Just read this entry from Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical and have to say kudos too. It’s refreshing to see people of influence out there waving the flag of getting things done for the common good. Sometimes finding the positive in competition is challenging unless you’re willing to accept it, learn from it and adapt.
Change is evolving and a good thing ….
I started using Linux in 1998 cause it was different, I wanted to learn and it was cheap. Back then it was RedHat as the flavor of choice and it’s nice to see they are coming to Nashville. The end of May RedHat will hold their Summit 2006 at the Gaylord Opryland Hotel. Three days and four nights for $899 is reasonable for a professional conference but a little out of my price range. The tracks cover a wide range of topics and the speakers have a diverse technology background.
If I had the time and the dough I’d be there, if only to sponge off the environment I’d be in. For those who have not been to the Opryland Hotel it is a very, very nice place and a great location for a conference. Back in 1990 I was their for a week as part of a business trip and it was an excellent time.
As I have mentioned a few times my current employer is a Microsoft shop so I was suprised a week ago when at our fall conference when I saw Ethereal on a big screen in the sales room. I thought to myself hummmmmm, isn’t that interesting. A laptop running KDE on Linux using Ethereal to provide a baseline for security discussions on secure and open networks. Now Ethereal does run on Windows but it struck me as just a little funny Linux was on the projector all week.
I’m glad to see we are open to alternatives.. ;)
Since moving out of state from where our office is and working remotely back in 2001 some unique challenges came about. One of those was email as it seems we continue to use it as a way to communicate and store documentation. Since the company I work for is a Microsoft shop Outlook is the standard and for me it was causing problems. I never used the calendar feature much and did not like having more than one archive, not to mention needing one at all.
I’d guess in a company with a large number of employees this type of setup and the access Outlook brings might be a good setup but consistently having to go to archives to find old emails and documents was becoming a pain. Not to mention some internal IT situations which would cause headaches for those who kept a lot of email, archived or not. So now that I was remote and using my own equipment, supporting it and my network access I went looking for a new solution. Back in 1998 before we standardized on an email client I used Netscape and liked it very much so I went to Mozilla and grabbed Thunderbird. It was the right choice.
It has only been about a year ago that I switched and wished I would have done it sooner. The main reason I switched is the ability to find emails. Even though it is now 2005 much of what employees document from processes to fyi’s to “did you know” comes in the form of an email and in some instances attachments in the emails. Old habbits are hard to break I guess but because of this finding what was previously documented in email is common place. I store email’s by Department so regarless who it comes from it gets put in a group folder. If it is a Development generated email about a product it is put in the folder of the group that supports it, i.e. what kind of product it is. Today given a subject keyword or user who would have sent it I can find emails as far back as 1998 in less than 10 seconds. Outlooks archive structure prohibited me from having that kind of access.
Another reason for switching is I just don’t need the other non email features of Outlook. I don’t need to send meeting requests or reserve resources, if I do have a meeting it goes in the Zaurus as well as any tasks. Thunderbird’s customization features are excellent as well and make reviewing threads that much easier. Did I mention threads ??? Another big winner in my book is email threads and how they are handled. No more searching for other messages related to the one I’m looking for, one click and the entire thread is right there.
Last but not least is Thunderbird’s ability to operate on multiple operating systems. I need Windows XP for work but when traveling it is Ubuntu that is my workhorse. If I need email just copy the mail folder and I’m ready to go. When I get home copy it back to the Windoze box and I back to being current. I’d prefer not to use XP but enabling web versions of some applications are preventing this. I can live with that for now.
I am very pleased with Thunderbird and if all you need is email I’d recommend it. As the slogan says, “reclaim your inbox” !!!
Open source came the the rescue again this weekend when I needed to reformat a hard drive. I use to keep handy a Windows boot floppy to get the job done but I have not used a diskett in years. Not to metion of the three machines I currently have none of them have a floppy. Now of course I could have burned a CD or used a Windows rescue CD but none of those was available.
Enter Knoppix.
A few months back I burned a copy of Knoppix 3.6 just in case I ran into a scenario of needing a quick format. This weekend it did the trick. There are certainly other tools available to format a hard drive but QParted was the quickest access.
A spare 20GB laptop drive that was Fedora Core 2 needed to load XP Home. The reason for using Knoppix is the XP install CD was not getting anywhere with no NTSF partition. A quick boot to Knoppix and a couple clicks later, where done.
