Hacking for fun and profit

This is a good day for Free Software. The city of Munich is finally making its migration to Linux official, and they will be using Debian (translation). They were going to use SUSE, back when it was still a German company.

The announcement happened a few days after the election of Branden Robinson as the new DPL. I hope things change in Debian soon. The current stable version of Debian was released in July 2002. That can be ok for a server, but as a desktop computer it means extremely old software. That’s why most Debian desktop users use the “unstable” version of Debian: sid. Don’t be fooled by the “unstable” tag, it is more stable than the most popular distros out there.

Still, the future is unclear. I am a big supporter of Debian, but nothing is perfect. The Debian organization is extremely vertical and bureucratic. It seems that sarge will never be released. And there is the rise of the Debian based Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu is, IMHO, the best “final user” linux distro out there right now. There are several Debian Developers working in Canonical (Ubuntu’s sponsor), and they basically fork Debian unstable, put the most recent GNOME desktop in it, and release. And they DO release. And best of all, they release OFTEN. This is the complete opposite of Debian. Probably the only thing Ubuntu lacks is some kind of distro-control-panel-for-the-linux-newbie, like SUSE’s Yast2, Mandrake’s DrakConf or RedHat’s redhat-config-* suite.

There has been a lot of noise from some of the most fanatical DDs. They don’t like Ubuntu. Even Ian Murdock (Debian’s father) had something to say. They fail to see that if Debian had a sane release cycle, Ubuntu would never have been the smashing success it is right now. It’s kinda like Minix/Linux in a small scale, Minix was there already, but Linux “won” the market.

Another personal gripe with Debian is the lack of some form of “official” corporate support, specially a Debian Professional Certification or something like that. I know there are lots of business out there offering Debian support, but still, some form of cert would be nice to see. Note that I am not a strong believer in certs (this belongs to another post), but a Debian certification would really give a big boost to Debian in the Enterprise World. Sadly, most Debian developers don’t even care about the corporate market.

But even with these minor gripes, I use Debian as a desktop (unstable of course). I think it is, on the technical side, the most solid distribution right now. And when used as a server, it is a pleasure to administer, thanks to the Debian Policy. My complaints with Debian have nothing to do with Debian as a distribution, but with Debian as an organization.

I hope Branden can improve some things now, specially because he signed the Vancouver Release Team Meeting. One of the consequences of this meeting would be that Debian will abandon most minor architecture from stable, focusing on i386, powerpc, ia64 and amd64. Other architectures will still be supported, but they won’t cause delays in Debian stable releases anymore, which is a Good Thing for the vast majority of Debian users.

I finally updated the layout of this place. Now I’m using a slightly modified version of Blogging Pro’s Gila Theme.

I also enabled Permalinks, so now the URLs will look better and will be more expressive.

On the Plugins front, I enabled:

• WP Admin Bar 2, this one is for my use only.
• Smart Archives, this one powers the archives section.
• PHP Exec, this is a great plugin, it allows the use of PHP code in posts and pages.

In other news, apparently this humble blog has been one of the top referrers of the main www.debian.org site for several months (only after Google and other Debian sites). I am still trying to find out how this is possible.

From www.installfest.info:

Latinamerican Free Software Install Fest

On Saturday the 2nd of April/2005 we are holding the Latinamerican free software install fest, an event with the goal of promoving the use of free software and bringing closer together free software user groups in all the countries in Latin America.

To achieve this we will hold simultaneous events in different cities, where local technical experts will install free software in any computers brought for this purpose. This will be done in an entirely legal manner and the service will be provided free of charge.

The event is being organized by APESOL, BSD Venezuela, CaFeLUG, CatatumboX, CDSL, ChampeTUX, Colibrí, EcuaLUG, FUNLAM, GaLlo, GLUC, GLUD, GNU/LUGNA, GrULiC, Grupo Kernel Mexico, GUGVE, GULCR, GULIP (Puno-Perú), GULTab, GUSILA, Iskariote, LANUX, LinuxLSC, Linuxpreview, LUGRo, Merlinux, OpenEcuador, PLUG (Perú), PLUG (Argentina), POLUX, PSL-ABCD, Pulpa, Software Libre Chile, TALUG, Ulfix, UNPLUG, USMP-LUG, VELUG and XPOLINUX. We invite other LUGs to actively participate in this event. The install fest will be held in 13 countries, with a total of 106 participating cities, 12 in Argentina, 5 in Bolivia, 30 in Brasil, 7 in Chile, 16 in Colombia, 1 in Costa Rica, 9 in Ecuador, 2 in El Salvador, 1 in Guatemala, 1 in Honduras, 11 in Perú, 4 in México and 8 in Venezuela.

This means that tomorrow will be a very busy day.

I will be helping in Universidad Nacional de Ingenieria. Se you there :-)