Technologists Notes

“Genghis Khan and his brother Don
Could not keep on keepin’ on”
(1971) “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” – Bob Dylan

Windows 3

I wrote before: “I remember thinking in 1989 that X-Windows was going to be the dominant windowing environment on PCs. I said about as much in “Unix – The Force Behind Personal Computing?” Unix Technology Advisor 2, 2 (February 1990). When Michael Dell read what I had written, he gently suggested I take a closer look at Windows 3.0. History shows Michael was right and I was wrong.” (more…)

For various reasons, some of which I’ve hashed and rehashed in the past^{[1,2,3,4,5,6,7]}, I feel obligated to keep up with Linux, particularly Fedora. It had been three years since I’d gone all the way through the effort of learning all the new stuff and upgrading production machines to the latest Fedora release (now Fedora 19), which meant I was two years behind from an release end of life perspective, and in jeopardy of not catching up.

Partly, I had held off because I didn’t like the things that were changing: increased memory requirements, more dependence on GUI for administrative tasks, new mechanisms that feel both like overkill and under baked, e.g., firewalld and systemd. I’m not Alan Cox in either Linux credentials or antipathy to recent distributions^[8,9]. I don’t naturally adapt to the Ubuntu distributions either, so trudging forward with Fedora seems the most natural path, in spite of the challenges.

My typical pattern has been to emphasize the odd numbered releases, so I would have likely prioritized Fedora 15 if it were not for the new “features” that gave me pause. That was the first release with systemd, which now appears to have been the last straw for Alan Cox, and certainly hasn’t delighted me. Even more discouraging for me was the installer’s enforcement of minimum memory requirements that my ancient hardware couldn’t meet.

So it took me three years to accept and adjust. I’ve stopped trying to use the truly ancient hardware for more than museum purposes. I’ve upgraded to newer/faster/cheap used hardware. All my production machines are now running Fedora 19, as of last night. With the exception of MySQL Workbench, I’ve managed to avoid resorting to using the GUIs for administration. I’ve even got a machine dedicated to trying to learn Gnome. I brought my XO up to the latest from OLPC and even fetched some Fedora 18 RPMs for it, intending to try to get past the horrible keyboard and find some use for the XO.

In the process I’ve tried to refresh and reorganize my museum of hardware and software. I found my NextSTEP/486 discs and am thinking of trying to get NextSTEP running on my souvenir Dell 450 DE/2 DGX. That couldn’t be as frustrating as trying to re-engage with Fedora.

1. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2010/07/06/lucky-fedora-13/
2. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2010/07/06/spamd-challenging-old-iron-to-keep-up/
3. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2010/02/15/finally-friending-fedora-12/
4. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2009/08/02/fedora-11-delivered-our-heavenly-right-to-say/
5. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2009/08/12/old-iron-servericeable/
6. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2009/01/15/xo-musing-820/
7. https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/05/22/fedora-9-uneven-slices/
8. “So Fedora 18 seems to be the worst Red Hat distro I’ve ever seen.“
9. “Ok so problem box switched to Ubuntu“

The news reports and tributes following Steve Jobs’ passing this week have been dramatic, both in quantity and in degree of regard and respect. Today in the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Jobs: The Secular Prophet there is an extreme example, with allusion to Socrates, the Buddha and Emerson, and comparison with Martin Luther King Jr.

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It’s been almost 5 weeks now. It’s been a good experience, even better than I anticipated. Having a real computer that fits in my pocket is what I wanted, and the Evo meets that desire well. My wife thinks I enjoy the Evo more than any acquisition in recent memory.

The most-publicized caution, battery life, has been a non-issue for me.

The most-publicized feature, 4G via WiMAX, has also been a non-issue, because the coverage isn’t quite what I hoped.

Other than that, my concerns and anticipations of problems had been needless, and the surprises have been good. I’ve come to think of the Evo as the best (for me) pocket computer I can imagine in today’s marketplace, and a good mobile phone, as well.

(more…)

My father considers 13 to be his lucky number. He and my mother married on September 13. He was born June 13. Last month he celebrated his 100^th birthday, so that sounds lucky to me.

For whatever reasons, I’ve favored the odd-numbered Fedora releases (and the odd-numbered Red Hat releases before Fedora), so I was predisposed to like Fedora 13. And I do like Fedora 13.

I’m not sure what else to say. (I gave up on VMWare hosted on Fedora — trying to accomplish that wasted much of my time with Fedora 11 and 12.) I’ve now, as of Sunday, got Fedora 13 in all of my production Linux environments plus several others.  I can’t remember any noticeable problems migrating from Fedora 12, so 13 must be lucky.