Are you tired of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for your computer's software? Tired of having to buy upgrades, and new hardware to run the upgrades? Tired of crashes, security flaws, cyber-attacks, and worrying if your computer is safe to use? Had enough of license agreements, lock-downs, and restrictions on what you can do with your computer? Worried about your business being sued for making a careless copy?
It doesn't have to be that way. You can live your life free of Microsoft, and free of their thousand and one petty annoyances. And you can save money in the process.
This website is devoted to helping you say Goodbye to Microsoft, and to "Take Back the PC."
By now you may have heard that Microsoft has been awarded a U.S. patent for the "Page Up" and "Page Down" functions. Yes, those two keys that have been around since at least the first IBM PC, and whose function is even older (I recall using something like that on a PDP-11). But ponder what this says about Microsoft as a company:
1. This patent did not result from Microsoft's much-hyped "innovation." There is not some Microsoft researcher toiling away in the lab, who had a blazing idea for a button that could move down a page of text...because anyone who has used a computer in the last two decades takes this function for granted. No, this patent resulted from some Microsoft team poring over the patent files, asking themselves "what do we use every day, that no one has bothered to patent?"
2. Microsoft has engaged in blatant misrepresentation -- at least by omission -- to get this patent. Now, I don't know that a patent application must disclose prior art. It's quite possible that the application was legal and proper, because there weren't any prior patents on this function -- so Microsoft could feign innocence and say "gosh, we didn't find any prior art in our patent search." No one who works with computers could be unaware of the prior art; but no one until now has had the chutzpah to try to patent this widely-used function, so doubtless there were no prior patents.
3. Microsoft has spread much FUD about the hundreds of patents they claim are infringed by Linux, but has been careful never to name the patents involved. Now we know why, if those patents are anything like this one.
Despite their marketing claims, Microsoft is not particularly innovative, except in the legal arena. I don't know what kind of "research" department patents the old and obvious, but that's the kind Microsoft has.
Here's a useful article on DesktopLinux.com about using Linux in a small- to medium-sized enterprise. The author, Michael C. Barnes, comes from a mixed Windows/Linux environment. In this article -- a fascinating read -- he focuses on these aspects of various Linux distributions:
Compatibility with hardware
Installation ease
Repository system
Performance
Interface
Applications
Stability
Configurability
Scalability
Security
He mentions several different distributions when comparing the pros and cons in different categories. From a quick read, I'd say that Mepis and Puppy are his favorites, but Ubuntu and Mandriva are also well liked. I'm intrigued that one of their tricks is to load Wine on Puppy Linux, and use that as a lightweight environment to run some Windows XP applications.
I'm also intrigued by the mention of the Quasar accounting software for Linux. I'd never heard of this before.
There are also several good observations about how to get employees to accept Linux. Giving them a familiar look-and-feel -- e.g., a desktop that resembles XP, if that's what they employee is used to -- and allowing them to customize their systems, seem to break down barriers.
OK, this item (found via Capn Kirby) is just whimsical. Some time back I posted a few items about tweaking a Linux desktop to look like Vista. Well, Linux desktop environments seem to be flexible enough to mimic the Mac, too. Here are four distros which have already been tweaked to look Mac-ish. I'm tickled to see that one of them is MacPup, yet another variant of the popular and lightweight Puppy Linux. (The other three are Dreamlinux, Elive, and gOS -- yes, the gOS used in Wal-Mart PCs.)
The latest Windows news is that "Microsoft is reportedly investing $300 million in a new advertising campaign starring comedian Jerry Seinfeld". Somehow a comedian whose most famous endeavor was "a show about nothing" seems the perfect spokesman for Vista. And when you have a pig of a product which you seem unable to improve, then apparently the way forward is to buy tons of lipstick.
Or, perhaps, do something positive for a change. I can't say it better than Matt Asay:
As reported by The Wall Street Journal, people close to Microsoft's campaign suggest that "the point is to stress breaking down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting." If this is correct, let me suggest an alternative tagline for a similar message:
Build bridges, not toll roads.
Through closed standards, aggressive patent FUD, and proprietary Office file formats and SharePoint repository, Microsoft has effectively declared war on the very idea of "breaking down barriers that prevent people and ideas from connecting"...unless you happen to be using 100 percent of Microsoft's software to do the job.
...Microsoft needs to tear down its Berlin Wall between open source and its own proprietary technology if it truly wants to "break down barriers." Microsoft can't talk out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand it seeks to control and maintain its monopoly power through closed tolls, yet on the other it talks about breaking down barriers. It can't have it both ways.
But that would require Microsoft to put its money where its mouth is...rather than spending its money on a new mouthpiece.
I may be the only former DOS owner who never used Norton Commander to manage my files. I gather that its users absolutely loved it. I had never heard of the shareware Total Commander for Windows, but I was aware of Midnight Commander for Linux.
Imagine my surprise, then, to find that there are not one, but ten different Commander alternatives for Linux. If you're a Commander fan, there's surely something there for you.
You'll recall that the first application I installed under Wine wanted to use Internet Explorer. So, I decided to try installing that. And I've been wanting to try out the IEs 4 Linux installation script, anyway.
As always, there's a prerequisite: IEs 4 Linux requires "cabextract" to access the .cab files used by Microsoft. Fortunately, (a) this is available from the Debian repository, and (b) I had already installed it.
Unfortunately, I discovered that IEs 4 Linux doesn't know about the Wine 1.0 release. It informs me that I seem to be using "old version" and I should upgrade to version 0.9.x. So my only choice is to install IE the hard way.
Since I'm only installing IE to support other applications, I'm not interested in the latest and greatest version. In fact, IE 5 would suit me just fine; alas, it seems to be no longer available for download. So again my choices are limited: IE6 SP1.
I downloaded ie6setup.exe, the IE6 installer, and executed it with wine. And it reported "Setup has detected a newer version of Internet Explorer already installed on this system. Setup cannot continue."
That's when I wandered over to the Wine Applications Database to look for tips about installing IE6. It seems I was lucky that IE6 wouldn't install, because according to the warning on that page, "Internet Explorer is not intended to run under Wine. It breaks lot of functionality and creates big mess."
Now, I could follow that long list of instructions. But I'm trying to collect and publish information for new users of Linux, and I think those instructions are a bit involved for most new users. So, until IEs 4 Linux is upgraded to support Wine 1.x, my Wine applications will have to get by without Internet Explorer.
I can still use IE, though. I have a copy of Codeweavers' CrossOver, which is an improved version of Wine explicitly tailored to run Microsoft applications -- including Internet Explorer. The installation under CrossOver is easy; and if you want to switch to Linux but need to run IE (or Office), this commercial product is well worth its modest cost. My version is a few years old; here's a recent review of CrossOver, with a good explanation of how it differs from Wine.
Even if you don't want to switch to a new distribution, you can read about which tools each of these seven distros chooses to include. Then, most likely, you can install those tools in your own distro.
Linux has made headway in Microsoft's UK heartland, the PC sales channel. The number of machines shipped with Linux preloaded on them has multiplied a whopping 28 times since Microsoft launched its Vista operating system in January 2007.
Sounds impressive, but Linux was starting from a rather small base in traditional sales channels: of all PCs sold in the UK last January through indirect channels, a feeble 0.1 per cent had Linux preloaded, according to numbers given to us by market research firm Context.
Remember, that's the number of computers preloaded with Linux -- that is, purchased with Linux already installed. It does not count the number of computers whose owners installed Linux after purchase. And since Linux can be (and often is) downloaded for free and shared around, even the sales figures of Linux vendors are deceptively low.
The Windows application that impelled me to install Wine is IAR Embedded Workbench, a development suite for the TI MSP430 microprocessor. The market for software like this is usually measured in the thousands of users, so the few percent who use Linux are insignificant to the developers of that software. Thus, it's available for Windows and nothing but Windows.
The software comes in a ZIP file, which contains a self-extracting and installing Windows file, FET_R511.exe. The web page says that it needs at least Windows XP. I remembered from my review of the Wine Configuration program that XP was set as the "Windows Version" under the Applications tab, so that didn't need to be changed.
It was just a simple matter of opening a console window and launching that .exe program under Wine:
wine ~/downloads/yada/yada/yada/FET_R511.exe
(My actual download directory is a much longer path; you get the idea.) This presented the usual Windows installer dialog. I accepted all the defaults, and the installer ran without a hitch.
Okay, one hitch: at the very end of installation it gave me the option to read the release notes for the software. I chose "yes", whereupon it informed me that I didn't have Internet Explorer installed, so it couldn't display them. I expect I'm going to run into this message a lot, so my next step will be to install IE under Wine. (I've encountered some applications that simply refuse to install if IE is not present. Fortunately this was not one of them.) Meanwhile, I can navigate to the /docs/ directory with my Linux browser and use it to read the release notes.
One last touch: I decided to add a launch icon to my desktop rather than to my start menu. So I dug down in the .wine/drive_c directory to find the .exe file which starts the IAR Workbench, and then added a desktop shortcut to perform this Linux command:
So far it seems to be working perfectly. I've been able to edit, assemble, and simulate some simple microcontroller code. I haven't yet attempted the "acid test" of using the serial or parallel ports. It's possible that I won't need to use those ports with this package; but I am curious to see if they work.
