Sunday 17 October 2010

Oracles OpenOffice commitment

As you might have read, Oracle is committed to OpenOffice.

As a long term follower of Oracles policy, especially its adoption of open standards, I'm pretty convinced that they will push forward OpenOffice development. First thing, Oracle made an announcement. This is definitely a good way to show commitment and support.

If OpenOffice is under the tight grip of the coroners of innovation, is there any hope for an open and free office suite?

My hope rests on LibreOffice.

Friday 1 October 2010

New layout

How do you like our new layout? After setting up so many blogs for friends and family, I decided to give it a try for myself.

I have neglected this blog for a while. Why?

First, Ubuntu has grown up. It's a stable and solid platform. I still think that OpenOffice should get some attention (which I sincerely hope it does with LibreOffice).

Second, there is enough material available on the net and in magazines specialized in Ubuntu. My input is not required anymore.

Third, I am slightly disappointed with Canonical and the way things develop.

  • Canonical does not take leadership in bringing Linux to the forefront of information technology. 
  • They allow kids to provide code in an uncontrolled and immature way.
  • Error elimination is not carried out in a professional manner.
  • Separation of communities, Launchpad, maintenance and development leads to nonexisting responsibilities.
Ubuntu by far is not ready for prime market. There is a spark but no fire.

Canonical and its leader could put emphasis on a mature and competitive development environment. They can put pressure on the Gnome team to come up with something like pyGTK. They can claim a stable and working office suite.

The window of opportunity is closed now. Microsoft has once again settled its business with Windows 7. Vista is forgotten.

With Office 2010 and Sharepoint 2010 they have forced their installed base to migrate from older platforms successfully. Visual Studio 2010 is unmet in the computer industry.

All left for open source affictionados is to wait for Microsoft to suffocate on it's own inability to innovate. The rest will be dealt by the big 3 that will challenge themselfs in patent lawsuits.

With all this happening around me I seriously considered changing to the dark side (Mac or Windows).

I shared my experience on Ubuntu with you for the last 3 1/2 years. I hope it helped. I think now is the time to consider moving on to something different.

VMware Workstation 7.1.2 on Meerkat 10.10

You probably have noticed: VMware did it again.

They ship a new version, it offers update, downloads fine, installs with a breeze and
... zilch ...
crashes on restart.

vmmon and vsocks do not compile.

How many time does that have to happen?

Here is a patch:
patch-modules.sh
vmware-7.1-2.6.35-3-generic.patch

Download both. Then:
chmod u+x patch-modules.sh
sudo ./patch-modules.sh
This script will save the original driver tars, patch them and run the module installation script.

VMware Workstation should start fine.