Month: June 2007

Dell has only been offering Ubuntu for over a month now. I haven’t heard all that much in regards to their Support, I wonder if Microsoft is giving dell $$ to not Support Ubuntu on computers sold for Home Office/Business purposes?

Dell Refuses to Sell Ubuntu to Business – An anonymous reader writes “I had a surreal experience with Dell today. My boss asked me to order a new computer for our small, non-profit business. Wanting to support Dell in their decision to sell computers with Ubuntu installed, I decided to order one. First, I talked to a small business representative, who informed me that I could not order one of the Ubuntu-based computers through the small business department. I had to go through the “home and home office” department. I called the Home office department. I asked the representative if I could buy one of the ubuntu computers for my company. She said (and I quote), “these Dell computers are designed for personal use only, as long as you use it for personal use, you can purchase one.” So I lied and said I would…. Next, I tried to buy it on our business credit card. They would have none of that. She told me that I had to buy it through a personal card. Now, as a non-profit, our business does not pay sales tax (10% in Tennessee). Had I bought it with my own card, I would have had to pay tax (~$90), which my company would not have reimbursed me for. So…..no Dell today.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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I for one am currently at torn between XP and Vista. I like XP because it doesn’t crash, my drivers work. However, more people keep asking for help with Vista, and I haven’t even logged into a Vista Machine yet. 🙁

Microsoft Pleads With Consumers to Adopt Vista Now – SlinkySausage writes “Microsoft has admitted, in an email to the press, that ‘some customers may be waiting to adopt Windows Vista because they’ve heard rumors about device or application compatibility issues, or because they think they should wait for a service pack release.’ The company is now pleading with customers not to wait until the release of SP1 at the end of the year, launching a ‘fact rich’ program to try to convince them to ‘proceed with confidence’. The announcement coincides with an embarrassing double-backflip: Microsoft had pre-briefed journalists that it was going to allow home users to run Vista basic and premium under virtual machines like VMWare, but it changed its mind at the last minute and pulled the announcement.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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This is just lovely. A file system that can take automatic snap shots!

ZFS On Linux – It's Alive! – lymeca writes “LinuxWorld reports that Sun Microsystem’s ZFS filesystem has been converted from its incarnation in OpenSolaris to a module capable of running in the Linux user-space filsystem project, FUSE. Because of the license incompatibilities with the Linux kernel, it has not yet been integrated for distribution within the kernel itself. This project, called ZFS on FUSE, aims to enable GNU/Linux users to use ZFS as a process in userspace, bypassing the legal barrier inherent in having the filesystem coded into the Linux kernel itself. Booting from a ZFS partition has been confirmed to work. The performance currently clocks in at about half as fast as XFS, but with all the success the NTFS-3g project has had creating a high performance FUSE implementation of the NTFS filesystem, there’s hope that performance tweaking could yield a practical elimination of barriers for GNU/Linux users to make use of all that ZFS has to offer.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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My original colocation machine was FreeBSD 4.2 and it was fun to play with. The package system was great, you could either compile or install pre-compiled versions. However, when you upgrade and leave compiled/pre-compiled packages dormant. They can come back to bit you in the ass with dependency issues and the package database breaking. I’m glad someone is making an effort to make it more user friendly, although I don’t run BSD I love a lot of its features.

24-hour Test Drive of PC-BSD – An anonymous reader writes “Ars Technica has a concise introduction to PC-BSD, a FreeBSD derivative that emphasizes ease of use and aims to convert Windows users. The review describes the installation process, articulates the advantages of PC-BSD,and reveal some of the challenges that the reviewer faced along the way. From the article: ‘In the end, I would suggest this distribution to new users provided they had someone to call in case of a driver malfunction during installation. I would also recommend PC-BSD to seasoned Unix users that have never tried using FreeBSD before and would prefer a shallower learning curve before getting down to business.'”

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Should companies that are already providing Joomla! components commercially be forced to move to an GPL (open source) based model?

There are many start up companies that provide a feature/component that Joomla! never had to begin with, for an inexpensive fee. There are also people that have modules that have been created to be free! Should this change? Should all Joomla! components be open source?

Is another split going to happen? Will this be the end of the thousands of companies that provide modules for a fee to disappear? You can read more on the frontpage of Joomla!

GPL compliance issues are tearing Joomla! apart – Joomla! project leader Louis Landry and his colleagues want to protect the project they love. That’s why, after two years of allowing proprietary plugins for the open source CMS, the group has decided to ask third-party developers for voluntary… [Linux.com]

This is a really neat idea. You can roll all of your scripted installations for all of your distributions into one application, instead of configuring each distributions application. For example, if you wanted to install RedHat, you no longer need Kickstart. The same would go for Ubuntu, no more preseed. Just one application to handle all of the scripted installations.

New LinuxCOE helps admins customize distros - Hewlett-Packard released version 4 of its Linux Common Operating Environment (LinuxCOE) software this month. LinuxCOE is a front end to a set of Perl scripts that helps administrators by building customized install images for various Linux... [Linux.com]

This is something I saw over at Ars Technica. This is a big and ugly move for AMD, no chip fabrication and just straight up design might put them in a hard place. Intel at the moment does both, and has many fabrication production facilities. Here are some facts about AMD:

And here is some information about Intel:

It was hard to find a lot of detail about Intels Facilities. Even WikiPedia and a 4 page google search turned up nothing.

Read More…
[Ars Technica]