Revisited: openSUSE 11.4 GNOME

If you guessed again that there isn't much else to write about, you'd be right! That's why I'm looking at openSUSE 11.4 GNOME today.

Slab Menu + GNOME Application Browser

A few months ago, I took a look at openSUSE 11.4 KDE. Before that, I had compared openSUSE 11.3 KDE to other distributions that primarily used KDE. I found that version 11.4 was a dramatic improvement over version 11.3, to the point where I heartily recommended it to anyone who wanted to try it. It was fairly fast, stable, looked great, and had or could easily get all the applications I wanted. But to call openSUSE a primarily KDE distribution is slightly misleading, because while openSUSE does indeed try to promote KDE a little more, it puts just as much effort into making the GNOME edition a unique experience as well. Plus, the developers that created openSUSE also created Mono, which is basically the C# programming language for Linux, and helped develop the applications written in it that are now popularly used in many GNOME distributions, such as the Evolution mail client (UPDATE: Evolution is not written in Mono, though it was developed by the same group/a group close to that one that developed openSUSE — thanks to an anonymous reader for the correction), Tomboy note-taking application, F-Spot photo manager, and GNOME-Do launcher. So I figured it's time to see what openSUSE GNOME is really like.

I tried the 32-bit edition (and, for further clarification, all distributions I test are tested in 32-bit guise unless specifically stated otherwise) using a live USB made with MultiSystem. Because I didn't try the installation process with the KDE edition, this time I tried it in VirtualBox with 1024 MB of RAM allocated to the guest OS inside a Pinguy OS 11.04 Mini live USB host. Follow the jump to see if the GNOME edition is as good as the KDE edition.

Microsoft's Latest Scare Tactics as of 2010 October 28

For the last few years, Microsoft has been making vague threats to sue vendors of Linux-based products for infringing on Microsoft's patents. When Microsoft is asked to elaborate on what exactly is being infringed, it suffers a convenient case of amnesia. In any case, while it has bullied a few companies (first Novell over SUSE, now companies like HTC over Android) into paying excessive royalty fees for no reason, it has never made good on its threats to sue anyone, probably because it would be clear as day just how ridiculous Microsoft's infringement claims really are.
It seems like now, as this article (Adam Hwang, Digitimes) points out, Microsoft could possibly make good on this, although it seems like it's just bullying companies into paying royalty fees as opposed to outright suing. It's charging AsusTEK and Acer royalty fees for the very vague "email, multimedia, and other" functions just to make sure they don't sell netbooks or tablets with Android or Chrome OS on them. It would be a shame if these companies submitted to Microsoft's demand, but it'll probably happen considering that the same thing happened to Novell and HTC; then again, consumers are now more aware than ever of alternatives to Microsoft Windows, so I think they may actually seek out and demand Android and Chrome OS devices anyway. Let's see how this turns out.

Red Hat: The New Big Monopoly?

Given the presence of Microsoft and Apple, of course Red Hat can't be a monopoly (at least in the desktop market). However, there have been a slew of reports of Oracle rebranding RHEL as Oracle Linux a.k.a. "Unbreakable Linux". This article (Brian Proffitt, ITworld) discusses how that and Amazon Linux AMI (Amazon's Linux distribution built for its own cloud servers) are proof that companies are "stealing" Linux, as Oracle and Amazon are bundling their hardware with their own Linux distributions.
First, I think it's misleading (at best) to say these companies are "stealing" Linux. How is what they are doing any different from what Canonical, Novell, and Red Hat do to Linux? Are they also "stealing" Linux to make their own distribution? I feel like this is the point of free software — allowing anyone to build customized versions of software to fit their own needs; good for Oracle and Amazon for taking full advantage of the benefits of Linux and free software. I don't think Oracle and Amazon are going to prevent loading other Linux distributions; it's just that the bundled distribution will be Oracle Linux or Amazon Linux AMI, as opposed to Microsoft Windows or Ubuntu. Also, isn't this what was supposed to happen to Android — phone makers customizing Android to suit their phones' needs? Isn't this what is happening, at any rate? Saying these companies are "stealing" Linux to suit their needs just seems a bit silly to me.
The bigger problem I have, though, is that both Oracle Linux and Amazon Linux are based off of RHEL. I think it's great that Red Hat has become so successful and so widespread, but this incredible adoption rate worries me at the same time because it could give Red Hat a monopoly over the market similar to the one Microsoft currently has over the desktop market (and I fear similar effects stemming from this). Come on, Canonical and Novell. (I am fully aware that it's easy for me to say this from the comfort of my keyboard.) Learn from Red Hat and give Red Hat some competition. People will have more choice regarding the back-end, and everyone wins from choice and competition.

Our School's Stupidity Regarding Microsoft

It is fairly well known that while the vast majority of servers use the open-source Apache technology (as opposed to Microsoft's closed IIS technology), the vast majority of computers hooked up to these servers use Microsoft Windows. Due to the huge price benefits schools and businesses get from Microsoft, these organizations are also partially bound to Microsoft's ideologies. Case in point: the Ubuntu forums are blocked sites in my school.
I am here to report that the situation has gotten even worse.
It is common for office workers who want to use open-source software at work but can't install such software directly to use Mozilla Firefox Portable and OpenOffice.org Portable from their flash drives to avoid using Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Office.
This is what I did for a while.
However, as of today, neither of these are possible anymore on the school computers due to new user privilege restrictions disallowing the use of any software not installed on the computers themselves.
While I appreciate the newfound appreciation for user privileges (something that UNIX started and has been continued on with Linux, BSD, OpenSolaris, Mac OS, and (more recently) Windows [Vista and 7]), this is a huge step backwards from 3 years ago, when Mozilla Firefox was preinstalled on the computers already as an alternative to Internet Explorer. I was pleased then.
I am highly displeased now.
(UPDATE: I know this is a little delayed, but I kept forgetting to add this...until now. It seems that third-party software can be run from one's "My Documents" folder, just not from a flash drive. However, I can see changes to that as well.)