Windows vs. Linux the candy bar analogy

So I was trying to explain to my significant other, this morning, about why, having worked with both *nix systems and Windows systems, do I dislike working with the OS from Redmond so much? Do I have something personal against Bill Gates? I mean come on man what's the deal yo? I really should like Windows, many of the things I do take much longer in Windows than just about any other OS, so there are more billable hours to be had. As an ethical consultant though, I really do want what's best for the customer. Also billable hours where the customer is in a panic because they are trying to recover important files that were lost because of some weakness in their operating system is not a fun call. I kind of summed up my dilemma in analogy that went something like this.

It would be like being a great chef, able to create any dish that tasted like anything in the world. But all people wanted to order from you, or have you prepare. were deep fried candy bars. They taste yummy to the customers, but the problem is, the customers keep keeling over dead. But it doesn't stop there, because you fed them the candy bar in the first place, you have to round up the Pope, the Local Witch Doctor and a guy from India named Bob to have a lengthly ceremony, where small animals are sacrificed to resurrect the now lifeless customer.

The customers is alive again, they are missing some fingers off of their left hand. Not to worry though, "Give me another candy bar!" the customer cries, "I'll pay anything, I love it!,and besides, it's what everyone is eating, I get a side of deep fried candy bar with almost every meal I order from any restaurant, why not? Oh and do I get a discount on you sewing my spare fingers back on?"

So I send the Pope, the Witch Doctor and Bob home with a healthy donation to the church, a goat and a support contract, or did I send the goat to the Pope? Well, regardless, the very next thing the customer does is order another deep fried candy bar. I say to the customer, "Look man, if you eat that you will just die again, and I'll have to call the Pope and things will get ugly, but you know, I can make you something that will taste just like that other candy bar, it will have the chocolate, the nougat, the caramel, everything the other candy bar has, and it won't kill you, except it's totally magical and organic, made by little elves in a far away land with chocolate rivers and houses made out of gingerbread, at least that's what I might as well be saying when I start to talk to the customer about the advantages of Open Source and the protected memory architecture of a *nix system vs. other operating systems that don't have these nifty features, not to mention the savings in time and money in maintenance, performance, downtime, etc.

You just can't beat a LAMP system (Linux, Apache, Mysql, PHP) for small to medium sized deployments. I just set up a small store owner with Ubuntu and Zoneminder on an 8 year old PC that would no longer run Windows, and now it's a low cost security camera server replacement for her 3 Axis Video cams in her store. Whenever my friends or family come to me with their Windows machines infected, again, I have just started to wipe them and put Ubuntu on them. If they want to keep their Windows, fine, but I'm not going to try to unravel their messes anymore. Oh and if you want to know what kind of new computer to buy, get a blue one :p

If you've got the dough, nothing will give you that low end torque like a Solaris Risc box running a well tuned Oracle database, oh baby! I put in a Sun box at a large deployment to process credit cards on the Internet a few years back, and it's still running without a reboot, chugging away. The Windows server that was processing credit cards for only a few local machines, had to be rebooted every night or the machine would hang, requiring someone to go down to the server room and hit the reset buttton in the middle of the day while cash registers were pumping and plastic was sliding. The problem was because of a poorly written application, but therein lies the big difference between most *nix systems and Windows based systems. In *nix land, it's much more difficult to write a program that will completely hang or crash the machine. Because of protected memory, which I won't go into detail about in this article, it makes it harder for a regular user to run a program that will cause the system and other users grief, it also makes it harder for virus' and other malicious programs to do extensive damage should they happen to get in.

All that being said, maybe one day, people will start to use an Operating system that is crafted by tiny elves in a far away magical land and forsake the evil king who rules from atop his green mountain of cash, with his armies of briefcase wielding stormtroopers, but then again, to quote a phrase "and maybe monkeys will fly out of my butt". Until then though, I guess I'll just shut up, put a few bills from the mountain in my pocket and go home :p

Mozilla 3.6 and VMWare

I went there, and I went back. Some kinda issues on that baby. Chrome doesn't work at all (yet) with VMWare, but oooohhh what a Sexy browser, I just love Chrome, and now that it's on Linux, it makes it all better.

Anyway, after going down the long dark upgrade hole of Mozilla 3.6 pre2, Well actually the Upgrade was easy, it was what happened afterwards that was a long dark hole.

Firstly, my My VMWare did not work. Wouldn't even let me log into the console. This problem is easy enough to fix. Turns out that in 3.6 (And 3.7) SSL2 is disabled by default. I'm not sure what the story is, but I assume it has something to do with SSL2 being easily cracked. Anyway, the solution to getting it to actually log in, is to enable SSL2.

To enable SSL2, in the address bar at the top of your browser type in:
_
about:config

Scroll down to

security.enable_ssl2

Then click on whre it says false and click "Toggle", it should then say True.

Stop and start the browser (Actually I don't know if that's 100% necessary), and you'll get a login screen.

The next problem I ran into was that I couldn't get the console started, but It may not have been all 3.6's fault. Part of the problem was that because I couldn't get VMWare running, I decided to try to get to my VMWare server w/out Mozilla. Wrongo!!, I try to install the VMWare player and the installation process removed VMWare server, Doh!

After re-installing the VMWare Server and Downgrading my Mozilla to 3.5.9, I was ready to go, or so I thought. My VMWare instance would boot to 95%, then just stop. A poke around the log files found some errors about bad links in /var/run. To solve this, I did the following:

1. Stop the VMWare services by doing:

sudo /etc/init.d/vmware stop

2. Check to make sure no vmware process are running

ps -ax | grep vmware

There may be stuck vmware process' running, you have to kill by hand with kill or kill -9, make sure to kill the vmware-watchdog process first, or it will keep starting up process' you are trying to kill.

3. After everything is stopped, go to the /var/run directory(ies) from your /var/log/vmware log entries and remove any .lck file in the .lck directories.

4. Run vmware-config.pl and select the defaults all the way through.

You installation _SHOULD_ work now, if it doesn't, hey it worked for me :p

Star Trek Online, How to NOT get it working in Linux (Ubuntu)

Well, I wanted to make a short post as I thought I had it working using the method below. When the screen came up to the initial game after I installed, logged in, updated, etc. The Video was scrambled.

Since then I have been hopelessly lost down a road of re-installs and Wine Internet Explorer madness. I won't bore you with details, but just wanted to follow up to my last article and let anyone know that, the guy in the Video made it look, Sooooo.... Easy, nothing about the extra bits and bobs that you might need or that he was using, anyway, suffice to say, I'm still dual booting to get my Kling-On, but I did manage to get Team Fortress 2 working on Ubuntu, but that's another story, I'm going to hit the waves for a bit while I wait for the Excel, Visual Basic, ODBC Macro monstrosity I have written is finished before it's off to the world of Cut, Paste and Glue!

I also saw someone comment about how my later articles were better than my earlier ones, and you know, it's because I'm better too, but that's REALLY, another story, until then Geek on, and I'll see you in space you squishy Federation types :p

Star Trek Online, How to get it working in Linux (Ubuntu)

OK I haven't posted in awhile, but this will be my geekiest post to date. Not only do I talk about Star Trek, I talk about a Star Trek game, not only is it a game, it's an online game, a massively multi-player, online game (MMO). Now if that weren't geeky enough, at the end of this post I'm going to provide links that will allow you to install Star Trek Online under Linux. So if you are not already having spasms of geek joy just thinking about playing your geeky game about your geeky TV show with other geeks on the Internet on the geekiest (and most user friendly, ahem!) operating system on the planet, then read on.

I've really been enjoying this game, it's very cool to get my Kling-On :p. So far PvP as a Klingon is the best part of the game. There's a mission called "A Good Day To Die" where the object is to be killed 50 times in PvP. The only drawback with PvP'ing is that PvP is the primary way for a Klingon to level, Federation types have all types of missions they can run to level up and get good loot. It also means Federation types are soft and squishy. They don't PvP much, whereas the Klingons pretty much have to PvP to level or get any good loot. The alternative for Klingons is to grind exploration missions. I think once more content is added for Klingons, they will become less the PvP elite that they are now and it will balance out a bit. Still though, Klingon vs. Federation at the moment is pretty much a game of burn down the noob, hehe.

So on with how to get this sucker installed on Linux (Ubuntu Hardy Heron w/ Upgrades was what I installed on). First I tried to install this under VMWare. Even with the latest release and much gnashing of Teeth, no go. Next I tried VirtualBox. I really liked VirtualBox and I think I will move to it for my personal use of things like GotoMeeting, etc. Things I have to run I have to have Windoze for. Anyway, VirtualBox had a problem, even though I had read people had gotten it to work. Of those who reported it to to work it worked very slow.

In comes Wine, yeah Wine. The difference between Wine and VMWare or VirtualBox, is that VMWare and VirtualBox, at their base are hardware emulators. They emulate a virtual piece of hardware, that any operating system can be installed on. Wine on the other hand is an API that interfaces Windows applications to the Linux OS. It's more of a bridge than an emulator. That being said. I found this nifty YouTube Video where this clever chap shows step by step how to install it.

The application he's using is PlayOnLinux, which helps you install your Windoze games on Linux. It can be downloaded from http://www.playonlinux.com

You'll also want to install the PlayOnLinux plugin POL Helper (Also in the video)

Instructions for that can be found in the following thread:

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/topic-2415-Plugin_POL_Helper.html

So my friends, sit back, relax, and geek out!