I recently acquired a new machine, which now has the following specs:

Intel Core2 Quad Q6600
3 GB 800mhz DDR2
Sapphire ATI X1550 512MB PCI-E
WD 500 GB SATA II
WD 250 GB SATA (I)

The machine came with Windows Vista Home Premium, and almost as a reflex, I removed it immediately in favor of Ubuntu. However, during my partitioning, I decided I would go be curious, and leave a couple NTFS partitions for a Vista reinstallation — one NTFS partition for Vista itself, and another so that files could be shared between OS’s. Ubuntu of course has no issue mounting NTFS drives, while Vista, of course, does nothing but…

I don’t like it. Vista. It looks pretty, but I can tell it’s just fancy dressing over total fugliness. Even on a machine with specs as impressive as this one, it hiccups and momentarily freezes, which is ridiculous.

Vista is also a hard drive hog. As a student I have access to some software packages provided by my university. Included in this bundle are Office 2007 and Visual Studio 2008, both of which I downloaded and installed, along with Firefox, video drivers, and that’s it. Twenty-five gigs, people. Twenty-five gigs! I’m sure that some of this is due to system restore, but system restore is on by default, so this is what most people are going to endure. Plus it’s Windows, so you need system restore.

Oh, did I mention that my network drivers magically uninstalled at one point? Yeah, system restore didn’t fix it, either. Nope, that was fantastic.

My belief (or hope) is that Vista will turn into Windows ME (remember that?) The next version will hopefully be more like what XP became after 98Se. Of course what will I care? Booting back into Ubuntu…

Let’s not pretend I have some remarkably written tutorial here. I just smile and point…

In order to get VMWare Server set up on Ubuntu 8.04, do this and then do this. Simplify.

UPDATE: On a completely different, newly updated machine that had had a preexisting version of VMWare installed, applying the vmware-any-any-update-116.tgz patch worked, while the previous two solutions did not.

Red Hat and Novell have reportedly announced that they will NOT be after a share of the consumer desktop marketplace with a desktop offering of their respective Linux operating systems. I’m not sure if the community (of Linux users) perceives this news as good or bad, but I am here to tell you that it is good.

It’s good news because, aside from any of the other lingering flaws of a Linux operating system — package management woes, convoluted installation procedures, [still having to edit] .conf files — the one single greatest disadvantage that Linux has endured in the fight against Windows and Mac OS is that there is not one Linux, there are many.

A true Linux enthusiast will bash that point because the greatest advantage of Linux, for those who know how to use it, is choice. But average, everyday consumers outnumber true Linux enthusiasts by a healthy number. What Windows and Mac OS do for consumers is make the choices for them — see, not everybody values that type of freedom; not everybody wants to tinker with configuration files; not everybody wants (or can understand) the source code to their programs and operating system.

There is an old adage in the supermarket business that carrying too many different varieties of an item will hurt overall sales of that item in the end. It’s a complicated psychological problem that can be boiled down to simple statistics:

A huge percentage of the process of selling a product is simply getting the consumer to make the decision that they want it. Once that has happened, the rest is about convenience and various other less important factors. If the decision to buy is made to be questioned, even indirectly, a “definitely” turns into a “possibly”, and the seller gets screwed.

Why? Say you decide you want a loaf of bread. You go to the store, walk into the bread aisle, and there is one type of loaf. That’s your option, you have no decision to make. You buy the bread.

Take that scenario, and instead of one loaf, there are 50 different varieties. As soon as you see this, you start to think again; you need to re-decide what you want. At that point, a “definitely” has turned into a “possibly”. Instead of bread, maybe you’ll buy some wheat wraps…

The sale of the item has been lost. Obviously this is an example in which the specifics differ substantially from the specifics of choosing an operating system. However, the higher-level psychology remains the same. With a ton of options, the average consumer can become bewildered by the choice and look for a comfort zone. Aka Windows.

It’s looking now like Ubuntu is the de facto loaf. Cheers.