Yes it is in PowerPoint…I hate PowerPoint, but I was told to learn the new version, so…

If I could have a cell phone that had a laser projected keyboard and a Pocket Projector, so that I could sit the cell phone down on an empty desk, type on a full-sized virtual keyboard, and see the interface displayed on the desk behind the phone or on an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of paper I taped on the wall.

That would be really cool.

The slides are in both OpenOffice.org Impress format, and in PDF.

OpenOffice.org Impress Format

PDF Format

Creating an Online Image by Scott Grizzard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I wrote it to remove all of the “properties” changes and filter out the output files, so all that was left was the code changes and a list of binary files that were modified.

Just pipe the output of svn diff to the script, after you set the parameters at the top of the script. I put the filters in the script instead of parameters because I always run the same filters.

It is released under the GPLv2 (the licensing details is longer than the script itself).

clean_svn_diff.bash

This software is licensed under the CC-GNU GPL version 2.0 or later.

Given that Mono is now part of Debian’s default installation, I think the issue has moved from “ripe” for discussion, to “rotten and stinks to high heaven.”

The basic conclusion the anti-Mono crowd reaches (and if I am wrong, please let me know) is this: you shouldn’t use Mono, because Microsoft could come back later (after it has gained wide acceptance) and claim patent violations, gaining control (or at least significant influence) over open source software that uses it. They are especially vehemently opposed to using Mono for any core packages (or packages that gain widespread use), because that places Linux at considerable risk from Microsoft.

The pro-Mono crowd (for which I think this rant by Jo Shields is a fair representation, though if you have a better one please post) contend that Microsoft’s patents aren’t really a threat, they are perhaps unenforcible, and in any case, a patent-suit from Microsoft is against Microsoft’s best interests. I think the pro-Mono crowd is missing the point…

At the very least, Microsoft could use the threat of its patents and the “murkiness” of the issue to spread FearUncertaintyDoubt. At worst, Microsoft could sue major distributions, forcing them to sign patent-license agreements, and destroy (by sending a chill through) the open source movement at its core (even if Microsoft later withdrew its claims). Mono is evil, and to paraphrase Douglas Adams, Microsoft has shown it is not above such behavior “in the same way the sea is not above the clouds”.*

Killer Proprietary Apps

I think Mono is “good” because it solves the critical problem Linux faces to gain wider and wider adoption – Killer Proprietary Apps.

That said, I use Mono (sometimes). I like Mono, I think it is good technology, and I think Mono is essential because it helps solve the critical problem that Linux faces to gain wider and wider adoption – Killer Proprietary Apps (KPA’s). Killer Proprietary Apps are pieces of software that are closed source applications, that won’t run natively on Linux, and users won’t live without.

The largest problem most users face switching to Linux is no longer “usability”. Despite Linux’s reputation, I honestly believe (from observation) that Ubuntu/Gnome is easier to use than Windows and even Mac, different, but easier – the usability problem has been solved, or at least “solved to no longer be the problem”. The insurmountable barrier to adoption that most users cannot and will not overcome is killer proprietary apps that don’t run natively and easily on Linux. Microsoft Office, Apple’s iTunes (with DRM), Adobe Photoshop, Inuit Quicken, and World of Warcraft keep home users on Windows and Macs more than any other factor, even the fact that Windows came with their system and that they would have to install Linux themselves. If they must dual-boot (or run a virtual OS, or futz around with Wine), they’ll just stick to Windows thank you very much.

In that context, anything that makes it easier for companies to port proprietary applications to Linux, even to keep those apps proprietary and sell them, is a “good thing”. While Microsoft will never publish a Linux version of Office (unless coerced by the EU), Adobe, Inuit, and Blizzard would, if and only if they could make a profit on it. Since profit equals revenue minus costs, anything you can do to lower their costs is a win-win for Linux and Open Source, even if it means running proprietary, closed source applications on Linux. If the goal is wider adoption, Mono is good…fantastic…essential.

Business Users

Home users are just foreplay though, the real sex is in the workplace, with companies and programmers. If companies start using Desktop Linux (i.e., start forcing their employees to use it), it is my belief that Linux, being a superior product, will be “taken home” by those employees.

However, medium and large companies face four major remaining obstacles switching to Linux on the desktop:

1. K.P.A. business software, especially industry-specific software.
2. KillerInternalApps written for Windows.
3. Human Capital invested in .NET that is not otherwise transferable to Linux.
4. Lack of commodity IT people for Linux¹.

Of those four, Mono can directly and drastically impact three. The fourth is simply a function of market-share (as Linux becomes more common, desktop-level IT people will begin appearing, trained on Ubuntu or Suse, and ready to help users turn off the CapsLock key when their password doesn’t work), and insomuch as Mono helps increase Linux market share, it helps there too.

If you think about all of that internal code floating around companies, much of it ancient with little to no documentation, written in .NET, it is clear that those companies face an enormous expense trying to migrate to Linux. An IT manager that prefers Linux, looking at the choice, is going to say, “well, when we retire the old system and move to a new application, then we can talk about switching platforms”.

But, the company acquires human capital to maintain those legacy systems, and those programmers are intimately familiar with .NET, so even if a company rewrites its entire application from scratch (instead of “evolving it” as tends to happen), the company is going to be sitting on programmers that know .NET, and are less familiar with Python or Java.

If a company is faced with large decreases in productivity while its programmers learn an entirely new platform, it will add the decrease in productivity to the “cost of migrating” side of the balance sheet, and decide that it is cheaper to stay with Windows.

Mono changes that, providing a way to both migrate existing .NET systems to Linux, and leverage existing human capital. Linux moves from “too expensive” to “the kind of cost reduction that will get me promoted”.

Programmers

Speaking of human capital, what about all of those hours Windows developers have spent learning .NET, and all of their .NET productivity? Will they listen if you tell them “sorry, all of your time, energy, and training are now sunk costs”? Of coarse not…those programmers will resit you even if you show them a superior technology/software methodology/way of thinking about software development, because, given their human capital investments, that technology/method/ideology is not superior to them.

But, with Mono, there is no longer this “leap” from Windows to Linux, or from “proprietary” to “open source”, now there are smaller steps. It lets .NET programmers become involved with open source (even tainted), and exposes them to new technologies and ways of thinking about software. Without Mono, these programmers will keep doing what many of them do now when you mention open source, stick their fingers in their ears and shout, “NO NO NO NO I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”.

Once you get them on Linux, they will learn other, “pure” languages simply because Linux is so inviting and conducive to learning – as they want to change little things in the operating system (and once they get hooked on APT and YUM), they will become Linux programmers, with human capital now invested in Open Technologies.

Conclusions

Commercial, proprietary software is not going anywhere, and neither are custom, internal-only applications. If these current applications can be ported to Linux using Mono, then we have drastically lowered the cost of Linux Migration. This is a “good” thing.

If Microsoft wants to extract “economic rents” from these users for using “their intellectual property”, I’m not happy, but I won’t get my panties in a twist over it… in my opinion, if you aren’t opening your code (or ideas) for others, you deserve to pay for others’ code (or ideas). If Microsoft tries to make these royalties prohibitive, the EU will drag them back to court before the first check clears. Yes Microsoft’s patent threats raise the cost of migration, but not nearly as much as Mono lowers it. Companies at the margin will stick with Microsoft, but many more will see cost-savings and switch.

As the anti-mono people are right to point out, you shouldn’t use Mono for new Open Source projects, especially core projects – the potential threat from Microsoft is just too large. But, remember that Microsoft’s power is market power first, and its political power is derived from that. Anything that reduces that market power should be seen as a “good thing”. Mono in the core of Linux distributions has the potential to endanger Linux, but used properly, Mono makes Linux viable for many more people, giving them more choice, and more choice is “good”.

^1. Commodity IT people are those rank-and-file AS from community college that “majored” in MIS, and form the “bottom bulk” of “Microsoft Certified Whatever”…the ones you send downstairs when the “administrative assistant” to Ms Davis in marketing has a problem the printer…who have no interest in computers aside from World of Warcraft and would rather be running a bar. Companies rely on these people, liking the fact that they are cheap and easily replaceable. They are coming soon to an operating system near you…yeah…maybe replacing Microsoft is not such a great idea after all.

I am proud to say that I have been Windows-free (booting directly on hardware for use as desktop for something other than using “one app”) for a year now , and off Windows as my primary system for two… first to Mac and then to Linux (I still use Mac on the laptop). I’ve come around to the position that largest barrier to Linux on the desktop is not usability, but Killer Apps that are not available for Linux, and lately, I have been thinking about the Windows applications that force me to pull up my VM or run Wine.

Of course there is World of Warcraft, Microsoft Office (just checking to make sure the export worked), iTunes (remember I have a Mac laptop), and Internet Explorer to check my sites. But, the application I run in Wine the most is an Open Source text editor, Notepad++. I’m not the only one; there are even instructions for running Notepad++ in Linux on the project’s FAQ’s.

Linux if full of great text editors, but none really “fill the shoes” of Notepad++. It is in that niche of text editors that go beyond “basic”, but don’t have all the bloat and complexity of a full integrated development environment. On Linux, there is Kate, Gedit, Geany, and a whole bunch of others in that same category, but none of them quite match up.

Granted, much of this is the fact that I am “just used to” Notepad++ – I have been using it since… 2004 I think…, and I have loved it since then. But more than familiarity, there are some things it does that no one text editor for Linux does, and that is why I Wine it.

• Advanced Find & Replace that includes regular expressions, line endings, and can search entire directories for strings in files.
• Macros Macros Macros. It lets you record Macros for repetitive tasks.
• Good “Large-File” handling – some editors choke when you give it a 25meg xml file.
• Spell checker (it’s a plugin).
• Plugin support in general.
• Easy to set up custom syntax highlighting.
• Support for Windows line endings.
• Support for Windows Batch Files (yes, some of us have to write .bat files for Windows clients).
• Color code printing – the syntax highlighting prints.
• TextFX – think of all those annoying Search&Replaces you are always doing, like inserting back slashes in front of quote marks – that’s what TextFX does, on steroids. All the things that you do in Tidy, plus a little more, right on the menu bar.
• Block comment/uncomment in several languages.
• Tabs
• Auto-complete

Geany comes closest, and it does several things (like version control system interaction – I really love that) that Notepad++ doesn’t do. It’s not that one is better than the other, in fact, I think they are at about the same level, but they’re different. I find myself using Geany more and more, and Notepad++ in Wine less and less, as I get used to Geany, but for those few things it won’t do…

I don’t think a port to Linux is necessary – the stuff that Geany won’t do, Notepad++ will do in Wine. Notepad++’s strongest feature is it’s fast run speed in Windows, and that is something that won’t translate as well to a new OS. The rest of the items could be added as plug-ins to Geany.

I’m not advocating anything, and I really don’t have a point; I’m just saying the application I launch in Wine the most often is an Open Source Text Editor, and I thought it was a little odd.

The “her” is a client/family relation. She has a one-person legal practice, with a sometimes part-time assistant and a once-a-month bookkeeper. The practice had two computers, (XP desktop and Vista laptop), a Blackberry, and an all-in-one printer. On the software side, the practice was Office 2003 based, with QuickBooks for the bookkeeping, and AOL for the mail. Backups were… “limited” in frequency, and she was swapping files between computers on a jump-drive and loosing track of which version was which.

She asked me to help her after her three-year-old desktop ate itself on a Trojan horse. I did the data rescue, and offered her a solution: Subversion.

Subversion and the LAST Server

I was introduced to Subversion three years ago, and these days I don’t send an email without version control. This is a tool designed for developers to keep track of source code, to make sure everyone in a team is modifying the correct version of a file, and tracking the evolution of source code between versions, greatly assisting debugging.

Because it is open source, and meant for open source projects, the primary means of accessing it is through Apache, and you can leverage all of Apache’s authentication power to allow/disallow access to your data, with all of the “eyes” using and looking at and debugging Apache, ensuring that your data is kept as secure as your password or, if that isn’t secure enough, client SSL certificates.

In addition, many project management tools like Trac have grown up around Subversion, providing a web interface to your data that is served and protected through Apache. What has evolved is something that I like to call the LAST server – Linux, Apache, Subversion, Trac. On Ubuntu server, it is very easy to install – start with a LAMP server, and apt-get install subversion libapache2-svn trac. (Ok, if you have to configure Apache, especially if you want authentication and SSL, but that is common knowlege for LAMP setup.)

What has emerged is not only great for developers, but anyone that needs to keep track of multiple versions of files between several computers, especially if they have a ton of data, it needs to be protected, and you are traveling. It is certainly a little harder to use than many commercial, document management applications, but a one (sometimes two) person office cannot justify the expense (not just of the software, but server license needed to run it on). The open-source version control systems (Alfresco, Knowledge Tree) are good products, but they are hard to use for “simple version control”, and underutilized features scream at you though the interface instead of being “tucked away”. They also can’t be “apt-got” like Subversion and Trac.

With LAST, practically any feature you want can be added later, including document search (through the repo search extension or beagle), virus scanning on the server-side by piping to ClamAV, email notifications with triggers, etc.

So I talked her into it, telling her that she would have to learn a new system, selling her on the great features of version control – having a “second copy” of everything on the server, being able to share files between her computers, and having her data securely accessible from anywhere in the world. I took her old computer, put two new hard drives on it for mirrored RAID, and installed Ubuntu and LAST – a “business-class” server solution for less than $200 in hard drives. (Did email, LDAP, and a bunch of other stuff too, on the same server.)

She bought a new computer (Vista – yuck), and I sat down to show her Subversion.

The Tortoise and the Fox

Subversion is a server-side application. Yes it comes with a command-line client, but only the uber-geeky use it, and only when they want to do something simple. For the non-geek, there is only one way to access subversion – TortoiseSVN.

TortoiseSVN is one of the “little sung” (at least from hard-cord Linux-only types) heroes of Open Source – one of the applications that introduces individuals to open-source, fills a major need, and doesn’t see interface as an after thought, but the thought. It completely dominates the Windows Subversion client (and version control) market in the way open source should – it is the standard to beat in that proprietary vendors must “justify” the purchase of a proprietary product over Tortoise. Most significantly, (and I’m sure others will contest this) Tortoise drove Microsoft from a market (SourceSafe), forcing them to come back with a more compelling product that is, in no way, dominant.

TortoiseSVN has an incredibly easy interface, all accessible with a “right-click”. When a file is changed, but not committed to the repository, a red circle appears on it. When you commit, a green check replaces the circle, and you know your changes are in the repository.

If you want to see an older version of a file, right-click and view-log. You see all of the previous versions, and you can double-click on one to see it. Oh, and you can see the difference between two versions too, and that is easy. Browsing the full repository on the server is easy, and adding files is a matter of dragging them from your desktop to the folder on the repo-browser.

The only major pain in TortoiseSVN is the fact that you have to enter the url of the repository by hand. If you are using the LAST server, or Subversion through Apache with one of the other interfaces, you tend to browse to the folder you want in a web browser, highlight the url in the title bar, Ctr-cit, and then Ctr-v into Tortoise’s little “Enter the URL” dialogue box – a pain in the neck. As often happens in open source, someone got peeved enough to fix it.

Toby Johnson wrote an extension to Firefox, called TortoiseSVN Menu, that puts the Subversion menu right into the context menu of Firefox, so when you right-click on a url in Firefox, there is the Tortoise command “checkout”, with no more frustrating URL pasting.

All of this functionality is available for the grand price of… free – every one of these components is available as free and open-source software, and in my opinion, represent one of open-source’s greatest unsung triumphs.

Together, TortoiseSVN, Firefox, and the TortoiseSVN Menu plug-in, constitute a Killer App an application that you come to depend on and cannot live without.

Together, TortoiseSVN, Firefox, and the TortoiseSVN Menu plug-in, constitute a Killer App an application that you come to depend on and cannot live without – an application that must be available (or have a perfect substitute) on a platform for the person to consider the platform – if the application is not there, the option is dead, killed by lack of the “Killer App”.

This solution, TortoiseSVN with FF extension, is only available for Windows – it is a free and open source Killer App that “kills” Linux (or Mac) as an option for people considering their options, and hence, “The Killer App keeping her on Windows is Open Source”… A moment for irony, please.

Mac Subversion Clients

Before looking at Linux, I think it is appropriate to turn to the Mac platform, known to most people as “easy to use”.

Subversion is Apple’s primary version control system, so one would almost expect Tortoise-like Subversion functionality to by built in to the system when you take it out of the box. However, as I have said before, Apple puts users into two distinct categories – users and programmers, with nothing in between, and “Subversion is for programmers”. Apple provides native integration with subversion in Xcode (a version or two old), but does not provide anything for users (it might confuse them).

This “bifurcation” attitude results in “separate coddling” of the two groups, with very good subversion tools provided for programmers… as long as they use Xcode. The presence of these tools stifles the efforts of individual programmers who might be motivated to develop an open-source application that is as slick as Tortoise and useful for the non-programming population – why bother?

Consequently, the Subversion market in Mac is divided between the command-line for advanced programmers, Xcode for X-coders, and proprietary solutions for everyone else – none as good as TortoiseSVN (don’t believe me, just Google “TortoiseSVN” and “Mac”).

The SCPlugin people are trying, but they are merely trying to catch up to where TortoiseSVN was three years ago, and failing at that. Not to disparage them, what they have done is great and I use it, but I know what I am doing, and I would never loose a “newbie” on that tool. My favorite line from their website is, “if you’ve just noticed that the icon badging is somewhere between ‘inconsistent’ and ‘totally busticated,’ be assured we know — everybody knows!”

They are swimming upstream against a culture that doesn’t want them, and no one is more to blame than Apple. The fact that they are trying is either a testament to some deep, driving sense of mission that they possess, or the manifestation of a deep, unspeakable childhood trauma resulting in such masochism that visiting a shrink won’t fix or seeing a dominatrix won’t satisfy.

By all means guys, please keep coding it — I have a MacBookPro I use on the road.

Subversion on Linux (or, “Is that thing still going on?”)

Subversion was really developed for the Linux platform as a “fix” to CVS. CVS was the major version control system in use prior to the development of SVN, and it has… “issues”. There are several graphical clients to use SVN in Linux, most Free and Open Source, but none of them as slick or easy as Tortoise. In reality, I use several of them, since none really do everything I want the way I want it done.

Linux used to have a fantastic client – KDE-SVN for KDE 3.5. It was better than Tortoise in many ways (it not only showed what you had modified locally, but not committed, but also showed what was newer on the server than the version you had), but not as good in others. The move to KDE4 broke it, and now it has “more bugs than a bait store”, and crashes on routine operations. It was also integrated with Konqueror, the old KDE file manager, and no one has (to my knowledge) taken the time to port it to Dolphin, so now it is just another, separate SVN client.

While Subversion is predominately installed on Linux and served through Apache, it is now being done so for groups coding on Mac and Windows, for Macs and PC’s. Subversion as a client in Linux is becoming “abandonware”, for the simple reason that the community has built something better for their needs (several somethings in fact).

Linux founder Linus Torvalds built Git, and Canonical, Ubuntu’s corporate sponsor, built Bazaar. Both of these tools are distributed version control systems that allow programmers to commit to branches on their local machines, and then merge these branches with changes other people make, ending the need for a centrally-managed server, fitting the open-source development model much better.

Last week, I thought that was the end of the story, but I went to a Linux Users Group meeting on Tuesday (yes, we still have them), and someone pointed out a new project – NautilusSVN. I installed it and, I must say, I am impressed. (Yes, I use KDE, but I have both, and I booted into Gnome to give it a whirl.) Like the SCPlugin team, they are trying to mimic Tortoise, and they are really getting there. They still lack the “drag and drop” repo browser, and there isn’t a Firefox extension yet (at least, on Mozilla’s extension page), but it’s getting there.

I can only imagine why this project started – either some KDE guy missed his KDESVN during the “4.0 – 4.1″ incident (psst… don’t tell him 4.2 is usable again), or some programmer uses Subversion like I do: personal documents. All I can say is “keep going guys (and don’t forget the Firefox extension)”.

I am truly excited about NautilusSVN – this is something that shows an accommodation to younger programmers new to Linux, something I’ve always said was a strength of the Linux community as a whole. Keep up the good work guys, because until it is done, I’m stuck helping my client/family member with her Windows issues.

It is what it is. I am releasing it (not the web site, just the chart) under the terms of the this Creative Commons license. There are probably a thousand of these on the web, with instructions on how to make more modifications. However, there probably aren’t many done in OpenOffice.org that are simple to use, and released under a copy-left license that allows commercial use, so here is mine. I hope it saves you some time.

I only tried it out in OpenOffice.org 3.1, but it will probably work in any 3.x. You can try to open it in that other office suite that people buy but can’t see source code for, but I don’t know if all of the graphing stuff will translate exactly. The Excel 2007 sp2 version should open the document, and a plug-in for other versions of Microsoft Office 2003/2007 can be installed as an add-on.

The last data sheet (titled notes) contains a list of notes for use, and I commented the data page.

I hope it helps.

indifference-curve-demonstrator.ods

PS: I would consider the charts produced by this system to be “output”, independent of the Data page. As far as I’m concerned, you can use the “charts alone” as freely as you want to – I think these are yours. If you are really worried the CC people might not agree, drop me an email (or fill out a comment here) and I will (subject to the definition of output) send you a copy-right assignment form. If the publisher makes you code your own, find a new publisher – I don’t know how to make my intent clearer.

If you make improvements, I’d appreciate a shout-back here, but that is not required in the license.

PPS: the big icon is part of the Oxygen Theme, and it is also CC-SAv3 licensed. See what happens when we share?

Goldoh wrote:

I agree that Macs are best for end-users who want to spent their time working in apps instead of working on aps. There is a niche for this sort of people, and it only comprises about 95% of the market. That doesn’t mean that Linux shouldn’t cater for the remaining 5%, but if it wants to dominate the desktop (something I believe is possible) then it needs to do just as well for those other 95%.

I don’t think Macs are best for “end-users who…etc” – I think Macs are best for you (the family member who is always called for tech support), if you don’t want to deal with their computer issues.

not “interface” or “working on applications” (all of which, in my opinion, are easier and better in Ubuntu w/ Gnome than on either Mac or Windows).   No… a new Linux user’s biggest issue is unsupported, killer apps. If you can get iTunes (with DRM and store), Photoshop, and the latest MS Office working on Linux without issues, then users will defect in droves. (I know Wine and Crossover try, but they’re not there yet. (PS: If Mono gets us any closer to that goal, no matter what the patent issues, I say, “hurray!” Quick show of hands, who reading this in the U.S. doesn’t have libdvdcss installed on their boxes? Or paid for mp3 support? Of course, I raised my hand for both, because I think all of these software patents are legit.)

My point about Linux is that there is a natural progression from novice to expert, even for the 95%, and it requires no additional desire or frustration more than what an average user experiences in any operating system. The only difference is, in Linux, users can do something about their negative experiences, and there are tools that are easy to use and people willing to help.

I’m using SuSE linux 11.1 (not Kubuntu) and I have had my share of broken library dependencies. I had never heard of “sudo apt-get build-dep”. My loss apparently, but then I rarely stray beyond the packages that come with the SuSE distribution and can be installed through YAST.

How can I say this politely?… WhyTF are you still using SuSE? SuSE is Diet Windows using Yast as an artificial sweetener. Pick Coke or Pepsi, and drink that! (More like pick corn-starch or sugar sweetened.)

In my opinion, if you are mostly a server guy, you ought to go RedHat/CentOS, just because it is what most people use on servers. If you are mainly doing desktop work, give regular Ubuntu a shot, and then apt-get install kubuntu-desktop once you are used to the “Debian way of doing things.” But I know recommending a distro is “fight’n words”, so I’ll stop now before the entire board comes to give me a beat-down.

This is another problem with Linux: there isn’t just *one* standard package manager that does everything (and does it so well that you never want anything else), there are at least two.

As opposed to Windows and Mac where there are… NONE. If you give Ubuntu a shot, I think apt is what you are looking for. Get all that SuSE junk out of your head. I think the multiple package managers is a very strong advantage for Linux.

The fact that there is “two or three of everything” (KDE and Gnome, yum and apt, rpm and deb, Grub and LILO, ext3 and ReiserFS or whatever is the other one now, Thunderbird and Evolution and Kmail, OpenOffice and KOffice and Gnome loosely affiliated applications) means that there is a rapid pace of innovation between competing communities. Desktop distributions (with the exception of SuSE, which is geared towards Windows Power Users) are very good at hiding the sheer number of choices available to beginning users so they don’t get overwhelmed. If someone hands you an Ubuntu or Mint CD, and you install it, you won’t even know about KDE until you start fiddling around inside the system because you get curious.

I disagree with scottgrizzard about Linux being for users by users though. If you need to get beyond what’s pre-cooked, you’ll need to consult a book like Frish, A. (1995) Essential system administration. O’Reilly & Associates. System administration is never for end-users, and the trick is to ensure you needn’t get involved in it. For better or worse, MS Windows goes further to make sure you don’t have to if you don’t want to.

Yes, in 1995 you needed a book to learn about system administration. Since then, we all got broadband and started blogging/list-serving/wiki-ing night and day (especially night). You don’t need books to learn Linux – what you need is a desire to change something about your system and an Internet connection. (For serious tweaking, a spare box or a virtual machine doesn’t hurt, but only if you are playing with the core system.)

My first admin job was for my apartment complex in grad school. They wanted a Samba Domain Controller (they didn’t know that – what they knew was that the last guy had installed a pirated version of Windows 2000 on their old server which a bolt of lightning had eaten). They gave me a month’s rent free to do it, “for $700 in hardware” when I told them it could be done using free software. I set them up with a SuSE 10.0 Domain Controller that they could manage using webmin. (Yes, I used SuSE at one point, but if you can admit you have a problem, recovery is possible.) It took me two weeks (off and on) to set up, but I did it with the aid of the online helps, the mailing list, and the IRC chat room. The owner hired me part-time after that.

You don’t need to keep regular users out of system administration; you just need to not require them to get into system administration until they want to do something sysadmin-like. Then, you need to let them pick off the piece they want, without making them get involved in everything else. The good Linux distros do this, letting the user install a “server package” with the same graphical ease that they install a chess program. (With the exception of anything involving SELinux, but someone was on crack with that one but it should be hard, because SELinux was designed by the NSA for high security, and no one has ever been terminated with extreme prejudice by mildly disgruntled Fedora users.)

My points (and I do have two) are that Linux is for everyone, (unless you are in some niche like graphics design, in which case someone needs to crack the whip under the CrossOver folks), and stop using SuSE! While it may be evil, even more importantly, it’s lousy software!

PS: I just copyrighted the Yast as artificial sweetener line, before I posted it here. It’s mine… (evil laugh).