Only a fool could possibly think Linux is not ready for the desktop

The evidence is everywhere, and it became even more apparent a few seconds ago when I needed to get a few albums for my daughter. I started looking around the airports shops only to find that they have given up selling the old CD hardware. So I thought I will just log on to the net and download them from the Amazon mp3 store, DRM free of course. My laptop connected immediately to the wifi connection, and I was up and connected to a network I had never seen before in seconds.

I have had the Amazon mp3 downloader software on my laptop for a while, so getting them was a 1 minute point and click with my browser, and voila! , they are now on my hard drive. I have just uploaded them to my Ipod mini using Rythmbox , and they are playing a treat.

All this was done on my Dell XPS 1330 with Ubuntu 9.04 Linux happily sitting on the disk, with not a whiff of any of Gates or Jobs proprietary nonsence anywhere. I'm typing this post with the latest version of Googles Chromium browser and feeling very smug ;-)

Would I change any of this for Windows 7 or Snow leopard? Not on your life, why would I possibly want to waste £200 on an OS that comes with zero apps, when I have a fully working fully functioning system that offers so much and delivers on a daily basis.

Which albums I hear you cry. Green Days 21st Century Breakdown and the Gossips Music for Men. They would not normally be my cup of tea, but they are for my daughter.

If you want to free yourself from the Blue screen, costly, virus ridden , expensive, slow , proprietary hell that is Windows and hardware lock-in that is Apples OSX, then just click here.

What a week on the IT merry-go-round. Anyone for an IBMphone?

Being something of an old timer in the world of IT I thought I had seen pretty much all there was to see in the sometimes strange company interplays that are stuff of this industry. However, I was to be proved wrong, and I hadn't seen it all.

At the start of the week we have Oracle buying Sun for a cut down fee, and to put it mildly this opens up a can of worms with a lot of the technology that they have just acquired. Java, Solaris, ZFS, MySQL and of course all that marvellous new ZFS backed open source storage technology. I think this will take several months until anyone can have a clear picture of how all this shakes out, and just how much Larry Ellison has managed to annoy IBM.

Then we have the news today that Microsoft are really beginning to feel the full force of the Open Source revolution and the Netbook generation eating into their once great monopoly. I have posted often on all the causes for this change, which is unstoppable, and while part of their current problems are the disaster that is Vista and the economic downturn, there is way more to this story than that. Why did Redhat Linux and Apple Mac not suffer the same affects, given the exact same economic landscape? Having to bribe people with XP Home on netbooks at minimal mark-up, with zero chance of up-selling them any other products is a disastrous business strategy.

We also have the great news that Ubuntu have launched Jaunty today (version 9.04), and I'm happily upgrading from the Beta version to the full version as I type this post. Try doing that while doing an XP to Windows 7 upgrade ;) The beta has been rock solid and this is yet another fine release. All of my machines now boot/suspend quicker and once I have started to implement EXT4 everywhere, I expect to see even greater performance improvements.

We also had Ubuntu launch their updated operating system for the ARM processor, which is all part of the plan for the next generation of netbooks, which will basically completely exclude Microsoft from the market, as they can't compete on price, and they don't even have a version that will run on this processor.

After all these momentous happenings, lets hope that IBM don't start talking about buying a certain player in the MP3 and mobile phone market, anyone for the IBMphone or the IBMpod , with what has happened this week, anything is possible.

My love/hate relationship with my Apple Nano

I'm going to start to tell you what I really like about the nano, and then I will divulge what annoys me about it.

Apple to be fair have done a really good job of closing the market off for their MP3 players, to such an extent that when I looked around there were only a handful to choose from. I do think though that the design of these little units is very user friendly, and would have been on the short list anyway.

I wanted one that would fit easily into my top pocket, hold several albums , and it must work with Linux. The nano fitted the bill on all these counts, and I haven't been disappointed. The screen the unit offers is bright and easy to use, the software is fast and allows you to select the artists/albums with ease. The battery life is extremely good, to the extent I have never run out of power, which was a frequent occurrence on my iriver H20. It also works perfectly with several Linux music programs, I happen to use Rythmbox.

Some additional benefits that I didn't look for or expect when I bought it, were the large array of Apple compatible docking units that you can buy to plug your ipod into and play music around the house. I have subsequently purchased a Gear4 docking unit which works a treat with the little unit, and has a marvellous little remote control. So all is sweetness and light you would think.

Alas no. As someone who uses open source whenever I can , it annoys me that this machine doesn't natively support all the codec's that I want to use, so I have to encode everything as an MP3. This is not the end of the world, but Ogg Vorbis is just better, so I'm having to downgrade the quality to fit the device, which is not the way this should work. It is always worth remembering that the MP3 standard is not an open or free one, so I have to pay for a program that allows me to use these files.

As a Linux user, I'm locked out of the itunes phenomena , so I have to either buy CD's and encode them, or I can now use Amazon to buy my MP3's. Not the end of the world, but it shouldn't be like this. Why should a company who has a virtual monopoly on this market be allowed to lock certain types of user out. I believe they should not be allowed, but as always the European legislators seem to allow American mega companies to get away with murder, until someone screams loudly enough. We only have to look at the current browser investigation, years late, to see how little is done in an appropriate time frame.

I know all of the previous business reason's behind the decision for locking out Linux, but now Apple are moving their music DRM free, there is no obvious reason itunes could not be ported to Linux, so I can access all the music they have to sell. This is beginning to look more like a desire to keep Linux out of their OSX market, something that should not be allowed. If they want to sell their products in Europe, they should be forced to sell on all the platforms Europeans use, not just the ones the North Americans use.

So living in the real world I have to put up with the current situation, not one that I enjoy, and one I would like to see come to an end, but I'm not holding my breath. Pragmatism , though despised by many philosophers, seems to have it's place when wishing to listen to music on a digital music player.