LinuxJedi's /dev/null

Well, I have finally booked my Zend Certification exam and MySQL DBA exams.  I will be taking the ZCE on the 4th July and CMDBA I and II on the 11th July.

Wish me luck

My kids were watching 'Pinky Dinky Doo' today and I found evidence that cartoon characters are adopting Open Source Software.  Here is Pinky wearing what appears to be a Debian top:

Most major Linux distribution vendors are trying to push the Linux desktop harder than ever, in my opinion this is mainly due to the new hugely popular subnotebook craze (such as the EeePC).  There is however one major problem to this and that is most open source alternatives to proprietary solutions are not release read yet.

For example, anyone who has wanted to go out and by a wifi dongle for their Linux desktop has had to proceed with caution...or use ndiswrapper with the Windows driver.  If you want flash there are 2 open source solutions, both good but neither support everything.

So vendors have had 2 choices, try and assist development of these open solutions and push a distro that does x, y and z but not a, b and c.  Or do deals with the devil.

Fedora appears to have gone one way (only open source), openSUSE the complete opposite (evil deals with MS) and Ubuntu appears to be somewhere in the middle (including some proprietary drivers and codecs).

My worry is the massive explosion of proprietary additions into a Linux distro to get competitive edge over other vendors could cause the original end goal for Linux to be lost complete.

The question is this:  When does proprietary additions into a Linux distro become evil?

Believe me when I say I am no fan of Belkin gear.  Its very overpriced and often poorly made.  In fact I have hardly had any Belkin hardware that I haven't had to take back for not working as advertised (especially wifi kit).

A long while ago I was given a Belkin USB bluetooth dongle, which I completely forgot about, my wife washed my coat one day with the dongle still in it.  It came out quite badly scratched but in one piece, I shoved it in a draw and forgot about it.

Today I wanted to link up my new(ish) Sony K800i to my Dell D530 laptop which doesn't have bluetooth.  I remembered the dongle, dug it out and plugged it in.  2 shockers:

1. It worked perfectly!
2. Ubuntu saw it straight away and configured it!

Maybe this is the recipie to get Belkin gear to work properly!

I am currently a distro torn person...
I want to like Fedora 9, but it is far too buggy to use...
I want to like Opensuse, but there is the whole Novell / MS thing and the package management is terrible...
I don't want to like Ubuntu, I think the LTS on 8.04 was a terrible decision, I think the idea of aligning all package and distro release dates is an insane pipedream.  Unfortunately Ubuntu just bloody works on my laptop, has all the packages I need without extra hidden repositories and has an excellent package system.

The whole Linux world is a constant state of flux, I would say more so right now with the extra publicity generated during the recent lauches, KDE4's brokenish releases, etc...

For now I will stick with going against my feelings and stick to Ubuntu...