Well an awful lot has happened since I last posted here. Having worked full time since the age of 19, some 23 years ago, I'm currently in a period of my working life that I think I'll look back on as one of the strangest.
Whilst I was away in Scotland in April, the company I have worked for since 2001, Sun Microsystems, was bought by Oracle. Being one of a team of people who handled procurement work on behalf of Sun, and procurement by it's very nature, being an activity that requires a certain amount of forward planning by the business you are buying on behalf of, the lengthy period of nothingness that is the result of needing to get SEC approvals for the merger, have the shareholders vote, blah, bah, blah, means that there are quite a few people at Sun with very little to do.
So, it's with some degree of irony that, whilst the foremost corporate exponent of open source software makes it's way into IT heaven (if there is an IT heaven then I'm sure Sun will enjoy meeting Silicon Graphics, Apollo Computer and DEC there, "what took you so long to get here?" I'm sure they will say. It was probably all that money we made in the tech bubble that delayed us, but I digress) I am spending my downtime learning as much about open source software as I can.
It all started with me coming across an article online whilst I was searching around for news about Sun's acquisition. I wish I'd kept a copy of the article as it could rightly said to be one of the few articles I read on line that genuinely changed my life, in one way or another. The author was an IT buyer for schools in the US and he was a long time Mac advocate. But he was bemoaning the fact that there was such a large price premium to be paid for Apple laptops. The example he used was that the cheapest he could by Apple were $800 second hand Macbooks and he said he could get little Acer notebooks for around $320 and load Ubuntu Linux on them and they did the same job.
Certainly it made a ton of sense for the IT buyer for a school to go for the Acers instead of the Macbooks, but it did get me thinking. My main machine is a Macbook Pro, it cost $3300, OK these little Acer notebooks are not as highly specified as the Macbook Pro, but can Apple really justify charging 10X the cost of Acer?
Intrigued and with a lot of time on my hands, and with a few Amazon vouchers we got as wedding presents, I bought the little Acer the author of the article had mentioned.
One thing that seemed immediately strange, was that Amazon do ship Acers like the one above, running only Linux - but those machines are slightly under specified, they ship with only 8 gig of flash memory. The machine I bought was their regular X86 Windows machine with a 120 gig hard drive. Of course, the first thing I did when I got it was figure out how to partition the hard drive and load Linux. It seems very difficult to buy X86 PCs without an Windows pre-installed.
I must confess I had been put off Linux for a long time and had not used it in years. Sun, in one of it's many bursts of enthusiasm to change the world without much thought of how it would make money (which admittedly was why so many of us employees loved Sun, but also is why it is where it is today), brought out a complete Linux based desktop package. In one of our many strokes of marketing genius, we called this the "Java Desktop System". It would have been much more appropriate to call it the "Sun Linux Desktop System", but we were in love with over using the word "Java". There was actually pretty much no Java in this, it was all Linux.
In fact the overuse of the term "Java" is sighted in a really interesting piece as one of the "Top 10 reasons why Sun failed". The article was, and again this is another reason why Sun was such a great and different place to work, posted in an "official" employee blog, but was taken down by Sun in the new atmosphere of pre-Oracle caution. Some of it has survived though and it has been reprinted in a number of blogs, like
Food-ological's here.
Anyway, JDS was a cool idea, very Scott McNealy, take Microsoft on, head on with a complete functioning, opensource operating system with all the basic apps you would need, and not a trace of Microsoft product used in it. Unfortunately, like a lot of ideas at Sun, it was, way ahead of it's time and didn't really work. In fact it was released far to early in the evolution of Linux. Some apps were very flaky and there were so few drivers for it, using it was a very limiting experience.
I got a Sun provided laptop around 2004 and it was a dual boot JDS / Windows machine. Having been driven crazy by Windows 98, by 2003 I was a confirmed Microsoft hater, and my main machine at home was a Powermac. I was using a very old Fujitsu Pentuim 2 Win 98 machine for Sun work, so the thought of ditching Microsoft for work too appealed to me.
However even the sight of the above screen shot makes me shiver to see JDS again. I remember the frustration of trying an average of eight times a morning to get the inbuilt Linux VPN client to connect. Worse, when traveling on business I realized that JDS was only really capable of boring old work. There was no way you could stream a movie, use iTunes, etc, etc. So most of us Sun people sheepishly started to boot to Windows again and JDS died a slow and sad death. I can't remember when we stopped providing dual boot JDS / Windows machines internally, but it was a long time ago. I managed to break the original hard drive of my JDS laptop and it came back from the Toshiba repair people in San Jose with only Windows on it. I felt rather guilty for a while, thought - oh well.
I think I had first come across Ubuntu when I was reading a Wikipedia article about the "one laptop per child" project. It seemed like Linux had done a lot of growing up since 2004, but I didn't really have time to check it out then.
Having spent the last two or so weeks using it I must say now that I am a convert. I quickly got frustrated by the size of the Acer. It is a nice little machine for traveling (the review on Amazon that really sold the machine to me was the guy who said you could use it in economy class on a plane, even when the person in front had reclined their seat, having been left with a useless Macbook Pro on a flight numerous times, this really appealed to me), but was no use for all day use. So having tried Ubuntu out on two other old X86 laptops I had lying around and got them (mostly to work), I took the plunge and, with some trepidation, installed it to dual boot on my Macbook Pro.
There always seems to be just one thing in an installation of Ubuntu which does not quite work, and of course it is the old Achilles heel of Linux - drivers. The wireless card is not working on the Macbook, but I'm working on it....
I spent a few days googling "Ubuntu eqivalent of Dreamweaver..." etc. and quickly found out, with a bit of work, I could do practically everything I already did on the Mac, on Linux instead.
The best thing about Linux I think, apart from the fact most of the software is free, is that there is this wonderful sense of community around the software. If you have you have any problem, you just need to google it, or post it to one of the 1000's of forums that exist.
My favorite discovery so far is the fact that there seems to be loads of music creation and recording packages, and even a podcast to tell you how to use it! It's like having two mates with you helping you use the software.
Anyway, I'm sure there is much to learn and discover, but I think this is time well spent, as there now seems to be a viable alternative to Windows that is now Mac (not that I'm anti Apple now, I'm just getting anti the prices they charge, it seemed to be a good time to break my Mac habit).
I even managed to put up the statement: "Kirkcaldybands.com is now maintained and hosted entirely on free open source software" at
www.kirkcaldybands.com. Now that's progress!
ps I am also learning about "creative commons", so I should really acknowledge some of the sources of the images above. The "apple dollar" was made by Flickr User "Scott_Free and the pic of the digital editing software is, of course, a screen shot of "Ardour".
I've been in these beautiful buildings all week, working with Oracle on the Sun transition. Having your company bought and then sitting around waiting and not knowing what was going on was a bit like being a member of the living dead, so it's nice to be actually working again.
