Why the Linux Desktop Just Won't Work! and why Linux depresses me. 3736

Charles LeGrand

Morphix? Not SuSE, RedHat, Mandrake, or some other well-known commercial distribution with a good solid reputation for support? I'm not saying Morphix is necessarily a bad release, but you might have found some critical plugins such as Adobe Acrobat Reader and Flash Macromedia Player were already available in the commercial distributions but not available for Morphix. Morphix isn't even considering it's current offerings to be "production" code. It's at revision 0.4.1

The most common issues are Adobe Acrobat Reader, used to read PDF files from the browser, and Flash Macromedia Player. Both of these are available as plug-ins for FireFox running on either Linux or Windows.

The other critical element is having a good Java implementation. For best results use the Sun Java JVM which can be downloaded directly from Sun. Most commercial Linux distributions include both the Sun and IBM JVMs.

The OTHER ActiveX controls? Watch out!!! Those are the ones that tend to create back doors, that have to be guarded against. These are the ones that steal your credit cards information, that tap into your Microsoft Money and Quicken applications and set up the little transactions that steal $10-30-month from your bank account without you noticing.

People vote with their $$$. If MSN won't let you access their site with GAIM from Linux, then switch to Yahoo, AOL, or ICQ. Send e-mails If they love you, they will follow you out of the land of Windows-Only.

This one is a bigger problem, but again, vote with your $$$. Wachovia has a great web site that fully works with FireFox and Linux. There are several other banks that have very "Linux-FireFox friendly" sites. Again, you may need to make sure that you have a pdf viewer (many banks provide documentation in PDF format because it can be viewed by both Windows and Linux users.

Which Java JVM are you using? Have you enabled flash? Verizon will work with FireFox but there are many of their pages which are loaded with Flash pages. Again, this can be downloaded or is available from commercial distributions.

I'm curious why you needed to show up so often? You could have configured VNC and given them a script that would open up their firewall to your VNC access. Then you could have supported them remotely. In addition, you could use ssh and X11 to have direct access to their consoles.

Again, you were the sole source of support. Had you installed Red Hat or SuSE, and paid the support fees, they could have made telephone calls to Red Hat, or asked questions via e-mail. Since you provide no link, no references, no resume, I can't tell whether you are a competent Linux administrator and application support person or not. It would be better if you had been able to access a team - so that when you had an issue, you could have worked with a specialist who really knew the nuts and bolts of that application.

But for each IE-Only web site, there are plenty of compebreastor web sites that provide the same quality of service, without demanding that you open the back doors of your browser-PC to any old snooping virus that wants to corrupt your computer, steal your money, or steal your idenbreasty. Again, vote with your $$ most of these sites rely on advertizing. In fact, if you had not installed the macromedia player, it's quite possible that about 95% of the "warnings" you got were actually from the advertizing, not the actual site functionality. Advertizers love Micromedia, but they really need to make sure that they function both with and without Flash, based on the settings of the browser. They get charged for the "View" even if they don't actually get to display their ad.

This is one of the reasons why Macromedia Player and Acrobat Reader plug-ins have been offered for Linux. You probably haven't configured these and didn't realize that you needed to do so.

Microsoft has admitted in federal court that they provided huge incentives to major corporations in exchange for their willingness to use Microsoft-Only features on their web site. The Appeals court did rule that Microsoft was not allowed to leverage it's Windows monopoly in this way, but there hasn't been much effort to stop Microsoft.

Ironically, the site managers and advertizers themselves have been the ones who have opted to stick to a rather limited subset of functions which can be implemented as either IE ActiveX controls, or as FireFox-Mozilla-Netscape plug-ins. Java, Acrobat, and Flash are very Most sites avoid using other features because corporate firewalls will block their sites, plock the control itself, or block the certificate authorities used to authenticate the controls (which means that unauthorized ActiveX controls cannot be executed.

Since most of the commercial distributions such as Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, Linspire, and Caldera, as well as OS-X all do support the most commonly used features without opening the entire system to self-installing-self-executing applications (ActiveX controls) there is much more likelihood that Linux and FireFox will be adopted very rapidly.

By the way, you do know that you can run IE under Crossover-WINE and other enhanced WINE libraries? Not reccomended for general practice, but acceptable for emergency requirements.