Slashdot Mirror
Linux Going Mainstream
Gossi writes "The BBC is carrying an excellent overview of the growing use of Linux, by many different fields. The article says it all, really, and is probably something you should show your Boss."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
It's very interesting in that it doesn't mention technology at all, only some stuff about the "open" future.
You can watch it here.
She wouldn't understand it. And sadly, couldn't do anything about it if she did. I might be the IT guy for my program, but our overall IT policy is set by conservative M$/Novell fans in another province.
I break enough rules just by recommending Firebird and Thunderbird...
Corruptissima re publica plurimae leges.
If your question was more about user-interface issues (KDE, GNOME), then I was under the impression that they came with installation helpers, or had standard installation places. I'm not a great fan of either desktop (I tend to code under Linux, and the "normal user" desktop accoutrements just get in the way), so there's probably better people to answer, but I've never heard it raised as a problem before...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
I'm in a local pizza and gaming establishment (rhymes with lucky sneeze), and lo and behold, I'm looking at a linux boot up screen on an arcade game.
And then I'm at a local clothes retailer, and I look and see Red Hat 6.0 sitting on the register display.
It's coming, folks. It's just a matter of time.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB19980715S0008
...
Linux Aims For The Mainstream
July 15, 1998 (2:46 p.m. EST)
By John Borland, TechWeb News
SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- The Linux operating system is at a turning point in its development, poised to jump from servers and the technical community to consumers' desktops, the software's creator and developers said at a Linux conference Tuesday night.
Speaking at a "Future of Linux" conference sponsored by Taos Mountain, a systems-support company in Santa Clara, Calif., Linux creator Linus Torvalds led developers in calling for more applications that would move the open-source operating system to end-user desktops.
"We already have the server side. All the pieces are basically there," Torvalds said. "Let's go after the end user. Let's go after the [grandmothers] and the 15 year old boy who just wants to play games and look at pretty pictures on the Internet."
I think they're a tad behind schedule.
LaTeX was fine - I was a little disappointed that after decades of popularity there was still not even the simplest wysiwyg apps for it.
Yeah - it's amazing that nobody has thought of writing one.
Hmm, well, as per recent /. story, Dell PCs start
at $319, less than half that $799. That gets you
2.4 GHz CPU which is prolly on par with that 1 GHz
G4 in an eMac (yes G4's are faster but not that
much of a difference). You get same 128 Mb RAM,
and 40 Gb HDD in both. There may be a few places
where eMac is clearly better or there may not be
(too lazy to compare thoroughly). Oh, and this
eMac has got a 17" CRT so we add $100 to Dell's
price. In the end the Mac barely gets out of being
twice as expensive as a PC.
Macs are quite competitive in notebooks though.
Most of your problems take just a tiny little bit of effort to overcome.
Excel beats the ever-loving crap out of Kspread.
Have you tried Open Office?
None of the software works well together - Mozilla and Konq have no idea what software to launch when you download a file.
Yeah. If you're that fussed, tell Mozilla what to use by setting the mime type actions under preferences.
And why do I need to be root to burn a disk? Or to install the simplest apps?
That's called security. And if you really want, you can give your user the rights to do those things.
Rather than sitting around going "bitch, bitch, bitch, Linux doesn't work like Windows", why don't you take your questions to google and get the solutions.
If even that is too much effort for you, stay with Windows. Enjoy MyDoom.
Looks can be deceiving. Or CAN they?
They have Kurt Vonnegut promoting Linux? I have died and gone to heaven. Being a huge fan of Vonnegut this makes my day.
-----
One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
I'm part of a tech support team that supports several Linux-based products and there's quite clearly a major lack of Linux skills in most of the rest of the team that I'm trying to resolve by doing some Linux training occasionally (as the company won't pay for formal Linux training). So as you can see, Linux is core to the business despite the employees using Windows 2000 for everything.
A memo came out a few months ago that warned everyone against using "unapproved Open Source software" on their Windows machines due to "possible insecurities" - this was despite the fact that the corporate intranet was being dragged down on a regular basis by the latest Windows worm.
I responded to the memo and asked for a definition of which particular pieces of Open Source software were either approved or unapproved. This was as a result of deploying Open Source and free tools like Putty and Ethereal to allow tech support people to launch SSH sessions and perform network sniffs as part of their jobs.
The only responses I got were from various people in our US offices passing on my reply to other people. In the end, it just got forgotten about.
It just amazes me that just about every member of the tech support team has cracked commercial software installed on their corporate laptops that nobody ever checks up on - yet I can't get a clear definition from the company as to what they deem "Open Source" to be...
LaTeX was fine - I was a little disappointed that after decades of popularity there was still not even the simplest wysiwyg apps for it
Not What You See Is What You Get, but a What You See Is What You Mean editor.
> Corporate middle management is not interested in
> facts. They are not interested in improvement.
> They are not interested in efficiency that is not
> accomplished by either making people shovel shit
> or firing people.
> Middle management seeks to maintain the status
> quo, and to do nothing unless it is absolutely
> necessary. Incompetence, bankruptcy, waste,
> stupidity, anything is better than trying and
> failing.
I'll call bullshit on this.
Corporate middle management (MM) now faces the repercussions of CIOs and senior management telling shareholders "we'll reduce the cost of IT by 20/30/50% in the next 12 months". Middle management then gets told "do this or die"; either they slash their costs by A LOT within 12 months or they're out the door. Whatever was the case in the past, MM is now *all* about efficiency.
A sizeable chunk of MM has worked out "Hmm, if we keep doing what we have been doing, we'll keep getting the same results, so now we have to try something different". In many cases, they don't yet know what "something different" is or should be, but they are on the lookout for something - anything - that means they won't be leading their team into the unemployment office in 12 months' time.
**Now** is the best possible time to go to these MM guys with your ideas.
I'll give you an example: want to put e.g. Postfix/procmail in front of Internet-facing MS Exchange servers and use it to (a) de-evil incoming email with evil HTML content such as @ signs in URLs, and (b) filter out email from known open relays? Collect some figures on how much time/money has been lost in your org fighting spam and the latest HTML-based email virus, drop those figures on your MM's desk along with the costs of implementing your solution. If you do it right, your MM will realise, if it's done right, it'll slash his costs hugely and maybe get him a few percent closer to keeping his (and your) job intact.
The trick is to present data that makes sense to your MM. Don't tell him "we'll block 13432 incoming spam messages per day"; tell him "we'll block 13432 incoming spam messages per day that cost us $2300 per day in storage costs. My solution will cost us $3000 to implement, so it's paid for itself by the 2nd day". He has to talk in terms of financial outcomes, because that's what his boss wants; if you want to get your ideas across, you have to do the same.
Many techos, and I've done this myself in the past, present their ideas in such a way that it comes across as "It'd be really cool if we did X, and there might even be some benefits for the company if we did it. We're not quite sure exactly what X will cost, or how long it's gonna take to do it, but we should do it anyway because my geek buddy did it and he's really smart". It only took about 300 rejections before I worked out that this approach never works unless your boss has a goatee...
RTFA. Linux can seriously eat Microsoft's lunch in this environment. And you need to learn a little about Linux before trying to comment.
And moderators... Insightful... Please...
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
I'm not going to bother pointning out the crap in most of your post, but this just annoyed me:
Yes, the Linux community has done some spectacular stuff - but it just doesn't hold a candle to what the retail world has done in the same time.
Bullshit. I can't think of a single intriguing interesting or useful piece of mainstream software that has come out in the commercial sector in the past 4 years. All the things I can think of are either based on open source, written ages ago with the only things done recently being piddly little 'improvements' and of course price hikes, or does its' job incredibly badly.
The retail world has been doing nothing for the last god knows however long. The only interesting things I see being done now are in the open source world.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
"The unfortunate reality here is that this is often not the case. I have a stack of Loki games from a few years ago that will not run on modern Linux systems. Some of them will, but often with lots of screwing around with libraries and stuff. Contrast this to Windows and Mac - one way or another, the vast majority of software released for those platforms over the last decade will work, often without much fussing. It may not be pretty, but it will work!"
Bullshit. A good deal of the Win32 games written prior to Windows 2000 won't work under Windows 2000 or XP due to shitty programming. And these days you really have to be a masochist to be still running Windows 98, so NO, the vast majority of software released for Windows over the last decade WILL NOT WORK.
What a pity that Clark Boyd, the tech journo who wrote the piece, failed mention that the BBC uses Linux and Apache to host its main news portal. If some above average technical writer would like to do a piece about the Net infrastructure at the BBC, I for one would be very interested to read it.
Eager to find this 300 dollar PC I jumped to Dell's site to find something close to the eMac.
Here's the big ad/cheap machine on the site:
"Dimension 2400 Series $599 with a limited time 100 mail in rebate." Now that's cheap. Yet the eMac comes with a better video card. So we're looking at where Apple has always been, a few hundred dollars more expensive than the CHEAPEST PC. I think a fairer comparision would be the Sony Vaio which has all the multimedia software that comes on the Mac. Those start at $699 sans monitor.
Just because one thing is cheaper than another doesn't make that other thing "expensive." $799 for a eMac is still a good deal when you consider OSX v Windows, all the iX software, etc. Apple will always have some premium, but the real question is: is it fair to call a 799 desktop and a 1099 laptop expensive? Considering what people spend on average for computers in general that's still good pricing and far from the myth that a Apple will cost you an arm and a leg.
It's really amazing, yeah...
1 place Mandrake CD in tray
2 boot computer
3 follow instructions
I find the Mandrake install even easier than windows, refreshingly void of the constant 'rebooting computer' messages.
Well, every Dell, HP and IBM PC is sold with MS Windoze pre-installed, so most people do have legit copies of windoze, even if they do not have the disks to show for it.
I refuse to help, too.
It's only fair since they refuse my advice on what software to use, and I'm not shouting at them, "use Linux!" all the time, either. Simple things like when they complain about IE/Outlook, I suggest Firebird/Thunderbird -- even going so far as to put them on CD. I rarely recommend Linux on the desktop to people because most of them play games. If someone is only using their computer for home-office tasks, then I do.
The "it's free!" approach doesn't seem to work because they all have pirated MS products anyway.
Remember, XP is only $100 if a) you buy it and b) your time is worth nothing.
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
No, they could also use Free/Open/NetBSD. Or Darwin x86, or Solaris x86, or FreeDOS. But GNU/Linux offers the best ease of use and ease of installation for a moderately experienced Windows user.
I don't even use GNU/Linux -- I use FreeBSD most of the time. But when I work on someone's computer, it's a community GNU/Linux distro or nothing. Occasionally I offer to put Windows on if they go out and buy the CD from the store, but that is never a viable option for them.
Sometimes this process involves switching people from AOL to a different ISP, usually broadband. I find that when people are fed up with Windows, this often coincides with being fed up with dialup Internet service as well.
I simply got sick of running over to other people's houses again and again to reinstall Windows for whatever reason. It's easier to just ask them what software they need, borrow their system and bring it back in a few days with everything they need on it. You're essentially turning an unsafe Windows system into an interactive Linux appliance. It doesn't take long to explain the basics to them, either, and I offer free support through the message forums on my website if they get stuck.
In the end it works out for everyone. The vast majority of home users only need good programs for email, the web, word processing, music and card games. If you can cut out the virus and security threats, popup ads, and crashes from someone's computing life, they'll be more than willing to deal with the temporary inconvenience of switching OSes.
You are, as you pointed out, free to do as you will. When I was younger I wanted to help and show off my computer knowledge to my friends and family, but now I just want them to stop bugging me with computer problems. GNU/Linux allows me to help them once and for all, and for free. As far as freedom is concerned, yes I'm making the choice of which distro to use... but the end-user is the one who chooses to go with me and Linux or someone else and Windows (again and again).
Want to convert someone? It's easy. Just remind them how many times you've fixed their computer and how many times you've reinstalled Windows with your CD and CD Key, which is illegal. Explain how it is illegal. Explain how GNU/Linux is free from such restrictions. Explain how Windows viruses and security threats don't affect GNU/Linux. Ask them what software they need or what they need their computer for. Then develop a solution... I suggest Ark Linux, Knoppix, Morphix, Gnoppix, and Fedora Core as potential distros to use. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's really just a fifteen minute conversation and if it is successful it'll save you a lot of headaches in the future.
-JemRumors have it that OpenBeOS is somewhere near. Maybe thiscould help.
Au contraire - it's not that they are incompetent at all. They have 60k desktops to support, and the attempt to lock the platform down (Windows was never really designed to be locked down; it's inherently a blown up single-user system. One of those design decisions I was talking about) to reduce the desktop to a one-size-fits-all push introduces complexities that are difficult to manage.
You apparently don't have a clue what a 'network operating system' is. Active Directory is a directory service - just like Novell's NDS, and the industry standard LDAP (which AD and NDS both owe a debt of gratitude to), and NIS/NIS+ (both of which, IMO, suck, but do what they are designed to do and did it LONG before Microsloth realized they needed a Directory). And, as the saying goes, only fools are positive. I admit, somewhat sheepishly, that I have an MCSE - first acquired in 1997, and updated once since then. I've supported enterprise level WAN spanning M$ NT/2k networks before I got to play with the big boys.
And in case you didn't realize it, *NIX had TCP/IP long before M$, and the entire stack of protocols for NT (tcp, udp, telnet, ftp, http) could be considered a "*NIX Emulator", quite defensibly, if not exactly accurately.
, Actually, quite a few more than that, I was simply talking about the level of computer savvy required to run linux, and making the point that I would like to believe that our American business computer users are more savvy about computers in general than my grandmother. But maybe that's a forlorn hope. *sigh*.
The fact is that I could (and have) built distribution systems that would allow me to roll out *NIX (linux, specifically, in this instance) to an arbitrarily large number of people with far fewer "desk runners" and less IT/workstation interaction than any M$ migration I've seen, and much faster install times... Even using Ghost over a 100mbit network, a full boat imaging of a windows Box usually takes on the order of 20 to 50 minutes depending upon how many applications are included; I can do Linux boxen in 9 minutes from reboot to login.
Well, then, I'm proud of you. How did you keep those users from double clicking on 'document.doc' from MyDoom? I'm just curious.
"Real World MIS experience"... I'll tell you what. I managed an exclusively Microsloth network (only 2500 seats, but spread out over seven countries and having some 130 servers of various types) for four years, then that same network and all of that company's Unix servers for another two years, then on to solely *NIX support for the past five years. Now, you go out and get a job managing an Enterprise level *Nix network, and do it for as long as you've worked on Microsloth's products, and then come back and tell me about "real-world MIS experience". I've done both at very high (engineering and systems integration) levels. Have you?
Thinking outside my Head