Slashback: Bundestux, Kerberos, Blizzard

Slashback tonight with several updates and amplifications, starting with a nice report on the current state of the effort to put Linux into the heart of the German government, but also bits on Starcraft, cleaning up UNIX config, and Kerberos.

This deserves a hearty 'Jawohl!' DocSnyder writes: "Since the Bundestux campaign started collecting votes in favor of putting Free Software into the German parliament (Bundestag), more than 25000 people have done so. A lot of online discussions - in addition to Heise News and Linux-Community.de, even some Bundestag parties have put up their online forums - are very active to share user experience about GNU/Linux and Free Software. (Sorry for most of the linked sites speaking German, it's simply too much to translate at once.)

After several open letters and press releases have been exchanged between lobbyists and politicians, some information about a research performed by the German company Infora appeared on Heise News (english version), recommending an all-Microsoft infrastructure with the exception of some security-critical services like e-mail. The detailed paper is still not available.

An internal test (english version) between the Bundestag administration, SuSE, IBM and Microsoft confirmed that GNU/Linux and Free Software are in fact ready for the Bundestag's IT infrastructure, yet the testers don't like the copy&paste method used by KDE and recommend Windows for the desktops.

Last week, the Bundestag members (MdB) Jörg Tauss and Hans-Joachim Otto have been invited by Heise for an online chat with the community. While Jörg Tauss is a clear supporter of open standards and Free Software, Hans-Joachim Otto takes the internal test as well as Infora's research as primarily relevant for the coming decision.

On Saturday, MdB Uwe Küster summarized some details in an interview. He considered the decision - officially due Feb 28 - as almost finalized. The solution would show GNU/Linux on most servers, Windows XP and Office XP on the desktops, keeping proprietary data formats and lock-in interfaces up to the next upgrade cycle, which in fact would have been problem number one to solve.

All in all, the community has provided lots of experience, ideas and solution paths which finally seem to be largely ignored in the decision finding process towards the successor of a homogenous Microsoft Windows NT4 infrastructure, which has to be replaced until 2003 when Microsoft will no longer provide support for NT4."

That's a lot of cleaning up to do! maffew writes "A lot of feedback and ideas have been flying around since my article How to fix the Unix configuration nighmare was featured on freshmeat and slashdot. So we've created an ongoing web site and mailing list for people to continue discussing, organising, and hopefully in the end coding. It's all at unixconfig.sourceforge.net.

Meanwhile here's a link to the permanent home for the nightmare article. This is where I'm making revisions and adding links."

Raise your hand if this would mean seeing it for the 4th time ... Chris Brewer writes "In case you've been living on a different planet, The Fellowship of the Ring picked up Five Baftas, the British equivalent of the Oscars, including Best Director, Best Film, and Peoples Choice. During a live interview (Real only) after the awards, Peter Jackson announces that a preview for The Two Towers will be shown from the March 22 screenings of The Fellowship."

At long last ... something? If you've followed the strange relationship Microsoft has had with Kerberos, you may feel grateful to the anonymous coward who writes: "It would seem that Microsoft is granting the world a royalty-free, non-exclusive license to implement their Kerberos extension."

Here's some comfort for Starcraft players. An Anonymous Coward writes "As stated on Blizzard's battle.net service, the latest Starcraft patch supports UDP play, so some of the compelling reasons to use bnetd have been addressed. Whatever you may think of Blizzard and the DMCA, at least it shows Blizzard is listening to its fans."

Comments

Linux on desktops

[blibbleblobble]

So the linux clipboard (or lack of compatibility thereof) provides enough reason for them to buy and use Windows/Office XP?

Sounds like a reason to fix the shitty broken clipboard, then. I'll be grateful when I can at last paste from KMail into Mozilla.

Re:That darn clipboard

[Bilestoad]

Here's why Linux isn't making up ground on the desktop. When someone says something doesn't work right the response is RTFM, or that it is supposed to be like that. If Linux is going to succeed in environments like the German government then intuitive or ingrained use patterns should be the norm, no matter how much geeks like the other way and no matter how much it might seem like windows. Geeks can turn it back the other way if they like, they know how.

Re:MS Kerberos, a corporate culture of wrongness

[Rasta Prefect]

Um, I don't mean to flame, but why does it matter? Byte ordering strikes me as rather arbitrary.

Yes, it's completely arbitrary. Which means that since Kerberos is supposed to be Big Endian, Microsoft had no compelling reason to screw with it. Its arbitrary, but by no means interchangable. Now when using Kerberos you actually need the check every time you use an integer to determine which way 'round it ought to be, thus allowing for a whole new class of bugs. Hooray.