Using a US$10 Billion OS for free

I was just surfing around when I stumbled across this Slashdot article that said Fedora 9 is estimated to worth about US$10 billion if built from scratch.

Wow! And all these while I have been using it mainly for writing papers and preparing slides. Somehow, now I feel like have been driving a Rolls like a Kelisa.

Goes to show that OSS can command some serious dough.

The next version of this wonderful multi-billion dollar distro will launch on 25th Nov 2008.

MS Web Application Installer

Well linuxmalaysia passed me this link and I was like, WTF! Man, MS doing what us OSS people been doing all this while? Installing apps from the web? Wasn't Steve "The Chair Thrower" Ballmer who said that OSS was a cancer?

Hehe...now even funnier the apps they offer are all OSS apps. Hmm, if MS is all about quality and all that is good and sweet why don't just offer one of their bloatware? So, if Ballmer was correct, then MS has got to be the dumbest company in the world; they just gave themselves cancer willingly.

And to MS, "Submit ye to the power of the Source!".

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is out!

OO.o 3.0 is finally out. From the RCs, not much in terms of UI but the support for MS Office docs seems to better. Gonna download it in a little while. Come to think of it, it's kinda sad when I am so excited over an office productivity suite.

Wikimedia moving to Ubuntu Server

Wikmedia the company behind Wikipeida is moving over to Ubuntu Server. Ubuntu which is more well known for its Linux desktop offerings is actually very capable as a server as well. I have used Ubuntu 6.06 before with Centos in a production environments (in data centres and in the office) and it simply just "boring" i.e it didn't give me anything to be excited about such as down times and stuff. Just your regular old refrigerator-reliable stuff.

Oh yeah its repos are simply awesome and apt was simply a joy to work with too.

For those of you are still unsure of how good a "desktop" OS is as a server OS, this will surely be proof enough.

One for the Ubuntu crew!

Argghhh...the pain!

Well my lappy comes with one of those XP OEM license. As any proper computer geek (or a self proclaimed one) worth his/her salt I promptly rebuilt it with Linux. All nice and dandy....never quite needed Windows and since I don't play much games, the only reasonable reason for Windows' existence doesn't seem that all compelling.

Well that is until now. There seems to be some slight differences between OSS packages running on Windows and Linux and since my home is Windows free (yay!) the best bet would be having it installed on my lappy to see how OSS stuff runs on Windows.

That's when the pain started. Being a Linux user for so long I totally forgot about stuff like drivers (and why would there be like 5 different NIC drivers for the same model?), anti-virus, anti-spyware, and the performance degradation as a result of making my XP more secured. Urgghh.

Windows Update, another piece of the engineering marvel from the Redmond boys, last count, two; the number of times I needed to reboot before I get any updates.

Seriously I am really spoiled by Linux. Yeah, it's not as "easy" (that is debatable, some might say solving the Rubik's Cube under 5 mins to be easy) as Windows some would say, but hey I never did remember installing any drivers for my lappy.

So darn glad to be back in my "hard-to-use" Linux environment.