The Power of Ubuntu

[Null Ack]

I was reflecting this morning on my previous criticisms for areas that
Ubuntu and GNU/Linux needs to be improve in order to reach its
potential. I recently had an experience that crystallized the power of
Ubuntu for me and I felt I should share this view with you all.

Part of my ICT specialisation is in test management and release
management. Naturally my contributions to Ubuntu have tended to lean
into bugs and testing. I was playing around with the Intrepid Alpha 1
release. Having raised some bugs and satisfied myself I have
sufficiently covered core functions I was interested in, I settled
into using it daily. One of the upgrades was for Xorg and for a few
days I was without X and Gnome while all the package dependencies were
met in development.

It occurred to me how powerful Ubuntu is. Even without Gnome, I could
still run my Upnp server to watch films on my xbox 360. I could still
use apt-get to keep my systems configuration items up to date with the
repos binaries. I had nano for basic docos and my printer working
fine.

Best of all, I was able to leverage the power the system has with
logging. I was easily able to determine the problems with X in the
logs at \var\log unlike the vaugeries of Windows Server or Vista where
at some level the actual problem gets lost inside the web of hidden
layers within the system internals. And trust me, I know the Windows
platform very well.

There is so much exciting things happening too. I hear a rumour that
ZFS native in kernel space is coming. DRI2 so that memory on video
cards can be fully managed. In comparison, we have more vague
references to Windows 7 and "midori".

I have the comfort in knowing there is no back door, no hidden little
Government probe that can be put into closed code. Am I paranoid? I
think not, open code, as Schneider puts it, is a cornerstone of
security.

I am free to put up new ideas and show how certain functions might be
improved. I was interested in the gnome-mplayer, and provided some
insights there, which the actual Developer responded too and is now
looking at for a future release. I am part of the ecosystem and can
support the betterment of it.

Going back to xbox 360 media sharing, what do we find? MS implement a
upnp service that is not standards compliant so that it works out of
the box with Windows stuff only. To make it worse, they also have
implemented it in error as the video side is dealt differently to the
music side at a technical level. So all their interfacing code has
worked around this, rather than doing it in a consistently correct way
to start with.

The future of ICT relies on open, consistent standards that avoids
vendor lock in.

In my house, and professionally, I have used Windows, OS X, Unix,
Mainframes and so on. No system is perfect, but what is clear to me is
that Linux has the momentum behind it and the right free and open
approach to be the system that lasts for centuries ahead.

I love you Ubuntu.