TimburyDotOrg

Some of these are computer related, but some aren’t.

1. That changing incorrect instructions couldn’t be done because it would break translations (which were also, obviously, incorrect and already broken). — Debian and Ubuntu developer.
2. That a virus destroyed someone’s hard drive. — A friend
3. That this same hard drive had to be replaced for 110K won (~$100) when it was still only a month old and under warranty. — same friend (Sorry, dude — you’re on the list twice.)
4. That employees “worry too much about what’s in their contract.” — Superintendant of the shool district when she tried to make everyone work unpaid overtime.
5. “Do you want to hamburger?” — An English teacher for the district teaching a unit on want.
6. “How do I install a .tar.gz? When I type ‘dpkg -i file.tar.gz” it fails.” — System administrator.
7. “Your an idiot.” — Sogoodsofarsowhat
8. “I made the front page of Digg.” — Me (Like … who cares?)

It what is probably the least shocking development of the holidays, Microsoft’s announced support of ODF in MS Office 2007 SP2 will not be interoperable with other implementations of the standard.

Microsoft has announced that ODF will be implemented in Office 2007 SP2, due out between February and March of 2009. Under MS’s Document Interoperability Initiative (DII), a preview of the implementation strategy has been released, but it varies significantly from other suite’s current implementation of the standard, ODF Alliance Managing Director Marino Marcich said in an interview with PCWorld. He claims that MS’s course will break interoperability.

I feel like I should be writing for BoycottNovell now, but I can honestly say that very few people I’ve talked to over the last year expected MS to do anything different than the announced plan. Most of us expected MS’s ODF to behave in strange ways that would break any chance for other office suites to get a fair shake.

MS’s OOXML doesn’t meet the specs and is thus a lock-in. MS’s ODF is intentionally breaking interoperability, giving people the impression that either the standard or the other office suites are sub-standard. It appears not as much has changed in Redmond as what many tech writers would have you believe.

Business as usual at MS.

I got my first computer for Christmas in 1978 — a Tandy Model I with 4KB of RAM (the one shown in the picture has the 48KB + disk drive expansion which I got a couple years later). I used that system for much longer than I should have, did a little Unix in university, and switched to Linux full time some time in December 1997, though I didn’t mark it on my calendar.

I realized, though, that I’ve spect very little of my life using MS Windows — probably under five years. That still doesn’t get me out of tech support for my friends.

Merry Christmas!

My friend Tommy from Burma has been trying to set up Ubuntu 8.04 as a PDC. He’s following an e-book he got, and the thing is killing him (and by proxy, me). I want him to follow this advice: download eBox 0.12.1, install it, log into the web admin page, and turn on file sharing with PDC (and roaming profiles if you want that). Add the users, and you’ll be done. That was easy, wasn’t it?

The eBox install disk weighs in a 560MB and is based on Ubuntu 8.04. In fact, The install is in two parts. The base Ubuntu system is installed, the system reboots, and the rest of the eBox system is installed. This kind of reminds me of the old, two-stage Debian install. Everything is on the disk so you don’t need network access if you can’t get hooked up.

In addition to Samba, eBox has an LDAP server. That means that eBox can serve as a bridge while you start a migration from Windows to another oprating system. Since I’ve never seen an easy LDAP installation, eBox seems the way to do that.

If you want a cut-down version of eBox, it can operate as a firewall and VPN system, too. Each of the modules can be deactivated or removed to trim the system down.

Still not convinced? There’s a web server with user shares, a mail server with quotas, a Jabber server, a DHCP server, a print server, and a proxy server with Dansguardian.

If you are one of the few small businesses which doesn’t have an actual server yet, consider using eBox.

Is it brain-dead easy? No. You’ll need just as much know-how to set this up as you would getting a Windows Server PDC going and secure. Once eBox is going, you should be good for the next four years. There are no client licenses to buy or limitations on number of connections, either.

Consider it, eh, Tommy? Save me some headaches.

With Giver, you can share files between desktops on your network with absolutely no configuration necessary. Other Giver clients are automatically discovered using Avahi.
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Use virtualization software? Check out VirtualBox 2.1, which adds some exciting new features:

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