'Til All Are One

I came across this art­icle at csmon​itor​.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 PCLinuxOn​line​.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. Open​Of​fice​.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 Open​Of​fice​.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.