Open Source

Microsoft announced on Sunday that it would share Microsoft Office 2003 source code as part of the Microsoft Government Security Program. The program is designed to make governments feel more comfortable about Microsoft’s security practices. The source code for Office 2003 is going to be shared with the governments of more than 30 countries. I’m sure the United States will have numerous teams from different agencies analyzing this source code. It will be interesting to see what the NSA has to say about it. Something I’m curious about is if a government finds a blatant security flaw of some sort are they to fix the flaw themselves or is Microsoft the only person allowed to manipulate the code? I’m Microsoft isn’t going to want to have over 30 different versions of Office 2003 out there but it sure would be nice to strip out the Excel game and all of the other non-sense incorporated into Office in an effort to speed things up and make it more secure. ...

This will be the final article in the “Moving to Linux” series. The Moving to Linux plan had been going along as it should. My Western Digital 200 GB hard drive arrived and I was ready and waiting with a freshly burned copy of Red Hat 9. All the research I had previously done indicated that there shouldn’t be any major issues because of all the key components in my computer being compatible with Linux. ...

When I got the idea to write this article I decided to do some searching and see what other people were saying about ease of use in Linux. I found the results of my searches to be less than fruitful, see for your self: https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=linux+ease+of+use https://www.google.com/search?q=linux+ease+of+use What came up were a few useful writings but nothing significant in terms of Linux ease of use. It has been said that 2003 will be the year of Linux on the desktop so why isn’t there more information out there about Linux ease of use? Hopefully, this article will explain why. ...

After deciding how my hard disk will be partitioned in Linux, I need to select a filesystem for those partitions. A filesystem is a system for organizing directories and files, generally in terms of how it is implemented in the disk operating system. In layman’s terms it is code that tells your operating system how data is stored, organized, and managed on a hard disk drive. Every operating system has a filesystem of some sort. In the Microsoft Windows world you’re fairly limited as to what filesystems are available to you. FAT, FAT32, NTFS, and eventually WinFS are really your only options. In Linux however, there are quite a few filesystems available. They all have their own unique advantages and disadvantages and can have application specific reasons for existence. In this article I’ll be discussing what I believe the four candidate filesystems are for my move to Linux. ...

After deciding to make the move to Linux, determining that my hardware is compatible with Linux, and after picking a Linux distro it’s time to decide how to partition my hard drive. Unlike Microsoft Windows where one partition is usually the case, Linux users agree that a few partitions should be made for certain paths that Linux uses. I’ve done some research on the Linux Directory Structure and that would be very helpful information to read before continuing if you’re not too familiar with Linux already. ...