Just a quick note to let people know that we have launched a new skin, over at beerftw.com

Take a look, and be sure to pass on any feedback, as well as contribute to the wiki!

I’m sick of hearing how Linux is ‘failing’, due to both Mac and Windows having a greater market share. It’s not a popularity contest, and Linux is not out to make money. Linux, and indeed the Open Source Community, is not judged (internally or externally) by how many people use it. We consider a ‘product’ successful if it is useful, and helps people. Market penetration, squeezing the competition, more sales - these are all marketing terms, and not technical terms. They really have no use in determining the value of a product. As we live in a capitalist society (well, a large majority of us do), the general population have come to associate these terms with success or failure. Especially in the absence of traditional monetary values in the Open Source community, a large majority of people do feel the need to measure success based on preconceived notions.

So, apart from not caring about what the sales and stats data say, why does Linux have a lower market share? Well, I think the market share is higher than what is commonly reported. There are a few ways these stats are collected, and I’m going to give you my take on each of them.

Number of sales/dowloads. Corporations love this value, as it relates directly to revenue which pleases shareholders. What’s wrong with? I’ve paid for various Microsoft Windows OEM licenses that I no longer use, simply because they came bundled with the laptop or desktop I purchased. So far, I’ve purchased 2 OEM licenses which are sitting here unused. That’s two Windows users that Microsoft are counting, that are completely false. Of course Linux cannot be measured in sales, so the comparison usually used is downloads. This is simply counting the number of times a Linux distribution has been downloaded. Just last week I downloaded Ubuntu 8.04, which I installed on three separate machines. That’s one download counted for three users. Let’s review - I personally have been counted as two Windows users and a single Linux user, when the reality is I use four Linux installations and no Windows installations. Of course there is no easy fix - Microsoft’s licensing allows one install per license (leaving out VL, OB, OL etc), where as the Linux GPL allows unlimited installs. I must commend Dell for offering Linux as a pre-installed options, which is definitely a very large step in the right direction.

Additionally, there are cases where one Microsoft license is replaced by another, meaning it is counted twice. I know of one multinational corporation who provide their staff with laptops featuring an OEM license, but the actual OS installed is licensed via their Open Business license with Microsoft. Multiple that by 10,000 employee’s, and you can see how the sales/downloads are just not accurate.

Just a quick point on this, which I am not going to harp on. The Open Source community gains no benefit from a reported increase in users. We do get a benefit in an increase in actual users, assuming that a proportion of those users help in someway - submitting bugs, providing feedback, developing, documenting, raising awareness, etc.

Let’s use web stats for a moment to analyse the OS installation numbers for a moment. My major concern with this is finding a neutral website, or group of sites, to obtain meaningful data. An IT based site is going to lean more towards Linux, BSD & Unix, where as social networking sites will lean more towards Windows. There is just no way to get a non biased sample. My own website (beerftw.com) is reporting 23.9% of visitors use Linux, 71% use Windows, 2% use a Mac and the remaining 2.9% use various others (including bots). These figures are wildly different to those normally reported, and my site is not even an IT site! I would have though a beer based site would be fairly neutral, but with such different results to “the usual”, it is hard to tell.

There is also impersonation. I have found several site which throw errors if I am not using a “modern browser”. Yeah right, Opera is not modern? It is one of the most standards compliant browsers around, if not THE most. When I encounter these sites, I set Opera to use IE as the user agent. Guess what? This means I am counted as a Windows user in many cases. Sloppy web development = higher reported Windows user base.

I’m not denying that Linux is used less than Windows and Mac’s. I know Linux and other Unix variants are a minority in the desktop OS world.  I’m just trying to say that we don’t care if our user base is less than ‘competitors’. Our OS works. Our OS support’s our needs. Our OS is here to stay, market share or not.

For the first time I actually saw a guy wearing this tshirt in public. He was definitely a geek, which I’m sure I could have picked even if he wasn’t wearing the shirt. His choice to wear his geekiness across his chest, made me shake my head as I walked past him. I’ve been tempted to buy one of those tshirts and wear it in public, but I haven’t, due to fear of what people like me might think. Now I am certain I will never wear one in public, as even myself (a geek) shook my head at a fellow geek wearing one.

He wasn’t even at a geeky place like a Star Trek convention or a computer shop. He was buying food at Safeway. He did have a girlfriend though, who’s hand he was holding. If he didn’t have her hand, I wonder if she would have run away…

As much as I like Think Geek, this tshirt just gave off the wrong message. I still want a binary clock though…

Finally, how long until we will see a “no place like ::1″ tshirt?

Working in the outsourcing IT industry for the past few years, has given me the opportunity to find and test many different applications. I’m going to list one every few days - hopefully someone else finds them as useful as me. The major of apps will be Windows (including this one), but I will throw in some Linux apps.

The first one is NetSetMan. This is an awesome app for anyone who moves between various IP networks. It’s a little app that sits in your tasks bar, and lets you create profiles for all of the IP networks you require. Settings include DHCP/static, IP address, subnet mask, gateway, DNS, workgroup, WINS, default printer, logon script and mapped network drives. Simply 2 clicks from the task bar when you arrive onsite, and your network is ready to go.
Multiple network interfaces? Not a problem. Only want to change some settings for a profile? Sure.

Take a look, it is a great app. www.netsetman.com

PS
No, I don’t work for or receive any money from the app developers. I just think it’s a great app, the people should know about.

Despite VMware having virtual disks, you cannot resize them from the GUI. Luckily the command line tool is quite easy to use, but there is an additional step required, as VMware does not resize partitions for you.

Before resizing, you will need to delete any snapshots you have. The command will terminate with an error if you do not do this first. The command to resize your disk is:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 20GB Disk01.vmdk

Obviously replace 20GB with the new size you want, and Disk01.vdmk needs to be the full path to your existing disk file.

Once complete, you may want to resize your partions, depending on your requirements. I’ve found GParted to be great for this. As it is a live CD, you can simply mount the ISO as the CD drive in your virtual machine, and boot from that. GParted also supports multiple file systems, including NTFS, FAT32, FAT16, EXT3 & EXT2. Full table of supported file systems is available here.

Do you need to install VMware Server on Ubuntu, but receiving errors during the complile and configuration? Here are the steps I used to install VMware server 1.0.4 on Ubuntu 7.10.
1. Download and extract VMware server
2. Download and extract (to the same folder) http://knihovny.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/vmware-any-any-update114.tar.gz
3. Comment out this line static inline _syscall1(int, compat_exit, int, exit_code); in lib/modules/source/vmmon-only/include/compat_kernel.h (relative to your VMware extraction folder).

Run the compiler again