The World of a Penguin

We visited my mother in law this weekend. The main reason was to attending a party in Stockholm, but since Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) was released on Thursday I took the chance to upgrade her computer. I have actually nothing to write about it since there were no problems and no surprises. Worth mention is that here Computer is a 1GHz Celeron with 256MB memory.

Congratulation to us and nice work! I have been running Hardy Heron (the beta) on one computer at home for a while.I upgraded my workstation at work before I left for the day. So I have tree computers to go before all is on latest and greatest. How much have you seen about XP SP3 compared to all articles about Ubuntu 8.04?

Groklaw has an interesting article about that MS Office 2007 does not comply with the ISO 29500 standard (OOXML) and fails the OOXML conformance tests. On the other hand does OpenOffice conform with the other ISO-document standard ISO 29300 (ODF). So we have one standard that noone complies with and onte that some complies with. Where will this end? A better news is that South Africa is adding up to the group of countries that accept ODF as a national standard. Lat week was it Brazil .

Each time we get close to a new Ubuntu release I notice an increasing number of articles in non Open Source media. This time I found an interview with Mark on BBC . Mark mention deployment of 50 000 Ubuntu desktops at the French police and 500 000 Ubuntu desktops in the Spanish education system.

What does this mean? Are Red Hat giving up and saying that they have lost the battle of the Linux desktop to Ubuntu and Novell/Suse? Relative to the state of the art Linux desktop at the given time I think that Red Hat 7 was a better desktop than latest Fedora is.

For two days, I have attended a conference about using open source in the public sector in Sweden. I held a talk about developing GIS-applications using open source, using applications such as PostgreSQL with postgis, geoserver etc. There were several talks that included reports about the state in the other nordic country. Very simple is the political system in Denmark promoting open standards, Norway and Island promoting use of Open Source. In Finland and Sweden are the politicans doing nothing. One keynote was held by the swedish minister for Infra structure. The speach was a huge disapointment with no indication at all where they want to go. She were not even willing to answer questions. The sky is not totally black. The city of Sundsvall told that they had developed a system for communication between school and parents released it open source and then purchased the maintanence in competition between suppliers. In this way can the follow the swedish law about public purchasing (LOU...

I am reading an article on the Swedish news site IDG about pro and cons between re-install and upgrading Ubuntu. The attached forum shows a clear doubt to upgrading. I meet the same opinion and lack of knowledge at work when talking about how easy it is to upgrade Ubuntu/Debian, in fact that it is as easy as do a security update. People do not believe me. Why? My guess is that MS Windows, commercial Unix such as Solaris, True64 and RPM-based Linux distribution have an upgrading scheme between releases that differs from security upgrades. You need to reboot the machine on a CD run a special upgrading program and hope that everything goes well. Most of the time you get a very crapy result whith lost configuration, broken application etc. Some OS (read MS Windows) are more or less impossible to upgrade to new releases, a new installation is the only option. It is time for a information campain about how easy it is to upgrade between Ubuntu releases. If it was not so easy it would be impo...

Some companies are smarter than other. U3 is not one of them. U3 provides technology to make an USB-memory stick to act as an CD-ROM. That may be be good or as other describes it; another way to distribute malware. Anyway, my wife got a U3-enabled USB-stick from work. Curious as I am I wanted to disable the U3 part. I find U3:s uninstall page. It asked why I want to remove it. I selected the alternative that I run Mac or Linux and then took the download button. Guess what? I got a MS Windows program. So why does they provide me with an alternative "Mac or Linux"?

I do not understand why it is so common that people writes to a mailinglist and ask how to unsubscribe? If they were capable to subscribe, why are they not capable to read the footer in each mail: -- ubuntu-users mailing list ubuntu-users@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users The exampel above is from the ubuntu user list but it is quite common on other lists too. Are you one of the people I talk about? Then check some mails from the list you want to unsubscribe for instructions before you ask/complain on the list.