I understand that I must now log on,
and pasting your password can no longer be done,
but why does it have to take me all day,
to reach what could have been one click away?

The fact that the invoice is live generated,
is clever technology, though that could be debated,
but would it not be easier all round,
if the invoice was sitting ready to bring down

I would not mind if the system was quick,
but I click and I wait and I wait and I click.
So next time you think of a clever solution,
think, will it be quick and will it be easy?

Unable to succesfully[sic] process request.
ERR-010: Request timeout.
Contact the application system administrator or Help Desk.
Sigh.

On entering Currys there was plenty of evidence of the new Windows 8, but I noticed that all the copies were upgrades from Windows 7 or Windows XP.  Currys explained that they do not stock full copies of Windows, only the upgrades, and stated that this was not a Curry’s issue, but that it was a Microsoft policy to only sell full versions of Windows via their website.

So I found myself searching online for “buy windows 8” and ended up on the Microsoft site, but, as with Currys, the only versions available were upgrades.

Starting to feel like I’d entered the Twilight Zone, I searched at BT Business Direct, this seemed to be much more successful and I found 4 choices available, but all the versions were OEM copies which I assumed that I was not legally permitted to install on a VM. It appeared that the only choices were OEM licences or Retail upgrade licences, on the face of it - leaving users like myself unable to legally buy Windows at all.

I thought perhaps that this was a short-term anomaly post-launch, but it seems not. Apparently the OEM version is all things to all people, being both a Retail copy for non-system builders, and an OEM copy for system builders (read more). If this is correct then this means that those 4 choices at BT Business Direct may be okay for me afterall.

And here is the word from Microsoft on the matter: “If you are building a computer for your personal use or installing an additional operating system in a virtual machine, you can now purchase OEM System Builder software using the Personal Use Licence.” After pouring over the text of EULAs, this is actually easy and unequivocal. Well done Microsoft.

Knowing my preference for all-things GNU/Linux and FLOSS, some of you may be wondering why I need Windows at all. The reasons are very few and I don’t use Windows from one month to the next, but I would find it difficult to eradicate completely:

1. Tax return: I know that it can be done under Linux, but I prefer to use TaxCalc.
2. Road Angel: I have found no way of updating my Dad’s Road Angel without Windows.
3. Inforad: Similarly I have found no way of updating my Inforad without Windows.
4. Leappad2: I have found no way of updating my childrens’ Leappad2’s without Windows.

So there we have it, we can now officially buy the OEM version for our VMs.

At least I think so.

It is commonly said, at least in Microsoft circles, that Linux is free if you do not value your time. But is that really true, given the ease of installing and updating software under Linux?

Today I needed to install a Windows-only budgeting program called Profitplanner on our Windows 2003 server. This process was straightforward enough, just a ZIP download which needed extracting and installing.

Whilst the install worked fine, it warned that I needed to install the Microsoft Visual J# 2.0 Redistributable package, and gave me a link so to do.

Unfortunately the Download button on the Microsoft website would not work in Internet Explorer 8, forcing me to use Chrome instead.

Having downloaded the executable I then tried to install it, but no good - it needed .NET installed first.

The link provided did not take me to the application download page, but instead took me to the main Microsoft download page, where there were 1042 results for “.NET framework”.

The instruction was to install .NET “2.0/3.0”, which I take to mean either 2.0 or 3.0. Even filtering for Windows Server 2003 R2 results in 78 results - 5 pages - including service packs, updates, patches, SDKs etc. There seems to be know way of filtering the results further, leaving me manually searching for Application entries.

I then realised that I should have checked that I don’t already have it installed already, even though it had told me that I hadn’t. Sure enough I did indeed already have .NET Framework 4 installed. Do I really need to install 2.0 or 3.0 alongside it?

I decided to attempt a fresh installation of the .NET Framework 4, but doing so merely told me what I already knew - that it was already installed. The conclusion had to be that that I needed an older version of .NET than that currently on my system, or perhaps a newer version of Visual J#? I searched for the latter first, but 2.0 does indeed appear to be the newest version.

Going down the tack of installing an older version of .NET, a Google search suggested that 3.5 might include versions 2.0 and 3.0. I would have assumed that 4.0 is just a development of that, but who knows - at this stage it is worth a try. I downloaded and attempted to install, but then realised that I have inadvertently downloaded the web installer, which just kept restarting, possibly our proxy server getting in the way. I search again, this time for the redistributable package, and downloaded that.

I then tried to install J#, but again it insisted on 2.0 of the .NET Framework. Only then did I realise that I had installed the .NET Compact Framework.

Yes this was completely my fault, but mistakes like this are inevitable when using the Microsoft Download Centre, as you are offered a bewildering array of similarly named downloads.

I uninstalled the .NET Compact Framework, and search again, eventually finding the 3.5 redistributable listed at the bottom of the .NET Framework 3.5 web installer page. The 197mb download (there are Linux distributions smaller than that) took a while to download and even longer to install. Eventually it completed successfully.

Installing J# now worked, so clearly 3.5 worked where 4.0 did not. With J# installed I was then able to easily install Profitplanner.

Success at last.

Having gone through the above craziness, it occurred to me that .NET is a supported CrossOver Linux application, and J# is probably easily installed as well… 10 minutes later I had a CrossOver bottle with a working copy of ProfitPlanner.

Perhaps unusually it was actually simpler to install a Windows application under Linux than it was under Windows.

If you support this letter, please share and re-post.

• Open Letter to E-Book Retailers

After conducting further research, it seems that Nochex itself does not have the best reputation.

Further to this, I contacted them again, and once again they have failed to respond within 24 hours.

• Techcrunch: Google Kills Its Homepage Background Image Experiment Early

Now those that want pictures of kittens as their background can and the rest of us can keep our plain simple and fast search page. After spending the day using ixquick, I’ll be glad to return to google.com, which is still the best search engine that I have ever used.

When are we going to see a decent open source search engine, maybe distributed in some way amongst its user base?

And they have.

I can only imagine Google are wanting to reduce their monopoly and increase competition in the search engine market, and perhaps that is to be applauded.

Okay, so what can I use instead of Google? I think I’ll try Bing, supposedly their privacy policy is better as well.

I warned him that there were issues connecting third party hardware (GPS, Phones etc), but he could see the benefits and felt able to cope with them.

Then:

• Q. “Will it work with my iPod?”
• A. “Yes, really well - I have mine working in Amarok - no problem at all.”
• Q. “Will I still be able to use iTunes?”
• A. “No, but there are some great music players on Linux.” (slight feeling of trepidation)
• Q. “Do they link up to the iTunes website?”
• A. “Eh, no” (I can see where this is going)
• Q. “Is there an alternative comparable download site?”
• A. “Yes I think Napster is similar” (hoping I wouldn’t be proved wrong)
• Q. “Presumably I can transfer all my iTunes purchased music over to Linux?”
• A. Silence (except for the thumping as my head hit my desk repeatedly)

Yours somewhat depressed.

I include in this the Wine Project, Reactos and more recently Mono, even OpenOffice’s attempts to mimic MS Office have come in for criticism. Speaking as someone who has put the Linux desktop into a company, I can tell you that the biggest problem for me was in dealing with mission-critical applications that are Windows-only. The solution for us was virtualising a Windows 2003 server

• Microsoft wins again.

I know, it’s our fault for choosing Windows software, well, here’s a newsflash, most software is written for Windows, and there aren’t always Linux alternatives. You show me Linux-compatible motor-trade software or Linux-compatible filling-station software. You can’t - they doesn’t exist. But - and here’s the crunch - I can show you .net applications in both those markets, and I can show you software that works, to a fashion, under Wine. If these technologies can be properly implemented on Linux, then you make it a whole lot easier for businesses to adopt Linux on the desktop.

And business is critical for Linux, because people are most familiar with the operating system that they use at work; if that happens to be Linux, then they are infinitely more likely to adopt Linux at home. Once Linux is in the home, then the whole family and, most importantly their children, are likely to adopt Linux. Thus the Linux snowball starts gaining momentum at last. Once there are a significant proportion of Linux users on the desktop, then developers will start to worry about cross-platform, making it even easier to adopt Linux.