noel alanguilan

i was just thinking the other day the things that using free and open source software (foss) affords me. i decided to list them down:

no viruses. windows viruses cannot run on linux systems. so i don’t have to worry much if my workstation will get infected with conficker or any other ficker for that matter. i actually tried running a windows virus in my system.  my usb stick got infected by something from a shop where i had a document printed off the stick. when i got home i tried double-clicking the virus program just to run it and it wouldn’t. i forget what virus it was but i knew it was a pretty useless one.

no software licenses. i know of a company who spent weeks trying to pin down all of the licenses for the software they have been using for the past several years. unfortunately, they couldn’t find everything. with the threat of the anti-piracy people raiding their offices at any time looming over their heads, they are seriously considering switching to open-source software instead of buying another set of licenses.

keeping track of software licenses is easy if you only have less than three computers to look after. it gets more serious and tedious if you’re trying to keep tabs on 25 or more workstations. using foss, i do not  have to worry about these licensing issues. no ax over my neck.

system stability. and this is entirely from my experience (your own mileage may vary)–there were more times that i had to reset windows than linux due to the system itself becoming unresponsive or an application making the whole system unstable. i have several linux servers which has an uptime of more than 60 days.

more than affordable. its free. how can you worry about that? which affords me a decent pair of pants. or maybe three.

simply put, i worry less when i use linux.

i noticed a couple of things that changed when i ugraded to ubuntu 9.04

• the menu entry of grsync was moved from applications – internet to applications – system tools
• opera disappeared. i don’t exactly know how but the .opera subdiretory with my previous settings was still there. i just had to download the latest .deb package directly from the opera website. it wasn’t in the add/remove applications program and there’s one dubious looking entry in synaptic so i decided to do a direct download.
• skype disappeared too (there’s a pattern here). so i had to download the .deb package directly from skype. because of the relative newness of ubuntu 9.04, the available versions are for ubuntu 8.10 but these should work as before.
• after ugrading to firefox 3.0.9 flash videos became choppy. i remember uninstalling the flash plugins–all of them–via synaptic. then downloading and installing the latest .deb from the adobe website. i also noticed that firefox’s memory footprint became quite a bit larger–a little over 500 megabytes in my case–especially after spending a good amount of time in javscript and ajax-heavy sites i.e. facebook.
• the booting, shutdown and login screens are new.
• when shutting down the computer there’s a new confirmation dialog box with a 60-second countdown timer confirming if you really want to shutdown or not. this also applies when you want to restart the computer.
• booting seems faster–around 20 seconds on one workstation.
• there’s a new theme called new wave which i switched to.

i’m just wondering how it performs with older computers (pentium 4, 256 meg ram). if you know, please leave a note.

oracle is buying sun. oracle is into databases in a big way. sun is home to sparc, solaris, java, open office, and recently, mysql. a lot of people have been blogging about what will come out of this marriage. i’m just wondering about what will happen to open office, mysql, in that order.

oracle doesn’t really need mysql. it is, after all, a huge database company. maintaining a free open source sql database such as mysql may just eat away at the markets of its other database products. so mysql may be spun off or, more logically, ultimately die under the care of oracle. i’m not really worried as i know that mysql has been forked already so the line will go on.

what i’m really wondering about is what will oracle do with openoffice? oracle is known to be one of the top contributors to linux because it ultimately contribute’s to the company’s income. but i do not see openoffice contributing significantly to oracle’s bottom line. i reluctantly see openoffice withering under oracle which is a shame, really. should this actually happen i will be sad but not worried as there are other alternatives. as always is the case, with open source. there’s go openoffice which is an alternative build to sun’s openoffice. and then there’s ibm’s lotus symphony.

but i do hope that oracle will continue openoffice development or better yet maybe spin it off. its better than killing it off.

i have here with me a temperamental laptop. it has a new hard drive, you see. i have reinstalled windows xp and religiously downloaded and applied all the updates. lately, it seems that the laptop has the impression that something went wrong the last time it was used that it has been giving me the option to login in windows safe mode almost everytime i start it up.

i finally got fed up and decided to install linux on the thing just to spite it. i happily slathered interpid ibex (ubuntu version 8.10) on it. that took all of about 20 minutes. after thats done i immediately upgraded it–via the network–to the jaunty jakalope release candidate (ubuntu version 9.04). the upgrade took about four hours (slow internet connection, mate).

initial impressions. nice. very nice. it has that tiny bit more polish than the previous interface–showing signs of a “maturing” gnome. i good step, i think. and although i haven’t tested it yet, the kernel version that came with jaunty is suppose to support more usb wireless cards. i am also interested in trying out the new file sytem (ext4) but i’ll wait until they fix some issues with it.

before i forget, there’s this nice touch with the shutdown process in jaunty. before, when you click shutdown, the system immediately does shutdown. with jaunty, when you click on shutdown, there’s a dialog box that pops out with a 60-second countdown before actually shutting down and there’s a cancel and shutdown button. cancel, obviously, cancels the shutdown process and the shutdown button shuts down your computer immediately, ignoring the countdown. i think its a nice touch which eliminates that “dooh!” moment the old version that immediately arrives right after you click on shutdown option. but then that’s just me. some people would be irritated by the additional click or two just to power off the computer.

so now i sit here in front of my own workstation which is still sporting interpid ibex and i’m seriously thinking if i should upgrade to jaunty jakalope now even though its  still a release candidate. the other laptop is taunting and tempting me.

i’m going to sleep on it for now. and start backing up my data…

the stock papt introductory letter

a client of mine recently received a letter from the pilipinas anti-piracy team shown on the left. with the exception of to whom the letter was addressed to, i received this exact same letter about a year ago. when i first got this letter i had the impression that the company i was working for is using pirated software. that’s strange. i know for a fact that all the software programs in the office are either properly licensed or legally free. reading the letter the second time puts it in perspective–its a reminder not to use pirated software, albeit worded rather aggressively so the first tendency is to panic. some might even consider it a veiled threat.

its nice to know that some people in government are doing their job.

so what do you do when you get a copy of this letter? first, do not panic. read that letter again. no one is actually accusing you of using pirated software. its just a notice.

next thing you do is to take their advise and perform a software license check. remember that for each kind of software there is a single corresponding license. so, if you have a windows set up like most of the world, each computer should have one license for microsoft windows and one for microsoft office. there is no one license to rule them all (we’ll get to the linux license later).

and the cost of those licenses add up–php7,700 for microsoft windows and php18,000 for microsoft office 2007; php25,700 in total. multiply that by the number of computers that you have. if you have 10 computers the cost is going to run up to a quarter of a million pesos. that’s jusT for 10 computers. that’s quite a hefty sum considering the recession and all.

if you do not want to spend that much on software there are legal alternatives. you can replace microsoft office with open office. that’s a savings of php 180,000.00 already for 10 computers. and yes, it can open all your word documents, excel spreadsheets and powerpoint presentations.

if you want further savings, replace your pirated microsoft windows with linux. that’s savings of php 77,000.00 for 10 computers. there are so many distributions (loosely, types of linux) out there. off the top of my head, ubuntu is a nice alternative if you’re coming from the windows world. you can look for more distributions over at distrowatch.

if you want to stay within the microsoft world then be ready to pluck down a hefty sum to use their software.

the first update of the year came it on january 4. the second came three days later. that’s one thing i like about linux, and ubuntu in particular — they release updates to their software when there are updates available (as i write this i’m dowloading updates to openssl; third update for the year). development doesn’t seem to be slowing down and it appears that linux will continue to succeed through 2009.

and then there’s news about windows 7. i’m actually intrigued about this new one from microsoft. its appears to be better than vista. hasn’t anyone noticed that once they found out that se7en was going to be better and a little faster than vista, the publicity on se7ev ballooned — you see news about it almost everywhere. and very little news about vista except for the handful of updates to the software. but se7en has been hogging the spotlight. i also heard about the rumor that se7en beta was leaked to the torrents by microsoft. its a rumor so take that bit of news with a grain of salt. but if i was microsoft i would do the same. maximize distribution and publicity. i think i just saw the beta of the 64-bit version in the torrents uploaded a few hours ago.

still, windows is windows. and its still the most widely used operating on the planet making it the most likely target for viruses, worms and malware. again. i’ll stick to linux at this time. i’m just wondering how much they will sell se7en. if they sell it at 0.0 then it may spell some trouble for linux (but that’s another story altogether).

even so, linux moves forward. i read that the government of vietnam will be adopting opensource software in all state agencies. that’s a huge step and a wise one. i wonder if the philippine government has the guts to follow suit. in my opinion, it is an intelligent decision. i have heard that they were looking into using opensource but that was in 2002 — six long years ago. pagasa already has some (or all) of their forcasting done on a linux cluster and some high schools have received 13,000 computers running on linux.

a friend of mine asked me once, why would i use linux when the rest of the world is using windows? several reasons come to mind (i’ll list them down in another entry) but a couple that sticks to me is that i believe that linux can honestly help in moving me, my work and, hopefully, the country forward. and its free.