Robert Pogson

SJVN found a great story for the week, a guy who had his GNU/Linux server fail.

What was the problem? An update to GNOME failed. Apparently he was using a GUI to manage the server. That’s not wrong especially if users are going to visit the server with a GUI and he wanted to have their experience. There’s more than one way to do that of course, and there’s no need at all to have the GUI on the server. It can be on your client machine. You see, a GUI is much more complex than a server needs to be and a server is automatically more reliable if less software runs on it. It’s statistics. No matter how good your programmer there is a good probability of having X bugs per thousand lines of code. A server without a gui is millions of lines of code. A server with a gui is probably many times more buggy. The GUI failed when he updated it and he could not get the GUI to start… If he were running SSH on the server he could get in just fine.

The guy also complained that the GNU/Linux server was more work to maintain to which SJVN replied he spends about an hour a year maintaining his GNU/Linux server. I would agree with that. I did have a bit of a problem with the server that runs this blog but it was our own stupid fault, not GNU/Linux. It ran for months after our little tweak and eventually was swapped for failing hardware so I have not had to look at it for a long time. It’s just there. Where I worked last year there was no running server in the building and I set up several with no GUI, not to make work for myself but to make my life easier…

GNU/Linux servers are so reliable that I recommend every user should have one. If there is no server hardware on your LAN, you can run a service on your client. There’s nothing like connecting to a web application with no network lag. I had to warn students lest they fall of their chairs. Just install Apache2 or Boa or Nginx and you can serve static files instantly. Add PHP or perl and you can do server-side scripts. A database is real fun. You can make servers very complex or have hundreds of them but one server should never be a chore but a blessing.

see SJVN Linux servers work just fine

Just as iPhone dominated the smart phone market for a year or two and then drowned in a wave of Android/Linux smart phones, tablets are going the same way. iPad had 95.5% share in Q3 2010 but it’s down to 66% in Q3 of 2011 and Ice Cream Sandwich / Android/Linux 4 just emerged to catch the wave. M$ is nowhere to be seen (2.4%). I think 2011 will finish with iPad near 50% and still declining. You just cannot win fairly against FLOSS. That’s not to say that one should have a monopoly because there are many options with FLOSS: making your own, using GNU/Linux, using Android/Linux. It’s the right way to do IT. The world needs software and can make its own cooperatively.

see The Register

Here’s an example of a tablet that’s selling out. The AndyPad sells for £129 and £179 and the higher-priced model has sold out. When a manufacturer does not have to enrich M$, the manufacturer can sell more units and make more money. Apple and M$ have no way to beat that.