The Answer Guy
Version-a-go-go
and the Tragedy of being "Left Behind"
Removing Lilo
from a multi-boot machine
Question on sendmail... --or--
Kernel
crashes
Winmodems --or--
Mail on a LAN Linux
to NT --or--
Remote Tape
Backups
adduser
Letter to Dell
- Linux on Dell Hardware
Hello --or--
Why Linux?
Redhat telnet
Network Cards
A little note about
"good times" or emailed viruses --or--
The Answer Guy --or--
TACACS+ client for
Linux --or--
Sendmail jam --or--
PPP connection and diald --or--
getting
ppp-2.3.3 to work
Mail access --or--
Program for
Mailer Daemons --or--
The theme for this month seems to be "vendor support for Linux." From
the responses to my open letter to Dell, through the common problems
with "winmodems" and "winprinters" and even to the impossible dream of
running MS Windows applications and accessing Microsoft proprietary
formats from native Linux applications --- we continue to fight uphill
battles with so many vendors.
This isn't new in the broader Unix world. Readers of
A Quarter Century of Unix by Peter H. Salus should recognize
this as a as an attitude that has dominated hardware vendors for almost
thirty years. They've been prdicting the "death" of Unix (and the "death of
the Internet) almost since from the beginning.
There is some hope on the horizon. As some of you may have heard or
read Corel Computer
(the hardware division of the famous software
company) is basing it's NC (network computer) on a Strong-ARM version of
Linux. Within a week or two after that Corel Software announced their
intention of porting the rest of the applications suite to Linux (their
WordPerfect 7 and 8 have been available in Linux versions for some
time).
A little further afield it appears that
Apple Inc is starthing to make
some sense with their future OS strategy --- by "thinking different",
or "outside of the box" in a manner of speaking. Specifically they've
apparently decided to skip the planned version of Rhapsody with its
"blue" and "yellow" boxes that separated the MacOS and the
Mach/NeXTStep (Unix) personalities. Apparently buried in their
announcement for
MacOS X ("ten") is the i
rumor that your "NeXT"
(Rhapsody) native applications will co-exist on the same desktop
with yor MacOS programs --- and that the MacOS API's will be seamlessly
supported with all the multi-threaded support that the Mach microkernel
can provide. Of course you have to hear that as rumors, or read
between the lines with a considerable background in the Macintosh
architecture since it is not apparent from their own press releases,
or from the San Jose Mercury News articles on the subject. The
San Francisco Examiner sings a similarly hollow tune.
However, I'm not alone in my opinion as we see in
David K. Every's article.
I suspect he knows way more than I do on the subject.
Oddly the MacOS Rumors web site
seems to have no mention MacOS X on their site.
What does this have to do with Linux? Well, I can only continue to
speculate that mkLinux
binaries will eventually run under MacOS X (Rhapsody). I can also still hope
that, with the progress in the G3's, and the plans for the G4
generations of the PowerPC platform, and hopefully the continued
availability development of the DEC (Compaq) Alpha processor, we'll see
some real choices and competition in the market place. Linux is the
one OS that crosses all of these (and Sun
SPARC's and
SGI MIPS and others).
Some form of Unix is available on just about every platform, whether or not
it supports Linux.
As we look beyond the world of PC clones we see that there is some
vendor support. There is some hope that Microsoft's legacy will be
the separation of hardware vendors from their "control" hegemony.
Before Microsoft it was the norm for computer manufacturers to almost
completely control the availability of software for their platforms
--- Unix has undermined that control for over two decades. The popular
backlash from Microsoft's own unique form of control --- over the
collective Wintel platform --- may finally completely sever the
puppet's strings. The trickles of vendor support that you're seeing now
is largely a survival strategy. So not only will these vendors give up
the efforts to control their customer's range of software choices,
they'll be glad they did it, considering the alternative.
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Greetings from Jim Dennis