Forrester Study About Open Source’s Role in Corporate Environment

Three weeks ago Unisys published a Forrester study regarding the use of Open Source in corporate environments. One notable result is that not only costs but also “added value” are reasons for strong adoption of Open Source Software.

Forrester asked around 500 corporate IT people about their experiences with Open Source Software. You can find Unisys’s summary here, the study can be downloaded as a PDF file.

The key results are that Open Source software is often used in mission critical applications and that not only the cost savings are driving the acceptance but also the use of code without restrictions and the open standards. On the other side, most IT people do have stomachache when they think about the support options. To me that is a clear sign that Red Hat, Sun and Novell don’t make their jobs very well, btw.

But the rest of the study is also worth a read. And since it covers only 17 pages with colourful graphics and a big font size you can quickly go through it
Here are some additional points which caught my attention:

• Supporting open standards, using without restriction and no-vendor lock-in are much more important than the price!
• Viewing/Modifying the source code is as unimportant as creating and distributing derivative work. No surprises there, they are not software vendors.
• The companies clearly don’t want to participate with the community. So you shouldn’t mention that possibility as a key point whenever you sell OSS.
• Security concerns are roughly fifty-fifty: 50% think OSS is more likely to be insecure because of the open source code, and 50% don’t think that. Old habits die hard…
• Many other concerns (maturity, complexity, business orientation) are also fifty-fifty. Is that a sign of a turnaround in these days? And if yes, where to?
• Despite all efforts of Microsoft, TCO is not a concern of the most people. Hardly a third do see this as a concern.
• They want support in all ways (maintenance, integration with closed source software, consulting, life cycles, etc.).
• Only half of them want legal support, and they don’t fear problems in that area anyway.
• OSS is used in almost any branch: server, database, network infrastructure, development.
• OSS is hardly used as the Desktop OS.
• The IT people see OSS as a key in consolidating IT infrastructure and improving the IT efficiency.
• Most of the asked people do not see direct business effects since that is more a question of they way how you use software and manage processes than of the licence of the software.
• The most important capability of an OSS vendor are the OSS skills - second is the competitive price.
• A vendor needs to have customer references and integration skills as well.

Nice overview - and it gives a pretty clear impression: there is a strong demand for Open Source service providers which are able to support the used applications and who are able to integrate them with other applications as well.
And the people do not really care about legal stuff (which Microsoft talks about all the time) and they do not care about the community itself (in the way of participating).

As usual: this is a study, therefore you should keep an eye at the numbers, at the details and especially at the details which are missing. In this case the number of asked IT people is relevant:

In order to get the most valid data possible, only companies that indicated that they had at least evaluated open source software were included. […]
In this sample, 59.1% of the respondents were currently using open source (49.6%), currently piloting open source (5.8%), or planning to pilot open source (3.7%). Only 26.8% of the sample had no plans whatsoever to use open source.

Also I wonder if everyone using Open Source Software really know that he/she does. There are several enterprise products around where you might not know that it is OSS.

Five reasons that prevent my ’school’ from adopting Open Source: (from a non-western perspective)

Recently the NZ government aggressively pushed the adoption (some say too early adoption) of open source software (NeoOffice) for their Macs (news-report here I found this a fascinating discussion but in the end unrelated to my situation because while my heart goes out for the permeation of open source for the sanity of the global IT customer/user, my own school (in a non-western country) is ions away from moving towards open source awareness let alone adoption.

A bit about my ’school’: My school (without naming names) is a small set-up for advanced learning; with about 50+ computers for faculty and students. All computers run Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP. All computers use Internet Explorer (except a few faculty who have chosen the adoption of Firefox. The Firefox option does not exist for the students). For office software, all student computers have Star Office 7. While the faculty have either Star Office or MS Word 2003 (education version). Some faculty have their own MS Office solutions, through OEM licensing when they bought with their laptops. The same is true for students with Laptops, though students with desktops (usually assembled of local one-room shops) may have some pirated software, but all MS oriented. In the entire campus, there is only one Mac, and that sits in the Publications Office.

There are at least five reasons why for the next five years my ’school’ will probably still be dependent on Windows-based products and not touch anything from open source.

1. Our institution is not government funded, hence management policies are determined in-house and by the Board. While currently, finances are not preventing positive IT implementation, there are still enough financial constraints to give the impression/feeling that “we can’t take risks” with open source.

2. Since our IT supervisors (we outsource our IT solutions and support) are MS Windows oriented, their recommendations will obviously be Windows-based solutions. In fact, one deterrent for resisting the implementation of Linux in student computer labs is that, according to these IT-guys, the Windows server does not (cannot?) recognise which site a student on a Linux computer is browsing. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but in a school situation where internet monitoring is important, such arguments are clinchers.

3. Our management (raised in the generation of typewriters) is not IT friendly, and any adoption of new technology (even if it is windows-based) is not thought of positively. For example, out of all the faculty, I know only one has a blog. And that too he needs help to manage it. Of course there are exceptions; we have probably two-three IT geeks hidden in the faculty/management. But they are still in the Windows mold and trust Windows enough because it works for them.

4. There is also a false (in my view) impression that grammar check and spell check improves grammar and spelling. That is why, there has been a push for the adoption of Microsoft Office on all our student machines; because it has grammar check. (Currently we use Star Office). There is also the false impression that the software with more tools means greater productivity. In actual fact, neither student nor faculty, in my experiences, uses the computer for more than writing academic documents (which require footnotes, table of contents and indexing). Still, the idea of ‘better’ software is always, ‘potential’ to do more.

5. Finally, there is no understanding of open source philosophy. Open Source philosophy, of free (as in money) and free (as in for cooperation/transparency) is unheard of. Linux is probably just a catch-phrase out of context. And right now, people feel they have bigger and more important things to worry about than the operating system and software running on their computers. I say this because this lack of understanding of the ideology of Open Source exposes how despite being an advanced educational institute that focusses on the discussion/critique and development of ideological thinking among students, they fail to understand the ideology (and politics) that control their decision to continue with Microsoft, or the alternatives the lie, waiting for adoption.

In summary: as you can see, we’re far away from implementation. I almost wish that the government was funding our institution and would then force us to adopt something like what the New Zealand government is doing. But alas, I realise that even if our government was funding us, they will still push for Microsoft, because what is here below (the people) must reflect what is there above (our governments that reflect our people).

Fedora 7 - My Personal Bugfest

Fedora 7 is to be released in these hours. I already got a copy of the last RC and have been bug hunting since then. And I gathered quite some over the last days, unfortunately, but most are simply due to new, not yet tested application features.

The Fedora 7 release was supposed to come along with a new feature I personally really could use: extended authentication support in NetworkManager.

So after the features were added and Fedora packaged a beta version I got my copy and tried to get the network working.
However, it didn’t work: the wpa_supplicant has seriousproblems and even crashes. As long as that problem is not sorted out I’m afraid I can’t use my universities network.
But since I was already at my universities computer lab I tried to get at least the VPN working - and failed as well: the client configuration file for Cisco routers doesn’t work for NetworkManager - and has some minor file association problems, btw.

Unfortunately Fedora 7 has some other issues as well on my computer - suspend/resume is not working anymore for me, I get a kernel panic. And KDE is no longer able to remember which applications have been started in the last session.

Anyway, since I was already working at it I also filled three other bug reports not exactly related to the release of Fedora 7, but also valid bug reports/wishes: one was against Fedora in general to add the necessary config options to xorg.conf in case of loading synaptics drivers, one was to update a certain package to the newest version and the last one was about adding the (atm not working) extended authentication support to knetworkmanager.

Hm, all over all I must admit that I’m a bit disappointed that enterprise network things on Linux are still not in a really usable shape, and I really do hope that things improve massively with the release of NetworkManager 0.7…

Short Overview: Current State of Mesa and OpenGL on Linux

Most free X.Org graphic drivers are based on Mesa, which is a free OpenGL specification implementation. However, while OpenGL is already in Version 2.1 the Mesa implementation only supports version 1.5. This is to change soon - but OpenGL will make new releases as well.

Graphics in Linux has several problems and issues: first of all there is only Intel providing real free graphics drivers - but Intel does not build high-end graphics software. Second, Microsoft did its usual monopoly homework, and everyone talks about DirectX 10 - it becomes harder to port graphics apps between Windows and Linux because on Windows you most certainly want to use DirectX. Third there is OpenGL itself: the development stagnated for quite some time and the current OpenGL API does not support all the new cool hardware things out there. Fourth, and that is something I realized just few hours ago, the OpenGL implementation for Linux, Mesa, does only provide an OpenGL implementation for Version 1.5 - although OpenGL 2.0 was introduced almost three years ago.

The first problem might see changes in the future: Nvidia always provided advanced graphics drivers for the Linux community, and AMD at least said it would like to solve issues somehow. The second problem is more difficult: it depends on how well OpenGL evolves in the future. If the API is well implemented with Windows and if there are impressive features and such things available which are appealing to developers on the Windows platform these might prefer OpenGL again instead of DirectX. But to achieve that goal the OpenGL people really have to do their homework.

This is somehow related to the third problem: OpenGL itself. Version 2.0 was released in autumn 2004, version 2.1 was released last year. This year we will see two releases at once: one release in the 2.x branch - and a 3.0 release.

First one that is coming out soon is Longs Peak (OpenGL 2.x), which is a major clean-up of the code after almost a decade and a half of nothing else but stacking numerous extensions together.
This API is supposed to arrive in summer timeframe, most probably July. Approximately three months after that, Mount Evans (OpenGL 3.0) will run specifically on hardware born after November 8th, 2006. You’ve guessed it correctly, we are talking about DirectX 10-class hardware, bringing all the features of unified 3D architecture to the world of OpenGL.

This means that OpenGL will get all cool features as well - eventually. I hope that this move is not too late, and I really hope that this will bring more people to use OpenGL again. This is crucial as soon as it comes to porting applications to Linux or any other operating system.

But to use all these cool features there must be drivers available who actually implement these features. Nvidia and ATI/AMD provide Linux drivers (and Windows drivers of course) implementing OpenGL in version 2.1 (Nvidia) or 2.0 (ATI/AMD). However, the free implementation of OpenGL, Mesa 3D is only at version 1.5 - which was released 4 (!) years ago. This is depressing somehow :/
However, the current development version of Mesa, version 6.5.3 is in a good state and a new version, v7.0 featuring OpenGL 2.0/2.1 support is expected soon:

Mesa 7.0 is expected to follow shortly.

Shortly can be anything, but to me it sounds like we see OpenGL support this summer.

The question is afterwards: how fast will the drivers pick up the implemented support for the new API? I can only hope that they are already targeting at the new Mesa release.

And there is another question: how ling will it take to take on with the next OpenGL releases? 4 years are just too much time for the fast developing graphics market.

But having a look at the Mesa news it looks more like that the main development was done in recent months, meaning that the development sped up, compared to the time before. This would mean that there is now an active development community behind Mesa. And if that is true chances are that we will see OpenGL 2.x and 3.x support soon in Mesa.

In any case, the new Mesa will be released soon. And since it will be the first main release after 3 years we can expect a lot of news overage, maybe even an interview or two and quite some information about the road map of Mesa and even OpenGL.

I just hope Mesa will update their homepage till then, it looks horrible at the moment

New OpenGL driver for ATI cards from AMD this year

Phil Rogers was recently interviewed by extremetech.com about the ATI drivers. While the interview focuses mainly on Windows there are some information about Linux as well.

In the 5-page long interview Rogers mentions Linux while he talks about a totally reworked OpenGL driver: the driver was rewritten from the scratch in the last three years and is developed for Windows XP, Vista and Linux. While (of course…) the Vista driver has the main priority the Xp and the Linux driver will be shipped later this year.

Besides the Linux driver itself Rogers mentions also a new Catalyst Control Center:

On the Linux front we will also be releasing a new version of the Catalyst Control Center quite soon.

Sounds great - however, I wonder when we will see the first results of this new drivers. And I wonder what this new driver has to do with the AMD announcement to fix certain issues of the current driver regarding to Open Source. Remember: the fglrx driver does not support AIGLX or has its own implementation (like Nvidia has), not to mention stuff like RandR 1.2.

Last but not least, I wonder which OpenGL version will be supported by this new driver - it is planned to release a new OpenGL API version 3.0 this year (!) and it would be nice to see ATI being fast to adopt it.

KDE: Plasma&SuperKaramba, Kalzium, Kwin, WebKit, Krita and the general State

The new commit digest is out, and features several important news. Among them are the first real Plasma screenshots, a Kcontrol module for Kwin and Krita and Kalzium improvements.

This weekends Commit Digest, Issue 60, was already mentioned last week to become a big one: the first real Plasma screenshots were announced. But even without the Plasma news there are enough interesting news and changes - and it also feature two videos, something I never saw before in a Commit Digest. Here is an overview about the most important and notable news.
Plasma&SuperKaramba

First of all, here is a Video showing Plasma in action (a mpeg version is linked at the Commit Digest):

Pretty neat. Of course similar things have already been possible with SuperKaramba, but Plasma will provide much more functions than SuperKaramba did - this clock is just a first example and proves that the basics are indeed working.

Speaking about SuperKaramba, the Digest also explained the realtion between SuperKaramba and Plasma:

SuperKaramba themes can now live within the Plasma space and will help fill the initial void till real Plasmoids appear.

Sounds to me like the merge will take more time than expected, but that is ok: Plasma is not complete at the moment and we will even see huge improvements in the step from KDE 4.0 to KDE 4.1 In the meantime SuperKaramba might deliver everything which is still missing until both finally merge.
Kalzium

One of Kalzium’s main new features will be the molecular viewer:

Kwin

The new composite extension of Kwin develops quite well- but had to be enabled by command line in the past. This changed now: kwin gets a kcontrol modul. Atm it does not really do anything and kwin doesn’t care about the module, but that will change soon. I’m really looking forward to the next KDE Four Live release where I can test this feature and have a look at the new kwin composite features.

Speaking about the composite extension several application developers were faced with the problem that they wanted to support such features in their applications, but needed to know if the composite extension was activated. Therefore the applications developers started to implement their own solutions for each application, which of course is unnecessary duplicated work. Therefore, a common function to check if the composite extension is enabled was introduced:
bool KWindowSystem::compositingActive();
Nothing revolutionary, but as said necessary. Now the applications developers need to get aware of that function.

WebKit

Work started to have the option to integrate WebKit as a kpart in the future. This means that users can choose if they want to have KHTML or WebKit displaying their web pages. If this work is finished it might also inspirate other people to start a stand alone browser for KDE based on WebKit.
Of course this does not mean that konqueror or even KHTML are replaced or anything like that - it simply adds another possibility.

From my point of view this is great since I have great hopes in WebKit and the fact that several parties are involved with the development: Apple, Nokia, Adobe, many KDE developers, and so on. Still, I would prefer to see that all KDE/KHMTL developers would be fine with WebKit, atm there are still some strong emotions among some developers.

Krita

The Krita development is pretty strong - as usual. And I have to admit that I’m really looking forward to the new Krita 2: I was used to Gimp in the past but started to play around with Krita in the last days and weeks whenever I had to modify images - and I was impressed! It works reliable, fast and just smooth.
And this will hopefully be better: with the last week Krita got an OpenGL interface for display of HDR image exposures. The print support was implemented, new layers and transparency features were added, etc.

But the Krita developers are also faced with a current problem: they want to improve the usage of tablets (think of Wacom here), but to achieve this goal they need money to buy them. Therefore they asked the community to donate money. All over all they need several hundred Euros, which is quite a lot, but you know the math: if each user donates 1 Euro…

Stae of KDE 4 in general

There are many more changes and improvements making this Commit Digest worth a read. It also shows pretty well how active and alive the current development and the community around KDE 4 is.
Also, with Plasma now getting into shape there are hardly any base technologies left which you have to worry about if they will make it into KDE 4. The only things I’m missing are news about kicker and kmenu replacements.

However, the current state of KDE 4 itself is best described by hints found in to other posts: in recent posts both Annma and Troy mentioned that they currently use KDE 4 to accomplish their daily work! Annma mentioned that she was pretty impressed seeing KDE 4 in such a good state already, while Troy pointed out that the state of KDE 4 is enough to write his famous articles inside of KDE 4.

Or course it does not mean that it is ready for normal users yet - base desktop applications like the menu and the taskbar will be replaced before the final release - but it is on a good track! And there is still a month left till the first Beta release…

LinuxOS 2007 vs openSUSE 10.2 vs Windows XP: Comparing Boot-up/Shut-down timings

I recently installed PCLinuxOS as the third distro on my system (incidentally overwriting Ubuntu). And since I’m an openSUSE (fan) user, I’ve been jumping distributions a lot recently to get things done… just to give each distro a fare usage. Anyway, the moment you regularly jump distributions, the boot-up (and subsequently shut-down) timings become an issue. And I thought it would be interesting to compare the three operating systems from a ‘timing’ perspective.

Testing Method: There’s nothing too technical in my experiment. I used the stop-watch on my wrist-watch. I gave each operating system about three times to load and look the last reading. If the last reading was way off the other two, I took the middle reading. For boot-up, I timed from the moment I clicked the distro in GRUB till the Login screen. For shut-down, I timed from the Logged-in stage (hence the distro would have to logout and shutdown in one go). My desktop is one of those AMD 64bt, 1800+ machines, with 512MB RAM (and a normal hard disk, ie not SATA) So on faster machines the boot-up/shut-down times will definitely be faster.

nb: Please note that while I’m a openSUSE fan, I’m not trying to skew the numbers in it’s favour. Which is why it comes out the ‘worst’ of the three.

BOOT-UP TIMING: from GRUB to LOGIN Screen

PCLinuxOS 2007: 37.33 seconds
Interestingly, all three times I booted up to PCLOS, I always got 37 seconds, it was the most consistent.

openSUSE 10.2: 1 minute 5.43 seconds (65.43 seconds)
I like openSUSE, but this is atrocious. All I can say is that I’ve heard a rumour that openSUSE is trying to speed things up. More power to that!

Windows XP: 25.64 seconds
Windows has always been the faster booting system I’ve seen. These seconds actually matter because you (I) tend to choose Windows when you need to quickly check something.

SHUT-DOWN TIMING: (From LOGGED in position to computer TURNOFF)

PCLinuxOS 2007: 22.81 seconds

openSUSE 10.2: 28.93 seconds
A much improved performance!

Windows XP: 35.44 seconds
This was surprising, and I feel I must qualify by saying that possibly Windows was trying to close all the background programmes running in Windows logged in mode (there were no open programmes), which is why it took so long. But I guess that is a Windows problem, so why give excuses, right? :)

SUMMARY:

My personal favourite openSUSE failed big-time, though the shut-down was not so bad. PCLinuxOS is slowly winning me over by it’s high standard. And Windows? Well, it’s always easy to enter Windows but (in the words of the Eagles) “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave…”

Fedora 7 Moonshine - first impressions

I tested a release candidate of the new Fedora 7, code name Moonshine. As already pointed out, most big changes were under the hood and are not really visible to the user.

Fedora 7 comes along with a pretty impressiveset of changes - however, the average user will not see most of them. Especially if he upgrades a highly personalized system like mine and additional runs KDE which traditionally does not get so many improvements in Fedora.

However, some things were notable: First of all several packages are update. The kernel is now tickless and you can start using PowerTop to check for evil processes. Also, my knetworkmanager features a new overview actually displaying the IP and other current information. However, support for additional network types like the new version of NetworkManager provides is not yet included. KDE 3.5.7 is not (yet) included, but k3b is provided in version 1.0. Also, Firefox finally is shipped in version 2.0, as is Thunderbird.
Another notable thing was the fact that I didn’t had to install the ipw2200 firmware: it comes with the distribution now. Very neat.

Also, as promised the device nodes of the IDE drives changed - now all my partitions have /dev/sdX nodes. I had to alter one or two scripts to deal with that, but it also showed me how useful labels are.

Of course, one of the largest changes, the merge of Extras and Core is invisible (despite the missing “core” in the name). First of all because the repository directories are still not opened yet and second because this has no direct effect to the average user. Strange, somehow, because quite a lot of effort went into this change.

And, another big change, the integration of the newest GNOME version, is something I can’t say much about since I hardly use GNOME ever. But you might want to read more about the new version here.

All over all, from the user point of view an evolutionary but very useful step to a new version of Fedora.

How this “poor chap” fixed his GRUB

Recently I ooh-ed and aah-ed about PCLinuxOS 2007. But one gripe I did have was that it messed up my GRUB (ie. it recognised my Windows but it did not recognise my openSUSE partition). While writing that point, I confessed that I have some GRUB problems with many distros and only Ubuntu in my experience recognises and boots everything correctly. I then confessed that I have actually installed an entire Ubuntu distribution (in the past, but on more than one occasion *blush blush*) to fix my GRUB!

Later, I saw a GRUB fixing how-to post that was intended to help ME fix my GRUB, and it referenced me as “the poor chap”. Which I admittedly am! :) The helpful techinical post is found here: http://www.tuxmachines.org/node/16701

Anyway, I was inspired to fix my GRUB, but the post was a little complicated for a noob like me. And so I did what I usually do, go for shortcuts and hope for the best. The following text is extrapolated from the comment I wrote in that post. Hope that helps some people, though I would urge as many people as possible better read the helpful techinical post to get a better idea of how to REALLY fix the thing.

*****

Hey thanks for your effort, but what you wrote, for a person like me, was tooo scary. Really, I’m one of these people who find it difficult to read too much technical stuff… and so I found it difficult (and scary) to read your help. But you did inspire me to fix my GRUB immediately, and so, I did. And this is how I did it.

Firstly, taking on from your pointer, I realised that GRUB is just code. Thanks for that pointer.

Secondly, I realised that I actually needed to “cut and paste” only. Thanks for this pointer too.

However what I did, was I went to my openSUSE GRUB menu.lst and opened the file (using su) and then I copied openSUSE’s boot code, which in my case was

title openSUSE 10.2
root (hd0,3)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hdc4 vga=0×317 resume=/dev/hdc3 splash=silent
initrd /boot/initrd

I pasted this to the end (replacing my previous openSUSE detailed attempt). And then tested.

Viola, it worked!

Now I know that people like me are the bane of linux. Meaning, if I knew the code, I’d understand it… but instead, more and more, a generation of windows-based users (like me) are infiltrating linux and filling the space with a desire for ‘easy’ solutions. I try not to be one of them, but sometimes I am. However, I guess I have to go with my strengths. I don’t think I will ever be friendly about understanding code (cut and paste solutions are just about all that I can do), and so I guess I want to thank you again for taking the time to address this issue… and hopefully there will be more people who will read your entry and actually UNDERSTAND what they’re doing.

Cheers!

NetworkManager: more support for corporate environments

The NetworkManager tries to ease the usage of wireless networks from a users point of view. The next version 0.6.5 will incorporate support for a range of authentication methods which are often used in large WLAN deployments.

The NetworkManager is an irreplaceable tool when you work with changing networks on a Linux computer: it can manage different wireless LANs as well as wired LANs and even VPN connections. And of course, you can switch easily between the networks without any problems.
NM’s release by Red Hat was the breakthrough which made networking on Linux user machines really easy. Today almost every bigger distribution includes NetworkManager.

However, there are shortcomings: although NM uses the wpa_supplicant to authenticate against secured networks NM doesn’t support all authentication methods supported by wpa_supplicat.
Especially the EAP methods have limited support. This limits the usage of NetworkManager in corporate environments somewhat because these techniques are often used by big WLAN deployments.

Now it was revealed in a bug report that the next version of NM, version 0.6.5 will have support for several of these methods:

Using the 0.6.5-pre version of nm-applet downloaded from
http://people.redhat.com/dcbw/NetworkManager/0.6.5, I can see options for
EAP-TTLS/{PAP,MSCHAP,MSCHAPV2,GTC}. So, it should work for you.

This is great news for everyone working at a bigger company or using WLAN for example in universities (I know of several universities which use one of these methods to authenticate).
From my point of view it would be additionally nice to see when Linux would have native support for these techniques because howtos I read about TTLS/PAP configuration on Windows stated that you need extra software because Windows does not support it native.

One thing though: this is still a development version - nothing is written in stone, it is not marked as usable in production environment and I haven’t tested that. But as soon as a new version is marked stable enough I’m out testing it!

A last word about new versions of NetworkManager:
0.6.5 is a minor release: big changes will come with version 0.7:

• Multiple Active Devices (think of connection sharing here)
• System-wide Configuration (the current one is userbased only)
• wpa_supplicant dbus Control Interface (socket based atm; a dbus interface could bring more flexibility)
• More Wireless/Wired Authentication Methods (even with the mentioned support there are some missing)

However, there is no targeted release date I know of atm.

PCLinuxOS 2007 installation review and first impressions

Never have I had such an incident free installation procedure before. Really! I’m not joking. There’s literally nothing much (in terms of problems) to report. My installation of PCLinuxOS 2007 was simple and error free. What I will say now (about installation) will be comments on certain preferences and perhaps some confusion on (my) part. However, I would say that while PCLinuxOS 2007 installation was one of the most simple and straight-forward linux installations I have ever done, it wasn’t perfect!

Installation Ease? 10/10

Speed of installation? I think I had a whole installation completed in under 30 minutes. That’s excellent, though not as fast as Freespire which I think has a record (on my machine) of about 10-12 minutes!

Configuration capability? Now there’s the problem. I guess every Linux distro has to choose between how “easy” to make an installation and how “configurable”. Well, PCLinuxOS’s installation configuration ability is not thaaaat great. It’s sufficient, but somehow, it is a little scary because when you’re messing with the partition editor, everything looks “fun” even “childlike” and the gravity of the situation just seems to be lacking. The advanced options are limited and often unhelpful. Perhaps to compare, one of the BEST installations in term of configuration was openSUSE 10.2. Now in that installation you can almost change everything (including which windows drives to mount or not)! But I guess, PCLinuxOS just saves the user the trouble and does the thinking for you. Nice, but a little frustrating to non-so-new Linux users.

Bootloader? Well the final bootloader looks pretty, and it even automatically recognises my Windows XP partition, but it failed to recognise my openSUSE 10.2. This was made all the more frustrating because while installing there was no way I could add (or figure out how to add) the full details for openSUSE which was really frustrating. (it’s still not working and I know I have to edit grub somehow, though I don’t know how). Anyway, all this should not be a problem for those who work only with Windows and PCLinuxOS. I must say though, that the BEST bootloader installation is by Ubuntu, which doesn’t look pretty, but recognises EVERY single distribution that I’ve had on my machine. In fact in times of greatest frustration, I’ve actually loaded an entire Ubuntu just to fix my GRUB. OK… that suggests I’m still a noob, but it also shows how reliable I think Ubuntu’s grubloader is.

Internet connectivity? No hassles at all. My DSL modem worked fine as soon as I entered my IP address etc details.

Graphics display? I must add that PCLinuxOS has been one of the BEST (alongside Mandriva) out of the box experiences in terms of my monitor graphics display. Usually, in openSUSE, Ubuntu and any other distro I’ve tried, I’ve usually had to re-configure my Graphics display settings, and even download a VIA driver when available. And even with a VIA drivers, my Ubuntu display blinks! No such problem in PCLinuxOS. It’s working. No configuration needed. And that’s excellent. Really excellent!

Multimedia Codecs? Well, I’ve not tried everything, but so far, everything has worked; EVEN DIVX movies. Can you believe that? (Yes it plays DVDs and mp3s too) No need to install anything. I’m yet to try a Quicktime .mov file, so I’m not sure about that, but any distro that can read my .divx (which even Windows needs a software package for!) out of the box is excellent!

Look and feel? I must say that PCLinuxOS is visually a standout distro! The icons and the desktop look unified, as if they had one designer thinking it all through. We don’t get the modular design look (where many designers work on different programmes to give their own ‘personal’ and contradictory touch). In terms of other distro’s, openSUSE is pretty good, but you still have to work to make it look really good. Ubuntu is just terrible! But PCLinuxOS is just simply beautiful. It did remind me of Dreamlinux, but a better version of Dreamlinux! It even makes the blue look good (and I hate blue distros)! There is one minor drawback. I think because of the lack of ‘proprietary’ fonts, the font-display of my webpages is not as ‘good’ as on openSUSE or on Windows. Well, that can be changed, or gotten used to, but that’s just an additional comment.

Software Packages? I’ve given the packages in PCLinuxOS a quick look-in and I’m surprised that all the major programmes are there… OpenOffice 2.2, GIMP etc. But I’m surprised that the games are missing. That’s sad. Because for such a distro, the games would only help strengthen it. I know where to get the games, but I wish, especially if/when I were to give this distro to a newcomer, the games were already there because it would just be that much more attractive (because the Linux collection of games are actually quite fun… some of them at least).

Summary? Basically, PCLinuxOS 2007 lives up to the hype. And as a single-CD distribution, it looks and feels much better than Ubuntu, at least in its first impression. I find myself missing the power of openSUSE, but then, openSUSE being a multi-CD distro with big-buck-support, is a tough act to beat. I liked PCLinuxOS for all the reasons people are saying that it is a great distro: looks, ease of use, out of the box multimedia functionality etc. And I can’t wait to try and test it out more. Cheers to the PCLinuxOS team. This is really a Linux Plus!

(final screenshot after installation and slight modification below)

HelixPlayer news

After almost two years the HelixCommunity updated their pages and gives information about the current development state. The next release can be expected after June this year, but it will not feature AMD64 builds. Still, WMA and WMV seems to work…

Half a year ago I wondered if the HelixCommunity is still alive - the homepage was in large parts outdated and the development seemed to concentrate on other parts than on the players itself.I
I joined the lists and figured out that there was development in place, but without a release schedule at that moment.
Today I checked again the home page and was pleasantly surprised to see a reworked design and new information.

The first impressive information is also a sign that the HelixCommunity does has other priorities than someone might expect: the base technology is more important than the PC players because the base technology is used in more than 125 million devices - mobile phones. Pretty impressive, I think. But: the player for the Symbian OS already features the third generation of the Helix DNA client while even the second generation based HelixPlayer/RealPlayer for the PC is still in development.

But the player development was also straightened and now has a detailed roadmap. The roadmap shows that the work is currently at stage M11. Stage M13 will be reached in June, afterwards we will see the first Beta/RC1 releases which means that we might see a new RealPlayer/HelixPlayer combo this summer.
The roadmap also points out which features have been implemented/tested yet and which not. Among the tested and working features you find WMA and WMV support - I wonder how this works with the Free Software licence the HelixPlayer is released under…

But there are bad news as well: there will be no AMD64 version of the player. These users have to wait for the next generation of the player.
This is sad somehow because I had great hopes with HelixPlayer. I once hoped that it could become *the* multimedia backend for Linux. It would have been nice to have a multimedia backend supported by such a large community and with such a corporate backup. However, this chance has gone by: gstreamer conquered the gnome desktop (and has some corporate backup as well), and as it looks like xine won the hearts of the KDE people silently (amarok, kaffeine, phonon-xine).
And without functional AMD64 builds there will be no way to gain more market share again.