Is Linux more secure than Windows? The quick and easy answer is yes. Most viruses and malicious software today are written to target Windows systems and will not affect Linux or Mac computers. If you’re going to work – and play – in a Windows world, you better get protection.
THE MagSafe charger for my MacBook died last week. It had given me some warning. Every so often, the power indicator on the magnetic connector would refuse to light up, and I would have to jiggle the cable to just the right position to get it working again. Finally, it had become so unreliable that I decided I had to buy a new one. After all, it’s hardly good form to start a three-hour lecture by fumbling with the cord of your power adapter for 10 minutes, hoping the charge light will come on while your battery is draining.
OPEN source industry veteran Matt Asay joined Canonical, the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu Linux, as its chief operating officer last month. In his new post, Asay is responsible for aligning the company’s day-to-day operations with strategic goals and leading the company’s marketing effort. After barely a month on the job, Asay answered some e-mailed questions about what we might expect from Ubuntu and Linux in general.
MAKE desktop Linux more attractive than Mac OS X. That was the challenge that Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth issued to open source developers in July 2008. Now, almost two years later, Shuttleworth seems ready to put his money where his mouth is with the coming release of Lucid Lynx, the first Ubuntu to break out of its dark brown motif and orange “Human” theme since the distribution was introduced in 2004.
HANDS down, Snow Leopard – also known as Mac OS X 10.6— is the easiest operating system upgrade you can make today. Over the weekend, I upgraded my Intel-based Macbook from Mac OS X 10.5 and was pleasantly surprised to find that the entire process took only an hour and seven minutes.
ARE you just not cool enough to be a Mac person? Strangely enough, this question wasn’t triggered by a new snooty Apple commercial but by Microsoft’s latest marketing campaign, a series of ads that emphasize what most of us already know: you can get more hardware for your money if you don’t buy a Mac. The first of these ads features a bubbly redhead named Lauren, who wants to buy a fast notebook PC with a 17-inch screen and a large keyboard for less than $1,000.
WHEN Apple released a beta test version of Safari 4 last week, it claimed it was the world’s fastest browser. Some tests have supported that claim; others have not. These speed contests remind me of the gunslingers of the Old West—being the fastest draw was usually an ephemeral state.
THE headlines seemed designed to alarm Mac users. “Virus found in pirated copies of iWork ’09” and “Mac pirates catch cold,” news sites blared last week. These were followed quickly by “Second Mac trojan attacks pirated Photoshop CS4.” From these, it was just a hop, skip and jump away to “Mac malware tide on the rise.” Coming just a few days apart, these headlines seemed to portend a tidal wave of malicious software that was about to pummel and sweep away unsuspecting Mac users. Comeuppance for years and years of smug complacency, some Windows users clucked. Now that the Mac is gaining market share, expect more such attacks, others warned.
The truth was a little less exciting than the hype.
XAVIER School is demonstrating what most of us have long believed: an organization can safely dump Microsoft Windows and save millions of pesos by replacing it with Linux, a free and open source operating system. The shift isn’t only about cost savings for the Jesuit-run school, which has developed a reputation as a high-quality preparatory school for college among affluent Chinese-Filipino families. It’s reflective of the progressive outlook at the 52-year-old school, which began upgrading its computer systems and network at the turn of the century.
AS A Mac user for the last two years, I can understand why the company behind Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, wants to be on par with Apple in terms of usability. It is a big hairy audacious goal that Mark Shuttleworth, chief executive of Canonical, laid down at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland last July. Free Linux desktops such as Ubuntu should have “a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years,” Shuttleworth said at the time, a point he drove home in an interview with Datamation.
A fairly new entry, Dropbox (http://www.getdropbox.com) is quickly becoming my favorite online storage solution because of its ease of use and convenience. The service, which used to be limited to beta test users, was made publicly available on Sept. 12. Remarkably, the software that accesses Dropbox’s servers is available on Linux (Ubuntu 8.04 and 7.10 and Fedora Core 9) as well as Windows and Mac OS X and offers the same functionality on each platform. Google—this is the way you should have done it with Chrome.
Ubuntu Hardy Heron running in full-screen mode on a Macbook, courtesy of VirtualBox.
WHILE looking for a way to run some Windows video software on my Linux PC last year, I stumbled upon VirtualBox, an open source program that enables you to install and use different operating systems on the same computer. Last week, I turned to VirtualBox again because I wanted to watch the speeches at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, and the Web site that streamed the video used Microsoft’s Silverlight plug-in that works only with—surprise, surprise—Windows and Mac OS X. When I downloaded the latest version of VirtualBox, I found that it is now owned by Sun Microsystems, which bought Innotek in February. Fortunately, the program, a 27MB download from Sun’s Web site, is still free for personal use.
Digital Life is a blog that features a technology column by the same name that appears every Tuesday in Manila Standard Today, a national daily from the Philippines. This blog gives readers easy access to the column, which started in November 2002. Copyright 2009 Chin Wong.
Is Linux more secure than Windows? The quick and easy answer is yes. Most viruses and malicious software today are written to target Windows systems and will not affect Linux or Mac computers. If you’re going to work – and play – in a Windows world, you better get protection.
THE MagSafe charger for my MacBook died last week. It had given me some warning. Every so often, the power indicator on the magnetic connector would refuse to light up, and I would have to jiggle the cable to just the right position to get it working again. Finally, it had become so unreliable that I decided I had to buy a new one. After all, it’s hardly good form to start a three-hour lecture by fumbling with the cord of your power adapter for 10 minutes, hoping the charge light will come on while your battery is draining.
HANDS down, Snow Leopard – also known as Mac OS X 10.6— is the easiest operating system upgrade you can make today. Over the weekend, I upgraded my Intel-based Macbook from Mac OS X 10.5 and was pleasantly surprised to find that the entire process took only an hour and seven minutes.
WHEN Apple released a beta test version of Safari 4 last week, it claimed it was the world’s fastest browser. Some tests have supported that claim; others have not. These speed contests remind me of the gunslingers of the Old West—being the fastest draw was usually an ephemeral state.
A fairly new entry, Dropbox (
Ubuntu Hardy Heron running in full-screen mode on a Macbook, courtesy of VirtualBox.
