Techie

Real quick review of the desktop in pro’s and con’s Pro’s Installer is pretty and well laid out Theme extends across all 3 supported desktops (lxde, KDE, and GNOME) Administration utilities use native toolkits for each platform unlike YaST from SuSE Con’s Why wouldn’t you use network-manager rather than your cheesy control center tool I first used in Mandrake 6.1 or 7? The default KDM theme reminds me of the old Solaris days, doesn’t match the feel of the desktop GTK theme seems like a cut-n-paste from QT side and it isn’t pretty Beagle search rather than Tracker? Not starting a mono war here, but beagle is NO where near feature filled Seems to me that they took the bits and pieces from around the world and bundled it together. Problem is the bits they took were from the crappy bucket. Mandriva, I loved you back during the Red Hat vs. Mandrake days were you pushed the technology and ease of use for Linux. Now you just seem washed up.

I was up answering emails last night well into the night and before turning in I upgraded to Vmware Fusion 3. Thought I would pro’s and con’s it here for the group: Spiffy: Runs MUCH better on Snow Leopard and utilizes 64bit fully. Memory utilization on my macpro was much better than with 2 Ran a few games (HL, Quake3, DoD) and they seem to have less graphic artifacts. I can’t think of a game I play that isn’t native or run in WINE, but a neat option. I see this as a big boom for those doing 3d modeling and the software not able to run any other way. Also supports Aero and Windows 7 flip. I usually turn these off by default, but someone must like them. VNC! I missed this feature most from Workstation on Linux. You can make a vncserver so that when you start your VM you can then hookup @ the BIOS level from another machine. Great for hosting a VM as a sudo-server I haven’t had a chance to test, but the migration tool looks to be a killer option for those moving from Windows machines. It works over a network and requires a little program install on your windows machines. I am wondering if this is based on P2V they offer for Enterprise work. I wonder how many of these little converter apps will be finding their way to corporate images :) The end result being install a little program, start the mac, and convert your whole machine to a VM with your apps and settings. Lame: ...

Just wanted to post some thoughts on UNR 9.10 – Most of the netbooks utilize the Intel i915 based video cards and have HORRID performance under the latest xorg drivers. 9.10 fixes this and allows for UXA acceleration and was my main reason for skipping over 9.04 UNR. The image installs quickly and provides for the basic web based programs. The EXT4 (I use it on all my desktop/laptop now) allows for quick boots and shutdowns on the MSI Wind I have. A few points on 9.10 UNR: ...

A great post from W. Mark Brooks asks when did Information Security become IT Security? The point is very much in line with my triangle theory, that security is the pinnacle of IT and requires mastering the lower levels first. Though to counter the ITS vs IS argument I posted that IA is the more appropriate name. Post below: I prefer the military nomenclature of Information Assurance. I have carried it over to the commercial world and make sure all my security types carry that title now. I like the definition and what it means: ...

I posted this to ServerFault.com today. Folks loose site of requirements and systems engineering and it drives me batty. Here was my response to the guys question about redundancy and RAID/COOP/etc. ——– Every design and architecture should be requirements driven. Good systems engineering calls for defining the constraints of the design and implementing a solution that meets that. If you have a SLA with your customers that calls for a .99999, then your solution of N+N redundancy should account for all those LRU (line replaceable units) that could fail. RAID, PS, and COOP planning should all account for that. In addition your SLA with vendors should be the 4 hour response time type or account for a large number of spares onsite. ...