Opensource Products for everybody

We use a lot of opensource/”free” software and services at Collabor – not just because they are free (which is cool in itself), but also because they are pretty good. Opensource has classically been associated with Linux and the famous LAMP platform – and a lot of people still think of it as a developer’s toolset. Well the developers have…..well…. developed quite a few products which merit serious consideration.

At Collabor and our group companies this is what we use in addition to the development platform/ Here is our list:

Feel free to add or share your list

Filed under: Collabor, Opensource

My travails with Ubuntu 7.04 – Feisty Fawn

The fawn has indeed been feisty for me.

You see, I have a home PC which I no longer am best friends with. Well, its old and slow and still has Windows 98, has blown its power supply once – so you can imagine keeping the friendship going is a little tough. I am now with new Vista friends. Ya, I know I am mean. Its kind of like real life, where I am hardly in contact with friends from high school, but still close to guys from the MBA days and of course closest to guys who i worked with most recently.

Anyways, I thought of giving my old PC a new lease of life and loading Ubuntu 7.04 and scrapping the Win98 from the system. Kind of like “Extreme Makeover” on abc.

So I visit the Ubuntu site and download 7.04 desktop from my closest server at Northeastern U. I get a .iso file and burn a CD. When I try to install – NO GO.

Since I could not figure out the problem immediately, I downloaded the Ubuntu 6.06 version after a couple of weeks and read the installation manual (by the way, very tough to find the thing on the site). I found the part where they ask you to match the checksums to make sure the download was clean. Well the check sums did not match.

A month went by, and I downloaded 7.04 again. The checksums again don’t match. What is going on, I say to myself. I am 8 weeks into this download thingy and still cannot download a clean version – I probably could have requested free CDs and got them by now. Maybe I will do that now.

So my old friend the Win98 home PC languishes in the closet, while I chum up with my 2 other laptops running Xp and Vista.

Filed under: Opensource