I speak of course, of the troll wars pertaining to Linux vs Windows vs Mac. Now, unfortunately, Macs tend to get away pretty well in these arguments, because regardless of how much open source software they steal and how much they try to push forward the boundaries of Vendor Lock-In, they are still the under dog in comparison to Microsoft, so MOST people, tend to leave them alone. The troll wars that I am particularly interested in, are those that follow the blog posts of a certain Steven J Vaughan-Nichols (Or SJVN to most of us). You see this is a very seasoned journalist, who has got a LOT of experience in the world of I.T. and he has a tendency to make rather straight forward blog posts. Only this morning I read one on Windows 7 and how good it was, yet immediately after, I read another which claimed Ubuntu 9.10 was better and gave the reasons why he thought so, the post about Windows being good, had barely a bad word said in the comments, no Linux fans jumping in there saying how much Windows sucks or that it’s a crap OS, yet the other post, whoohoohoohoo out come the zealots, and then the defenders of the faith.

To me he’s in a pretty good position to make reasoned, educated postings about the ups, downs, benefits and disadvantages to various software and operating systems, he has experience from all sides, has been doing it all for some time now, and he gets paid to do it, for some reason however, not everyone seems to agree with me. These days, the second SJVN says a single word against an MS product, all hell breaks loose. Someone from the Windows camp will jump in and instead of simply refuting the claim against Windows, they will begin a whole toilet roll (Yes I said Toilet Roll!) of insults against Linux and why it sucks, why it’s a hobbyist OS, why no one should care about an OS (Then why are you bothering to post if you believe no one should care?) and of course a whole load of other crap about how Linux doesn’t upgrade properly, how the people who use Linux are all nasty 43 year old men who still live in their mothers basement etc.etc.etc.

Well you may be asking yourself the same question as most of us Linux users, I understand why Linux users are passionate, I understand why Unix advocates are passionate, BSD, Solaris, whatever flavour you like, their’s usually a reason to be passionate, the same goes for open source software in general, there’s a philosophy behind it, there’s even a moral high ground to be taken in some/many cases, but until now, I could not for the life of me think why, anyone would get passionate about Windows, certainly not passionate enough to defend it so much and so publicly. I think however, that I’ve finally cracked it, a lot of people get accused of defending Windows because they get paid to do it, well that may be true in some cases, however I would assume (Now this is never really a good thing to do, but we all do it) that MS would make sure, anyone they paid to make blog posts, counter posts, forum posts etc. relating to their products, would at the very least be able to spell, let alone articulate their point. Otherwise what would be the point in paying someone to do it? So I’ve come to the conclusion, that the people defending Windows, who cannot articulate their points, most of whom don’t even seem to know what their own point is, to articulate it, are simply people who have grown up using MS products, like many of us did, started to rip off Windows a few years ago, then got fed up with the whole “Genuine Advantage” thing and decided to try Linux, not because of it’s morals, or it’s background, or even for it’s stability or security, but instead, for the fact that it was free, and ended up having not a very good time. I personally did something similar several years ago, I got fed up with the BSOD, I got fed up with constantly having to re-validate my Windows XP machine because MS had invented yet another way of checking if your copy of Windows was genuine and yet again got it wrong. So I moved to Fedora Core (Can’t remember which version, 5 I think).

I hated it, with a passion. I hated Gnome (I still do), I hated the fact that my video card didn’t work (a problem that is now well in the past), my sound card didn’t work (Even though it said it did (this problem is also for the most part gone), I also hated that the look of the system in a graphical sense, just didn’t seem as polished, so I re-installed XP and made do for 6 months, before I tried Ubuntu, the hardware handling was much improved by this point, but the system still looked crap, so I started asking around and digging, to find a better desktop environment, what I eventually found, was KDE. I promptly installed Debian and ran that happily for 6 months, before long I was bored with how simple everything seemed to be, and had become curious about what challenges might be out there, I found Gentoo! 1 year and a WHOLE LOT OF BANDWIDTH later, I knew more about Linux than I had ever thought possible and I was completely hooked, my life changed however, and I no longer had time to wait for 2 days while KDE compiled on my AthlonXP processor, so back I went, this time to the KDE version of Ubuntu (Kubuntu).

After all this switching, you might think I’d stay with just one distro, but you’d be wrong, I’ve switched back and forth between Debian, Gentoo, Ubuntu, Fedora and CentOS for years, trying a few others along the way but not as a serious desktop option. Over the last 12 months I’ve been pretty solidly Kubuntu, without even considering any other distro or any other OS, I’ve tested Win7 both on hardware and virtualised, and yes, I must say it’s pretty good, but I still can’t bring down my terminal with an F key (Yakuake), I can’t simply turn on wobbly Windows or transparency or the desktop cube, I can’t rely on it being stable or drop to a command line if the system freezes up, I can’t just reload the X-Server if that freezes, I can’t install new programs, upgrades or drivers without rebooting, I can’t leave it running for 3 weeks and then go back to it and have it be responsive, the list of things I can’t do on Windows of any flavour is huge, the list of things I can’t do but want to on Linux, is limited to one thing and one thing only these days, and that’s run Adobe CS4!

I’m not going to go on about him, but I need to explain the main thing that angered me about these posts, in order that you realise, what, exactly made me realise, The specifics of the Google Plan for World Domination, or GPWD as it is likely referred to within Google. This idiot, compares the new (It isn’t new it’s been around for 3 or 4 years now) Windows Powershell, to the command line in Linux. He claims that there is now no reason for Linux users to keep holding themselves back (At this point I was almost in tears, both of anger at his stupidity and of laughter at the fact he actually wrote it down and published it on the web) and that we will all magically switch to Windows now it has Powershell, he seems to have completely ignored the fact, that where Windows IS a GUI running an emulator called Powershell, where if the GUI crashes, then the whole thing has to be rebooted, Linux runs on the command line and the GUIs run on top of it, thus allowing the GUI to crash, the user to drop to a shell, hopefully fix their GUI or choose an alternate GUI (Another thing Windows can’t do but that list is huge) and then get back to work, all without having to reboot and in most cases even blink. Oh and apparently we all want to play games and use Microsoft Office, let me just say, I do play games, on Linux, and on a PS3 and I’m quite happy with that thanks, as for Office, well this is my more professional blog, so I can’t use the words I would like to.

Anyway I said I wouldn’t go on about him. The specifics of the GPWD, I believe are as follows:

• Release Google Wave to the masses, get everyone hooked and using it to create documents, share photos, make albums, share video, plan trips, auto update blogs, report bugs, view bugs, im people and all the other ABSOLUTELY AMAZING things it’s going to be able to do (If you haven’t watched the preview yet, do so on YouTube, it’s 1 hour 20 minutes long, but you’ll be riveted if you like gadgets and techy stuff.)
• Help developers produce as much stuff for Google Wave as possible, new gadgets, robots, plugins etc to make everyone rely on it just as much as everyone already relies on google.com, when they want to know the answer to an office question, life question or prove someone wrong
• Release Google Chrome OS, built on Linux, sleek, smooth, new custom Google UI, with just a web browser, possibly a mail client and a few small apps to deal with getting photos off your camera etc
• Advertise the hell out of both Google Wave and Google Chrome OS, plus advertising Android as much as possible, travel the conferences to do showcases of how everything interacts (Already done, go watch the Google Wave Video) to make everyone drool and want all the Google Stuff more than they want Apple stuff
• Sit back and relax comfortable in the knowledge that you’ve just destroyed Microsoft and Apple in one fell swoop without even trying

The last one is obviously a joke and a dig at Mr Idiot over at the popular web magazine but it’s not that far from the truth really. If you haven’t watched the Google Wave Tech Preview on You Tube and you’ve got an hour spare, (If you haven’t make an hour spare) then go watch it, even if you’re not that much of a techy you’ll love it, things for everyone, from making collaborative photo albums, with realtime updates on each participants screen (Watch as they drop photos into one Wave client and they immediately appear on the others clients), automatic blogging and twittering by highlighting text and telling a robot to go post for you, automatic bug posting, resolving and discussion editing, live im’ing the ability to join a conversation late and click a “playback” button to see HOW the conversation developed in ordered threaded fashion (no jumping back and forth, scrolling your MSN or Skype client up and down to see what someone said ten minutes ago so you can reply to it now and no one understand what you’re replying to), the ability to reply to a specific comment in a conversation, no matter how long ago it was, who made it, if that person has temporarily left the “wave” etc. and know that they can come back to the wave later and view your comment, right next to their original comment for context, as Lars from Google says “It will make flamewars SO much more effective”.

My partner and I have been working on this for a long time now, along with Nicholas Tee over at Zane Publishing, we’ve spent the last few years converting all of the “Zane Publishing” Educational Video titles to digital format, converting the quizzes to digital format and building the website and membership system to deliver them, on-demand to the masses for low, affordable subscription costs.

The involvement and intensity of this site has been simply immense, an entirely, built from scratch, database driven website, which had to be easy to use, easy to navigate, yet look beautiful and function perfectly, delivering over 1000 videos and quizzes on-demand has been a challenge, but I think we’ve managed to come damn close with our 30 day release and when the 30 days is up you can expect to see much more in the way of navigational features, teacher resources and helpful how-to documents around the site. The site was literally a “ground-up” operation, unfortunately as much as I’m an open source advocate, nothing out their open or closed source was going to fit the bill for this project, so it was decided we would build this thing from scratch, from it’s first php tag to it’s last bash script.

Originally intended for home-schoolers, because of Zane Publishings original market, the site has become more of a vision for opportunity, we suddenly realised just after beginning the build, that teachers may want to use these videos, quizzes and resources as well. Let’s face it, we’re well and truly into the digital age now and I’ve been working in a school during the day for the last 8 months and discovered that teachers really do love to use a data projector, with visual aids and any other teacher resources they can find to help them in their role as “educators”, so why not open the site up to them as well? That’s exactly what we’re going to do, teachers will have the ability to search the sites extensive video collection for something that suits a topic they want to teach and buy an individual Video or Topic/Collection of Videos for less than $10 and use them for a month. Not to mention, we’re also building a schools based membership system for Educational Institutions to get special pricing and access to all of the sites resources for a yearly subscription fee, the ability to create teacher and student accounts in order to take full advantage of the site.

With free lesson plans and curriculum courses coming soon, teachers will hopefully love this site to bits, I’ve had some great feedback from some of the teachers I work with and I hope that trend will continue as more and more teachers discover the site. Home Schoolers will soon be able to earn money through the site’s affiliate program too. Any member of the site can also volunteer as a sudo-salesperson and earn themselves some money by recommending the site to their friends, other home schoolers and schools, the affiliate system should be available just shortly after the full launch of the site in 28 days time.

The “Christian Guide for Learning” is now in it’s final stages of conversion, from hardback to e-book format and will hopefully be released with the finished site in 28 days time, free sections of the book will be and are now available to all registered members, with 2 “pay for” sections available at around $25 USD each, or the whole book for around $40 USD, all to be released soon.

Music to Study By is a feature that’s already available to members who register now, a collection of music from the Baroque era, proven in recent studies to improve your concentration and learning abilities if you listen to it while studying.

World resources are offered in the form of “The CIA Factbook” and “World Leaders” directories, right there on the website, updated regularly the information can be invaluable to anyone trying to teach social studies or current affairs topics to children.

So pop on over to Zane Education and take a look for yourself, let us know here, or using the websites built in contact form what you think of it, suggestions you may have for more features etc, it’s all appreciated and after all the site was built with you in mind and it will continue to be that way, so suggestions are more imperative than just welcomed.

Prius owners however are a different breed of car lover, they’re not particularly looking for style, but they actually do think the Prius looks damn hot, they’re not necessarily looking for something cheaper to insure or maintain, and let’s face it they definitely won’t get that in a Prius, unless you’re comparing it to a GTR or a Jag in which case ANYTHING is cheaper in those fields, believe me! What they are looking for in their car, and they really, really, REALLY think they’ve found in the Prius, is a SUPERIOR car to everyone elses. Prius owners have fallen for the whole idea, that a hybrid car is superior, they ignore the fact that it takes more energy and fossil fuels to create their batteries than a normal 4 cylinder car would use in petrol over the period of 5 years (I keep getting told and keep reading this, so if it’s wrong please tell me, preferably in a non flaming kind of way), they ignore the fact it can barely even hit 100mph going downhill with a tailwind, it’s SUPERIOR remember.

Anyway enough about cars, I’m a Power man, in every aspect of the word, I like playing football (Soccer for the yanks), driving fast cars, using the command line instead of pointing and clicking and I like to know exactly what my software is doing, when it’s doing it, and how it’s doing it. Now the thing is, I think I’m using a superior operating system by using Linux, and well, no the analogy really just fell down right there, I don’t just THINK I’m using a superior operating system, I AM using a superior operating system, I can customize everything I want to, I can play the games I want to, I can program anything I want to program and I can use more software than you could imagine, by pointing and clicking OR by typing commands, it’s fantastic, not for everyone I admit, but for me, fantastic.

So who are the Prius owners of the Geek World? I’ve come to the conclusion, that it’s Mac owners, they think their machines are more eco friendly, faster, easier to use, easier to fix, less vulnerable to viruses, they’re even more fanatical about them than Linux users in my experience and they do nothing but try to convert everyone else to Mac. The truth in fact is that Macs can in fact be FAR MORE costly in power terms, MUCH slower than even Windows in lots of circumstances, harder to use for anyone who’s used anything other than a Mac, harder to fix because you can’t get to anything in the all-in-ones, you can’t modify the source code and re-compile to fix nackered applications, you can’t issue basic bash commands in a lot of circumstances, because Apple decided to remove them, more vulnerable to Viruses than Linux, BSD, Solaris, Unix, in fact now I come to think of it, the only Operating System Macs have less viruses than, is Windows.

Macs look very nice, stylish, expensive and professional, but the thing is, it’s all wrong, there are other machines out there that look nice too and having a Mac is like driving a BMW 316, you may have the badge, the looks and the price tag, but you just don’t have the grunt under the hood. As for professional, Macs are anything but really, the old tagline of “Hello I’m a Mac” “And I’m a PC” is just the definition of WRONG. PC stands for Personal Computer, what on earth could be more of a Personal Computer than a Mac? It allows you to store YOUR MP3s, YOUR Movies, YOUR Photo Albums, YOUR web stuff, it’s ALL ABOUT YOU on a Mac. Which is great, but the actual PC gets associated with Windows all the time as a result of that slogan/ad campaign and it’s just plain wrong.

I used to work with Windows as an IT Engineer and I didn’t like it much, I started to deal with Macs and Linux professionally after a while because I was so into Linux in my personal life, eventually I just moved away from Windows all together, stopped working with it, stopped dealing with it, completely gone, woohoo! The last job I accepted was working in a school, with a completely Mac network, I thought “This could be cool, I’d rather there were some Linux machines in here, but that’s ok, Macs are Linux cousin, maybe I can have some influence” WOW WAS I WRONG! Mac guys are just plain and simple unconvertible, I don’t want to turn hard core Mac users into hard core Linux users, I just want them to recognise Linux the way I recognise Macs, it’s just not gunna happen though, that Prius attitude of “Mine is more superior than yours” is just unbeatable for them, you can’t get round it, if they’ve been sucked in enough by Macs, then there’s just no way back, not even an inch.

So in short, if you start to get involved with a Mac Guy in someway, and you think you might be able to convert him a little, at least get him to use Linux servers, so that the job is easier, faster, stronger and more reliable than Mac XServes, just forget it now, if someone is hardcore enough to use XServes, they’re a lost cause and you may as well just forget it and run, trust me on this. I’ll simply clarify this post by saying, I will still and do still recommend Macs to basic computer users, older computer users and people who don’t really need to do anything powerful with their computer, because that’s what a Mac is for, I just wish the Mac users would realise that. Lost cause.

Well I’m sure many of you will realise this, but those of you who are desperately searching for a way to do it and ended up here, I’ve noticed a few people have reported this bug and a few people who are new or newish to Linux trying to install Nvidia drivers and not getting very far with it, so the procedure following will allow you to install your NVidia drivers in a Virtual Terminal and then reboot to your GUI environment:

1) reboot your machine and hold down the SHIFT key as it boots up to get the GRUB menu to appear
2) Select the recovery option for the latest kernel and press enter to boot into recovery mode
3) From the recovery menu select “Drop to a Root Shell” (Doesn’t matter if you choose with networking or not)
4) Once you have a shell prompt type the following > telinit 3
5) You should now be in a root shell at RunLevel 3, allowing you to navigate to the folder that your driver is stored in

IF YOU’VE INSTALLED NVIDIA DRIVERS BEFORE THE REST IS SIMPLE, IF NOT READ ON

6) Once in the folder for your NVidia Driver type the following > sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-*
7) This should give you the basic Shell based Graphical Interface for the installer
The rest is obvious really from the information on screen, however here are a few tips:

Say NO to downloading a pre-compiled version from Nvidia, say yes to compiling one from source and say yes to running nvidia-config to enable the graphics drivers to be used in your xorg.conf file.

You should now have a running NVidia driver in your Karmic Koala installation, simply type > shutdown -r now
Your system will reboot and with any luck, if you’ve chosen the right driver, made the right choices in the installer etc you should see an NVidia splash screen momentarily before seeing the Karmic Login box.

Hope this helps anyone having trouble.

The problems began with not being able to run it in a Virtual Machine because my current processor (AMD Athlon64 4000+ Socket 939) doesn’t have the AMD-V extension necessary to run 64bit Guests on a 32bit Host, this annoyed me somewhat but I attempted to carry on by unplugging the majority of my disks and plugging in an empty 200GB Sata Drive. I tried to install Windows 7 4 times, each attempt resulted in a failure, either the system would crash completely, or it would simply freeze and refuse to go any further, with the Vista-ish spinny wheel spinning still.

Before we jump to any major conclusions here, I should point out that I then decided to try and test the 64bit Beta of Kubuntu Karmic Koala (9.10) on the same disk, and each of those installations failed too, now I know my processor is old, it’s getting replaced soon and it was one of the first 64bit processors out there, so perhaps neither of these OS’s is possible on my current processor, I just don’t know, I have previously run Debian Lenny 64bit on it however so what could be SO different about these installations.

One thing I can say about the installations, is that the Kubuntu installation took (As always) around 20 minutes, I could run it while running a live CD session (Which interestingly enough DID boot and work) and it only seemed to fail right near the end and on one occasion not until I actually rebooted after the installation, it simply failed to boot, the Windows 7 installation on the other hand, took 45 minutes each time before failing and from previous experience with Windows installs, the process it was going through at that time, was a good 20 minutes or so away from completion.

I will be upgrading my machine this coming week and you can rest assured I will be re-installing my main hard drive with the 64bit version of Kubuntu Karmic Koala (hopefully the full release version not the Beta) and I will once again attempt to install the 64bit Trial DVD of Windows 7 in both a VM and on a proper HDD. I’ll be sure to write blog posts about both, either here or on my ProdigalProgramming site, most likely spread across the two. I’ll try to include screenshots where I can and both reviews will be as honest and un-biased as I can possibly muster, I know several people who currently use Windows 7 and insist it’s actually quite good, I’m finding it hard from what I’ve seen so far to see much difference in it from Vista, both in looks and functionality but reliability as well.