Those of us who are deep in the tech world remember about 6 weeks ago when all our social media and news feeds were talking about the XZ Utils backdoor. ( Here’s a great writeup from my favorite tech site, Ars Technica)

Really quick, bulleted recap:

• XZ Utils is a really awesome compression format. (In fact, earlier this month I got some Linux image files to run off an SD card that were compressed in xz
• SSH uses XZ Utils
• Only one guy was effectively maintaining it
• Someone or some group pretending to be one person social engineered the maintainer to giving them commit access
• they used that to put some backdoors
• Because it’s in SSH it would have made every computer on the net vulnerable
• LUCKILY it was found (by accident - see the Ars Technica story) before it made it out of most (all?) Linux distro test repositories

I was incredibly surprised to hear about it today on Planet Money’s episode: The hack that almost broke the Internet. It’s a really great episode to share with your non-techie friends who want to understand what you were stressed about and which it matters to everyone, not just techies. Of all the Linux distros, they start off interviewing someone from Red Hat! (My favorite Linux distro family) The episode then goes back to the 1980s to explain the origins of open source (not FLOSS, there’s no rms here - it’s Bruce Perens they interview) before bringing it back to the present and explaining the how the social engineering attack happened and what it affected. (Also a quick moment that explained how MS went from hating OSS to supporting it) I thought it was an incredibly well-produced episode that brings everything into context for those who aren’t neck-deep in Linux and/or open source. Give it a listen and pass it along!

1. I “lost” my optical drives. I had to mess with a registry key to get them back.
2. Here’s one I didn’t realize until I went to play Civ 5 and my saves were all gone. Because I have my main OS on a small SSD (and originally had my games on a regular hard drive - now they’re on their own bigger SSD), I had My Docs and My Pictures pointing to another drive. The Windows 10 upgrade lost those settings. I had to open up Windows Explorer and right click on each of those and change the location on the location tab.

I hope it’s a little more mature in Windows 10 - I’ll definitely consider it when I update my photography hard drive.

This is the first time in nearly 10 years that I’m moving to a new version of WIndows.  I pop the CD in and boot up.  I see a text screen as Windows “loads files”.

Nothing here different from a Linux distro.  Then the Windows logo pops up.

Recently Microsoft screwed themselves over.  We have MS Money 2006 from back when I was still getting into Linux and hadn’t convinced my wife completely about how much better it was than Windows.  Recently we switched to back to a credit card where we previously used to download the transactions from within MS Money.  When my wife went to do this, she was informed that MS Money only allows you to do this for two years.  After that if you want to keep doing it you have to buy another copy of Money.  So when she found this out, did she buy a new copy of MS Money?  NO!  She was extremely pissed that this important feature would expire.  So she want to MoneyDance.

System Information for WIndows (SIW) is a program you MUST have installed on your Windows computer.  It gives you all the information you could ever want to know about your computer in a nice easy to use interface.  I learned about it in a recent Computer User Magazine.  Here are some examples of the information it provides:

Motherboard:

PropertyValue

ManufacturerASUSTeK Computer Inc.

ModelP4P800-E

VersionRev 1.xx

Serial NumberMB-1234567890

North BridgeIntel i865P/PE/G/i848P Revision A2

Many people know the mantra - if you are a gamer or office worker, you use the OS from Redmond.  If you are a creative person such as a musician, video editor, etc you use a Mac.  Geeks use Linux.  But more and more people are moving away from Windows and seeking either Macs or Linux.  If you switch to Mac you have to spend a ton of money and if you switch to Linux, it’s free and you can use the hardware you already have.  But what if you’re a creative person?  Can you only go to a Mac?  Lots of people want to allow the creative people to come to Linux so there are more and more Linux distros for the creative types.  This month, in Linux Format Magazine, 64 Studio was bundled on the disc.  It doesn’t run as a liveCD or liveDVD so I’m running it in VirtualBox.  As you can see here, it is a Debian-based distro:

The Free Software Foundation’s Defective by Design is reporting that MSN Music is shutting down, leaving anyone who bought music legally left with music they can no longer listen to.  This will have two outcomes and neither of which is what the music labels really want.  Some people will decide they got left holding the bomb with one second left for doing the right thing and paying for music.  They will decide to download music without paying from now on.  They will reason that if they ever buy music again they won’t know if it will cease working.  Or they will being to take note of places like Amie Street and Amazon.com that sell DRM-free music.

I was recently in a hotel room with my wife and her brother and sister. We both have the exact same acer computer - the Acer Aspire 3680-2022. I have Ubuntu on mine and he has Windows Vista. We bought them both at the same time. So this is IDENTICAL equipment. And in the hotel room he could not get a wireless signal while I was able to get a nice sustained signal the entire time. It’s not what Microsoft wants to hear, but in this case Ubuntu was BETTER on wireless than Windows!! That’s right - Linux IS ready for the desktop NOW! Not next year - now!

Responding to Penguin Pete’s WHY is the transition from Windows to Linux easy for some people?, I had no idea my response would be so lengthy. So I decided to copy it over to my blog. Read his and the other comments and here’s mine.

As for me, my first computer was a Tandy T80 - I’m not 100% sure about it being a T80, but I know it was a Tandy. It was just a keyboard that connected to a Tv. I learned to program in basic and I played proprietary games that came on cassette tapes.

When I was doing my renders of the mancandy mesh/rig, it seemed to me that Windows was taking forever to render the scene compared to my previous Blender renders on Linux. A quick investigation on the Blender FAQ stated that, indeed, the Windows version was faster than the Linux version. However, this didn’t make sense to me. My Windows machine is a 3 Gz Computer with 2 GB of RAM. My Linux box is an AMD (2 GHz, I think) with 512 MB of RAM. The Linux version couldn’t be THAT efficient, could it?

With Windows Vista requiring a computer more powerful than the majority of computer users have, many have touted Linux as the savior of these PCs. Do not throw away your PC because you must upgrade to Vista. Get all the graphical goodness and latest software with Linux. It has modest hardware requirements and will even ressurrect Windows 98 PCs. Then they talk about Compiz/Beryl, the 3D desktop. All of this is true, but I think it’s a bit of a half-truth.

One of the biggest trends over the last few years has been customization. People customize their cellphones, myspace pages, websites and computers. Via the popuplar widgets system on the Mac OSX, SuperKaramba for KDE, and gDesklets in Gnome, people customize their desktops to make them unique to their vision. Even Microsoft has jumped on the bandwagon recently and introduced a widget system of its own. All of these customizations would have taken place on the computer no matter what.

….that my wife, who hates the idea of Linux on her computer, told me that when her computer dies, rather than have Windows Vista on her computer she wants me to install Linux on the computer for her. That’s right, she’d rather have Linux on her computer than the next version of Windows. Why? First of all, she’s heard all the problems of how Vista doesn’t have any drivers for any hardware. She’s also heard about how they’re already getting virii and other exploits and even Forbes recently recommended not updating because of the digital restrictions management and how that messes up your system. Specifically it causes your CPU to use up cycles trying to make sure you aren’t doing anything disapproved of.

My brother upgraded and now his MICROSOFT brand mouse does not work. Specifically, the extra buttons no longer work. Way to not support your own stuff Microsoft!

Dell has introduced (or, if it’s been around for a while, it was just recently brought to public attention) the nSeries Desktops. These are computers that have no installed operating system - so you don’t have to pay for windows. It comes with a Freedos disk. So you can install Linux, *BSD, or whatever you want onto that clean machine - without having to first get rid of windows!

DO NOT UPGRADE! There are many reasons, but here are the most important ones - Norton Antivirus does NOT work with Vista as of now. It will make some graphics and sounds cards work at reduced capacity. Finally, they are ALREADY talking about a Service Pack 1 - meaning there are flaws they know about. Wait until those flaws are fixed. Service Packs mean big flaws, not little ones as are in every piece of software.

Borys Musielak, has published an article on polishlinux.org on his top ten reasons why Linux should be used instead of Windows. I have just finished part one, which is what the previous link goes to. Although he claims that he is purposely being biased against Windows, he’s actually quite fair towards Windows. For example:

What’s the difference between the security policy of Microsoft compared to GNU/Linux and even better, BSD systems? It’s the defaults, idiot! Technologically, both systems can provide a similar level of security, actually. The difference is that most GNU/Linux distros make it much easier to have a secure OS by providing reasonable default settings, usually secure enough for home computer users.

Today, The Linux Extremist, posted his attempts to compute what we in the Linux world call “The Microsoft Tax”, this is the extra cost of a computer with Windows as opposed to a computer without an operating system. His numbers are not all that surprising with an extra cost of 323.67 British pounds for Windows, Office, and Paint Shop Pro. In my eyes, the true purpose of his article was not so much to document the extra cost of Windows, but rather highlight that the Windows user must pay 323.67 in order to gain the functionality that us Linux users take for granted.

VMware has relased their VMware Player player for free. This product acts as a virtual machine (as opposed to an emulator) and is, therefore, supposed to give you much faster speeds than a program like QEMU. You could use it to run Windows on Linux or Linux on Windows. I will go over putting Linux on Windows. First go to http://www.vmware.com/products/player and download the player. Then download the Browser-Appliance. Of course, the easiest way is to download a Linux image which has already been created for you. They have Debian, Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu, and a few others. However, as I already have CDs of Fedora Core 5 test 2 downloaded, I don’t want to waste bandwidth (and time) downloaded the vmx image. Therefore, I will go over a slightly harder way, but, according to the PDF at this site, it doesn’t appear to be that hard.

I was successful in sharing the drive with my windows computer and have tested that I can create files and delete them in Windows. I followed this tutorial. I did everything as they said to setup Samba, which communicates on the Windows smb protocol. They only thing different was to uncomment the line security = user. That has to be set to security = share. Now I’m trying to adapt their NFS to work for me for sharing with Linux. It was working before I formated the drive from FAT32 to ext3. (I reformatted because FAT32 has no ability to set file permissions. Shame on you BGates!) If/When I figure it out, I’ll probably post what I did differently on here. Stay tuned!

It only took me about 4 hours. Most of it was spent doing tedious things like trying to get the motherboard screws to align with the motherboard and getting the dagnabbin’ default motherboard I/O template and the new one in. So to replace my 1.5 Ghz 1 GB RAM dell that died, I now have a 3 Ghz 2 GB Ram Eric Mesa computer. Really my only complaint in the whole process is that the Asus motherboard holes didn’t line up with the Aspire X-Navigator Holes so it’s not as securely fastened as I would have liked.

In all the magazines and web articles I’ve been reading, there has been a call to arms in the Linux camp. Microsoft is going to be innovative, for once, and we’re going to take advantage of it. There will be significant interface changes for Vista and MS Office 12. According to Linux Format Magazine issue 73, there will be major changes to the way Office looks. Why does all of this matter? Well, one of the complaints leveled against Linux time and again is, “it may be simple, but I already know how everything works in Windows. Why switch and waste time relearning it?” It’s the whole gist of Microsoft’s campaign that it costs more to switch to Linux than remain with MS. It’s not cost as Linux is free as in beer and freedom, but because we have to retrain the workforce, they claim. So, the logic amongst Linux enthusiasts goes, if MS is going to overhaul things, why not give us a shot? I must say this viewpoint appears to have some merit.

My wife asked me a poignant question a couple of weeks ago, “If Linux is SOOO awesome, why don’t you stop using Windows?” I told her that I couldn’t play civ4. “I thought you said it was ready for use and equal to Windows,” she continued. And I realized, there are probably some others who prosthelyze about how awesome Linux is. While I think Linux is amazing, and can do some great things which are hard or impossible to do in Windows, it is not for everyone.

As I spoke with my in-laws last weekend about viruses and anti-virus software makers, they voiced a thought everyone has had at one time or another- perhaps the viruses from Norton and McAfee. After all, why would you spend $40 a year to keep your computer safe if there weren’t any viruses? As I explained to them that, actually, most viruses nowadays come from Organized Crime in an attempt to steal identities, I thought about the fiasco it would be for such a thing to occur. It would be like Microsoft purposely creating a virus for Linux.

Wine, the program which allows Windows programs to run on Linux by implementing the DLL structure, has gone beta. How long did it take? Twelve years! That’s right! Twelve! Now, a lot of programs in the open source world are considered to be beta and they run perfectly fine (eg fluxbox and enlightenment). However, Wine has been in Alpha for twelve years! The reason? Windows is complicated as heck to emulate and it isn’t exactly out there and documented like open source projects are. They had to reverse engineer EVERYTHING! But, you may be saying, Beta still isn’t release quality! When I go to Winehq.org the version for download is 0.9. That’s true, but getting out of Alpha was a VERY important stage. You see, while in Alpha they would always fix one bug at the expense of functionality of another. In other words, if you looked on the program compatibility database you might see something like - This worked with 20030406, but does not work with 20040406. From now on, because it’s in Beta, those kinds of continuity breaks are not allowed. It should allow for a much faster development cycle as bug fixes will build on each other, not eradicate each other. I’m building from source as we speak and I hope to be able to post some test pictures later. Lets give the folks over at Wine a round of applause!

One of the things I love about Linux is that it doesn’t slow down like Windows tends to. I can (and did) have the computer up for weeks at a time and it doesn’t go any slower than when I first booted it up. More importantly, after updates the computer doesn’t slow down. I don’t know what others have experienced, but whenever I update Windows or even download anything more than a few hundred megabytes, Windows slows to a crawl. This may be something unique to my computer setup or something, but just downloading the ISOs for Fedora cause my Windows computer to grind to a halt! With Linux, I can download gigs of updates and it doesn’t have any bad effect. I hope that 1) Linux never loses whatever it is about the kernel that makes it this stable when running for days and after updates and 2) that Windows finally learns how to do that.

I used to think Windows was so amazing. I thought it was at least 20 times better than Macintosh. Not only is their interface so obtuse, they don’t really have any programs other than video, audio, and photographic production. Windows was awesome and Bill Gates was a near genius. Those were the days! I remember being so angry at the government for filing an antitrust lawsuit. So what if Windows came with IE, weren’t people smart enough to download Netscape if they really wanted it? I remember Sophomore year in college being so excited at the new Windows Media Player which promised so many neat little trick like auto-playlists. The reason why I loved Windows so much si that I didn’t know I had a choice. I thought it was Windows or Mac and I certainly preferred Gates’ little creation.

Another reason why Linux will take over the world.

25 Years After DOS: Lessons Learned for Linux by Walter V. Koenning for the Reallylinux.com OPINION/EDITORIAL section.

NOTICE: Our other recent OP/ED postings include: Microsoft’s Approach May Isolate U.S. Permanently Open Source VS Windows: Reality of a Better Paradigm

Microsoft Corporation is preparing a gallant pageant to celebrate 25 years of what should at the very least be considered remarkable marketing. But what can the Linux world learn from Microsoft’s past 25 years of unique experiences and domination? I think we can uncover a lot simply going back to that first fateful year when Microsoft released PC-DOS for IBM PCs (as a joint venture with IBM).