I’ve read a few different articles lately about the rise of the Linux desktop and the impending Chrome operating system by Google.  Following each article is a fairly predictable line of comments which talks lightly about the information of the article and then degrades into finger pointing and name calling like a medieval battle line.

The Linux guys talk about the deficiencies in Windows.  The Windows guys talk about how clueless and geeky the Linux guys are.  The Linux guys talk about the impending destruction of Windows.  The Windows guys say that’s been predicted several times and nothing’s happened.  Blah, blah, blah!  Yada yada yada!  Everybody’s right.  Everybody’s wrong.

I’m a full-time Linux user and a pretty avid proponent for Open Source.  I don’t pretend to understand the far-reaching implications of economics and the true future of technology.  In fantasy and science fiction truly knowing the future typically not possible because the future is always affected by free will… which is precisely my point.

The point of these OS competitions is choice.  I don’t have a grudge against Microsoft that wants to see them die.  I used Windows when Windows fit my needs.  When my needs changed I moved on.  No big deal.  We can still be friends.  I feel that way about any of the technologies that I had a “relationship” with.  However, I don’t want my previous choices to follow me around.  I don’t want them to badger me that I made the wrong choice and I need to come back to them.  I don’t want them to make trouble for my newer choices that makes it difficult or impossible for me to continue on my path.  (Wow!  As I write these words down this starts to sound like the plot for a summer movie!)

Basically, all of this winds down to interoperability and standards.  In areas, like the Internet, where some open standards have been established, things go really well.  In areas like document formats, where there are fewer open standards and more commonly used tools, this becomes difficult.  I am a huge proponent of using tools that run on more than one platform.  You know some of the names:  Firefox for Web browsing, Thunderbird for email, Apache HHTP Server for Web serving.  There are probably several that you don’t know, like Audacity for sound editing, Pidgin for instant messaging, Inkscape for vector graphic editing, tightVNC for remote control (yes, I can control a Windows box from a Linux machine and vice versa!).  They don’t all have to be “free” either.  I use an XML editing tool called “Oxygen” for my editorial work in developerWorks.  It’s is not at all free, but well done, and works across platforms.  There are many choices for applications that do the same work to the same protocols despite your operating system choice.  If you choose a protocol and/or tools that are supported across platforms, then this becomes easy.  People choose what they like and no one has to suffer needlessly about not being chosen.

There are standards that work today in this fashion.  Adobe has been good about making protocols such as PostScript and PDF available.  JPEG is available for photos, but there is also the often ignored PGN (Portable Network Graphic) format that allows for transparency.  Of course HTML and good ol’ ASCII text are available.  Significant headway is coming in the form of the Open Document Format (ODF) which is used by Open Office, IBM’s Symphony, and recently supported by Microsoft Office with the addition of  a plugin.  MP3 is available for audio, but I bet you’ve never even tried the completely free Ogg Vorbis standard.

To me it seems that all of these environments can live together in relative peace provided that users can kick their co-dependency issues and be more open to making choices for themselves.  We don’t need to have a community where we look for the next alpha leader to destroy the previous one.  We don’t need to make sure that our side wins so we aren’t enslaved by the other side.  That’s not what’s going on here.

Don’t get bogged down in the argument.  Don’t pick a side.  Look at all of this as more choice opening up before you.  Remember that you can change your future through your choices.

I just got back into town from visiting my parents in the Dallas, Texas area (USA).  We did something that I’ve never done before, though it’s pretty obvious when I think about it.  It’s Summer Vacation for my daughter, which means no school.  My wife’s activities have slowed down.  I’m the one who gets to work.  Then I had an inspiration.

Like many in the technology world I do a lot of work remotely.  I actually work from a home office, which technically means that any time there is Internet and a telephone I’m i the office.  (Some may read that I am always in the office, and there might be a level of truth to that.)  I don’t miss the commute or the need to keep my desk so that it would impress visitors at any time.  IBM makes it extraordinarily easy to work remotely, even from Linux.  A little VPN client connects me to the IBM network any time I want.  I have email of course– lots and lots of email.  I also have the Sametime instant messaging which works just as well as people popping into my cube to disturb me.  It works better in fact because I can complete a thought before switching to them without feeling their eyes boring into my head and hearing the foot gently tapping.  In fact when I was in the office I had people carry on instant message conversations with me from the other side of the cube wall!  Other important applications are available through the Notes client or the web browser (Firefox of course!).

One advantage to this is I have some flexibility.  Since I work remotely anyway, it doesn’t matter if I’m in my home office or tucked in a room at the back of my parents’ house.  So, when we went visit my parents for Father’s Day — a quiet US event where everyone is supposed to be nice to their Dad for a day, which pales in comparison to the lavish attention we spend on Mom — rather than rushing back on Sunday we extended the visit with me working from there.  My parents get extra grandkid time.  My wife gets extra time with the grandparents distracting the kid so she can think.  My daughter gets extra spoiled.  I get work done and enjoy everyone’s company in the evenings and at lunch time.  It’s win-win-win.

All of that goes swimmingly.  My daughter went with grandpa to the natural museum to look at spiders and snakes.  My wife and my mother went shopping.  I got stuff done.  But then I end up with a weird little thing.  It had nothing to do with my IBM work.  All of that worked fine.  But I do have a life outside of IBM, you know.  My problem was with my personal email.  My Dad’s Internet connection assumes that only he will be sending email through their mail server… so as a courtesy to him they blocked access to other SMTP servers.  I guess that’s a good thing overall, but for me it was annoying.  It didn’t make sense to try to have the conversation with my dad about getting the block removed from his account.  It wasn’t worth bothering him, and since he is a Windows users it was probably good to keep any protections like that in place.  My solution ended up being simple and right under my nose.

Since I run Linux on all of my systems SSH is built-in on everything.  If you don’t already know about SSH then you are missing something. Basically it’s a very simple way to tunnel information through strongly encrypted sockets.  (If you are running another environment SSH is also available with freely downloaded applications.  For example, PuTTY is a popular client for Microsoft Windows.)   I use SSH to securely synchronize files between my laptop and the desktop across the Internet and to remotely access my home system.  However, SSH will allow you to securely tunnel any socket to a system or through a system.

Here’s the way I worked it out.  I cannot access SMTP from my current location, but my home system can access the account.  I can access my home system.  So, if I can have my laptop go through my home system I can use my mail normally.  Basically, I’m going to use my home system as a proxy server for POP and SMTP to my domain and I’ll do it through a secured tunnnel.

The command was simple.  I already use a free dynamic DNS server to update the address for my home system, so I can keep up with changing IPs from my ISP. (That was interesting.)  Essentially, I’m setting up a port on my local system which will be proxie through my home system to my mailserver destination.  Here we’ll call that myhost.  I use the username on my home system, which I’ll call user.  Here’s what the command lookedlike to do the magic:

ssh -l user@myhost -L 10110:pop.mymailserver:110 -L 10025:smtp.mymailserver:25

I get a connection between my laptop and my home system.  Anything I send to port 10110 on my localhost goes to the POP port on my mailserver.  Anything sent to 10025 on my localhost goes to the SMTP port on my mailserver.  My mailserver sees POP and SMTP traffic all coming from the same box, because the proxy causes it all to originate from my home system.  My dad’s ISP is oblvious.  I get the added advantage that any transactions going on with email are encrypted from my laptop to my home PC– though communication between the home PC and the mail server gain no additional encryption.

The command above created two tunnels.  I also automatically set up several tunnels using this technique, including one to tightVNC for remote control of my system.  In other situations I use the same sort of proxy technique to connect into a network and have VNC access to multiple workstatios behind the firewall.  Cool, huh?

I’m constantly amazed at the sort of flexibility that I have in this environment and how there are always little free tools and techniques to work through a situation.  It keeps it fun.  If you’re interested in some of these techniques check some of the links that I put throughout.  Linux does this stuff out of the box (or straight off the Internet, I guess I should say).  But with the tools around you can do the same thing in just about any environment if you do a little digging.

Happy exploring!  Cheers!

I really am.

A while back I won the “Ultimate” version of a prominent desktop operating system in a prize drawing.  As a Linux user, this, and really any product from this manufacturer, isn’t terribly useful to me.  I had a good laugh at the irony and tossed the box in the trunk of my car, where it sat for a couple of months.  My father is still a devoted user of this company’s operating system, so on my next visit I gave it to him.  He could use it more than me.

I got an instant message from him the other day.  He had a number of adventures.  First, there were issues getting his various types of hard drives in correct order as the operating system and the computer’s BIOS wrestled with him.  Once he got that sorted out he discovered that the operating system in question did not recognize much of his hardware and he had to go surfing for drivers.  He eventually found everything and got the system in working order, but it was a two-day ordeal of dedicated effort.  Good thing he’s retired!

The point is, that my dad is not a computer geek.  He had a technical background but spent several years as an executive, where one is fairly isolated from the day-to-day mucking about with a system in which many of us engage.  Yet he tackled this situation like a pro.  He had the persistence and patience to find the issues and knock them off one at a time.  He was also very sporting about facing the myth that I’ve always had to face as a Linux user:  “Those sorts of things don’t happen with major desktop operating systems.”

Obviously any operating system can turn into a nightmare under the right circumstances.  I was quietly amused to think that if I had walked in with one of the current Linux distributions that the majority of the hardware might have been detected and activated and that anything else I needed could be found with relative ease on the Internet.  There might be challenges, but it wouldn’t have been any worse than what my dad slogged through.  It would certainly be easier than what I went through several years ago on the open-source path.

My dad got to see first hand what happens when things don’t work as expected, and that you can dig into the problem and solve them.  He got to see that it can happen with even the most “Ultimate” of mainstream environments.  I think the experience leveled the playing field in his mind a little.  In fact, he said that our conversations about what I work with in Linux helped him form his strategy to solve his problems.  Hmmmm.  I’ve already got him using Firefox, GIMP and a few other open-source packages.  Now that he’s seen what he is capable of, maybe he’ll be up to giving Linux a try!  I’ll keep a disk handy for the next time he upgrades his computer hardware.

Anyway… Way to go, dad!  I’m proud of you.