Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

From VNUNet:

The government of Cuba has announced plans to take the whole country open source as soon as possible.

Communications Minister Ramiro Valdés announced the plan at a conference in Havana, and said that Microsoft had cooperated with government agencies and intelligence services in the past.

Valdes insisted that the information technology industry is a “battlefield” on which Cuba must fight.

He also highlighted a quote from Bill Gates, who described open source enthusiasts as “some new modern-day sort of communists”, pointing out that this would be a badge of honour for Cubans.

The article goes on to say that Cubans are developing their own linux distribution called Nova, based on Gentoo and that estimates are that there are around 3,000 Open Source developers based in Cuba.

It’s an interesting article on a number of fronts - linux is known to be more secure than windows and I’m sure it’s not the first national that has decided to move towards this technology (although I suspect that most would chose Sun).

With the advancements being made with GUI’s like KDE4 it will be interesting to see if some of Microsofts dominance starts to buckle - especially in the corporate environment.

It’s only been about a week since I got fed up of windows crashing and decided to switch over to Ubuntu.

I must say, It’s been a good week. It feels like I’ve inherited a brand new PC. It’s fast, it’s stable and nearly everything is free for it.

There are a few things I was worried about; how would I get by without Photoshop for example? I’ve never been a GIMP lover (an opensource graphics package) but help was to hand with a programme called Crossover Pro which allows you to install support windows applications such as Photoshop, Microsoft Office and Dreamweaver.

The desktop search add-on is great and I’ve even rediscovered my love for Monopoly with an opensource linux based multiplayer (online) version of it!

As a normal desktop user my wife is also happy - she’s able to do everything she could do previously in windows without much hassle and hasn’t really noticed a big difference (apart from the fact it’s faster).

So what’s the catch? Should everyone run and switch over? I’d say that the answer is that it’s not ready for everyone yet. I think that you still need to have an understanding of linux (or at least a general technical understanding and be able to operate google) as some of the extra packages are activated via command line in the terminal). It’s also not too simple to mount your windows drive.

I’ve been tempted to sign up to World of Warcraft again too since I cancelled the payments (as I wasn’t playing it enough) and apparently you can get this working though Wine/Crossover and the graphic capabilities seem to be better than in Windows.

Overall I’d encourage people to give it a go - you can out it on duel boot and you may even decide to ditch windows completely and go opensource if you find it as reliable as I have.

You should also checkout Lifehackers Article on the top 10 Essential Applications

I’ve been getting annoyed with my windows powered machine for a while now and was finally tipped over the edge this evening when I got in and found that my Thunderbird mail client had crashed and data disapeared.

So I spent the remainder of the evening backing up as much data as possible before booting up onto the Ubuntu CD, removing windows and starting afresh going open source.

So far so good.  The install was painless but having to edit some files in terminal to get access to my other windows drive could have been easier.

The inlaws are round this weekend (!), but my aim for when I have some spare time is to try and get my mail back and get Photoshop running (which should work via Wine) as i’ve never been a big fan of Gimp (the open source alternative).