Windows

Last year Microsoft started it's "Get the facts" campaign about how Microsoft Windows Server was suppose to be less expensive than Linux. Microsoft cited studies which they originally claimed to be by an independent group, which turned out to be true, but sponsored by Microsoft, which means not so independent as Microsoft led people to believe.

Eweek has an interesting article about the cost of Linux:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1782587,00.asp

Here's my own simple TCO study:

Take a beautiful product, severly cripple it, throw in a few cheap nuggets as a 'bonus,' and you have the iRiver H10. The H10 has a beautiful full colour LCD screen, can record conversations and radio, which it also plays. You can also store images and text data on the H10. So far, so good. Well, good goes out the window at about this point. Normally I try to see the positive in a product, as much as possible, but the iRiver H10 is crippled in so many ways that it's really hard to say good things about something which frustrates you so much!

Old Screenshot: 

The other day I spent the better part of 5 1/2 hours installing Windows XP, a few drivers (not all the ones I need), and updates, on a tower that was destined to become headless (i.e. I remote desktop into if from Linux). This evening I connected to the now headless box using a program called tsclient. tsclient is a graphical program that raps around various protocols like RDP, Remote Desktop Protocol.

With all the crusading about homeland and national security you would think that executive decision makers would start to get a clue about security. Unfortunately it seems that some decision makers still don't understand security. Take the 'brass' at the USAF, United States Air Force, for example. SC Magazine reported in December that the USAF plans on consolidating 38 contracts by standardizing on Microsoft software. Air Force CIO John Gilligan explained to SC Magazine that the problem has to do with patching all the different kinds of computers the air for maintains.

A few months back I decided to shell out the cash for a Transgaming membership. For those not aware, Transgaming makes a specialized version of WINE, the Windows Emulator for Linux, which is designed around running games -- just not the kind of games I like to play.

Of the 45 or so Windows games in my collection, only a couple work flawlessly under Cedega, a.k.a. WineX. The best of the crop is the ever-popular Diablo II LOD, and it worked better under VMWare with Windows beneath.

It's the Christmas season, and it's time to look at playing around, games in particular. I've already mentioned Transgaming in a previous rant. I mentioned that I wasn't completely happy with the direction Transgaming is headed, but they have continued to make Windows-based games work in Linux. As a bit of a holiday treat I thought I would show a few screen shots from one of my favourite games of all time, Diablo II.

One of the biggest challenges for new Linux users is finding information and getting help with programs. If you have some Linux experience and just want to know what options a program has you can often type something like:

heroes3 -h

Heroes 3 happens to be the Linux version of Heroes of Might and Magic III. The -h switch prints out other switches heroes3 can take on the command line. This comes in handy if you're looking for an option like running heroes3 in fullscreen or windowed mode.

In the what's new in Computer Refurbishing department it was an interesting week. This week our Linux PCs outsold Windows PCs by a margin of 5 Ubuntu Linux PCs for every 1 Windows PC. This is quite a big deal since the Windows PCs also come with Microsoft Office (our Community MAR edition which matches up with MS Office Standard in features, e.g. it comes with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook). It wasn't a busy week, but we sold about 13 PCs, repaired three times that amount, and worked on a few other projects.