Status-Q

[Original Link] One day SCO is going to annoy too many people. Well, they've already annoyed a very large number, but they made the mistake of accusing SGI, who started to do some serious analysis of their claims. Moral: if you don't have much of a leg to stand on, be careful whom you kick.

[Original Link] "OpenOffice.org Writer isn't a replacement for anything; it's simply a better piece of software." I agree with Bruce Byfield on this - many of the OpenOffice components are superior to their Microsoft counterparts. The only real thing they lack is familiarity. Looking forward to when it runs natively on my Mac (ie. without needing X-windows).

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Robert Cringely asks why Macs aren't more popular in business, and in particular why people adopt Linux machines in place of Apple's lovely XServe boxes. He thinks it's a conspiracy - that sysadmins are concerned that Macs are so easy to use that they'll be out of a job. I doubt it. I don't think people deliberately make their lives harder to keep themselves employed; not often, anyway.

I suspect it's just that Macs, for most, are an unknown quantity. You can try out Linux almost for free while to try out a Mac server costs a bit more. Apple should offer some 'sale or return' scheme.

And secondly, I think the traditional divide between Mac and Windows has been big enough that people don't think of buying a Mac as a file/web/mail server for PCs, a task it ought to be able to perform just as well as a Linux box. I'm thinking of trying this soon...

This will be of little interest to most people, but somebody may find it on Google and be grateful! I have seen a few queries about this out there, and I've hit the problem twice recently, so I thought it worth posting.

If you a have a WET11 wirless ethernet bridge or similar product, and you're having problems getting DHCP to work across it, it may be that your DHCP client is not setting the 'broadcast bit' in its DHCP query. I fixed this on my Linux DHCP server by adding:

always-broadcast on;

at the appropriate point in /etc/dhcpd.conf. See the dhcpd.conf man page for more info.

Realised today that it is well over a year since I used Windows. The Mac has done everything I need, and I use Linux for a few servers, experiments etc that I run. I've hardly touched a Windows machine in the last 18 months and I haven't missed it one bit.

[Original Link] A nice story by Jonathan Gennick.

[Original Link] Got a Linux box and an OS X box? Michael Dales' handy utility may save you desk space.

Having recently created quite a large document in OpenOffice, I must say I'm quite a fan. There are several features which I much prefer to their Microsoft equivalents. And if, occasionally, things seem not to be quite as intuitive as they might, I have to keep reminding myself that I've used Microsoft Word, on and off, for about 14 years, and that's quite a legacy/mental rut to get out of.

If, by the way, you've tried it under Mac OS X and have been disappointed by the ugly fonts currently supported by the X server, you might want to try this. Slow, on my elderly Mac, but much prettier. Make sure you turn off 'Preview in font lists' in the View options if selecting fonts is too time-consuming!

[Original Link] RedHat 8 is a nice version of Linux. It's good to have antialiased fonts, OpenOffice & Evolution installed as standard, and it even detected the graphics card and monitor correctly on one of the two machines I installed it on. 50% is a better hit rate than I've had in the past.

I even quite like the way they've tried to merge Gnome and KDE so you hardly know which one you're using. But it does mean there's a lot of confusion about how to configure certain aspects of the User Interface. Should I be using KDE tools, Gnome tools, or some RedHat special thing which tries to configure both?

What seems to be lacking, unless I've missed it somewhere, is any way to add and remove items from the main system menu. This is a major failing, but Michael Knepher tells you how to do it with a text editor. A useful article, which shows there's quite a sophisticated system underneath now. And what's wrong with emacs? We wouldn't want to let ordinary users customize their own desktops, would we...?

[Original Link] A little glamour for those who have been working on Mobile IP for so long! And great advertising for RedHat.

I'm starting to come up with new Star Trek movie plots. "What is it, Uhura?"

"Well, Captain, I'm receiving reports that Earth has been targetted by a SQL Server-related virus, thought to be coming from somewhere near the Horsehead Nebula. They're shutting down the terrestrial firewall, and all global critical systems are being rebooted. We're going to lose all contact with Earth for the next 18 hours..."