I also found another tutorial that shows you how to change the screen resolution once Ubuntu has been installed.

Lately I have been playing around with Ubuntu as a desktop version of Linux and have been really liking it. For the desktop it is excellent and may actually, finally put Linux on the desktop. Since it has been fairing so well as a desktop OS, I decided to try it as my server OS.

My server is very simple, mostly I just use it as a file server with the home directories shared and one large directory shared that can be used for dumping files. In addition, I also had a second drive in the machine on which everything in a home directory or in the shared directory was mirrored every hour. I realize this is not a true backup system as it also mirrored all deletes (this was mostly to save space). Now that the server is dead and I had to transform the larger of the two internal drives into an external drive, I have lost the backup capabilities.

Anyway, back to Ubuntu; it didn’t work. One thing I really like about CentOS is the administration tools. If I want to configure Samba I just click on the Samba config tool and add shares and users. There are also tools for Services, httpd and other apps. All of these are missing in Ubuntu (at least I couldn’t find them). I would rather use a GUI tool than try and work with config files. This is 2006, I should not have to open a shell and fool around with vim and config files to setup a few Samba shares. This is the main reason that I went back to CentOS.

I am beginning to think that my Windows install is messed up. However, since I installed Ubuntu, I may stick with Linux and only use Windows for playing games.

On Red Hat, this would involve trying to find the right packages, trying to install them, searching for dependencies, trying to install them again, and so on. On Debian, it is dead simple. For NIS, it is just apt-get install nis and for Jabber, apt-get install jabber. Would could be simpler then that.

In addition, for both apps, I have been able to find a nice little “tutorial page”:http://www.debian-administration.org/ on the Debian website that shows how to fully setup “each”:http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/36 “one”:http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/42. Very cool.

From my own experience, whether the software is proprietary or FOSS, there is still vendor lockin. At work, we are creating an application using the “JBoss application server”:http://www.jboss.org. One of the problems that we face is that we can not port our app to another app server even though our app is based on an open standard–J2EE.

The problem though is, in addition to the vendor lockin, is that there is almost no documentation for JBoss and the community support is nill. And, no one in the organization is going to dig into the code to fix a bug. We are either going to work around it or wait for the next release and hope the bug has been fixed. We have done this with all the open source software we use (PostgreSQL, Red Hat, etc).

So what exactly is the benefit of using Free software?

However, I have one simple question: does the rest of the world even care?

I think sometimes you need to take a step back and see how big or small a minority your group really is. Are we geeks really just a small, annoying group advocating the use of open source or is the greater public really aware of this particular argument? My guess is that the vast majority of everyday people know nothing about open source.

Part of this thinking comes from a post on “digg.com”:http://www.digg.com about how to get people to “switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org”:http://www.digg.com/linux_unix/The_transition_away_from_Microsoftness. The comes reflect my personal experience: you can’t. People know Microsoft Office. That is what they are used to. That is what everyone else uses. And they don’t see the problem with having to pay for the software.

On the other hand, trying to convince someone that office software can be free can be almost impossible. Trust me, I have tried. It took me several years and I am still not sure that the intended party really understands the concept. Actually, I am not sure that I understand the concept.

One interesting statement that was made in the digg.com discussion was that most people, when it comes to some of the stuff that runs on their computers, such as the operating system, they don’t even realize that there is an operating system. To the regular user, there are two kinds of computers in the world: a Windows computer, and a Mac computer. They don’t realize that they are buying hardware running an operating system, to them the OS is the computer.

Apply this idea a little further and it is easy to come to the conclusion that the battle over open source is only being fought by geeks and no one else really cares.

I realize that people are going to argue for Mandriva’s urpmi, or Debians apt-get, or yum, or emerge, or whatever package management system you particular favorite distro uses, but this argument simply lends even more support to the sorry state of software installation on Linux. Why should every major distro have its own package manager?

This leads to a bigger issue though and that is the fragmentation that exists in the Linux world. I personally think that the biggest hindrance to wide spread Linux adoption is its biggest strength, in many people’s opinion, and that is all the different distros. And I thought Windows Vista had a lot of different versions, but 7 is nothing compared to the dozens of different versions of Linux. If people can not figure out which Vista they should be buying, how are they ever to figure out which Linux they should use?

Just like people are saying that Microsoft should release one or two versions of Vista and that is it, I think there should be one or two distros of Linux and that is it. Fragmentation does not create better software, it just creates more of it. And this goes deeper then just the OS, do we really need twelve different mp3 players or 4 different video players? I have come to realize that Linux is not about innovation, it is simply about recreating the wheel, over and over and over again.

Linux is great for servers, but if it is going to make onto the desktop of real human beings, then it is going to have to unify and establish some standards that result in a single desktop, a single package management and software installation system, and a single OS in the minds of the general public.