The Sikh Geek

Miguel de Icaza has the low down on the release of Mono 2.0, the Opensource Project to bring .NET to Linux and other platforms. I’ve been following Mono since its inception but for me it was never feature complete enough to do any serious development on. This release has a complete implementation of Winforms (…and thank heavens they dropped their reliance on Wine to achieve that!), rewriting the forms rendering from scratch. They’ve managed to sneak in C# 3.0 and LINQ as well.

The Project Leader, Miguel de Icaza, is the original developer of Gnome which is one of the two main Linux desktop systems used today. He sold his business Ximian to Novell and has since worked for them on Mono.

The road has not been smooth for him as he is a strong advocate of the technical advantages of .NET which has not endeared him to the wider Opensource community. Bringing Microsoft technology to Linux? That’s heresy to many! Worse still he works for Novell, which many in the Opensource Community, feel sold out to Microsoft.

In reality he’s a pragmatist, it’s about getting the best technology to run on the best platforms and to have binary compatibility between them. It’s kind of strange to run a .exe file on Linux. I did a quick test on compiling a simple Winforms app on my OpenSuse 11.0 distro and then took the exe and ran it directly on Vista without a problem.

There’s no WPF and it’s not on the roadmap either, it’s apparently just too hard to implement with their current resources. Unless .NET gets major adoption on Linux then I can’t see this happening anytime soon. However, Silverlight is coming to Linux via the Mono subproject Moonlight and has technical support from Microsoft. In fact Microsoft has recently given its media codecs to Moonlight to port to Linux and Silverlight 2.0 support is on the roadmap. So, whilst you won’t get full WPF support there will be a desktop version of Silverlight to run on Linux as part of Moonlight.

So, this is a good example of Microsoft’s open technology approach around .NET, which is allowing an Opensource implementation of it’s framework.

This apparently is the view of David M Williams of NSW in a recent article and he’s a Linux guy, surprise, surprise. There’s a lot of inaccuracies in his post which Susan has highlighted in her post about this article. I’m not really sure why I’m even wasting my time writing about it.

I don’t hate Linux, as a true Geek I respect good technology wherever it comes from. I know people/friends who are running successful Linux businesses and good luck to them. Having done both Linux and SBS for SMBs, I know which one customers are happier with and it’s not Linux. There isn’t a Linux distro/product on the market which rivals what SBS delivers out of the box. So what if SBS is easy to set-up (that old chestnut again except from Linux people). I love the wizards and the fact I can do stuff easily, I have a life and I don’t want to show my worth in low level configuration stuff and scripts that are totally unmaintainable.

The thing that Linux implementers for small businesses love to do is get their favourite Linux distro working on a P3/P4 - why? Because they can! Yep, that’s the height of my ambition to work on the most lowliest, shitiest hardware I can get my hands on. Believe me, I have worked on the most resource constrained devices out there like developing OSes for Smart Cards - never again!

You know there is a company who is making serious money out of Linux and that is Red Hat. It’s a smart company! Why? Because it along a go dumped desktop Linux and SMBs and went straight to Enterprise. Bingo!! They started charging serious money for the subscriptions, they built a great certification programme (RHCE) and provided paid for support. They’ve watched their business grow and grow, despite people using things like CentOS built from their codebase.

From what I can tell the Debian development process is a complete joke but oh yes we have Ubuntu now - except that it relies on Debian.

I nearly forgot, there is another company that is making a truckload of money from Open Source and that is Apple. It took a BSD distribution, customised the hell out of it, threw a big "V" sign at the FSF, and cashed in big time and let Microsoft take all the heat. Sorry Linux, the desktop (KDE/Gnome) sucks big time and Linus Torvalds thinks Gnome is for retards.

I had big hopes for Novell’s Suse Linux but they are mired in a declining business that is NetWare. I’m about the only living person on this planet that likes YasT, yes more GUI/Wizard configuration tools. Also go check out Microsoft’s Open Source strategy and let’s promote Interoperability.

What Microsoft’s inept Linux bashing campaign failed to do might just be achieved by the anonymous blogger who is writing the Linux Hater’s Blog. I love reading it not because I hate Linux and if you read the comments on that blog, many are Linux users themselves. Ubuntu has just been voted the most hated Community distro on that site.

Whilst reading that blog is very funny, it’s also a great insight into the failings of Linux (mostly as a desktop solution). When I read it, I can empathise with the issues and a realisation that I had mostly brushed under the carpet these things. Why worry about these things when I could bask in the fact that it was all free!

Good old Apple, takes an open source BSD based OS, customises the hell out it without releasing back to anyone, makes a ton of money from it and completely escapes the FSF backlash, whilst leaving Microsoft to take the heat! Steve Jobs is a genius!

You might think that the conversion is complete, that I’ve drunk far too much Koolade and I was even accused of "fanaticism" this week! I like to think of it as "passion"

Firstly, no I don’t hate Linux (I use it myself and have done a lot!), but this is damn funny!

*** Warning ***

It contains very strong language so don’t say I didn’t warn you.

LinuxHater’s Blog

*** Warning ***

Whilst the Linux fanboys rip into Vista, many are using a desktop called Gnome which even Linus Torvalds thinks is retarded. If you think it’s only Microsoft who has crises then look at this call to action from the Ubuntu Community Manager. Jeez, he’s even offering to get everyone round to his house to sort everything out! Maybe, Mark Shuttleworth will stump up some more cash and buy him an office at least! Ubuntu, who thinks "shitty brown" is the height of design and they have the audacity to slag off Vista. At least if you were a Mac owner you might have some ammunition.

Don’t you just love it when things just work together, well I do! I recently wrote about using Ubuntu 8.04 and saw a great post by Girish entitled Ubuntu 8.04 on SBS 2003 network, so I thought I’d try this with SBS 2008 and it works! I previously couldn’t browse the domain using smb4k using Konqueror which uses Samba.

Girish used the likewise-open package and uses the the command line apt-get install but I used the Synaptic Package Manager from System -> Administration and then click on search and type "likewise" and install the likewise-open and likewise-open-gui packages. Once installed under System -> Administration select likewise. When joining the domain use the domainname.local format as domainname by itself didn’t work.

Modify the startup scripts as outlined by Girish and reboot. When logging  in use a domain login in the format domainname\username.

You can map your network shares using Nautilus by going to Places -> Network and on the File Browser select File -> Connect to Server and change Service Type to Windows share and complete the following info

Server

Share

Folder

User Name

Domain Name

You’ll be asked for a password which is the username’s domain password. When selecting the new Share icon you might be asked to authenticate again and make sure it has the right domain name and select remember password. You can  then browse through your Shares, open files, etc. One issue I found when trying to open Office files is that OpenOffice.org 2.4 asks for authentication again but defaults to "WORKGROUP" and I don’t know how to change that. To workaround this you can copy the file locally to work on it and copy back.

I’d never heard of Likewise but this is a great find by Girish! Now just need Evolution to work with Exchange Server 2007 and we’re rocking and rolling!

I was reading Viral Tarpara’s blog post about Facebook possibly Open Sourcing its code. Viral hoped that they didn’t choose the GPL because it would stop others commercialising derivative works. This is quite a common perception and something not helped by the Free Software Foundation itself. But is this true? Now, only a Judge and a Court of Law can actually make those decisions about the provisions of a License. What we do know is that GPL Software is commercialised and so are derivative works. Linux is an example of GPL Software and which is incorporated with proprietary code such as device drivers and sold on a subscription basis by companies such as Red Hat and Novell. Last time I looked these were fairly commercial organisations. There is a great book entitled “Open Source Licensing” by Lawrence Rosen which looks at these issues from a legal perspective. It is true that the FSF has not wanted the linking of non GPL code with GPL code but as Rosen points out in his book, what matters is the actual terms and conditions which don’t directly preclude this happening and also having this tested in Court and therefore the Precdents that would go with it. Linus Torvalds has been fairly vocal on this and wanting the freedom to incorporate/link non-GPL and GPL code.

The GNU project was started back in 1984 to create a Unix Like Operating System but the kernel was never completed and so the GNU suite of programmes were used with the Linux Kernel and Linux is a trademark owned by Linus Torvalds who has chosen to license the Linux Kernel using the GPL v2. It’s strange that an organisation like the FSF promoting Software Freedom, doesn’t want people to have the freedom to chose the Licenses under which a system/product is put together.

Well, it’s actually going to be a combination of Ubuntu LTS 8.04 (Hardy Heron) and OpenSuse 11.0 (hopefully when that gets released sometime in June). The main needs are to use Bugzilla and Subversion and also to look more closely at Mono and see how far we can really go with cross platform development with it.

In the recent Linux Format Magazine review Ubuntu 8.04 got a 7/10 and I can see why now. It’s a good distro, easy to install and configure but it’s not trying to be anything spectacular or cutting edge. One of my previous pains with Linux has always been getting stuff installed and having to build stuff from source and resolve library dependencies. It’s not pretty and life is just too short to be messing with things like that. I know some see it as a test manhood but not me! The Synaptic Package Manager and the .deb files of Debian are about the best things around and the online respositories are extremely fast for downloading from.

Accessing email from Cougar is done from Outlook Web Access via Firefox 3 beta as Evolution doesn’t support connecting to Exchange 2007. I don’t know whether there is a resolution to this at the moment. Also, I cannot browse my network shares on Cougar but having looked at the latest Samba version (3.0.29), I think I might have to upgrade to that.

I had the usual having to install libdvdcss to watch DVDs as most Linux distros won’t provide this because of the legal implications. I’ve installed Skype and I’m using Kopete for Messenger and how could I forget Twitter, which is sorted out with the Firefox addin TwitterFox.

There’s also a great game called Open Arena which is a Quakesque like experience, so shooting up some badies is catered for. So, for now I think I’m equipped for general day to day usage.

It’s fast and responsive on my lowly laptop and with Vista on it, things are frustratingly slow.

The Port25 guys have a really good paper on using Windows to manage Linux Identities. It relies on Samba on the Linux client side, Linux’s Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM)  and Identity Management for Unix under Active Directory Services on Windows Server 2003 R2. The Linux client is made a domain member of the Windows Server.

The latest version of Samba (v4) is looking to provide a full Active Directory domain controller but I don’t think Microsoft will be writing a paper on this.

The significance of Samba 4.0 is that it’s been virtually completely rewritten and support added so that it can act as an Active Directory 2000 or above domain controller to Windows Clients with a full domain join. Linux has a lot to thank Samba for because it is this little piece of software which makes it a possibility as a replacement for a Windows Server.

This ONLamp Article gives a great overview of Mono which is an implementation of .NET on Linux and the Mono guys have also been working hard on getting Silverlight working for Linux as well with some good progress.