It seems like the new kernel attracts quite some traffic because I get this notice when I try to look at the extensive changelog:

The server is taking too long to respond; please wait a minute or 2 and try again.

via lkml.org.

Is that a good sign because Linux is popular, or bad because it shows that the servers can’t handle a large amount of traffic?

(Third possibility: it’s a coincidence.)

The Windows version was released months ago

It happens more often that the promised Linux support isn’t as good as expected, has fewer functions or gets less attention from the developers. A good example is Skype, its Linux client is nowhere as good as the Windows version.

I can already predict the responses of people saying it’s just logical, because Linux just has a much smaller marketshare. However, this doesn’t mean that you should pay less attention to an OS if you say that you do support it. I don’t say that Chrome didn’t do this right, but if you decide to spend less effort on the Linux version, please state it very clearly at your website so we know we should look for an alternative program that does value all its users.

Apart from the program installed on Linux, the OS itself also has got support problems. Some netbooks that are sold with Linux have less functionality than the Windows versions, or have bad drivers. This is a bad case and probably partially the reason for of MSI Wind netbooks with Linux being more often returned than the Windows version, which I wrote a blog about earlier.

It seems like the companies and users have a higher expectation of Linux and start with optimism. However, after a while the users get disappointed with Linux, because the hardware they’re using isn’t fully supported by the manufacturer that installed Linux on it itself or because it has less features than the Windows equivalent.
The companies find out that Linux versions aren’t as profitable or popular as Windows versions, simply because the lack of marketshare. They decide to spend less resources on the Linux version resulting in a program that has differences between its different versions. Or they started with a program that already had less functions and thus didn’t became as popular as they expected, which they could have caused themselves by not paying as much attention to it.

What could be done about this? Yes, I do agree that the marketshare should increase in order to make it more interesting for companies to maintain a good Linux version. However, I don’t think that a small marketshare is a good excuse for this. If you decide to support a certain platform, you should do it properly. When you don’t do so, you contribute to a negative image of Linux because people notice that their favourite program isn’t as good at the opensource OS. On top of that, why would you want to serve the whole world? You don’t have to have a huge group of users to make profit or be succesful.

With supporting Linux badly, the companies doing that are at least partially responsable for the reasons that made them support it bad. If they would support it on a good way, there would be another reason to use Linux, increasing the potential userbase for that version of the program.

And supporting Linux can really give you popularity. A good example of this is the MMORPG Regnum Online, which supports both Windows and Linux. Because of the lack of other good and free-to-play MMORPGs, it has become almost the default choice for Linux users that don’t like the overwhelming amount of roleplaying in PlaneShift. Although the group of users still isn’t that exceptional, it’s still attracting a lot of users and binding them to it because of it unique selling point: Linux support.

-Motherboard: Asus M3N78-EH
-Graphics card: Asus EN9600GT HTDI
-PSU: Spire Jewel 420W

It all started when wanted a better graphics card than the onboard Geforce 6150. I just bought the Asus EN9600GT for my old Asus M2NPV-VM. But it ended wrong, like I described here:Asus Asus EN9600GT + Asus M2NPV-VM = no signal.

But I ordered it again, but now with a motherboard capable of PCIe 2.0 and a better PSU that has the PCIe plug, so I won’t have to sacrifice two IDE power plugs. A plus I discovered later was that the new PSU is much more silent than my old Q-Tec Dual Fan Gold 400W.

But after I connected all placed all cards in the slots and all cables in their ports, which went a lot better than my previous motherbord where the 9600GT blocked one of the IDE ports, I discovered that there was some kind of problem. First I thought it was the same as I had with my old motherboard, but updating the BIOS, nor disabling APIC solved it. It just wouldn’t boot.

What’s happening is that it can’t discover the SATA harddisk good. It does find it, but something times out, it checks again, times out again, until I end up into a BusyBox. Somehow it just can’t find/mount the harddisk. But it can read the initrd file, which is very strange.
I wanted to test the computer and installed hardy on an old IDE harddisk, but after that I discovered that the onboard ethernet connection doesn’t work. I can connect the cable and nm-applet does try to connect, but DHCOFFER times out. The spare PCI ethernet card I tried didn’t connect the cable at all, so that one’s probably broken. So I’ve got no internet, and no data, since my computer is the only computer in the house that supports SATA. I tried to boot Windows, which was installed on the IDE harddisk before I installed Ubuntu on it, but it doesn’t work. Windows refuses to boot when you change the motherboard and you’re required to reinstall it.

I’ve reported two bugs describing my problems, but I have no idea of how to download the updates when everything is solved, because the Live CD and the version it provides don’t work. This are the reports:

bug #231162
bug #231159

This is the reason that you probably haven’t seen me for a while now. This computer doesn’t contain my data nor has an IRC client installed. And I have to share it with my sister and mother. On top of that it runs WIndows XP and thanks to SP3 the nVidia drivers don’t work anymore, so the screen rendering is very slow.

I hope to be back as soons as possible, but maybe the only way to do that is to put my old motherboard back! And that would be a waste, so I’m refusing to do that.

(A question: my graphics card has some kind of thing at the top that looks like the thing that you put into the slot when inserting a PCI(e) card. I can’t describe it better, I hope you understand it. I’m just curious.)

But something else I discovered over there was that an old site I’ve made still exists. It can be found at http://dhost.info/calculat/. It’s not the ‘latest’ version, but I think it’s the last copy of the code that’s still exists. I lost the local copy a while ago when I accidentiatly deleted my website directory but noticed it only when it was already too late. But a problem is that I’ve forgotten the password and username. I think the username is calculat, but I all passwords I can think of don’t work. And I don’t know if the email address I used for registering still works. I’ve requested a reset of my password, but I can’t read it yet, since I don’t have access to that email address. I’ll first have to find access to the old email. I hope GMail keeps them, otherwise I’ve lost the code. That would be a pitty, because I think the code could be of some use. We’ll see.