Posts filed under 'Operating Systems'
There are times when my work requires Windows, and now I’m kind’ of OK with this, with time I got less and less religious about operating systems, maybe because OS-X is out of my reach and because the multitude of Open Source and Free packages available for Windows are more every day letting me use, pretty much, the same packages both under Linux as under Windows.
So last weekend when I had to reinstall an aged Windows (20 minutes for a shut down among many other little or hugely annoying things) I decided to make a list of the software I use and cherish, for the next time, because all of us know, there will be one ?
Some of the packages are not pure FLOSS just free as it costs no money, but still I think they are worth including them.
Office - OpenOffice – I don’t think there is anything to comment here, except maybe that I like it a lot more MS Office, I just find it more intuitive and clean, not to mention about actually owning your documents or many other great features not available in MS Office
- PDF Creator – this is a nifty program that let’s you print any document (not made in OpenOffice where this feature is included) or web page or email as a PDF document.
- NVU – a little HTML editor derived from the old Mozilla Composer for the moments I have to edit clean little HTML documents
- FreeMind – a Java program to edit mind maps for un-tackling complicated issues
Internet - Mozilla Firefox – tabs, security, standard compliance makes that my favorite browser
- Mozilla Thunderbird – I have the nasty habit of carrying all my mails since I had a mail account, and somehow among being secure, having a great spam killer it is the only one that can handle with easy my 20.000+ mails, that’s when I’m not under Linux where I prefer KMail
- Free Download Manager – when torrents are not available, resuming is important or I just want to limit the download speed
- Azureus – bit torrent client
- Putty – hey, Unix is kind of hard to get out of your system, so is SSH
- SSH Sentinel – VPN
- WinSCP – file transfers based on SSH, SFTP or SCP
- W.bloggar – hey I have a blog don’t I
- FileZilla –when I don’t feel like winscp-ing
- Konfabulator – when I have processor cycles and memory to kill, but It looks soo good
- TightVNC – when a command line it’s just not enough
- GAIM – all do I prefer Yahoo Messenger, when I have to be on-line on multiple accounts nothing beats this
Multimedia / Design - Inkscape – excellent vectorial drawing program, I don’t know what is more appealing the fact that it’s good or that it has SVG as it’s default format
- GIMP – no commentaries here, it’s a classic
- DIA - for diagrams
- Audacity – when I have to record conversations and then make them MP3 or OGG’s
- VLC Media Player – for those little movies I keep getting from friends in my emails
- PixelRuller – when pixels can not be trusted and have to be measured
- Magnifier – especially when doing graphics and design it’s good to check tings at pixel level
- ColorMania – I have a bad memory with color hexa or rgb strings so It’s handy to just have it at hands
Development - GVIM – well, old habits die hard, it edits anything more quickly
- XEmacs – I am an Eclipse convert but still I pay my respects to the ex-one
- Eclipse – well, the only one which was able to make me quit Emacs
- XAMMP – IIS is good, but nothing beats Apache, PHP, mod_jk, Tomcat, … and after a couple of battles to manually install all of this, I found XAMMP which did all this in 10 minutes, excellent
- MySQL, MySQL Administrator, MySQL Query Browser, MySQLCC (I still don’t like the query browser) – because everybody uses a data base and this one is the quickest to work with
- Postgresql – when MySQL is not good enough
- WinCVS – when Eclipse is not appropriated
- Active State Active Python – just because I’m under Windows doesn’t mean that I can’t do it
- Ruby – I still hope that one day I will learn it
- Cooktop – excellent for XML transformations
- Tidy – all kind HTML,XML of conversions and validations
- Gygwin – Windows just isn’t enough, beside that I have a hard time convincing my fingers to write dir instead of ls, or I’m just too lazy to do a Explorer search when I have find and fgrep, did I mentioned gcc, make?
Utilities - WinDirStat – in time your free space on your drives tend to disappear, it’s just a handy tool to actually visualize the content of your drive
- 7Zip – archive manager, it knows all what matters, gzip, bzip, zip, and many more
- Free Launch Bar – I hate the start menu, it’s just too slow
- HD Tune – I’d lost a couple of hard drives in my life so checking the temperature and the SMART status it makes a lot of sense to me
- Notepad2 – because notepad it is just plain stupid
- VirtualWin – after you spend so much time under Linux, one desktop won’t really fit you any more.
- Free Comander – I’m not a big fan of such tools, I’m still the command line guy, but sometime it comes
handy
I’m sure there are a couple more I forgot about, but I think the most important ones are above.
December 2nd, 2005
Well, finally it happen and I hope, will be huge. For those of you not so familiar with Linux, QT is a C++ cross platform (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) development framework which happens to be the foundation of the KDE window manager. KDE was and still is my choice of Window Manager under Linux for it’s maturity, multitude of well integrated applications.
QT is developed by Trolltech an Norwegian company who was smart enough to get involved with the Linux community and dual license they tool kit both GPL and commercial, which basically means you are free to use their tools as long as your application will be free (GPL), otherwise you can alway buy the licenses. Now, Trolltech got famous, had a rock solid and smart toolkit, the only problem was that they dual licensed only the Linux version of their toolkit and recently the OS -X version, which means, free apps but only under Linux and Mac, no Windows. With version 4 of QT also the Windows version is made available under the same terms as the Linux and Mac versions.
Now the big thing is that the road is free for some great Linux/KDE only applications to be ported under Windows. I would love to see my all time favorite applications available for free to the Windows users. What I miss mostly is KMail & Kontact (the best email client I used), Konqueror (the cool/fast/standard web browser), Quanta (the best free editor for PHP, CSS, HTML coding), Koffice (a good and simple enough office suite), I’m sure I miss many other applications.
What Gnome/GTK could offer for a long time (windows binaries) now KDE can too. Let’s not forget the cool: Gimp (Photoshop like graphic application), Inkscape (vectorial, svg graphical application), Gaim (multi protocol IM client) which are some great native Gnome/GTK apps but which also run under Windows.
June 29th, 2005
"Mike's thoughts reminded me of something I really never thought I'd ever hear myself say.
I really want a Mac!
To be precise a PowerBook running Mac OS X. Gorgeous laptop, nice UI, Unix under the hood, eclipse and JDK 1.3 and 1.4. There's MS Office available for it too for those who think they need it." [James Strachan's Radio Weblog]
Oh yeah, same here, unfortunately I bought a new laptop in the same
time OSX appeared, it's a great machine, still doesn't run OSX 
. I
figure I'll just have to wait a year or two to become obsolete, or
start writing articles for some extra cash 
November 2nd, 2002
Well, I love when my day starts discovering that is Friday instead of Thursday and that Mozilla managed to trash irrecoverably all my recent mails. Those are the signs of a promising day
So, a couple of days ago the WinXP Pro license arrived. I wanted
to have a licensed version of Windows on my laptop. After two days of
usage I still like it, do sometimes it drives me crazy.
I must tell you that for the last 3 years I used exclusively Linux
and I was quite happy :-) Then the normal question would be why are you
buying Windows then ? Well, I hove one day to sell some of the tings I
make and eventually I have to admit that most peoples use Windows and
Word. Linux is just not making any money. That’s a fact, not
necessarily a bad one! In this idea it is a bit hard to make windows
software under Linux 
BTW, the Win thing is not final. Linux got
the biggest part of the hardisk for a good reason, I don’t think I will
be able to resist to much with Win.
What can I tell you in two days it died as much as my Linux in one
year (about 3 or 4 times) and the multitasking is nowhere near the one
“Linux” provides, but at least it’s cute. One think I really like is
that all my gizmos are working (cell phone, “Visor”) properly. I kind
of get used to have minor problems with them under Linux.
It's a bit shocking to see that any software costs money, Linux made
me forget that minor aspect, but it's ok, no software is really free.
It always costs money, that questions is only whose money? In OS based
soft is the money of the developer in the rest is of the client.
Anyway I'm in the process of making it a bit bearable by installing cygwin and XEmacs
on it. That thing will be bearable at least. A bit of bash in Win
doesn’t hurt. BTW, Xemacs works and looks beautiful.
UNIX Under the Desktop is the OS X review in the new Linux Journal by Brett Simmons and Doc Searls.
I have OS X on a second hand old Apple. It is true, "Apple" did it
right, Windows is nowhere near OS X, neither in usability neither in
stability in nothing. I just wait to make the money so one day I will
buy the dream machine, believe me or not it will run OS X and Linux.
BTW,
always trust your instincts. Happily the XP came soon enough to make us
realize there is some time since somebody tested the applications under
Win. Course they didn’t worked, lucky us that we found out in time. So
here we are back again. This time I want to buy it (wish I knew how
would work that from Romania . Will find the way I'm sure.
March 15th, 2002
Watched last evening the Antitrust movie. It
was hell of a fun. Those who watched or will watch the movie will
clearly recognize that NURV is M$ and Gary is Bill Gates. Now what
was so funny. The guy's who did the computer animation definitely
are worth a big A for it. Every computer in NURV (remember, M$)
run Linux with Gnome including all Gary's computers. I had such
a good time visualizing Mr. Bill Gates running Linux on his
computers. Plus the future product of NURV (read M$) was based on
Java, he he he. If not for else watch the movie for the screens.
Sure in the end Open Source won, how else
Do I have to mention that all NURV employees get a Handspring Visor
with Palm OS on them instead of some Win CE.
March 4th, 2002
Installed 
KDE
3.0 (beta 1) today. Impressive work, everything is so well integrated
and looks just great. Not quite stable yet but doesn't matter one day
it will be. I think this is the first KDE release I really like. For some strange reason I always was founded to Gnome or Enlightenment even if most applications in KDE outperformed the Gnome ones.
After all that happened during the last last year I still believe in
Linux. I run it every day whole day long, and I like it, it's not hard,
it's not difficult (it was at the beginning, but please don't tell me
that you felt Windows from the first second)
It's stable, it's powerful, alive and very rewarding with those who
have some patience. This year meant a lot to Linux lot's of excellent
applications, starting with Mozilla, Galeon, Gabber, OpenOffice. Now that Adobe has released a SVG plugging for Mozilla all my dreams came true, I am a very happy Linux user, period.
I'm not sure that all those 10 predictions Joe Barr made
will become true, but I'm sure that Linux on the desktop is stronger
day by day and one day it will get it's well deserved place.
This week after a whole year of designing, planning and coding I made
the first mn8 pre alpha release to our sponsor. Even if it does not
have yet all the features I want for an alpha release and has pieces
which are not quite finished I like it.
A funny mixture of filings overwhelmed me, pain and suffering from
the exhaustion (2 hours of sleep per day can be ruff) and planning
failures, joy and amazement on how well mn8 performs. It does what it
has to do and I does it easily with grace, better than I expected when
I designed it.
This
is almost true about HyperPad to, we managed to make it a nice
application despite the fact that is Java/Swing based one, the skins
are nice and the antialiasing is a blessing under Linux, still is slow
and huge memory consumer. Also being base on the HTML component from
Swing gave us lot's of head aches. It's a shitty component. Some HTML
code do render, some render badly and most just crash it. It was an
experiment anyway. However, this week the idea of doing the same thing
but in Mozilla, with all the lessons learned from HyperPad didn't gave
me peace. Looking around through some documentation made me realize
that it would be a lot easier to implement than HyperPad was. Just
imagine an Mozilla (browser, mail client) mn8 aware, that would rock.
December 28th, 2001
Oh, this just wasn’t my day. After sleeping 3 hours I woke up at 6 AM to get some coding done and get out a few items from my todo list and when I boot my laptop my dear Linux wakes up with lots of reiserfs warnings. That didn’t looked good, not a bit. I had a few hunches before (twice the contents of a directory was gone, with only the subdirectory structure remaining intact, and a couple of very strange and unusual reboots lately).
Made a backup (it’s a bit difficult if your home directory gets over 1G) and tried to a soft fix (-x), the fix seemed to go ok, but the warnings where still there. Tried a rebuild-tree (worked perfectly on two occasions before on other boxes) and screwed up totally my file system. So at the end spent all day installing fresh Linux.
There could have been no worse time for this to happen as Monday I have a milestone and any bit of time is more valuable than gold. As usually the loses where only personal (a couple of config files and personal documents) because in a funny way yesterday I struggled not to leave the company before I make the big commit. Lucky me I did it
Oh well, that’s life, you win some then you lose some. My old Linux served me well for more than half a year, and reiserfs is a great files system. Life goes on )
November 9th, 2001
Among other things today was the day when I recovered a lost soul. A friend of
mine told me once how sick is of Windows and all the problems he have with it.
In one of it's visit he noticed that what we are running doesn't look like
Windows, he was shocked to find that there are other OS'es available.
So today we installed Mandrake 8 on his
computer. I don't know if he will manage to resist the big switch (if he
manages to hold on for two weeks he won't switch back). But to be honest
doesn't even matter if he will remain with Linux or not, what matters is that
he now knows that there are alternatives and that is what matters. BTW, he is a
small business owner and he is quite committed to switch all his computers from
Windows to Linux.
There where a couple of funny things in his reaction when we installed it.
First he didn't really understand how is possible to only allocate 8 G of space
for an OS and don't worry about future applications. Well it's amazing how
much can go in 8Gigs and how much space will still be available . Also after
playing with all the window managers and all the applications (well not quite
with all) he was wandering how can Microsoft make money selling that crap when
there is this piece of software which is so "easy to install" and so "sweet"
(his words . Well, Linux wasn't always
like that, I just remember 98 or 99 when I was trying to install Debian for the first time, and after a whole week
I still didn't manage to get all those dependencies right and I switched to Slackware.
October 18th, 2001
Eazel, a company in which
many (including myself) has put their hopes to improve Linux GUI and usability is
going down.
Unfortunately not many Linux
companies remaining, I'm wandering when
Ximian
is going to close their gates.
Even if the unfortunate dot.com bang wouldn't be associated with the OpenSource and Linux,
Microsoft war machine is all over Linux these days. There seems still that one thing they can
not understand. Yes they can demolish Linux (OpenSource) based companies (what's left whatever)
but they can not make Linux disappear. Linux is not a company and doesn't depend on corporate
financing, Linux is volunteer work and passion, you can't fight that )), in fact I have the
feeling that they will grow our numbers ).
What amazed me this morning that I found an
article about Linux in an
magazine. Then I show
the date August 1999. Which magazine have now the guts to write about Linux, even the truth ?
Still I learned one amazing thing from it, Jon Hall, the executive director of
Linux International (an organization which promotes Linux)
is an manger at Compaq !.
March 14th, 2001
Spent some time reading from
Joel on Software archive, I like the guy (not to mention that I found that we have the same idea about how a
software company should be, sure, he has more chances than me, not everyone had the "luck" to be a Romanian). He is simple, pragmatic, and I found the things he discuss conform my experience. Also he does not try to build a whole theory around his ideas like some do.
Still related to software management. I read a
ebook about
Extreme Programming. I'm in no position at this moment to critique anything related to
XP (since I didn't even finished the book), but even after I listened the
interview with Ron Jeffries on
technetcast, I still have trouble understanding the
two programmers one machine concept.
I have some concerns with this issues:
- Programming is an intimate thing, and I'm not the only one who thinks this way. I have no problem with others watching my programs, but I can not work if someone is staring at me. At least not that efficient. However I do agree that reviewing is absolutely necessary. So after a portion is considered ready, somebody else look at it. Also I think that sharing implementation plans (before the coding) are good.
- Productivity. You will hardly find two programmers who have the same programming rhythm. If the "pair programming" might work at the beginning, in time one programmer (the one which review) wich have a more static role, will lose rhythm, become distracted, and finally his participation will end up being only physical. This is even worse, because you will consider code as reviewed.
- If I understood that right, the major reason for this idea is that when someone start the coding, he loses the overall aspect of the problem and concentrate on syntax, and other issues. I don't think this is true, and I base this affirmation not only on my experience but on talks with other developers. I leave this issues on my development environment, who does auto-completion, special indentation (I notice when I forgot something), and the compiler.
For anyone who wants (dreams) about joining an open source project here is a
thread from the
Tomcat mailing list, in which the real big ones describe their background and what they consider as necessary.
The conclusion ? "
You guys all make it sound like much less pain than I had previously thought.". And what it takes is:"...
maybe it is not as much pure expertise as it is willingness to learn and contribute to the project...".
Open Source ! Last week, again on the
Tomcat mailing list was an interesting
thread on the Open Source licensing issue. I finnaly understood (exactly) what is the difference between X kind of licenses (X, BSD, APL) and GPL licenses (GPL, LGPL, ...).
What is about ? To quote a
kuro5hin posting "GNU's "freedoms" taking away MY "freedoms". Basically
JBoss (GPL)included some
Tomcat (APL) code. Perfectly right (the X kind of license basically says, here it is my code, do whatever you like with it). The issue started when the JBoss guy's offered some code to Tomcat (nice gesture). The conclusion ? Not possible. Including GPL code in APL code would result in APL changing in GPL (not good).So here we are both teams are fighting the same war, but still one has to reinvent the wheel all the time, and not because peoples are against sharing code (on contrary), but because the legal problems faced by the two different licenses APL and (L)GPL. My questions is, deep inside, isn't this just a personal war between the two leaders (
RMS,
ESR).
This war is really not helping our cause.
With this occasion I also found a good (human understandable) article on licenses, named
"The Open Source Definition", written by
Bruce Perens who also happens to be the initiator of the famous "Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution" book.
This was a big posting, sorry
November 4th, 2000
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