November 16, 2009

Bully Tries To Steal And Gets Caught

When I was a kid I used to love playing at my cousins house. They had all the cool toys and a lot of them. The only problem with playing with someone elses toys is that you have to play by their rules.

But that's not to say that if you only want to play that you have to go play with someone elses toys. You could make your own toys or play with free toys. We used to make some of our favorite toys out of scrap lumber that was left over from some project at the house. My brother and I would make our Army guns out of wood and we played for hours with our "new" toys.

How do you think we'd feel if our cousins would decide that their store bought toys weren't good enough and they came over and took our homemade toys home with them and told everyone that those toys were in fact theirs.

Far fetched right? Well after some research it seems that Microsoft has done just that.
The newly toted WUDT tool that was offered as a way to deploy the windows 7 ISO to a bootable USB drive is actually a stolen open source tool that is protected by GNU and should have been left open source.

Microsoft has been in the proprietary software business for so long that I don't think they are ready or able to learn how to play nicely with the open source community yet.
You would think that After the highly publicized lawsuit between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft in 1997 over the abuse and forced incompatibility of the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine that lessons would have been learned.

Microsoft, listen carefully. The global community will no longer tolerate being bullied because you believe you are bigger and better. Your days of being the only choice have come to a close. It time to trim the fat and find out what your customers need and want instead of forcing your bloated and over advertised software on us. Consider this a friendly suggestion because I could care less what happens to you as a corporation, but I would be sad to see such great potential toppled by it's failure to adapt.

November 04, 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 Has Bad Karma For Broadcom Wireless

For all the Ubuntu users out there we heralded in the new version of Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala this past weekend.

Now before I start on my rant I want to put up a disclaimer on my comments. I absolutely love Ubuntu and will continue to use it, write about it, train on it, and promote it.

Now on to the rant...

After spending months of joy with each version of Ubuntu since Hardy Heron I have never had a successful update either graphically or by the command line. How can a distribution that works almost flawlessly on a fresh install have such a poor updater?

Like I always do, I backed up my personal files and tried the updater and from 9.04 to 9.10 I found the following errors upon booting up Karmic
  • touch-pad mouse did not work
  • Firefox was extremely slow
  • Sound card did not work
At this point I tried fixing each problem separately, but after getting the touch-pad working and then going through a handful of solutions for Firefox I decided it wasn't worth the effort and I'd rather do a fresh install. Of course now we get to the meat of the rant...

After doing a fresh install I find that my broadcom wireless card wasn't detected. This is just plain weird because it was detected on the live cd. My solution was to load the broadcom drivers off of the live cd with the following steps...

1. Open Synaptic Package Manager
2. Load the Live cd in it's drive (or thumb drive if you install with that media)
3. Go to Settings / Repositories / Ubuntu Software
4. Check mark the installable from cd and close
5. Refresh Synaptic
6. Search and install
  • fakeroot
  • patch
  • dkms
  • bcmwl
7. Reboot computer

Hurray, now it works for me. Hope this helps.

Now I urge the hard workers at Canonical, during their 100 paper cuts initiative, to please focus on improving their graphical updater so it... well... works.

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