[Cumbria] A manifesto

[Ian Linwood]

Hello Roger,

Tuesday, December 31, 2002, 12:39:04 AM, you wrote:


> Ian Linwood has kindly just contributed a kind of his-story/manifesto and I
> thought mine own might also be useful...

Glad to get the ball rolling.

> My Outlook client isn't connected directly to my DSL (hah!) line though - it
> runs through my own qmail-pop server hanging off qmail on a RedHat 7.3 linux
> box in the room next door.

That's the way to do it! Qmail is an excellent stable and secure
MTA, my preferred choice.

> My Windows XP client _thinks_ it's talking to a Windows NT domain but is
> sadly misinformed - it's samba 1.x.

Oh dear, early Samba. If my memory serves me well, don't these earlier
versions require a 'reg hack' on the connecting Windoze boxes to force
the LAN manager to send passwords in clear text across the network
:-(

> GUI everything is the way to go.. And I speak as one of the few remaining
> people who can fly a DOS command line well, retains a subscription to 4DOS
> and opens a terminal window on Linux in order to do anything substantial.
> You cannot expect an 'ordinary' user to do that - you only have to look at
> the man page for 'ls' to work out why. Give me Konqueror any day...!

It is a poor indictment of the currently available GUI's that command
line has to be the main method of management. This is OK on servers,
but for 'ordinary users' it really has held back linux take up.
(that said, I rarely use a GUI on linux anyway).

Sun realized this quite early on, and were quick to make CDE tightly
integrated into Solaris. As Dave pointed out in an earlier post, Sun
are now moving over to Gnome.

[snip details of ENT infection  ;-)]

> If Linux stands still it will go the way of SlackWare and Mandrake (almost
> RIP). If it is possible to take on Microsoft and win - the jury still being
> out on that - then the RedHat way is the only way. Open source is good but
> it needs to be packaged in a way that corporates can accept and corporations
> can support. That means being in control and RedHat 8 is the end result of
> applying that control.

I think you may be slightly misinformed here regarding status of
current distro's. Yes Mandrake are struggling, but Slackware, is quite
healthy and are making a profit.

> The Debian and BSD philosophy is all well and good but they release for the
> hacker community, not the commercial one. You can't take on Microsoft by
> doing that and Microsoft aren't frightened by Debian or BSD - they're
> frightened by RedHat and Sun...

Yes the dark lord should be frightened of the Sun.  :-)

> I also had a ZX Spectrum and am quite proud of it. My brother learned
> everything he knows about programming on it and and now makes a better
> living than I doing 'real' programming for a low level software company. I
> get to shuffle paper at BNFL...

Still got Zilog Z80 programming manual here, and the Spectrum ROM
disassembly.

-- 
Best regards,
 Ian                            mailto:ian@darksideofthemoon.org.uk