I’ll likely never start up Windows again, but I’d like to have it available just in case my need becomes great in this Windoze world. Re-partitioning later could destroy your Mac OS X installation and all your precious data that you have on. Better to get it out of the way right away.

I do a similar thing if setting up a non-Mac desktop or laptop, but there I install Linux Ubuntu, and Windows.

I like to imagine Apple adding to the end of their beautiful Mac setup guide a suggestion to delay playing with your new tool and to install Windows right away. Now that would be awkward.

Or I imagine being able to order from Apple with Windows pre-installed. Makes me laugh, partially because it makes too much sense.

“Government buyers are using an exception in provincial law that allows them to buy directly from a proprietary vendor when there are no options available, but Facil said that loophole is being abused…”

The article has the tantalizing title of “Quebec government sued for buying Microsoft software“, but the heart of the matter is that Quebec is being sued for not accepting other bids. This policy is an anti-competitive business practice, and by effect anti- open source.

Quite a few of the comments in the article try to scapegoat the issue saying the government also relies on other vendors that have Microsoft Windows only solutions, but no one is arguing flip the switch and suffer. A government’s needs aren’t short term, and the very job of these policy analysts and technology procurement specialists is to weigh the options and total cost of ownership over the long-term.

It’s frightening that not only do they think there are no other options, but they are standing behind a law that shuts down all conversations. Their own belief that they are locked in, should scream to work towards alternatives. For a public office, important measures are openness and public value.

Another argument used by commenters to defend the current policy is that open source has a different, often worse user interface and experience. This isn’t really the case. There are a large variety of open source solutions with some mimicking Microsoft products and others having focused task based experiences. With choice, with open source, they can best meet the needs of their customers.

The last favorite scapegoat is that open source is free, and that this means that it’s unsupported. Many companies have built or reshaped their business around providing world class support of open source including IBM, Sun, Novel, Oracle, RedHat, and Canonical (Ubuntu). This won’t be profitable if the software products themselves weren’t world class. Canonical’s Ubuntu Support is even headquartered in Montreal, Quebec.

This policy hints at Canadian goverment offices being behind the curve. They have a great opportunity to review and measure how many other countries are using open source, and demonstrate how open standards and open technologies is how industry and government are investing in themselves and their members.

Cameron Field twittered “Anyone know how to install WordPress on a Microsoft Office Live hosted site/domain?”

Intrigued by what “Microsoft Office Live” is, I google it and go to smallbusiness.officelive.com, but instead of finding out what it is, I was rudely redirected to http://home.officelive.com/Misc/CompatibleShell.aspx?linkId=UnsupportedBrowser and greeted with

To use Microsoft Office Live, your computer must meet one of the following requirements:

* Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 or 7, running on Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Vista. You can download Internet Explorer from the Windows Internet Explorer page.

* Firefox 2.0, running on Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, or Mac OS X 10.2.x and later. You can download Firefox 2.0 from the Firefox download page.

So, not only is the site checking what browser I’m running, but what operating system I’m running the browser on. Maybe there is a legitimate technical reason why this site doesn’t work for Firefox running on Ubuntu, but that would surprise me as I can’t imagine why integration with Mac OS X could work without any easy solution also for Linux.

Assuming there is a technical reason, the saddest part is the missed opportunity of at least giving me information about the site.

I’m filing this one Optimized Under.

System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager is the common way to install software, but for the dyed-in-the-wool geek, it has to be done by the command line.

I’ve been careful not to dirty my Dell Dimension E520, aka delin, with every package under the sun, preferring to keep it pristine and do the dirty work on the ThinkPad. Today, I went to install VirtualBox to give me some spaces to play in.

apt-get is old faithful, but years ago, I started using aptitude because of its ability to clean up related software (dependencies) when you remove software (package).

Doing some research now, I see that apt-get has had equivalent functionality since Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), with the command sudo apt-get autoremove [application name].

So now, I have to break myself of the aptitude habit. I would sudo apt-get autoremove aptitude , but like it seems to be part of ubuntu-minimal — why?

Thursday, April 3rd Update: Thank you AmyRose! She explained that the default behavior of aptitude is to install “recommended packages”. I can see why this would be desirably by many people, but also why for many people such as myself this is very awkward default behavior. Why would the source code by a recommend package for Virtual Box? I would dislike to try and add a single KDE application and next thing I know am running Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu.

What are the advantages of aptitude today?


$ sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose
The following extra packages will be installed:
libqt3-mt libxalan110 libxerces27 virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.22-14-generic
Suggested packages:
libqt3-mt-psql libqt3-mt-mysql libqt3-mt-odbc xalan
Recommended packages:
virtualbox-ose-source
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libqt3-mt libxalan110 libxerces27 virtualbox-ose
virtualbox-ose-modules-2.6.22-14-generic
0 upgraded, 5 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.


Yesterday, I did an install of Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) on the Dell Dimension E520. The install went well; I haven’t experienced any hardware problems (yet), but I’m near tears for all the (minor) experience issues.

I’ve been using Ubuntu since the first release three years ago, and maybe I should be used to the problems, but with a new installation they are back in my face. My passion for Ubuntu, open source and free culture, also makes it hurt more — probably a good thing.

There is more to why it hurts. Complimenting my natural critical thinking, I have spent over seven years developing an eye for software issues, so my discomfort with each of the issues is definitely heightened, but I’ve learned in working with people on the software problems they are experiencing, that minor problems resonate and eventual exasperate people.

Part of me is begging the other part of me to switch to a Mac, but my pain is the pain I have the largest stake in healing, so here I am starting to work through the problems. Although a high cost, I’m willing to pay it, because I can and the benefits are well worth it!

I received a similar warning when I tried to use Synaptic Package Manager.

I checked and made sure that the software was trying to install from the official repository.

I’m not really sure of the cause, or when it started happening, but I have seemed to have fixed this by cleaning out most of the keys.

Searching the web, I found out about SecureApt, apt-key, but didn’t really find myself closing to a solution until I looked at the contents of /etc/apt/trusted.gpg .

In Software Sources (System > Administration >) I found a long list of “trusted software providers” including what looked like some duplicated.

I noted what they were and removed them all except the first one, 437D05B5 2004-09-12 Ubuntu Archive Automatic Signing Key <ftpmaster@ubuntu.com> and closed the application.

It was then working. It seems that I could have likely removed them all and then <code>sudo aptitude reinstall ubuntu-keyring</code>.

After I added back the keys for Google Linux Software and Wine for IEs4Linux.