I want no monuments

I’ve wanted to set up a shared printer in my office where I run mixed boxes (both windows and linux), in particular I wanted to allow a windows box to print to a printer attached to a linux box.

Guess what? Error! Error! The document was in the queue but the printer kept idling.

CUPS “error_log” showed

Print-Job client-error-document-format-not-supported: Unsupported format ‘application/octet-stream’!

If you search that message you’ll find thousands of people telling you to uncomment two lines in CUPS configuration (even thou with recent Ubuntu it shouldn’t be necessary).
Problem is: that’s not enough!

The solution came reading this post in the ubuntuforums.

It seems that having the right driver on both boxes fools CUPS.
As I wanted the right driver on the linux box (it is its only local printer), I told windows to use a rawer one, “MS Publisher Imagesetter”, and that did the job.

As you may know, I’m on a new business, that’s something like bringing a company back to the present days, technologically speaking.

Since it will be quite hard to “attack” the software part and since the technologies that I’ll use will be all open source, I’m working to give my coworkers proof about the actual value and reliability of OSS technologies in general, replacing windows boxes with linux ones.

The aim is: if it has worked when switching from windows to linux, it would probably work when we’ll switch from VB to Java.

It’s a matter of trust. If they don’t trust me, I’m not the right man for the job.

The first thing was setting up a decent networking. I’ve found an old and noisy box, perfect for such critical tasks such as DHCP and DNS ;)
So everybody now has a fully qualified hostname, with Bind caching DNS queries.

Then I’ve chopped the Vista server. Wait a minute: Vista server? Yes. It’s a Dell box, bought right after the release of Vista: it was cheap but equipped with the most useless operating system ever.
I have proof (even if it’s too long and boring for writing it down here) that it has the useless networking ever: something like a hardcoded limit of 5 TCP connections… and people cracking it to surf the web faster… can’t be real…
Well: chopped. Samba is doing the job right now: faster (and therefore more productive) and cheaper. Indeed I’ve found another old box, plugged in two brand new hard drives, set up software raid 1 and voilà: 30 megabytes is the average memory occupied.

How many Gs do you have on your Vista notebook!? Ahahah, bye bye!

It’s July 3 news that Microsoft will help the UK National Archives to get all its proprietary format files back to the future.

Sold as Microsoft will to “save the UK Archives”, Microsoft is actually recovering its own fault: as a matter of fact, most of the old, legacy format documents are Microsoft Word 97 (and previous versions) files. Formats that even the most recent Word can no longer read.

As reverse compatibility has never been an interest to Microsoft, the only way of recovering the docs will be to use virtualisation. They will install virtualised version of Windows95, Windows 3.1 and co. and will save the documents from one version to another.

Say you have a old Word document (done on Windows 3.1) that Office XP cannot read, but that’s readable by Office 97. They will open the document with Office 97 and save in 97 proprietary format. Then they will open it with Office XP and save in XP format. Then they will finally open it with the latest Office (I don’t even know its name…) and will save it in the OOXML format.

Easy, repetitive and boring. Have a nice day, pigeon!

Ok, I promise, that’s the last blog entry about advocacy.

But it’s just too funny and true not to blog about it, at least to make its rank go higher ;)

So, it’s worth-reading, have fun with this Inquirer article: “Microsoft admits Vista failure“

On March 28 post, Dell comments the results of the Linux survey, starting the countdown to see linux on more than some servers and the only Precision workstation.

The most important part of the post is the link to Direct2Dell today’s post, whose title says it all: “Linux: Driver Support is Key“.

Exactly! As a home user, I like to choose my preferred distro, given the availability of all the modules I need to gain the maximum from my hardware. As a company, I would prefer support and therefore choose a pre-installed linux box.

It really seems like Dell has discovered how many GNU/Linux users out there would like to buy and use Dell computers!

Latest news is the Linux survey Dell has started on March 13. You can give Dell some more hints about things like how you would like to be supported and what GNU/Linux distribution you prefer.
Here you can access the survey directly.

A personal note. A long time ago, I thought advocating about linux was just a waste of time. Someone told me I was wrong.
The answer to the question “How could have Dell ignored Linux for so long?” is “They just didn’t know about it. Until someone told them”. So keep on advocating.

On February 23, 2007, Dell reacted to the thousands of votes some of the ideas in Dell IdeaStorm have received.

Here are some of the best pieces (emphasis by me)

It’s exciting to see the IdeaStorm community’s interest in open source solutions like Linux and OpenOffice. Your feedback has been all about flexibility and we have seen a consistent request to provide platforms that allow people to install their operating system of choice. We are listening, and as a result, we are working with Novell to certify our corporate client products for Linux, including our OptiPlex desktops, Latitude notebooks and Dell Precision workstations. This is another step towards ensuring that our customers have a good experience with Linux on our systems.

We don’t want to pick one distribution and alienate users with a preference for another. We want users to have the opportunity to help define the market for Linux on desktop and notebook systems. In addition to working with Novell, we are also working with other distributors and evaluating the possibility of additional certifications across our product line. We are continuing to investigate your other Linux-related ideas, so please continue to check here for updates.

Dell recognizes our customers’ desire to have unlimited control over the software on their PC. In fact, today XPS customers can opt-out of almost all preinstalled software. We will be expanding this effort in the coming months.

Read the whole announcement here.

I think someone in Redmond is having a headache… >:D

Leggetevi la mail di Carlo Piana (avvocato della Free Software Foundation) sulla mailing list del MiLUG.

Risposta: poco meno di due ore contro un giorno e una notte.

Non ci credete? Buona lettura!

This is not a real news (at least, if you haven’t lived under a stone for some months): Dell offers its customers to have Linux pre-installed on its “Precision” desktops.

You could also buy the FreeDos version, that is just like buying an empty, clean desktop or notebook and have the freedom to install everything you want, without wasting money in useless software such as… uhhh… Windows… :)

You know: there are things that are made to stay! And that’s how you install Windows Vista!

Source: FoundryMusic