‘Til All Are One

I came across this article at csmonitor.com. Basically, it’s pointing out how juvenile a boycott of all words and products of French origin would be, for example renaming French fries to freedom fries. Besides, they are actually from Belgium, not France. Maybe we should call them oil fries? It only makes sense

That got me thinking. If so many Americans are eager to boycott everything French, what will they do with the admirals, commodores, brigadier generals, colonels, commanders, captains, lieutenants, warrant officers, ensigns, sergeants, corporals, specialists and airmen in their armed forces? Surely they wouldn’t want to use those in the war against Iraq? That leaves only seamen and privates for the assault (generals and majors are officers). Can they fight a battle without aeroplanes (including jets and their pilots), armour, artillery, bombs, rockets, grenades, bullets, rifles or machine guns? Can they attack without magazines or the ammunition stored inside them? And who needs soldiers, anyway? Maybe they don’t need an army, navy, air force or marines? Heck, perhaps they don’t need a military at all!

Strangely enough, weapons inspector doesn’t seem to be of French origin.

In semi-related news, Mandrake Linux 9.1 is out. OSNews has a great review of it, and Tweakhound has an informative interview with Mandrake Linux founder Gaël Duval. It looks amazing, particularly compared to 9.0, which could have been better (although I didn’t think 9.0 was nearly as bad as many reviewers did). As a side note, I clicked the "More links HERE" link at the bottom of the Gaël Duval interview and found PCLinuxOnline.com listed under "Other Good Linux Sites". Yay!!!

I’ve seen comments by some Americans advocating a boycott of Mandrake Linux because MandrakeSoft is French. To them, I have this to say: Are you really that retarded?! I mean, that’s just idiotic [see definition 2]! Free software is an international effort. Code and developers come from all over the world. The corollary of this is that most of the code in Mandrake Linux isn’t from France at all. It also means that all GNU/Linux distributions have some code that would have originated in France. Maybe you should boycott Red Hat, Debian and everyone else as well?

Yeah, so I ripped the title off Star Wars, so what? 

About three weeks ago (I think… I lose track of dates easily) on a Saturday I got a rather frantic call from my old friend Reaper. Here’s the Hollywood version (for your reading pleasure):

Reaper: "Aaargh! I’ve screwed up my hard drive and my computer is now useless! I have an appointment to have cable Internet installed on Tuesday and I need a working system so that the technician can install everything. Can I bring my computer to your house so you can take a look at it? Help me Yama, you’re my only hope."
Me: "You may, my minion. I know all. You may bow and kiss my ring."
Reaper: "Yes, my Liege! Thank you, Lord!"

*ahem* Well it went something like that, anyway.

About an hour later, Reaper shows up at my house with computer in tow. He somehow managed to kill his partition table, and after much fiddling I finally managed to fix it using gpart and (GNU/Linux) fdisk. He needed a copy of Windows installed for the cable guy, so I chucked on Win2K (which sadly/humorously is the best MS product since OS/2). To balance this out, I installed Mandrake 9.0.

Reaper is a Windows user, so I tried to make his Windows experience as non-MS (for both security and ethical reasons) as possible. OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are not only very capable applications (and IMHO are bettter than their MS counterparts), they also have direct equivalents in GNU/Linux. So the only thing keeping him in Windows is Windows itself. Reaper is a games player, but I think WineX can fill that void nicely. Of course, KDE is great for Windows converts.

I think a Windows to GNU/Linux transition is best achieved in two stages (to simplify the process). In the first stage, the user weans himself/herself off proprietary (particularly Microsoft) applications. In their place, open alternatives like Mozilla and OpenOffice.org are adopted. Once the user has grown accustomed to those programmes, they can make a transition to GNU/Linux (or BSD, Mac OS X, etc.). The apps stay the same, and only the OS changes. The whole process can take place over a prolonged period, and the user is free to switch back and forth (dual-boot) between operating systems.

Reaper, I know you’ll read this sooner or later, so tell us what you think. Am I talking junk or am I talking junk?

Update: Reaper messed up his hard drive when using Partition Magic 8. Yet another reason not to trust proprietary software, I guess.