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Fall season is one of the busiest times for Linux distributions, and this year is also a very busy time for me.  Ever since two years now I gradually migrated family and friends to Linux. This year these new Linux users gave me quite some work, especially on week-ends, and my own upgrade gave me quite some work. You might think that the people I installed Linux systems on their laptops would be autonomous and relying on forums when help were needed. Think again: Usability of every day applications may have never been easy, but installing new applications is something that still has not gotten through them, at least on a regular basis, and this means they rely on their favourite system administrator (me) to fix whatever issues they have. But it’s somewhat of a vicious circle, because I guess I enjoy helping them myself, and to add to the pleasure I installed different distributions for each of them. Below is the list of the computers I am watching over:

• Melissa’s laptop: running the latest Mandriva
• My father’s laptop: used to run Ubuntu until Karmic Koala that messed up everything, now it runs the latest OpenSuse
• Jeremie and Alexandra’s laptop: running Ubuntu (before it was running Vista, or rather, was coughing up Vista until Ubuntu made it possible to actually do something with the laptop).
• My workstation (my laptop is a Mac): running Fedora by default, now running Ubuntu Karmic Koala.

Let’s start with the easiest: the upgrade of Jeremie and Alexandra’s laptop to Ubuntu. The upgrade was a breeze, contrary to reports in the press and what happened with the upgrade on my father’s laptop. Usually Jeremie uprades its system himself but this time, I insisted on attending in case of a problem. There was none.

Next was Melissa’s laptop. Melissa has a Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled, but she never really liked it. She tried Mandriva at the beginning of 2009 and was immediately sold on it. The upgrade to the Mandriva 2010 was not overly problematic but somehow did not go all the way till the end. I quickly relaunched the upgrade procedure and everything went fine. Mandriva is graphically one of the most beautiful distributions out there, fares better than Ubuntu in many ways but sometimes fails in the availability of packages. I shall come back to this later.

Next my father upgraded its system as he is used to ever since two years, but this time when he rebooted he found himself with Xubuntu, and Xfce desktop he never wanted and a laptop showing what I call the “Windows symptom”: bloated, noisy, humming, doing everything slow and having an hyperactive hard disk. As I had heard about the problematic upgrade of the newest Ubuntu I was prepared for a total system reinstallation, but having seen the ease of use of Mandriva before I thought that changing distributions would be a good idea. More specifically, Mandriva and OpenSuse have something no other distribution (aside a few others such as Sabayon, Parsix …) has: an all in one, integrated configuration center that does everything from switching wallpaper to configuring the wireless connection and managing packages. Ubuntu desperately needs one, because newbies have only one place to remember in order to manage their system, whether it’s Drake Center or YAST. I burned a couple of live CDs, one with Mandriva and the other one with OpenSuse (both on Gnome, my father does not seem to enjoy KDE 4). Mandriva was ruled out probably because my father did not seem to like the graphical style of Mandriva, and thus we settled for OpenSuse. The installation process was uneventful, although it seems that the ability to upgrade from one version to a more recent one is really experimental. YAST was well accepted, but there is a funny anecdote about the OpenSuse interface: OpenSuse has put the Gnome main task bar at the bottom of the screen, which really annoyed my father as he wanted to have it on top of the screen. I do notice that he completely got out of the “it’s not like Windows” theme only to adopt the “it’s not like the regular version of Gnome”! I can’t wait for Gnome 3.0…

Next, I had to work on my own system, which was a finely tuned Fedora Core 11. Helas, the upgrade was one of the worst experiences I had with Linux distributions. Shortly put, I think it was a bad mistake for Fedora to have claimed its 12 version was ready. It frankly was not ten days ago and I doubt it’s ready even now. First, the special software used to upgrade distributions, “preupgrade” had a bug and was only discovered 24 hours before the release, which forced thousands of users including me to look for the newest version that wasn’t on the official mirrors. The upgrade itself took a long time  but of course it also depends on the system that was installed before. When the upgrade process was finished I found myself with a half baked Fedora 12. Cleaning the installation packages I was not cautious enough in realising that the drivers (both free and proprietary) were still working with the existing kernel although they were marked as “fc 11″. Cleaning the packages, as advised by every manual, erased them and I discovered afterwards that there was no available drivers for nvidia cards on Fedora 12, either free or proprietary (or rather that the packages were not ready yet). So I found myself losing the X server for good, and given my experience with the new Fedora 12, I decided, although I had lost a good day, to make a clean install on the next morning.

On the next morning indeed, I installed a fresh live CD from Fedora 12. But the live system would not recognize my wireless network nor would it even link to any driver for 3D. At that point I got really frustrated but was still willing to go with Fedora if no other distribution were to offer any significant advantage in its configuration. I gave a try to OpenSuse, which automatically recognized my wireless network, and explained me that 3D was not available but that I could enable it by following some simple steps. I was not going to go with OpenSuse, as it always strikes me as a good distribution but one that for some reason is not very appealing to me and has too much of mono everywhere (and no, I don’t consider OpenSuse as being some kind of traitor to Free Software, let alone because it’s clearly out of the deal between Novell and Microsoft!). I hesitated about Mandriva. What hold me back was the lack of certain libs for some special -and a bit obscure- 3D graphic software that I use and also because Second Life does not seem to run well on it. Otherwise I would not have hesitated. Anyway, I ended up testing out the latest Ubuntu. Guess what? Everything was easy, fast, wireless network recognized, 3D drivers enabled in a minute. It was a real relief for me, and so far I must say Karmic is a really good release.

Last but not least, here’s some “post mortem” analysis of the situation: This fall season saw a lot of problematic upgrades. I seem to give a hard time to Fedora, but in retrospect Fedora Core 11 was a good distribution; I am just disappointed at the lack of readiness of the Fedora infrastructure for such a major release. I’ll probably go back to Fedora some time, because it’s targeted at people just like me: power users who like it easy but still a bit rough (hey, it’s like barbecue folks). Fedora has also some unique features for advanced users: Assistants to configure services and security profiles are a must and simply do not exist on Ubuntu (they do on OpenSuse and Mandriva in a different way though). But not shunning away from the command line does not mean having to deal with issues related with poor work, and that’s what made me switch.

As for Ubuntu I felt at first almost bored that I to go for the choice everyone was making. But here’s what I think Ubuntu has become. In some ways Ubuntu, or more exactly the ubiquitous availability of deb packages through the system of PPAs (extra, adhoc software repositories hosted by Ubuntu itself) and the third parties repositories, is turning Ubuntu into an universal distribution, or perhaps a meta-distribution of sorts. The question of the availability of packages had already been solved by Debian and to the same extent by Red Hat. What we’re witnessing now is more and more applications being ported or packaged for Ubuntu, not so much because it’s the more popular distribution du jour but because Canonical made it really easy to have its software available online for millions (yes, millions) of users.

Thus, in a strange display of irony, Ubuntu is becoming what Debian always wanted to be in some way: the universal system for all. Linux distributions will not stop surprising me, after all.

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The famous and much awaited RGI (Référentiel Général d’Interopérabilité) has officially been published and enacted. This announcement was met with mixed reactions and as I have been following the RGI for quite a few years now, I thought I would write some of my thoughts about it.

The RGI is actually old, not just because it was already online as a final draft in May 2009, but because the RGI as a project dates back several years. Its story goes like this: Somewhere in 2006 the decision is made by the French government to draft a public sector-wide policy on IT matters. This policy is to be published in several parts, one on security, another on accessibility and the last one on interoperability. The last one, called the RGI, is published as a draft on the same year and submitted for public comments on a wiki, which was at the time something daring and courageous. The feedback that was received was ominously  good. In fact the first version of the RGI was mandating the use of Open Standards, and most notably ODF throughout the whole administration. At that very moment, Microsoft decided it was time to intervene and through a violent strategy of pressure and influence, managed to repel the RGI and have the process restarted. The process did restart and the same document finally got finalized for official approval in 2007. There the RGI progressively fades away, partly because of the presidential elections taking place in France at that time, partly because of a strongly applied pressure from the outside.

The freshly elected government seems to have not so fresh ideas about I.T. Its track record in the matter is probably one of the worst possible as it is the one who authored and championed the Hadopi law (the french three strikes system) and other network censorship legislation. Any communication system that is not controlled by the Hungarian director of police  glory of our nation, the President, is progressively being put under his control.  In this context one could believe that the RGI would have lost not time being reexamined again. The exact opposite happened, partly because of the neo-conservative bias of the new government who seems to believe in the omnipotence of markets vs State intervention, partly because of a strange proximity with Microsoft (four ministers inaugurated the new Microsoft offices in Paris!) and a common hatred of Google. In this context, the people in charge of drafting the RGI discovered they were deprived of any political support. Moreover, they also realized that the opportunity for a clear policy drafting had gone away. They are public servants, after all, and public servants cannot do a lot without the support of the politicians in power.

This is how we come to the present RGI. The document by itself has been totally rewritten, choosing to leave aside the policy aspect in favor of an exhaustive referencing and classifying of existing technology and standards.  This document itself integrates well with the upper echelons of European interoperability framework and does not attempt to dictate what the public sector stakeholders should do. On the crucial question of the office file formats, it is obvious that the authors spent some time carefully choosing their words. While the use of xml-based file format is clearly recommended, ODF is being put under observation (the reason for this is unclear) and so is OOXML, but at least we know the reason for this: OOXML has no known implementation (and won’t have any until a long time, they might have added) and therefore cannot be used.

This is what happens when a government is fiddling too much with powerful corporations and forget the interest of its own people: honest, competent, public servants have to compose with whatever they have in order to keep things going. If I were to judge this document from this standpoint only, I would actually give it a big cheer.The problem is that the whole concept of the RGI has become somewhat of a loaded gun in France, and it is I believe useless to use people of the DGME as scapegoats. With what they have, they could not have done better. But what was at stake was an opportunity for France to become a champion of open standards and sustainable digital future. It’s sad to see this government never gave it a chance. I hope one day we will realize that the ideological bias against any form of openness entertained by the present President and Prime Minister is something akin to the outrageous denial of global warming by the previous U.S. administration.I look forward to the future versions of the RGI, and think they will bring more constructive, innovative and positive elements to the development of a coherent information infrastructure  for our national public sector.

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Just back from the OOoCon I was taking some times reading my email and I am afraid what I saw does not push me into believing that Microsoft has amended much of its ways. I guess we cannot do much about it, and it’s Halloween season anyway.

• Just when we thought the European Commission was leading the way in getting rid of proprietary and foreign technology, helping Europe master its digital independence, the second draft of the EIF v2 (European Interoperability Framework) got leaked last week.  The draft contents are nothing short of appalling. Open Standards are simply erased from the document and Open Source seems to be considered as some shameful condition that needs to be discarded as a possible option for the European digital infrastructure, and reading in between the lines one may get the perception that it might just all be easier in a pure Microsoft environment. I understand that some people are whispering in the corner that Jonathan Zuck stands again behind the leak, but I really have no opinion on that. Go figure who leaks the leaks. Anyway, this might keep some of its credibility if we are to believe this representative of the Polish government, who basically explains that the leaked draft is, well, not a draft but something that does not seem to emanate from the Commission. Here and there outraged reactions have been heard. The good folks at OpenForum Europe who are usually known for their moderation, have spelled it out quite clearly in this press release. Another reaction from another insider in Brussels is also quite telling of a situation where entire pieces of legislation are being hijacked by the will of lobbies while the citizens of the European Union would like more control over the Union’s growingly opaque policy making structures. Basic mental and political sanity would recommend that this leak was actually a leak of a real draft of the EIF or another manipulation by some lobbies pushing an anti-competitive agenda by sabotaging open standards and open source.
• If that weren’t enough, Jomar Silva from the ODF Alliance Brazil has posted its latest revelations about the infamous Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) on OOXML in Geneva and how Alex Brown, its dubious convener, did everything to stop some delegations asking some interesting questions. It is amazing to see how international processes can be bent towards one and the same goal.

Halloween season, I tell you…

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