and now for something completely the same

Having failed to get my twin head 'nix system up under Centos and Mandriva, my thoughts turned to things Sun. I have a nice shiny OpenSolaris CD in my disk wallet and it seemed like that might solve my problem.

Two hours later and the answer is 'no'.

Things turned iffy when the installer failed to recognise my network card, a Via Technologies Rhine II that all the other installers had no problem with. It claimed, however, to understand the Nvidia video card and so it did, kind of. It knew enough to recognise the second monitor and even work out its maximum resolution but was not so obliging as to turn it on. This was something of a problem as it decided that the first screen has a maximum resolution of 640 x 480.

I couldn't even activate the second screen, although it was quite clearly visible to the OS, because someone decided that the Nvidia X control panel dialog should have a minimum size of something larger than 640 x 480, which is sort of reasonable given the screens that most people will be working with. The only problem was that I couldn't get to the controls at the bottom of the dialog. Enough of this sort of thing and you start to lose the will to live.

Finally I tried Kubuntu. That didn't even get as far as installing, as it couldn't live with the Nvidia card for some reason.

I like Open Source. In my own small way I've tried to contribute to it. My commercial experience shows that Open Source is displacing Closed Source in the server room, ever more rapidly. The problem is that the server room is the province of geeks, who will spend the time to solve the problems, as I would solve this problem if I was being paid to do so. But I'm not and nor are most people who will be trying to put 'nix on the desktop.

Open Source software can work wonderfully well, when people who know what they're doing take a hand. Look at Apple's OS-X, which is, at heart, FreeBSD. We use several Apple machines and they're amazingly stable and incredibly versatile. Those who don't want to know what's going on under the covers, need never even think about it, while we techie types can go on-site with a laptop that's impressive even in the board room, yet is running one of the best 'nixes in the business.

Linux too can be stable and useful. The Asus Eee portables show what can be done when a commercial organisation take charge, nailing down all the problems and quality engineering the rough edges. I've worked on a couple of projects myself where Linux has been engineered into specialist hardware with great success. The common point here, is that the companies have applied commercial savvy to the process, specified to the last degree what hardware the OS must run on, then tested the bugs out of the combination. That is something that large corporations can do, which loose federations of enthusiasts will always have a problem with.

It's no harsh criticism to say the Open Source movement needs to handle expectations somewhat more carefully than they do. It's just a case of, "look, this is a list of what we know the software can handle. if your stuff isn't on here, you'll need to proceed with caution". Of course, a geek can find that out easily enough, without being told, and quite possibly sort it out, but most of us aren't geeks.

This was intended to be a quick fix and it turned into a saga, so I cut the whole thing short by zapping the partitions and re-installing Windows 2000 across the whole disk (this is the machine that owns the licence, in any case). For the time being, I'll go back to my usual practice of running Linux on the desktop as a guest, under the free Vmware Server system and admit that, until further notice, Windows owns the desktop.
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