Going Open Source

Filed in archive Technology on March 30, 2006

At Creative Weblogging we have used Linux (that is Debian) for our server infrastructure from day one. We now use Debian as the OS for all application, web and database servers. It is simply powerful, stable and needs minimum maintenance.

A different story for me was the Desktop and especially my laptop with various proprietary drivers from Toshiba. However the re-installation cycles for Windows XP got shorter and shorter for me (down to 4 months) and I decided to give Debian a try there and I must say Linux has gotten ready for prime time.

I followed several Liux distributions in teh last 10 years - Suse, RedHat now Debian. None excited me so much but it seems the last years have brought enormous improvements. Gimp is now for simple users as myself a better Photoshop than the original. OpenOffice handles Microsoft Documents as well as MS itself. It sometimes looks like MS itself has ported Powerpoint, Excel and Word to Linux - so similar and easy to adapt to are these applications.

I do run a version of Debian Unstable now (although this unstable is 100x more stable then windows) and I have become a confessing Linux fan. Linux still makes it a little harder to get all system drivers installed (that is often because many manfacturers simply do not bother making drivers for Linux at all) and there is no such thing as an auto-install. But once up and running the easy of use and stability is joyful. Linux is free and does the job for 80-90% of all Windows applications right now - an enormous achievement by the OpenSource community since 1994. Amazing!

Linux on the desktop was long an undelivered promise but seeing the progress Linux made and the lack of exciting release at the Windows side it seems it will become a viable alternative in the years to come.

So I hope you excusse the relative silence on thsi blog - but i was busy debugging such error messages:

xauth: creating new authority file /home/ftpuser/.serverauth.23573
X: user not authorized to run the X server, aborting.
/usr/X11R6/bin/xinit: Server error.
Couldnt get a file descriptor referring to the console