover from laptop theft?

Right. So after the recent excitement of a stolen laptop, I need to go through the process of setting up a new laptop and recovering data, etc.

I'll make this useful by blogging about the IT trials and tribulations on my tech blog.

In the mean time, consider the following:

• Install a stolen laptop tracker on your PC - if the fuckers ever connect to the net, it'll let you know and provide their ISP details


• Keep invoices, serial numbers, etc in a safe place to facilitate police and insurance reports


• Get one of those cable alarms that screams if your laptop is moved


• Backups really are important - use a syncronisation app like iFolder to sync your laptop with the server when it connects to the network


• Encrypt your harddrive - I am now a prime candidate for identity theft


• Password protect the BIOS on your laptop - same reason as above

.

So I've been busy setting up the new laptop. What a mission. Anyway, it is a beautiful new beast. Follow the progress on my techie blog.

Here it is:








Vital stats here.

What does the future of the desktop look like?

I installed Compiz on my PC yesterday. Oh my goodness. Eye candy deluxe.

I have a dual-booting laptop with Debian Linux on one partition and Windows XP on another. I installed Compiz on my Linux partition. "Compiz is a compositing window manager that uses 3D graphics acceleration via OpenGL. It provides various new graphical effects and features on any desktop environment, including Gnome and KDE."

To those of you that imagine Linux / UNIX to be a green screen terminal-style command prompt, now's the time to take a closer look. Hell, if you're a Linux/UNIX guru, now's the time to take a closer look!

You know all the eye candy special effects on Mac OS X and Windows Vista? Take a look (a pretty good look at a whole lot of effects very quickly on a high-end 64bit machine) at Linux (Beryl is a downstream fork of Compiz that has now be remerged with the original project):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=QLuOlgu5dsA



The cube effect draws on the Linux/Unix "multiple desktop" metaphor. Even in the days of terminals, you could hotkey between visually and logically seperate command lines. The same capability is present in window managers (like KDE), where you can hotkey between seperate GUI desktops. I find this easier than Alt-tabbing between windows or minimising everything to try and sort through hat I have open. It also allows me to group tasks together (such as development on one desktop, mail and producitivity tools on another, and office stuff on another).

This demo shows (with a cool ambient garage beat) a feature-by-feature breakdown - part 1. Part 2.

Another good demo is here.

And another.

This demo shows a dual head (two monitors joined into one desktop) setup with Compiz(now all the traders are going to want fancy GUIs on their trading floors - take a look at the crazy trader pics here).

Crazy trader desktops!



Here's the Novell presentation about Compiz/XGL/Linux (SUSE distro) features.

Here's a narrated demo of a guy running at 2560X1600 - it will give you an idea of how efficient XGL and Compiz are. The guy also shows CPU usage using Compiz.

Obviously it's not really realistic to watch this on Youtube resolution, but it gives you an idea of the effects. You can have a look at some screenshots here which will give you an idea of the higher res effect.

For those of you wondering if this is lifted from Vista - one of those patents you've heard about - if you look at the dates on these Youtube videos, you'll see these features predate Vista.

Is this just eye-candy or is it useful? I've believed for a long time that our computing experience is limited by the screen desktop paradigm. Is your physical desktop really 15-, 17- or even 20 inches? I think these types of efforts to make the desktop more three dimensional help us escape from that trap. I often think about those classic scenes from "The Lawnmower Man" and "Disclosure" where the characters don goggles and conduct their computing experience in a 3D visual world. The 3D library so brilliantly portrayed in Disclosure as a metaphor for filing really works for me.

The virtual reality machine in Disclosure



If you've seen Minority Report, you've already seen a desktop very similar to the Linux one in these demos - it's just been moved to a large transparent flat panel (that technology is also close to being available).

The "desktop" in Minority Report



In fact, compiz with a touchscreen LCD monitor gives a Minority Report like effect. See this Youtube video.

Most of the underlying technology for this stuff exists in pockets. Second Life is a virtual world we use as a community environment. I've got excited about that before. But it is also used to create a 3D commercial experience for businesses. Might businesses also use it for virtual meeting places for multi-national staff? Or as a virtual environment to store data in a visual way a la the library in Disclosure?

I have no doubt that one day visual stuff will be trasmitted to our brain and overlaid on our the view from our retina the way it is in the Terminator. The technology is already available! Be it through an implanted chip, electrodes we wear, or some new wireless technology.

Already, wearable displays allow gamers to see overlays of computer data on their real environment.

While I wait for the world to catch up, I might just buy one of those giant LCD display for my desk and hook it up to Linux....



It's better than doing this:

Are copyrights and patents wrong?

It's a question that may come to define the early part of the millennium.

To recap, it is the issue being debated regarding people's right to copy music, software, etc.

On some issues the answer seems simple. However, ask people under 25 what they think of digital rights management technology (DRM) and they might just hiss and spit.

Frankly, I think most of the people insisting that intellectual capital should be free would probably change their tune if they had a major recording contract. And had slaved for 10 years in a garage with some mates, surviving on handouts from family and singing covers in a rowdy pub each night.

Things become a bit more complicated in the world of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). This includes the GNU Linux operating system. And thousands and thousands of other pieces of software running in places as diverse as on PCs in people's homes to mainframes in the datacentres of multinational banks.

It is a truly amazing world where people work half their nights on software they don't see a cent for. Few would predict that such a model could be sustainable - and some believe it isn't. But that's a different post.

A long running legal saga has been the SCO versus Linux suit. SCO alleges that Linux has copied substantial portions of the original UNIX software.

Now the fight has got really big - Microsoft has threatened to sue developers, distributors and users of Linux for 235 patent infringements. The threat culminated in a deal between Microsoft and Novell (distributor of the SUSE flavour) where Microsoft agreed not to sue Novell or users of SUSE in return for a collaborative distribution agreement.

More on the developments with regard to the 235 patents in this Fortune article.

It seems that things are getting nasty now that Microsoft perceives a larger threat from FOSS.

But it does bring up the topic of what can be copyrighted / patented in software. Microsoft refuses to disclose the patents it feels that it feels have been infringed. Do they include the File menu in the upper left corner of the window? Or are they excerpts of source code lifted from Microsoft programmes.

I'm sceptical. The American style of pre-emptive patenting of an idea by people who have no means of implementing it irritates the crap out of me.

Copying code or precise user interfaces is one thing. It should be illegal. But if this is a frivolous attempt launched by Microsoft on competitive grounds, it should be fought hard.

Perhaps FOSS foundations might encourage Apple to sue Microsoft for copying its idea of a GUI operating system....

More on this in the Financial Mail blog.

Torvalds and Moglen agree: MS patent claims are 'FUD'