Pinderkent

There is currently an article at Yahoo! News that takes a look back on how the market has so far reacted to Microsoft's Windows Vista. It covers a lot of the problems that many people have experienced when using Vista. And after reading the article, I find myself asking a pretty important question: Why would one subject himself or herself to the problems of Windows Vista?

One reason is likely ignorance, especially when it comes to the general populace. They bought a new PC, it came with Vista pre-installed, and so they use it. But I find that somewhat difficult to believe these days. Many would-be computer purchasers are aware of Apple's offerings, specifically Mac OS X. In many computer retail outlets, systems from Apple are displayed right next to typical PC systems running Windows Vista. So if you're looking at the PC running Vista, you will no doubt also notice the Apple systems running OS X.

Of course, there are also a number of viable alternatives to Windows Vista and Mac OS X. Some of the most notable are Linux, FreeBSD and Sun's Solaris. When it comes to Linux, the Ubuntu distribution is often recommended, and is indeed a very mature and reliable system for most home users.

The main reason may still be what it was a decade ago: gaming. Although the availability of games for systems like Linux and Mac OS X has improved over the past ten years, Windows is still the leader in this area. But we need to ask, is it really worth the hassle of using Vista for the sake of a few games? I would think not!

Regardless, it will be interesting to watch the adoption of Windows Vista over the next six months, especially considering the relatively strong competition it is facing from rivals such as Ubuntu and Mac OS X. Home desktop users are living in a time diversity, and it is my hope that they will use this opportunity to broaden their horizons, and use alternative operating systems that may reduce or eliminate the hassles they have experienced in the past. Best of all, they may even find their productivity greatly boosted!

Sun's ZFS is truly a remarkable filesystem. A while back I had read that it was going to be integrated with FreeBSD. And apparently that integration of ZFS into FreeBSD is now essentially complete. I was also reading some time ago that a port of ZFS to DragonFly BSD was being considered. So with Solaris and future releases of FreeBSD supporting ZFS, it's no doubt in my mind that it will become widely used.

Many of us already have worked with ZFS on Solaris. Mark Round is one such person, and he has written a very interesting analysis of the caching of ZFS. I think his article is a must-read for those of us who deal with ZFS. And for those who have not yet started to become familiar with ZFS, I suggest that you do. With major server operating systems like Solaris and soon FreeBSD offering support, it will become commonplace. And knowing its performance habits will be essential for any system administrator.

Earlier this month I wrote about how the Ubuntu release names can get rather confusing. An interesting reply of sorts was made to that posting.

The author brings up the point that other operating systems besides Ubuntu use release names, either instead of or in addition to release numbers. Systems like Mac OS X, and recent releases of Windows are given as examples. Yes, the same problems with the Ubuntu release names do apply equally well to Mac OS X and recent releases of Windows. It perhaps isn't as much of a problem with those systems yet, as the duration between releases has been relatively long. Thus there are a smaller number of names to remember, and each name is used for a loner amount of time. But with a new Ubuntu release every six months, the names begin to add up.

As for Sun's use of the name "Nevada" for Solaris 11, I think it's pretty irrelevant. Every colleague I work with refers to it as Solaris 11. It just causes less confusion that way. Then again, Sun hasn't been the best when it comes to the Solaris version numbers, either. Some long-time Solaris users I work with refer to Solaris 10 as Solaris 2.10. One guy I know calls it SunOS 5.10! But he's been using Sun systems since the 1980s, so I suppose he can be forgiven.

One thing the Ubuntu team should have done was to choose their release names alphabetically. At least then we'd have a clear ordering between releases, even if such a system didn't offer the clarity of year/month-based version numbers.

While I tend to use systems like NetBSD and Solaris, I do try to keep up with developments within the Linux community. As we are all aware, Ubuntu is one of the major distributions, and it gets a lot of media attention. But one thing I find confusing is their practice of naming releases.

See this list of past Ubuntu releases, for instance. You'll see that Ubuntu 6.10 was named "Edgy Eft". Ubuntu 5.04 was named "Hoary Hedgehog". The next version of Ubuntu is named "Feisty Fawn".

It matters little to me that they attach such names to their releases. What I find bothersome, however, is that people begin to refer to the versions by those names, rather than by the version number. The Ubuntu method of numbering versions is quite useful, too. It clearly shows the year of the release, as well as the month. For example, Ubuntu 5.04 was released in April of 2005, while Ubuntu 6.06 was released in June of 2006. The major version number is the last digit of the year in which it was released, and minor version number is the month.

With that numbering scheme, we see a clear time-based progression of the versions. We know that Ubuntu 5.10 was released six months after Ubuntu 5.04, and thus likely contains fixes and other notable improvements. But unless we know the mapping to version numbers, it's impossible to get that information when comparing the names "Breezy Badger" and "Hoary Hedgehog". I'd imagine some people have time to sit there and memorize all of the names. But for those of us with little time on our hands, we need the clarity and conciseness of version numbers.

Personally, I would like to see Ubuntu drop the practice of using release names. It makes it difficult to track which release somebody is actually talking about, since many people tend not to give the corresponding version number.

I felt the need to clarify some things with this article that discusses so-called "Ubuntu Web Browsers". The fact of the matter is that those browsers are in no way tied to Ubuntu. Likewise, Ubuntu supports browsers other than those.

Browsers like Firefox and Opera run on many different operating systems, from Windows, to Linux, to Mac OS X, to Solaris, to FreeBSD. Check out the Opera FTP site for proof of this. Look at the wide range of platforms they support. And don't forget that some of those directories, like the "unix" directory, themselves contain several platforms.

As for the rendering problems you mentioned, you may want to give Konqueror a try. It's a browser put out by the KDE project, and should be quite easily installed on your Ubuntu system. It uses the KHTML rendering engine, which is different from the engines used by Opera, Firefox, and the other browsers you mentioned.