Seriously, 9.10 has its rough points, but it's worth a try. I've just installed it for my mother in law, it runs Facebook games fine, so she's happy:)
It's far, far quicker than windows, and doesn't suffer from viruses to anything like the same extent. She was amazed at the simple things like how quickly it shuts down.
Yes, it's called a snapshot. Take a snapshot and you can either roll the entire system back to that point in time, or just browse its contents and extract the files you want.
No, but if the computer is that badly broken, you're better off telling them that you'll need to take it away to find what's faulty.
After all, you can either sit there for hours and hours running various test programs on dodgy hardware in an attempt to guess which part is bad, or you can take it away, spend a few minutes plugging in good components, and have a much better shot at telling them what's faulty.
It takes you less time, and it's a far more professional approach. Instead of saying "I think it's the graphics card", but having nothing more than an educated guess to back that up, after swapping the hardware you're now in a position to say "I'm pretty sure it's the graphics card, and it's run fine here overnight with a new one fitted".
Swapping the hardware saves you time and them money. If you don't have hardware to swap, make damn sure you tell people that at best you can give them an educated guess as to what's gone wrong.
/rollseyes Because Microsoft don't have any programmers capable of writing this interface in any other form right?
Running the selection process inside IE is a blatant attempt to sway the user towards selecting IE, well, that along with installing IE by default (and requiring an internet connection to download the others), putting IE first on the list, and prompting the user with security warnings if they make any other suggestion.
Microsoft abused the market to get IE to the position its in, and they're going to use every trick in the book to try to keep it there.
I'm amazed that nobody else has commented on how huge a deal this is. Microsoft are *not* going to be happy.
Google have basically said that it's too much of a nuisance to develop for IE. They want to focus their development on a single web platform, and released a tool to allow them to do that.
But what nobody seems to be mentioning is how this could transform the browser wars. If Google take the logical next step of releasing this as a general purpose development tool, there's no need to develop for IE any more. Web developers can just optimize for Chrome and run the code on either browser. And that negates Microsoft's advantage of having the dominant browser, it breaks the vicious circle that is Microsoft's browser monopoly:
Microsoft's 90% hold on desktop browsers -> Developers have to focus on IE -> Users and corporations use IE
With Googles plugin, that 90% hold on the desktop becomes far less relevant. Google can give developers the choice of developing for their browser, without reducing the available user base. After all, Microsoft have spent years training users to install any ActiveX control a website needs, what end user isn't going to trust a plugin from Google?:-)
This gives the market the freedom to choose to develop for Google Chrome without worrying about Microsoft's majority share on the desktop.
Same behaviour here, Firefox on Ubuntu regularly crashes, although I rarely have under 8 browsers open, and rarely under 50 tabs in total. Firefox memory usage averages around 1.3GB for me, although after a restart that drops down to around 250MB with the same number of pages open.
I've tried removing all plugins, and changing everything I can think of to fix it, to no effect. I've now installed the "restart firefox" plug in and have taken to manually restarting Firefox at times convenient to me rather than risk the constant random crashes.
And it's not restricted to Ubuntu either. My other half uses Firefox on Windows and that also crashes very frequently. It's far less stable than either IE or Chrome. The only saving grace is that it does save the session and can nearly always restore all your tabs.
I'm now running the latest daily builds of Firefox 3.5 though and fingers crossed, it seems a lot more stable. It still uses ridiculous amounts of memory though, so I'm still restarting it one or two times a week.
Well I'm english and I don't find him particularly funny either. Just downright weird.
Terry Pratchett however, now there's a funny author. It's rare an author makes me laugh out loud, but he's had me crying with laughter more times than I can count.
Yes, but Google are also *not* doing rather a lot of stuff Microsoft did:
- They're not forcing you to use their products. - They don't deliberately break backwards compatibility, using peer pressure to force you to spend more money to upgrade. - They're not breaking competing products.
There's a massive difference between Google and Microsoft. I *choose* to use a vast number of google's products, simply because they are better than anything else out there. I'm *forced* to use Microsoft products, often at great expense, when I would much rather be using alternatives.
Err, try again. The whole point of wave is that google are open sourcing the spec, and plan to release an open source *server* reference implementation.
The concept of wave servers appears to be similar to that of smtp email. Companies can run their own internal servers, and configure links to the outside world as needed.
Well if you're cleaning a system, that chances are that it's not your own. Generally, every time I clean a system, I also spend some time explaining the dangers of viruses to the user, and teaching them a little about how to avoid them.
I also make sure that it goes out bang up to date with patches, with a solid anti-virus and firewall system, and a relatively secure configuration of their web browser.
Properly configured, the risks of a virus infection can be kept pretty low, and while stealth viruses exist, if you have one of those, the chances are that your system is vulnerable enough that you'll have a few viruses, and sooner or later one will make itself known.
And no, I'm not currently re-installing my system, I'm absolutely positive that mine has no viruses, and I'd say I'm 99% sure that none of the other computers I manage have a virus either.
But that doesn't mean I don't have a policy in place so I can quickly wipe and restore any of them if the need arises. I'd rather spend 5 minutes restoring a backup than 5 hours cleaning a virus any day of the week.
err... these ain't my machines bud. Kind of hard to make backups of a computer that you've never seen before;-)
When it comes to my own kit, trust me, it's well and truly sorted. I run a mix of operating systems, those are all backed up, data is saved to a separate raid-6 server, and the server is automatically backed up off-site.... and that's just my home network:-D
The key word there being 'normally'. The problem with disinfecting a computer is that you have to be able to guarantee that you've gotten them all, the days of infection being contained to a single file or even single virus are long gone.
I've no doubt that it's possible to manually disinfect a computer. The problem is that it's long past the point that the effort involved is worthwhile, especially given the potential risk and the speed of re-infection if you miss even one.
Incidentally, I've been doing this kind of stuff since DOS 4.0, I just don't consider that experience particularly relevant with modern viruses.
Yes, I tried safe mode, but only because it usually works, and that was *after* doing a clean boot to run all the virus scans.
I generally boot to safe mode since it allows me to run the registry tools to have a look at what's running. While you can access the registry remotely, I don't know of any tool that will quickly and easily identify all the potential startup entries, and without automated tools, you are never going to identify all of the potentially dangerous registry keys by hand.
You've never come across some of the viruses I've seen then. Ever seen one that still loads, even in Safe Mode? How about the one that disables system restore, regedit, task manager, msconfig, *and* still ran in safe mode? That little bugger could lock down the computer better than most IT admins I know.
Thankfully it was only a single process virus. The ones that run as a linked set of 3 (randomly named) processes are the worst. You can't kill any process individually, you have to get all three at the same time, before they can re-launch each other.
The last time I attempted to clean a PC was a year ago, it took 6 hours to get all the viruses. There were at least 6 strains on there, three of which weren't identified by any virus scan (neither Sophos, Symantec nor AVG found them), and were subsequently identified by Sophos as being new.
It was pure luck that I spotted the one that still ran in Safe Mode, and it was an absolute swine to remove, even with all the tools and experience I have at my disposal (and I've been manually removing viruses for 6+ years).
I would never try to manually clean a system these days, there is no way to guarantee you found everything, and there are too many 'stealth' viruses out there that infect small numbers of computers in an attempt to fly under the AV companies radar, and with the viruses that sit and harvest bank details, the risk is just too great.
These days I would always advise to backup your data, wipe, and re-install. It's the only way to be sure.
Actually, if you follow the links, it sounds like deliberate behaviour by Microsoft. If true Microsoft are asking for trouble with this. They change the behaviour for their own file system types, and generate an error for any other:
Quoting from the fsdriver.org site:
"Currently it is not possible to start a program on Vista if UAC is enabled and the program's executable is stored on an Ex2/Ext3 volume. An "invalid parameter" message box appears, but the program does not start.
UAC is the feature of Vista that prompts the user to elevate the user privileges to administrator level when necessary. UAC is enabled by default. It is not recommended to disable it.
The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista."
Difficult to call? They fraudulently redirected traffic through their servers to generate themselves money, making google pay for transactions they didn't need to. It's practically the definition of wire fraud.
Hmm, ok, I may be wrong about the Lotus one - checking again there are a few quotes about Microsoft attacking it, but no proof that I can see. They still have an awful lot of cases though showing them doing whatever it took to beat the competition - legal or otherwise.
And regarding Stacker, Stacker was a one trick pony, but what do you expect when your highly successful program is ripped off by the dominant OS vendor? The wind was knocked out of the company at the height of their success, and despite their program being massively better than doublespace, nobody was going to buy it when a 'good enough' equivalent was being given away for free.
I was a big user of Stacker at the time, but eventually had to stop using it as there were no new versions coming out, but doublespace corrupted my data so many times I couldn't use that either. End results - as a user I lost the ability to compress my data.
Making $5.50 for every copy of DOS that was sold wasn't a good thing for the user - Stacker still had no control over the software, no means of releasing updates, and essentially killed the company.
Winternals may be updated regularly, but try to find Winternals Protection Manager. That was a cracking product, launched 2-3 months before Microsoft bought the company, and which hasn't been seen in over 2 years.
Protection Manager was a way to massively increase the security of XP, running any program as a restricted user, with network admins able to grant higher permissions to only those programs that need them. Think Vista's UAE, but for XP, and perfect for network administrators. Unfortunately, that would have slowed adoption of Vista, and allowed corporates to roll Protection Manager out en mass on their Windows XP installations, so there's been no sign of the program since Microsoft bought the company.
And as to the rest: I don't mind having a browser in my OS, I just object to Microsoft stifling innovation to do it, and as a network manager, IE is an absolute nightmare when it comes to security. It's done far more harm than good having that included by default.
I've spent the last 8 years fire-fighting security issues caused by IE. They created a browser you can't remove, allowed it to run scripts, and granted it huge amounts of access to the OS. And the only reason it was coupled so tightly with Windows was because Microsoft knew that what they were doing was anti-competitive behaviour and wanted to claim it was an integral part of the OS and couldn't be removed.
So great, 8 years of security headaches because Microsoft didn't care about the law and wanted to muscle in on the browser market. Damn right I have an axe to grind.
- illegally burying Lotus 123, and replacing it with an inferior product - illegally killing stacker, and replacing it with the inferior doublespace - buying winternals, and burying one of the most promising security tools for XP I'd ever seen - illegally forcing their browser onto the market, creating some of the biggest security headaches IT admins have ever seen - changing file formats with every release for no reason other than to force companies to upgrade Office
I'm a big user of Microsoft software, but I'm under no illusions as to their business practices, motivations, or horrendous track record when it comes to security and interoperability.
"I think that no one is going to trust an inflatable car."
Why not? As they say in the article, a good chunk of your car is now your airbag. If they're confident enough to send a door panel for the police to shoot at, and can design a car that passes crash tests *without* writing it off, it sounds like they're on to something.
I went for DekiWiki, it's a really full featured wiki, with the ability to create a generated document of the entire thing, which it can then convert straight to PDF.
Throw the PDF on a laptop and you've got a nice tool if the network goes down.
Exactly. The police are criticising Verizon here, but it took the police 11 hours to sort this out themselves. What makes them think it was any easier for Verizon?
The chances are Verizon have a computer system that simply doesn't have the flexibility needed to do this. There probably wasn't an easy way around it without getting that bill paid.
I would have thought a police department, faced with an 11 hour search involving multiple people, could have just stumped up the £20, and maybe asked Verizon for the money back later.
Hell, even if they didn't get the money back they'd have probably saved a few thousand pounds that way.
Spending £20 to save several thousand pounds of man hours and possibly somebody's life? Sounds like the kind of decision you would expect the police to be able to make.
No, I'd agree with lack of apps. Don't get me wrong, there are some good ones for Linux, but in general you don't have the polish or ease of use with Linux apps.
I can put up with the differences and work around things, the average user expects everything to be smooth, and consistent between programs.
Linux is getting there though, and the beauty of open source is that it's hard to stop. Slow & steady should win this race in the end.
Yes, that's 4,300 infected machines a year, with 400 hit badly enough that they get cleaned manually (and I hope to god manual intervention means wipe and start again, but I doubt it somehow).
So, that's a nigh on certainty that the login details for the database are already well known to 3rd parties then...
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, 9.10 has its rough points, but it's worth a try. I've just installed it for my mother in law, it runs Facebook games fine, so she's happy :)
It's far, far quicker than windows, and doesn't suffer from viruses to anything like the same extent. She was amazed at the simple things like how quickly it shuts down.
Yes, it's called a snapshot. Take a snapshot and you can either roll the entire system back to that point in time, or just browse its contents and extract the files you want.
No, but if the computer is that badly broken, you're better off telling them that you'll need to take it away to find what's faulty.
After all, you can either sit there for hours and hours running various test programs on dodgy hardware in an attempt to guess which part is bad, or you can take it away, spend a few minutes plugging in good components, and have a much better shot at telling them what's faulty.
It takes you less time, and it's a far more professional approach. Instead of saying "I think it's the graphics card", but having nothing more than an educated guess to back that up, after swapping the hardware you're now in a position to say "I'm pretty sure it's the graphics card, and it's run fine here overnight with a new one fitted".
Swapping the hardware saves you time and them money. If you don't have hardware to swap, make damn sure you tell people that at best you can give them an educated guess as to what's gone wrong.
/rollseyes Because Microsoft don't have any programmers capable of writing this interface in any other form right?
Running the selection process inside IE is a blatant attempt to sway the user towards selecting IE, well, that along with installing IE by default (and requiring an internet connection to download the others), putting IE first on the list, and prompting the user with security warnings if they make any other suggestion.
Microsoft abused the market to get IE to the position its in, and they're going to use every trick in the book to try to keep it there.
I'm amazed that nobody else has commented on how huge a deal this is. Microsoft are *not* going to be happy.
Google have basically said that it's too much of a nuisance to develop for IE. They want to focus their development on a single web platform, and released a tool to allow them to do that.
But what nobody seems to be mentioning is how this could transform the browser wars. If Google take the logical next step of releasing this as a general purpose development tool, there's no need to develop for IE any more. Web developers can just optimize for Chrome and run the code on either browser. And that negates Microsoft's advantage of having the dominant browser, it breaks the vicious circle that is Microsoft's browser monopoly:
Microsoft's 90% hold on desktop browsers -> Developers have to focus on IE -> Users and corporations use IE
With Googles plugin, that 90% hold on the desktop becomes far less relevant. Google can give developers the choice of developing for their browser, without reducing the available user base. After all, Microsoft have spent years training users to install any ActiveX control a website needs, what end user isn't going to trust a plugin from Google? :-)
This gives the market the freedom to choose to develop for Google Chrome without worrying about Microsoft's majority share on the desktop.
And make no mistake, that's huge.
Same behaviour here, Firefox on Ubuntu regularly crashes, although I rarely have under 8 browsers open, and rarely under 50 tabs in total. Firefox memory usage averages around 1.3GB for me, although after a restart that drops down to around 250MB with the same number of pages open.
I've tried removing all plugins, and changing everything I can think of to fix it, to no effect. I've now installed the "restart firefox" plug in and have taken to manually restarting Firefox at times convenient to me rather than risk the constant random crashes.
And it's not restricted to Ubuntu either. My other half uses Firefox on Windows and that also crashes very frequently. It's far less stable than either IE or Chrome. The only saving grace is that it does save the session and can nearly always restore all your tabs.
I'm now running the latest daily builds of Firefox 3.5 though and fingers crossed, it seems a lot more stable. It still uses ridiculous amounts of memory though, so I'm still restarting it one or two times a week.
Great reply bud, if ever there was a post deserving of +5 pwn3d, this was it :-D
Well I'm english and I don't find him particularly funny either. Just downright weird.
Terry Pratchett however, now there's a funny author. It's rare an author makes me laugh out loud, but he's had me crying with laughter more times than I can count.
Yes, but Google are also *not* doing rather a lot of stuff Microsoft did:
- They're not forcing you to use their products.
- They don't deliberately break backwards compatibility, using peer pressure to force you to spend more money to upgrade.
- They're not breaking competing products.
There's a massive difference between Google and Microsoft. I *choose* to use a vast number of google's products, simply because they are better than anything else out there. I'm *forced* to use Microsoft products, often at great expense, when I would much rather be using alternatives.
By yet again re-enforcing their brand image as being synonymous with the web.
Err, try again. The whole point of wave is that google are open sourcing the spec, and plan to release an open source *server* reference implementation.
The concept of wave servers appears to be similar to that of smtp email. Companies can run their own internal servers, and configure links to the outside world as needed.
Well if you're cleaning a system, that chances are that it's not your own. Generally, every time I clean a system, I also spend some time explaining the dangers of viruses to the user, and teaching them a little about how to avoid them.
I also make sure that it goes out bang up to date with patches, with a solid anti-virus and firewall system, and a relatively secure configuration of their web browser.
Properly configured, the risks of a virus infection can be kept pretty low, and while stealth viruses exist, if you have one of those, the chances are that your system is vulnerable enough that you'll have a few viruses, and sooner or later one will make itself known.
And no, I'm not currently re-installing my system, I'm absolutely positive that mine has no viruses, and I'd say I'm 99% sure that none of the other computers I manage have a virus either.
But that doesn't mean I don't have a policy in place so I can quickly wipe and restore any of them if the need arises. I'd rather spend 5 minutes restoring a backup than 5 hours cleaning a virus any day of the week.
err... these ain't my machines bud. Kind of hard to make backups of a computer that you've never seen before ;-)
When it comes to my own kit, trust me, it's well and truly sorted. I run a mix of operating systems, those are all backed up, data is saved to a separate raid-6 server, and the server is automatically backed up off-site. ... and that's just my home network :-D
The key word there being 'normally'. The problem with disinfecting a computer is that you have to be able to guarantee that you've gotten them all, the days of infection being contained to a single file or even single virus are long gone.
I've no doubt that it's possible to manually disinfect a computer. The problem is that it's long past the point that the effort involved is worthwhile, especially given the potential risk and the speed of re-infection if you miss even one.
Incidentally, I've been doing this kind of stuff since DOS 4.0, I just don't consider that experience particularly relevant with modern viruses.
Yes, I tried safe mode, but only because it usually works, and that was *after* doing a clean boot to run all the virus scans.
I generally boot to safe mode since it allows me to run the registry tools to have a look at what's running. While you can access the registry remotely, I don't know of any tool that will quickly and easily identify all the potential startup entries, and without automated tools, you are never going to identify all of the potentially dangerous registry keys by hand.
You've never come across some of the viruses I've seen then. Ever seen one that still loads, even in Safe Mode? How about the one that disables system restore, regedit, task manager, msconfig, *and* still ran in safe mode? That little bugger could lock down the computer better than most IT admins I know.
Thankfully it was only a single process virus. The ones that run as a linked set of 3 (randomly named) processes are the worst. You can't kill any process individually, you have to get all three at the same time, before they can re-launch each other.
The last time I attempted to clean a PC was a year ago, it took 6 hours to get all the viruses. There were at least 6 strains on there, three of which weren't identified by any virus scan (neither Sophos, Symantec nor AVG found them), and were subsequently identified by Sophos as being new.
It was pure luck that I spotted the one that still ran in Safe Mode, and it was an absolute swine to remove, even with all the tools and experience I have at my disposal (and I've been manually removing viruses for 6+ years).
I would never try to manually clean a system these days, there is no way to guarantee you found everything, and there are too many 'stealth' viruses out there that infect small numbers of computers in an attempt to fly under the AV companies radar, and with the viruses that sit and harvest bank details, the risk is just too great.
These days I would always advise to backup your data, wipe, and re-install. It's the only way to be sure.
Actually, if you follow the links, it sounds like deliberate behaviour by Microsoft. If true Microsoft are asking for trouble with this. They change the behaviour for their own file system types, and generate an error for any other:
Quoting from the fsdriver.org site:
"Currently it is not possible to start a program on Vista if UAC is enabled and the program's executable is stored on an Ex2/Ext3 volume. An "invalid parameter" message box appears, but the program does not start.
UAC is the feature of Vista that prompts the user to elevate the user privileges to administrator level when necessary. UAC is enabled by default. It is not recommended to disable it.
The problem is caused by Vista's internals: There is some code that compares whether the name of the file system type is one of the following: "NTFS", "FAT", "FAT32", "CDFS", "NPFS", "MSFS" or "UDF". If there is a match, it is one of Microsoft's file system types and a lot of code is skipped in the Multiple UNC Provider (MUP) implementation of Vista. If the file system type is a third-party type, for example "Ext2", some code runs in the MUP of Vista that always generates an ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER error status code due to a bug of Vista."
source: http://www.fs-driver.org/relnotes.html
Difficult to call? They fraudulently redirected traffic through their servers to generate themselves money, making google pay for transactions they didn't need to. It's practically the definition of wire fraud.
Hmm, ok, I may be wrong about the Lotus one - checking again there are a few quotes about Microsoft attacking it, but no proof that I can see. They still have an awful lot of cases though showing them doing whatever it took to beat the competition - legal or otherwise.
And regarding Stacker, Stacker was a one trick pony, but what do you expect when your highly successful program is ripped off by the dominant OS vendor? The wind was knocked out of the company at the height of their success, and despite their program being massively better than doublespace, nobody was going to buy it when a 'good enough' equivalent was being given away for free.
I was a big user of Stacker at the time, but eventually had to stop using it as there were no new versions coming out, but doublespace corrupted my data so many times I couldn't use that either. End results - as a user I lost the ability to compress my data.
Making $5.50 for every copy of DOS that was sold wasn't a good thing for the user - Stacker still had no control over the software, no means of releasing updates, and essentially killed the company.
Winternals may be updated regularly, but try to find Winternals Protection Manager. That was a cracking product, launched 2-3 months before Microsoft bought the company, and which hasn't been seen in over 2 years.
Protection Manager was a way to massively increase the security of XP, running any program as a restricted user, with network admins able to grant higher permissions to only those programs that need them. Think Vista's UAE, but for XP, and perfect for network administrators. Unfortunately, that would have slowed adoption of Vista, and allowed corporates to roll Protection Manager out en mass on their Windows XP installations, so there's been no sign of the program since Microsoft bought the company.
And as to the rest: I don't mind having a browser in my OS, I just object to Microsoft stifling innovation to do it, and as a network manager, IE is an absolute nightmare when it comes to security. It's done far more harm than good having that included by default.
I've spent the last 8 years fire-fighting security issues caused by IE. They created a browser you can't remove, allowed it to run scripts, and granted it huge amounts of access to the OS. And the only reason it was coupled so tightly with Windows was because Microsoft knew that what they were doing was anti-competitive behaviour and wanted to claim it was an integral part of the OS and couldn't be removed.
So great, 8 years of security headaches because Microsoft didn't care about the law and wanted to muscle in on the browser market. Damn right I have an axe to grind.
20 years? How many examples do you want:
- illegally burying Lotus 123, and replacing it with an inferior product
- illegally killing stacker, and replacing it with the inferior doublespace
- buying winternals, and burying one of the most promising security tools for XP I'd ever seen
- illegally forcing their browser onto the market, creating some of the biggest security headaches IT admins have ever seen
- changing file formats with every release for no reason other than to force companies to upgrade Office
I'm a big user of Microsoft software, but I'm under no illusions as to their business practices, motivations, or horrendous track record when it comes to security and interoperability.
"I think that no one is going to trust an inflatable car."
Why not? As they say in the article, a good chunk of your car is now your airbag. If they're confident enough to send a door panel for the police to shoot at, and can design a car that passes crash tests *without* writing it off, it sounds like they're on to something.
This is one to watch closely I think.
I went for DekiWiki, it's a really full featured wiki, with the ability to create a generated document of the entire thing, which it can then convert straight to PDF.
Throw the PDF on a laptop and you've got a nice tool if the network goes down.
Exactly. The police are criticising Verizon here, but it took the police 11 hours to sort this out themselves. What makes them think it was any easier for Verizon?
The chances are Verizon have a computer system that simply doesn't have the flexibility needed to do this. There probably wasn't an easy way around it without getting that bill paid.
I would have thought a police department, faced with an 11 hour search involving multiple people, could have just stumped up the £20, and maybe asked Verizon for the money back later.
Hell, even if they didn't get the money back they'd have probably saved a few thousand pounds that way.
Spending £20 to save several thousand pounds of man hours and possibly somebody's life? Sounds like the kind of decision you would expect the police to be able to make.
No, I'd agree with lack of apps. Don't get me wrong, there are some good ones for Linux, but in general you don't have the polish or ease of use with Linux apps.
I can put up with the differences and work around things, the average user expects everything to be smooth, and consistent between programs.
Linux is getting there though, and the beauty of open source is that it's hard to stop. Slow & steady should win this race in the end.
Bear in mind folks that this is the same government who admit to an 86% infection rate *each year* among the 5,000 odd computers used at Westminster:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/15/mp_malware_leak_risk/
Yes, that's 4,300 infected machines a year, with 400 hit badly enough that they get cleaned manually (and I hope to god manual intervention means wipe and start again, but I doubt it somehow).
So, that's a nigh on certainty that the login details for the database are already well known to 3rd parties then...