The World of a Penguin

As I wrote the other day I have visited the Swedish conference Open Source Forum . It was a talk about buying the right thing after lunch the first day. All he said were things that everybody knows; focus on the functionality you need, do not buy a lot of extra functionality, more expensive is not better etc. It is always good to repeat those things. I still wounder why so many organizations pay for extra functionality they do not need. The IT manager of the small city Osby then told us that they have converted their organization to Open Office. Those who needs the MS Office functionality can get it but its become more and more rare. Unfortunately the big suppliers of applications to governmental organizations integrates very close to MS Office and are unwilling to change that. I have talked to several cities that want it to change, but failed. The second day became more technical focused with talks about PostgresSql /EnterpriseDB, Ubuntu, Thin clients based on Ubuntu, Security and In...

MySQL has a press release that tells us that the Swedish police save the amount of 400 fully equipped police cars in the period of five years. Unfortunately, very few Swedish governmental organizations tells the public these kind of facts about their savings using Open Source. I hope this will be a wall breaking case.

I am setting up my own CA (Certificate Authority) for all my services using SSL on my machines. Yesterday I wanted to import the Root-certificate into Firefox. Thats easy, if it is for a single user. Just click on the root certificate. But if you have a lot of users and computers? One do not want to force each user to do this manually. I want the root CA should be installed on each computer by the administrator and automatically work for the users. This is not possible with Firefox. The Root-CA:s certificates are compiled into the Firefox binaries and then at first start each user get its own certificate database. There are no central certificate database that Firefox looks into too. Ubuntu and Debian has a nice functionality where all CA-certs are stored in one place and then used by all well written applications, but not Firefox. I hope this will change in Firefox 3.0.

and now has it happened. I am of course talking about the big discussion subject in the FOSS-world today, the CNN-article about Microsofts attack on Free and Open Source Software. I am not worried at all. I hope instead that this will kill software patents and proprietary software. Unfortunately, a lot of managers will be afraid of open source. Personally, I would be more afraid doing business with a company that base its existence on layers and lock in methods. The last two weeks, I have been working with a commercial content management system. Don't ask me why, I wondering this my self. It has not been a pleasant drive. Not at all, not a single minute. It is complex to configure. There are tons of errors in the documentation. They say you should use maven , but they don't do it in their example site. They jump around with different versions of jBoss, tomcat and other J2EE-environments. (Tomcat is not a J2EE-environment, but anyway are some examples based on it.) I am glad I...

There are two days left until Ubuntu 7.04 has its release. My objective view is that the non open source computer press writes more about Ubuntu's upcoming release than they wrote about Red Hat Enterprise 5 when it was released. The big question is; when are management in enterprise businesses ready to accept Ubuntu in the server rooms and on the desktops. I think, unfortunately, that they require a large business partner to rely on, even if they have enough competence inhouse.What may give a big push forward if some big consulting corporation, like CSC, starts to support Ubuntu. If this happends, how is the community affected?

Except from having a terrible cold this week I have been at two seminaries. The first one was Red Hat and JBoss Value² Tour. Red Hat clearly show that they have entered into the offices of managers, CEOs, CIOs, VPs etc. They also show that they want to lock you in as any other vendor, but they can defend themself that at least the source is open. From a commercial and organizational perspective I think they do one important thing wrong. They are still not shipping proprietary drivers such as wireless, graphic cards, codecs etc. This means that as a system manager one must still handle these things to give the users a pleasant drive on the desktop. Here is an area where other providers such as Suse and also Ubuntu have done a tremendous job. On the other hand Suse trie to lock us in with Yast, even if it is open source, which makes it harder to manage from central point. Ubuntu on the other hand lack of kerberos/ldap/AD integration in main, which is a demand in many organizations. Red H...

I read (swedish) at the Swedish computer newspaper Computer Sweden that OMX customers demands that their software runs on Linux. OMX develops stock and other exchange market place software. They also own the Nordic stock exchange. OMX next generation of system will be based on Linux. OMX says: "Our customers most often want to use Linux. ... Among the actors at the finance market who have selected new technical platform, very few have selected Windows." (my translation) OMX software sections revenue is about 200 million dollars. When will Ubuntu be their distribution of chose?

A few days ago I gave some support to people running a desktop pilot project. They are testing three different desktops; Novell/Suse Desktop 10, Fedora, Red Hat Workstation. The task was to integrate Suse Desktop with an existing AD. Okay, lets start with using the configuration GUI that they are famous for. There is a selection for running AD. Nice! Click for SSL, the current AD is no configured for TLS. Fill in Group and User OU. This seems promising. But here are we entering the halt. MS recommends that you configure your AD to use a proxy-users before authentication. But the Suse GUI does not have support for a proxy-user, so we change direction and start editing the /etc/ldap.conf-file. Add the proxy-user. But things is not working. A normal ldapsearch works but not doing id username . Looking in the logs it shows that it tries to use ldap and not ldaps. Some searching using google gives that on Suse the parameter ssl on in the config file is not working, you instead have to poin...