The World of a Penguin

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 .

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...

Hereby I nominate ant to the challenge of most stupid build environment. Why? Its function for tar files together does not preserve the rights on the files as all normal tar-programs does. If it were on windows I can understand it, but not on Linux/Ubuntu. Theres a work around where one can say that this file has these rights and those files has some other rights. But why make it so complicated? Well there is some kind of motivation for it; Java does not support file permissions. This is the big drawback with write once, run everywhere. One cannot take advantage of different Operating systems features. By the way... The world has been a better place, at least according to all Vista fans. M$ start shipping SP1. I am sad for them their world only gets better less than ones a year. Mine and all other ubunteros world gets better every six month.

After to much problems with my MS Windows-computer at work, I decided to start using our new Linux clients. It is based on Fedora 8 64-bit. My first impression was that it worked pretty well, but I need to use Citrix to access some applications such as document management system and time reporting. One of my duties is to develop a new website using the CMS-system Polopoly. When I started my development environment I run out of memory. Due to that the Fedora installation was 64-bit it needs more memory which was foreseen by the people that develop the new client platform and no one wanted to give me more memory. So I ended up installing a 32-bit Ubuntu 7.10, which was no big deal. I installed it on a HP laptop 6910p which so far seems to works nice. Flipping internal and external monitor works great., but I have not tested Wireless and Bluethooth yet. Since I mentioned Polopoly. We reported a bug last week that we could not upload pictures when using a PostgresSQL database. The answer...

I wrote yesterday that I thought to buy a laser printer . My brother in law told me that I could take the one he had standing in the cellar and try it out. So I will go there and fetch it some day. This weekend we visited my mother in law in Stockholm. We decided to visit Mediamarkt on our journey. When we told my Mother in law that, she asked us to buy her a printer for about €80. We found a HP Deskjet F4180 All in one that we bought for her. It has a built in scanner and copier. In her apartment I connected it to her Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) machine. The computer said "I found a printer you may start to use it" or something equal to that. Then we were up and running. Both printing and scanning worked out of the box. I wrote some small instructions for my mother in law how to print photos and use the scanner. In reviews I have read about the printer people complain about that it is hard to install ... in MS Windows. I do not understand it, run Linux/Ubuntu and there are ...

Yesterday I committed a sin. I registered an account for Microsoft messenger. The reason is that some colleges using MSN and one of them will be home for child care after X-mas and work one day from home. So we needed a faster way to communicate. I could not commit the sin without trouble so it looks like Microsoft and I agree with each other that our road must not be crossed unnecessarily. When I tried to install Microsofts own client it required that my client got upgraded. Since my computer at work is upgraded centrally I could not do that without installing Microsofts update client. If I do that I am on my own and my sysadmins will just wipe out my disk if I asks for help. The solution was to install Pidgin . The next problem was to register for a passport account, since I do not want a Hotmail account. It took a while to find the right place. After an hour or so I was up and running. I must point out that I only use MSN for work, not for pleasure. The main reason I feel that usin...

According to the Swedish computer newspaper TechWorld OpenSource ( article in Swedish ) the Danish Laptop provider Zepto sells one of four computers without operating system. My wife bougth one half a year ago. It works terrific with Linux, in her case Ubuntu. I would not hesitate to buy my next laptop from them. Zepto sells computer on mail order all over Europe. I do not understand in what the major computer providers sees the problem. May be I do, it is called Microsoft.

Red Hats Colby Hoke tells here that they introduced yum to solve the dependency hell. He continues: "Red Hat led the way [...] to solve a customer problem the dependency hell." He missed totally that they were more or last the last of the major Linux distributions to solve this problem. Or does he means that they were the first suits that talked about that they had solved a problem, other Linux users didn't have. To lead does not mean to just be in front of Solaris and Microsoft, it means to be in front of all. Does he knows that Y in yum stands for Yellow Dog, which is a Linux-distribution Macs. The dependency hell was one of the reason why I left Red Hat and Fedora in favor of first Debian and later Ubuntu.

It will be an exciting week in front of us. On Monday the European Union will decide in the antitrust charges against Microsoft. As all of you may know, SCO filed for Chapter 11 this Friday, so on Tuseday there will be a hearing to decide if SCO will get bankruptcy protection or not. These decisions will affect the Open Source community. I guess that the decisions can not hurt the community, just gain it. The question is how much?

It has been a lot of writing about that Microsoft offered "marketing money" to Swedish partners that become member in the OOXML standard group i the Swedish standard organization (SIS), which votes for Sweden in ISO. The Swedish computer news magazine Computer Sweden has now translated one of their articles to English that describes what happened. By allowing this kind of scenes happened ISO will play out its role as an serious standard organization. Unfortunately this will hurst both consumers and the industry. What will happen the day screws following the same standard are incompatible? Update: Computer Sweden has a new article (in Swedish) about the voting. SIS has found that one company voted twice, which means that the voting is invalid and has to be redone. A new vote will probably not conducted before Sunday when the ISO voting take place. This means that Sweden will not vote in the ISO voting. No vote is better than a yes vote.

This is another reason to not use proprietary software. It's much better to do it the Open Source way. Take a look an all the places you can download Ubuntu from. These are independent and you will be up and running without the single point of failure I feel sorry for all the people that have to call daddy Bill for an OK to take another "beer."

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...

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 wrote about Dell and Linux a few days ago. ZDnet confirms the problem. They called all five top vendors in UK and asked about buy a naked PC. Some of the vendors said that they could, but when ZDnet tried to they failed. Just as I did with Dell. Up to proof all big suppliers. I want to buy a laptop for my wife. The one of you that let me choose any, not just one, of your models in Sweden without an operating system or with a free Linux pre-installed (preferably Ubuntu) will get the order. Of course it must be cheaper than with Microsoft windows, last time a got €130 in rebate. So you need to be close to that.

There have been a lot of discussion about Dell and Linux for a while. Both at Dell's Idea Storm , different news and blogs. It had not only been at Linux and Open source news sites, but also in major computer magazines. Dell seems and confess that they are confused about Linux and how to fit in their business model. Mark describes it pretty well in his blog . He also mentions that taking part in Microsofts marketing budget is important money. This is impossible for the suppliers to admit officially, but several suppliers have told me this of the record. When I bought my new laptop this Christmas, I looked for a specific configuration but also for the possibility to buy one without an OS or with Linux pre installed. Any Linux is better than Windows, even if I replace it with Ubuntu. At a fair here in Sweden early last fall a Dell representative told me that I could buy a laptop without Windows if I called them, but not on the site. When it was time for me to buy my laptop mailed Del...

I just want to say that I support this . If you accuse some one, you should also show your proofs.

We all remember that Fraunhofer required license fees for MP3 a few years ago. Today it is reported in news that Microsoft has lost a law suite about MP3 licensing against Alcatel-Lucent. MS thought they already had paid to Fraunhofer, but the jury found that it is Alcatel-Lucent that owns the technology behind MP3. Microsoft has to pay $1.52billion to Alcatel-Lucent. Here is my advice to Microsoft; Do like Ubuntu does, skip MP3 and only provide the free Ogg/Vorbis-format. If I can dream a bit more I want them to skip WMV (not VMW) too in favor for ogg. All MP3-player manufacturers start to support ogg, and that iTunes converts to ogg.