Who? Me??

It’s times like these when supporting a good cause gives you fulfillment. When you make a difference by adding to the cause … not monetarily, not through force but through faith.

A friend recently made the leap of faith from Windows to Ubuntu, you can read her first hand review here. It does include the slight apprehension, the initial teething problems … but the story also has elements which make it a good technology script … the need, the learning curve and the triumph!! Here’s an excerpt -

It’s been a month since I first grappled with the overly sensitive mouse pointer on my brand new OS. Having solved that and many other problems (whether by exploring the functionalities, or plain screaming murder at Prasad and Ankit – our IT-literate friends), I seem to have adjusted surprisingly well to it. Phantoms of Linux have turned out to be bigger than Linux itself. Its fast. Its intelligent (use it and you’ll see what I mean by that). It has multiple workspaces. Which means you can chat and browse on another workspace without those irritating colleagues, who have the habit of peering into your screen and shaking their judgmental heads, ever finding out! So far, so good!

The point I am trying to make is that often people will sit on the fence when their knowledge about a technical product is low, the goal then is not to push the product, but to give as much information as possible but wait for the user to make the leap of faith.

I see this happen at work almost every day … we call it creative faith. The technology involved may not be related to computers, but it can be as abstruse if not more. So, the next time you are involved in selling a complex solution, try some faith instead.

Yes. I am going to bitch about Linux for a change. Throw your brickbats at me, I dont mind, but for this one time, I will rant. The problem with having an open OS is that there are a lot of updates … a LOT!! Also considering the fact that I have taken my time to view all the UIs viz., KDE3, KDE4, Gnome, Ice et al, that means a lot of updates as well.

Everytime I do an apt-get-update and an apt-get-upgrade, half a GB of data is downloaded, the system is re-initialized, and there are more updates to download. Whoa! Thats a lot of packages.

What is one to do? I just finished downloading 600 megs, I start Gnome … no big change

Yes, now I will tout the stability of linux

On my way back to Hyderabad this morning, as I was taking my seat bleary-eyed, I glanced at the Jet Screen. That’s the tiny entertainment TV for the passenger’s viewing pleasure. Could not help but notice that those monitors were running on a centralized system, and that system was booting. The techie inside me wanted to probe further, so I kept my eyes glued to the screen … and voila … it runs Linux!! All the peripherals attached to it were also being detected … credit card reader installed … awesome. Sadly, I could not determine which distro of linux, I think embedded linux though, because it was using RedBoot. The reason why I am so thrilled is because that just goes to show the trust in the operating system.

So we finally decided that Google Apps is not a sustainable idea without subscribing to their paid service (which costs a LOT by the way!). The only solution – look for alternatives who can give the same kind of service (my Head Ops wants this, thats Manish) and be as easy to administer (I want this) for as less as possible (my finance guy wants this). Yes, we want the BEST

So after doing a long due diligence, we decided, that having our very own hosted email server would be better (yeah, the cost-effectiveness hurts since Google Apps was free). Now, my MD wanted an interface where everyone’s schedules and calendars were visible to every other person. So, the need for a calendaring system was apparent, the moment he said that … I realized that we want something like the Google Apps paid version at a cheap cost. Fair enough, we can have that, just buy MS Exchange and enough Office licenses instead of using Gnumeric and Abiword bounded with QMail. My headaches would be resolved. Again, the financing of this exercise looks like a nightmare to me.

So, I have to look the open source way once more. Apple apparently offers CalDav, which works well with Outlook even (Thunderbird needs Lightning extension, or you can use Sunbird). Very good, so I take one derelict machine lying in my office (it’s a P3 you know ), and I install Ubuntu 7.1 on it. The installation goes without a hitch, I choose command line and remove the GUI interface, that drastically brings the load on the machine down. Sadly, for some reason CalDav is not installing, I cant compile the @*#@*^ file.

No worries, I look around and then decide to go with eGroupware, which needs not much just apache2, php, mysql and its own binaries. Installation has now begun …

10 minutes later … the file system on the machine has crashed. Some days are just fun days

I am beginning to appreciate Google Apps from a whole new perspective.

I have decided to make the leap from Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10) to Hardy Heron (8.04). First impressions are great, deciding to upgrade the operating system online … so the download of the entire online update took a mammoth 12 hours to complete. The unpacking of 1.4 GB of upgrades should take me another hour or so.

Finally it’s done! Some of the issues that came up are -

1. The grub entry has been reset – so my Windows is lost again. No big deal, I had written about it earlier on my blog, made the changes and we are good to go.
2. Ubuntu has become sluggish during booting, but once it starts, then we can roll along
3. My earlier stint had left some confusion with kdm and gdm … that is still there

All in all, the upgrade was nice. The OS is hardy, gnome is updated and so is kde.

Whew!! and a big Yaay!!

मैं मेरा पहला पोस्ट हिन्दी मैं कोशिश कर रह हूँ। सोचा था कि लिनुक्स पे पोस्ट लिखूंगा, पर मेरी हिन्दी देख के मैं हक्का-बक्का हो गया। अच्छी चीज हैं न ये?