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Jono Bacon goes on at length at his blog on the contrast between the euphoria over the release of Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) and the reports of problems by users.

Read the 10 or so entries below this one and you can see the problems I've had.

It's time to put this in perspective. I've had plenty of problems with all manner of Linux and other Unix-like operating systems over the past few years. Given all the hardware that a modern OS must contend with (and I'll include Windows in that number since it runs – or is supposed to, anyway – on a wide variety of hardware), there's bound to be breakage.

Apple has it easy because it controls the hardware and the software and hence has an easier time making all the bits work together.

In my experience, Ubuntu generally performs well, and its developers seem genuinely worried about whether or not hardware will work with the distribution's constant stream of releases.

In both Linux and OpenBSD, for instance, wireless support has only gotten better over time.

I wish I could say the same for sound and video. PulseAudio has been somewhat of a disaster over the past year or more. It just wasn't ready for the average user, and the above-average user is demanding Jack and real-time kernels to do sophisticated audio work.

Now PulseAudio seems to be getting better.

For me, my Intel video hardware on a couple of laptops (Gateway Solo 1450 and Toshiba Satellite 1100-S101) has been causing problems beginning with Debian Lenny's time in testing. Whenever you need xorg.conf hacks just to make video work, and those hacks aren't crystal clear and easy to find, there will be problems. People will try Linux and run away from it as fast as they can if they can't get the basics (sound and video) to work.

And for my particular Toshiba laptop, the use of Kernel Mode Setting killed X in my Ubuntu 9.10 upgrade. Once I figured out how to turn KMS off (with a new line in GRUB), I could run X without an xorg.conf for the first time since Ubuntu 8.04 and OpenBSD 4.4. That's a nice change.

But to get there — to get basic functionality — I had to bring my 2 years of FOSS knowledge to bear in order to solve the problem.

Then just about every ancillary GNOME app (Brasero, Rhythmbox, Empathy and the non-GNOME Pidgin) stopped working after the upgrade. A quick search determined that my previous installation (in 9.04) of KDEnlive brought in a plugin that kept the other four apps from working. I saw lots of chatter on the problem, but none of the solutions worked for me. I had to remove the offending plugin and then reinstall three opencv libraries to clear things up (you can see all the details in the previous entries on this blog).

Many will say that I should've stuck with the Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (with the initials standing for "long-term support"), which performed well for me but wasn't as stable on my particular hardware as 9.10 (for which I had to do some hackery to get NetworkManager to manage my network).

And both Ubuntu 8.04 (I'm still using it on the Gateway laptop, where it's very solid) and Debian Lenny (now stable and running very well for me on two other machines) are viable options, but for my main laptop I want newer packages, especially Firefox 3.5, and I've been more inclined to upgrade the distro itself rather than use backports or PPAs to bring newer apps to older distributions.

Maybe I've got that wrong (or maybe not).

I've been meaning to move all of my user files to a Debian Lenny machine and see how well that performs with my regular abuse of the hardware and software. And there's always Fedora (and Mandriva ... and PCLinuxOS ... Mepis ... and dozens of others).

But despite all my grumbling, I do have a functioning Ubuntu 9.10 system. I even ditched my own "blue" theme and wallpaper and brought in the "human" theme and wallpaper that shipped with the upgrade. I'm back to Ubuntu s**t brown and orange, and I'm liking it. The new GNOME icons are cool. And we all have the next Ubuntu release — and 10.04 will be the next LTS — to look forward to with hope that many bugs will be squashed in the service of a stable desktop that will have the customary 3 years of desktop support.

In a nutshell: Ubuntu's under the hot lights. People expect more from it than they do from any other FOSS operating system. And it generally delivers more than any other, if not as much as people are counting on in their lofty expectations.

I use Ubuntu for many reasons: It seems to have the right balance between total "freedom" and the ability to play most multimedia, its developers are focused more on the desktop and less on the server (although Ubuntu is making a big play there), and its vast user base means that when there are problems, the community (including me in this blog) can often solve problems that benefit all users.

We're all looking for the time when Ubuntu (or some other distro, or some other OS entirely) can be easily handled by the average computer owner. That time really isn't here yet. With a Windows preload, the manufacture of the hardware generally makes sure there are drivers for all the hardware. Linux preloads — a few of which do exist — generally do the same. But in the wild and wooly world of geeks burning ISOs and installing Unix-like operating systems on all manner of hardware, a foolproof experience just isn't in the cards. Yet.

Will we ever get there? I hope so. I also have at least a little bit of hope for more preloads of Ubuntu and other Linux distros and maybe even a BSD.

There has been a whole lot of progress over the past few years on the Linux desktop. It's hard to predict where the state of FOSS will be five years from now.

In the near future I'll settle for Xorg and Intel playing well together, mass adoption of a free and open video standard and a move away from proprietary document formats since we barely need to print anything anyway.

I'm not going to be upgrading a damn thing to Windows 7. I've actually wiped a couple of XP installs over the past year. I needed the space on the drives, and I wasn't using XP (even though I thought it might be a good idea to "keep my hand in," as it were; my hand wasn't in).

But for those who are using either Windows XP or Vista and who are thinking of upgrading, Microsoft seems to be making it deliberately confusing.

If you're interested, ZDNet's Ed Bott tries to sort it out in an informative post.

As an experiment, I decided to bring my Evolutionary Computing presentation on making the journey into free, open-source software — a slide show originally created in OpenOffice Impress 2.4 — into Google Docs, which happens to have a presentation app in addition to the better-known Docs and Spreadsheets components.

I revised the presentation — taking some things out, adding others and providing some updates on what I'm doing — and output it as a PDF.

Download that PDF for your reading pleasure by clicking on the image above or the link below:

Evolutionary Computing (revised July 2009)

Interesting note: I believe that no previous entry on this blog has been filed under so many categories. (And I've been considering dumping Categories entirely and just using tags ...)

Distrowatch guru Ladislav Bodner has been rolling more than a few operating systems onto his ASUS Eee PC 900 netbook — probably the most popular netbook out there at this point (they even sell them at Target now).

In this week's Distrowatch (which I recommend as a must-read for anybody who wants to follow what's happening in Linux and the BSDs), Ladislav writes about how a mouse-over problem that tends to freeze the screen in Ubuntu Netbook Remix on the ASUS Eee was solved in the Linux kernel but almost immediately returned due to the relevant patch being pulled from the kernel because it began causing other problems.

Ladislav goes over how you can go backward from Linux kernel 2.6.28-11.41 to 2.6.28-11.40 and get your ASUS working again under Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

He also provides a tip for those using SSD (solid-state drive) disks on how not to wear them out:

Finally, a quick reminder for those who are about to install Ubuntu Netbook Remix (or any other Linux distribution) on a netbook with solid state drives. Since these drives have a limited life span that depends on the frequency of write access to the drives, you can greatly prolong their life span if you follow these two rules while installing your preferred distribution (here is the source of this information, although there are those who dispute this):

* choose a non-journalling file system (e.g. ext2)

* don't create a swap partition

As Ladislav says, there is some dispute about the life of flash media in everything from those mini USB drives and SD camera memory cards to devices designed to replace traditional IDE and (mostly these days) SATA .

Some people have said that the MTBF (mean time between failures) for SSDs is so low when compared to spinning hard drives that the devices will last much longer than traditional spinning hard drives due to the lack of moving parts in an SSD. They say that worry about killing the flash memory with repeated write cycles is overblown.

But others are worried about killing their flash memory too quickly and take precautions such as the recommendation above not to have swap space on the drive.

For those who might not know, most operating systems do use swap space on the hard drive in the event that your computer's RAM (memory) fills up. I won't go into just how much space you need for swap because that's a whole new topic that's been discussed countless times in countless places. (I generally set aside 300 MB for swap on my systems).

Even Windows uses swap (that's one of the reasons your box tends to slow down after it's been running all day [or week/month/year]) — you've got a lot of critical stuff that the OS has written to the swap area of the drive.

Back to flash/SSD memory: As I say, some people think that worrying about excessive writes to flash is unwarranted. While I'm tempted to say that you shouldn't use an SSD on a server, Sun Microsystems (yep, the company bought recently by Oracle) is offering SSD-equipped servers and storage arrays. Sun thinks SSDs are the (near) future in servers since performance gains are too large to be ignored.

Sun is using single-level cell (SLC) flash memory, which has a much longer life than the cheaper multilevel cell (MLC) devices that pack more memory into the same space but have shorter write/erase lives.

We're a bit far away from the ASUS Eee PC and Ubuntu at this point in the post, aren't we?

Maybe. But here's what I want to say about flash-based storage: I'm all for it. I'd like to start moving everything I have to SSDs as soon as fiscally possible.

One thing I really like is a silent PC: no fans, and no spinning hard drives. If you've ever worked on a system with drives snaking out of the back of the case and sitting on a table (I did it for years), you know how much noise traditional hard drives make and how much heat they throw off.

For the energy and noise considerations alone, I'd like to dump spinning hard drives.

To that end, I'm doing one test and hope to do another soon. I've been running my Self-Reliant Thin Client (converted Maxspeed Maxterm) with an 8 GB CF card in the box's built-in CF-to-IDE adapter as the unit's main drive. I am still running Debian Etch on it (and will continue with it until I manage to get networking into the room). The box isn't in heavy use at present, but it is running (and has been this time for more than a week). I do have swap set up on the flash, and with only 256 MB of RAM, it'll probably get used a bit.

I'm running regular backups of the /home files to a 1 GB USB flash drive with rsync, so I have an all-flash system.

It's not fast. A low-end CF card (mine is a Transcend) doesn't have the performance of a top-of-the-line SSD. For one thing, the Transcend uses MLC instead of SLC and for that reason alone should have a shorter life.

I'll keep the box running for quite some time to monitor its progress with the flash memory and see if it can withstand repeated use. An upgrade from Etch to Lenny would definitely tax the CF card.

Another thing I'd like to try is an SSD in one of my laptops — maybe the $15 Laptop (Compaq Armada 7770dmt), which I've recently put back into service. At least the drive is easy to get to.

Dell may not have the absolute best laptop deals available — you can often do better with the HP/Compaq/Acer/Gateway specials in Office Depot's Sunday newspaper circular (see, there IS a reason to subscribe to a genuine dead-tree newspaper like our own ever-lovin' Los Angeles Daily News).

But Dell is trying to earn your business, and right now (and through April 2) the company is running a "9 great systems under $499" laptop promotion.

True, the $399 Inspiron 13 is no great shakes specs-wise, with a measly 2.13 GHz single-core Celeron processor. But it does feature 1 GB of RAM (barely adequate for the included Windows Vista but quite enough for Linux distributions such as Ubuntu) and a fairly roomy 160 GB hard drive. A 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor adds $100 to the price, and an extra gigabyte of RAM adds another $50 (yes, Dell SHOULD be ashamed to charge $50 for something that couldn't be costing them more than $10 wholesale), and for $550 you have a very respectable laptop that should serve you for at least three years (or 7-10 years if you're me).

What I'm much more excited about is Dell's Inspiron Mini 9 netbook (pictured above), the price of which has dropped to $249 for the basic Ubuntu Linux/512 MB RAM/8 GB solid-state drive model.

I had the pleasure of trying this very-small but quite usable netbook at the San Fernando Valley Linux Users Group booth at the recent SCALE 7x show, and I was quite impressed with it. I've seen quite a few ultra-small netbooks over the past couple of years -- the Asus Eee PC, the Everex Cloudbook, the HP 2133 Mini-Note, and this Dell is the best one I've encountered yet.

The smallish keyboard, while not super comfortable, is definitely usable, and unlike some other netbooks, the Dell Mini 9 doesn't run hot. It has a nice display and is fairly snappy with Ubuntu GNU/Linux 8.04 (the long-term support edition I'm using on the little girl's Gateway laptop and my extra Toshiba 1100-S101). It handled multimedia well when I saw it, and the small size makes it extremely convenient. It's easier to tuck it in a bag or backpack and open it up at will.

Battery life is supposed to be 4 hours. Not bad, but the talk recently of basing the netxt generation of netbooks on power-sipping ARM processors, like those used in cellphones,
and promising all-day battery life, is something to look forward to.

Anyhow, while the base Dell Mini 9 is $249, bringing the memory up to 1 GB adds only $25 to the cost. (Now you're talking, Dell ...) Going from the 8 GB solid-state hard drive to 16 GB adds an extra $50, but that isn't completely necessary (although I'd probably do it) because you can easily save to those miniature SD cards used in digital cameras — most netbooks have a slot for this — and keep your main drive fairly clean.

One catch with netbooks is that they don't have built-in CD/DVD drives, so you can pop for one from Dell for $89, or take your chances and pick one up for possibly less at Fry's or online from an outlet like TigerDirect.com, where USB-connected CD/DVD burners run from $60-80, or not much of a savings.

Again, if you fully embrace the "netbook concept," you won't need an optical drive or a even a huge main hard drive. These little notebooks are supposed to be for casual Web surfing, jotting down notes and the like.

But I still predict that the netbook will become a whole lot more ubiquitous than many hardware manufacturers and especially software giant Microsoft ever thought.

And while Microsoft is making moves to have an operating system other than Windows XP that will run on such lower-spec devices, I think it's just silently waiting and not-so-silently cajoling hardware makers to up the specs of these little laptops so they can more comfortably run not Windows Vista but the upcoming (and said-to-be-lighter-and-higher) Windows 7.

We'll see. The rumors of a shift from Intel-based processors like the netbook-aimed Atom to even-lower-power-using ARM CPUs could throw a considerable wrench into Microsoft's quest to move into the netbook market — a class of hardware the company didn't see coming.

Right now I still recommend running Ubuntu on those netbooks that ship with that version of the Linux operating system. I've heard less-than-glowing things about the netbooks that use modified versions of Xandros and Linpus, but I'll admit right now that I have nothing beyond the anecdotal to go by.

There are many people interested in running everything from Mandriva and Debian to OpenBSD and Novell's SUSE (either the OpenSUSE or SLED varieties) on their netbooks with the help in many cases of active projects porting these OSes to various netbooks.

Maybe you don't want a netbooks. I understand. I do a whole lot of writing on laptops, and that smallish keyboard might not get such a glowing review when I'm cranking 500-word articles on deadline.

But then again, I do the majority of my work on a 7-year-old Toshiba laptop with a dead sound chip and the ultra-reliable OpenBSD operating system, now equipped with Java and Flash Player 7 (the "newest" Flash player available in the BSD world). Right now the Toshiba — with 1.2 GHz Celeron CPU, 768 MB of RAM and 20 GB hard drive split between OpenBSD and Windows XP, which for testing reasons I haven't killed out — is serving me quite well.

And I always have the Toshiba's "twin," running Ubuntu 8.04, at the ready. And that one even has working sound (and with Ubuntu I have Java and either Flash 9 or 10 – I can't remember). If I have to do more with video than currently (now = almost none), I'll have to move back to Linux both for the Flash capability and the availability of more video-editing software.

But for the basics — Firefox, Opera, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, the Geany text editor, the Xpdf and Adobe PDF readers, the GIMP image editor, Pidgin for IM, gFTP and the Rox-filer file manager — I have a pretty nice setup in OpenBSD. I've been using this OS on this hunk of hardware for about three months now, so I should be in a position soon to write yet another distro review, except this one will be based on that three months of use and not the "I installed it, here's how that went, and here's how it's different from what I usually run" reviews that I and many others find so easy to crank out.

Winding back around to netbooks, what I mean to say is that $250 is a better price than $300 for the basic model, and for that Dell deserves at least some praise (and more than a little business).

The blogospheric din is rising about Apple's supposed $800 laptop, which if it ever happens (and I have my doubts) will really hit hard on the Windows-based laptop market.

With Linux starting to eat away at the very low end of the laptop market on the ASUS EeePC and other netbooks, Apple dominating on the high-end (where it's share is considerable), the mushy middle is where most of the action is.

Having an $800 Macintosh laptop hits the bulk of the market and would steer plenty of people away from Windows and toward OS X. And like the iPod and iPhone's tendency to get their users to think about going all-Apple with an expensive desktop or laptop machine, a relatively inexpensive laptop is a hell of a game-changer.

Should this actually happen, Apple will have what looks like the right product at the right price — and at the exactly right time.

Let's see: Windows Vista not doing so well, and certainly not driving PC sales. Economy in the tank. The holiday season upon us.

If anything, it's a good time to buy some Apple stock.

Heather Clancy at the Green Tech Pastures blog from ZDNet writes about Faronics' power-management software, which now runs in Mac's OS X in addition to Windows:

The Power Save Mac 2.0 software includes intelligent shutdown functions; the ability to schedule when a system should be awake, asleep or in standby; the ability to customize what "inactivity" means for a particular system; enterprise control; and a reports feature that generates records of energy and cost savings. The report generator creates a "before" record of your computer, as well, which serves as a benchmark against which savings are calculated.

Faronics estimates that using the utility will save you $25 per year. How much does the package cost? $14.10 per year.

Power management has been one of my biggest headaches in Linux and the BSDs. For me, even getting the CPU fan under control in my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop usually requires a bit of work. For a short bit of time, the 2.6.18 Linux kernel did this automatically, but since then I've had to write simple scripts to get the fan to only turn on when CPU temperature warrants it.

And as far as CPU throttling goes, — slowing down and using less power when it's not needed, I haven't yet been able to implement that, even though it seemingly should work on a Celeron M processor.

The biggest power-management issue I have is with suspend/resume. I suspect that suspend/resume hasn't worked that well for that long on most PCs even in Windows, but these days I figure that hardware manufacturers of Windows-compatible PCs supply drivers to implement power management to at least some degree.

Power-management is great on our iBook G4. Using that laptop has made me expect good power-management from all of my other machines. And yes, I'd like to get it.

I'm even willing to work at the command line to make it happen, but the information I have, for the Gateway anyway, is sparse at best, and plain wrong at worst.

I really liked this Computerworld piece on how to revitalize a five-year-old Thinkpad laptop for $125.

While an IBM Thinkpad is worthier of restoration than most, the fact is that if you have a laptop on hand, a little maintenance can give it quite a bit of extra life.

Among the things Brian Nadel did to his Thinkpad R50:

• Added memory
• Replaced hard drive
• Reinstalled Windows
• Got second hard-drive caddy and installed Ubuntu on original hard drive so he can switch from Windows to Ubuntu by pulling and replacing the caddy
• Replacing a damaged keyboard
• Cleaning the inside, outside and especially the fan
• Defragmenting the hard drive

Even though the driver situation and the need for 2 GB+ of RAM in order to run Windows Vista and not want to kill yourself is getting to be old news, most of the bloggers out there are writing about what the next Windows OS — now called the very-catchy "Windows 7" — has in store for us.

Expert Microsoft-watcher Mary Jo Foley opens up her rumor bag and spills it, with the following catching my eye:

• Windows 7 is being designed around five pillars (The five, as reported by AeroXP: specialized for laptops; designed for services; personalized for everyone; optimized for entertainment; engineered for "ease of ownership")
• Windows 7 will be more modularized and componentized than Vista or other previous Windows releases. Microsoft hasn't said whether it will allow users/PC makers to opt into (and out of) installing subsystems, the same way that Windows Server 2008 users can choose specific "roles," but hints that Microsoft is considering this approach for Windows 7 abound. Microsoft officials have discussed their work on "MinWin," a streamlined version of the Windows core. But MinWin may or may not be won't be part of Windows 7. (Update: Months after bloggers and reporters first discussed MinWin, Microsoft finally said MinWin won't be part of Windows 7, via the Sinofsky Q&A on News.com on May 27.)
• Windows 7 will be a minor update to Vista -- with "minor," here, meaning as less disruptive as possible to users and their applications. Microsoft has said Windows 7 will use the same driver model that Vista did.
• Windows 7 will allow users to run legacy applications in virtualized mode to minimize backward compatibility problems. Whether Microsoft will deliver this virtualization via an application-virtualization solution like SoftGrid, the new Kidaro enterprise virtualization product or in some other way is not yet known.
• Windows 7 will add native support for Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) -- a feature Microsoft already provides in Vista, in the form of Complete PC Backup (in the Business version of Vista).

In other words, not too exciting. Oh, and it's scheduled for release in 2010. So expect another couple of years of ... not much out of Microsoft.

I think the problem for MS has been the growing length of time between major releases (with thanks to Wikipedia for the info):

Windows 95 Released Aug. 1995
Windows 98 Released June 1998
Windows 98se Released May 1999
Windows 2000 Released Feb. 2000
Windows Me Released Sept. 2000
Windows XP Released Oct. 2001
Windows Vista Released Nov. 2006

So the five years between Windows XP -- after the leap from 98 to 2000 took less than two years -- had the effect of a) making XP more established than any previous incarnation of Windows, engendering "just works" or "works as well as can be expected" loyalty and building up a volume of compatible applications unequaled previously and b) not making people happy about upgrading hardware for the diminishing returns of a new, unproven, buggy and driver-poor OS.

And we all know that Windows and its success is about one thing -- and one thing only: drivers and the hardware compatibility they bring to the system.

So after a five-year drought in new OS releases, Microsoft had to hit one out of the damn ballpark, not a feeble grounder up the first-base line.

Just look at what Apple adds to OS X every year and then some. Hell, look at the leap from the "Classic" Mac OS to the Unix-based OS X. And look at how far Linux has come on the desktop in the past three or so years. If all you do with your PC is browse the Web and churn out a few documents and spreadsheets, you don't need Microsoft, or Windows or Office.

It's easy to catch your competition if they're standing still.

People need passion, excitement, new (ahem) vistas -- in short, compelling reasons to upgrade. And I don't see anything like that. "Touch functionality" is intriguing, but that's not a game-winner, and greater interoperability with mobile devices is a given, no more.

The increasing importance of OS integration with computing in the cloud is something that MS is no doubt working on, but any move to the cloud makes traditional applications and operating systems less relevant, so I can't see MS going wholeheartedly in that direction.

So where's the passion? Where's the compulsion to stick with Microsoft? If anybody knows, please tell me.

Rick Coca of the Daily News had a story on the cover today concerning an FBI warning about hackers who set up their own WiFi router with the same SSID name as the public WiFi router you wish to connect to, with the purpose being to steal vital passwords and other information during your wireless Internet session.

While the article was short and didn't go very deep into the security issues surrounding WiFi and Internet networking in general, and laptop computers in particular, users of WiFi in general and public WiFi in particular need to be aware of what they should and shouldn't do.

The article did say that it's a good idea to have your computer configured to CHOOSE the WiFi router to which you wish to connect, because the consequences could be, for lack of a better word, bad:

Once in, a hacker can steal passwords and credit-card information and install viruses, worms and other malware — malicious software — on a computer that can spread to other systems you run.

(FBI cybercrimes supervisor Bryan) Duchene recommends that Wi-Fi users change their settings so they have to manually input the Service Set Identifier (SSID) they want to log on to.

While free-access seekers spawned the "wardriving" phenomenon — Wi-Fi users drove around with GPS systems and Wi-Fi-seeking laptops, marking locations of unsecured, free Wi-Fi sites — that practice eventually piqued the interest of criminals, Duchene said.

While WiFi does increase the risk of "bad" things happening, and the lack of encryption on almost all public WiFi connections doesn't help matters, I'm pretty confident in saying that if you are entering logins, passwords and other "sensitive" information over a secure connection — one with https:// in the Web address instead of just plain http:// — you are pretty safe, even over public WiFi.

But in cases where your login or password is NOT sent via a secure, encrypted connection, or for regular Web browsing on non-secure connection, it's quite possible that others can see what you're doing on the Internet.

That may bother you, or it may not.

But especially when it comes to e-mail, make sure you are using a secure, encrypted connection, either through a Web-browser interface, or via the settings in your e-mail client, be it Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, the Apple Mail program or whatever else you're running.

The worst thing you can do is send sensitive information -- or any personal or private information -- via unencrypted e-mail over an unencrypted WiFi connection. That's just too much of a risk.

I've often said that I wish all Internet traffic — e-mail, Web browsing, file transfers, etc. — took place over secure connections. I think we're headed in that direction.

So here's my quick guide on what to do and not do over a public WiFi connection:

E-mail: Only read and send e-mail via a secure encrypted connection. That means if you're using a Web interface, make sure the ENTIRE session, from login and password to composing and sending the e-mail and logging out -- takes place in a secure environment with the https:// in the address box.

For Gmail, you can choose a secure connection with https://gmail.com ... BUT the last time I read about it, your Google login and password is stored as a cookie on your computer for easy access, and it can be easily stolen over a public WiFi connection.

For Yahoo! Mail, your login and password is entered in a secure environment, but the rest of your e-mail session is unencrypted, so don't use Yahoo! Mail over a public WiFi connection.

If you have an office-provided e-mail service via a Web browser, look for the https:// instead of http:// and ask your system administrator about whether your connection is secure the whole way through.

If you use an e-mail client like Outlook or Thunderbird, make sure your e-mail server allows secure connections -- and make sure your client software is set up properly to use it.

There are e-mail services that offer more security. For the extremely paranoid, there's HushMail, but my favorite is Fastmail.fm. Just make sure you use the secure version. I'll also put in a plug for my ISP, DSL Extreme, which offers Web-accessible e-mail in a completely secure session.

Antivirus, antispyware, firewall protection: Whatever you do, and especially if you're using Microsoft Windows, make sure you have up-to-date antivirus and firewall programs. This excellent though aging Washington Post page has links to many vendors of these programs, some of which are available free. For the PC, I prefer Avast. Avast also runs on Linux, although with that operating system you're only likely to pass along a virus, because almost all malicious code is aimed at Windows computers, which are much easier targets.

Web: For Web browsing, if you are on an unsecured connection, it's easy for snoops to figure out the URLs of the Web pages you're visiting. And from there those snoops can see what's on those pages, too.

While it's not conducive to privacy, this might not be a problem, depending on where you're browsing.

But ... if you're entering any logins, passwords or other sensitive information, make sure you're on a secure connection before beginning. AND make sure your computer is NOT set up for file sharing.

To be more clear, if your computer is free of malicious software -- key-loggers that record every keystroke, spyware, etc. -- an encrypted connection should give you enough security over WiFi.

IM is a problem: Most instant-messaging traffic is unencrypted, so don't IM anything you don't want others to potentially see. The last time I checked, Yahoo! Instant Messenger, AOL's AIM and Microsoft's MSN Messenger are all unencrypted.

And do yourself a favor: NEVER, EVER, EVER NEVER, install any kind of software from an untrusted source, over WiFi or a wired Internet connection. That's when the bad stuff happens -- when malicious software makes its way onto your computer. It's easier by orders of magnitude to attack from the inside than from the outside.

WiFi at home and work: Wireless routers that you control at your home or workplace can be set up for encrypted connections only. Don't use WEP encryption because it can be easily cracked. Instead, use WPA or WPA2, which are much, much more secure and robust.

And like it says in the Daily News article, make sure you change the SSID name of your router to something other than the default (usually something like Linksys, Netgear, or the name of whatever company made the router), and also make sure you have your computers set to only connect with YOUR router.

For more on this subject, here are a few links:

• USA Today's Complete Guide to Wi-Fi Security (make sure you read ALL the pages)
• Ask Metafilter discussion on encrypted WiFi
• Coffeeshop WiFi for Dummies
• Using Public Wireless Networks More Safely (from Microsoft)

Google didn't get where it is today by charging end users for software and charging them again and again for endless upgrades.

Back in the early Macintosh days (i.e. the mid- to late '80s), Apple used the OS to sell hardware. Upgrades were free.

Today, Apple sells music at 99 cents a track, but what they're really selling is iPods, iPhones, iMacs, and any other damn thing they can slap an "i" in front of. And while the music is available in 99-cent increments, the iTunes software -- which runs in Windows and OS X -- has always been free. iPods would've never gotten to be such a huge business in any other way.

It's no different for the OS.

With that in mind, Apple wins on the desktop -- and crushes Microsoft -- in one way:

Make OS X free -- or very cheap. And make it run on Windows-compatible PCs.

Everybody wants that new MacBook Air. They'll still want it, even if they can also run OS X on a crappy PC. While not getting $129 for each OS X upgrade, Apple would get market share, still move a whole lot of hardaware. And they would gain that all-important "mindshare."

Most people have heard of Linux, but few have seen it on the desktop, even though they "use" it every day when they browse the Web. Most have seen OS X, a significant portion have used it a bit, and a few are rabid fans.

And while I'd like to see OS X go free and open-source, I won't hold my breath on that one. As I said above, I'd prefer -- at a minimum -- that Apple port OS X to Windows PCs, i.e. make a native version that installs from CD and runs on non-Apple hardware.

But even making new versions of OS X free for Apple hardware would prompt more users to upgrade the software. When running the latest and greatest gets slow, they'd be more inclined to buy new hardware, most likely from Apple.

Right now I'm still running my 2003-era iBook on OS X 10.3. I saved $129 twice by not upgrading to 10.4 and 10.5. I can't even use Apple's newest Safari browser because it doesn't run on 10.3. Firefox does, so that's what I use. As a result, Apple misses out on any browser-generated ad revenue. Would 10.5 run well on my laptop? Who knows? I sure don't want to spend $129 to find out.

By flooding the market with a free or very cheap OS X, Apple could blunt the effects of Microsoft Windows, which customers pay for but don't really feel they're paying for because the cost is bundled into just about every PC sold.

Even if a free OS wouldn't fly at Apple HQ, if the company still ported OS X to Windows-compatible PCs, they could -- and should -- compete with Microsoft when it comes to pre-installed operating systems on non-Apple hardware.

Imagine if you could order a PC from Dell with Windows, Linux or OS X ... there would be real competition for the hearts and minds of computer users everywhere from the home to the enterprise.

And since Apple's hardware is so ultra-cool (and ultra-pricey), they'd probably sell even more of it if OS X had a much larger of the overall worldwide OS pie.

I've been changing text editors in Windows like some people change underwear -- clean people that is.

And every time I try a new one, I open a text file and choose the new application. Windows remembers what I chose the last time, and that is presented as the first choice when I open a new text file. I've gone from EdiPad Lite to Geany to Notepad++, and I appreciate Windows remembering the last text editor I've used. I get the same treatment with .doc files, which I sometimes open with OpenOffice but usually go quick-and-dirty with AbiWord.

Anyhow, it's a nice feature in Windows, this remembering the last app I used in a given category. Nice to hear me say something nice about Windows, don't you think?

Whether Windows Vista is a success, failure, bump in the road or GUI revolution -- and the answer varies depending on who you talk to -- those who keep an eye on Microsoft are already abuzz about the next Windows OS release, which is now going by the name Windows 7.

As the link above might already be telling you, I think ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley does very well when it comes to reporting on Microsoft, and she has this to say:

Because Microsoft won’t talk about Windows 7, I can’t quote any Microsoft representatives on what they are planning, thinking and hoping regarding Windows 7.

My opinion? The Softies want Windows 7 to be the anti-Vista. That is not a put-down of Vista, which may not be selling at two times the rate XP did — but which still is selling strongly enough to boost Microsoft’s Q2 FY 2008 client-division revenues by more almost 70 percent.

But Microsoft’s brass do want to avoid a lot of the pitfalls that it encountered with Windows Vista — and who can blame them? They want Windows 7 to be on-time, not polluted by feature-bloat and not overly ambitious. They want the Windows 7 betas to be near-feature-complete the first time that the majority of testers get builds. And most of all, they want Windows 7 to be a predictable, familiar, relatively minor upgrade. Should that take four years (counting from the fall 2006 Vista release-to-manufacturing date) to Microsoft’s stated 2010 Windows 7 ship target to deliver? Probably not; Windows 7 in 2009 looks like a realistic possibility.

So if you love or hate Vista ... a 2009 release of a whole new version of Windows will make today's edition of the OS seem pretty bump-in-the-roadish. ... and a full year from now the hardware will be that much better (quad-core everything, 3 GB standard in laptops, more in desktops ... ) that a release from Microsoft that doesn't further task computing resources would be mighty welcome by Windows users, both home and corporate.

More from Mary Jo:

... Microsoft is in a tricky spot. Apple can put consumers front and center when it designs a new operating system. But Microsoft needs to strike a balance between creating an operating system that appeals to both business users and consumers. If Microsoft only had to appease business users with Windows 7, a minor, no frills point-release update would be perfect. But it also has to fend off Mac OS X with Windows 7 on the retail front.

Another writer I respect, Microsoft-Watch's Joe Wilcox, things all this Windows 7 talk is too much hype:

Microsoft hasn't yet released Windows Vista Service Pack 1, and there are so-called leaks galore about Vista successor Windows Seven. There have been supposed screenshots of Milestone 1 and even a pirated movie-like video. I won't link to any of the stuff, as it would only feed the frenzy.

But he does offer this:

The real work on Windows Seven isn't the shell but the kernel. It's my understanding that the primary Windows Seven development focus, at least for now, is the operating system's plumbing. That's absolutely the right priority, and it is a huge departure from Windows XP and Vista development. Seven's predecessors got wish-listed to death. Previously, the early process was more about compiling huge lists of features the people inside and outside Microsoft wanted in the operating system.

And Wilcox provides a link to his own story about the Shipping Seven blog, presumably by an anonymous Microsoftie, which can be found here.

Having taken a look, Shipping Seven is a pretty good blog, with tips on using Windows now, plus a good bit of opinion. Wilcox smells guerrilla marketing from Microsoft, and I'm inclined to agree.

I'm not saying I'm gonna stick with Geany in Windows, even though I've had nothing but praise for it as a Linux application. I'm not crazy about the paragraph I'm working on going from a white background to gray (and I haven't figured out how to turn this "feature" off), nor am I crazy about the cursor disappearing at times when I scroll down and it's a the far left of the screen ...

But I did figure out the solution to one of my problems:

When I copied and pasted my text from Geany into whatever Web program I'm prepping it for, I ended up with extra lines. I fixed it by going under Document -- Set Line Endings and switching from Convert and Set to CR/LF (Win) to Convert and set to LF (Unix).

(Note: Having to do this for EVERY file is a pain in the ass. Why can't I just set it and forget it?)

I also noticed that Geany -- mainly a text editor for programmers -- has a couple of features that might be useful: Under Tools -- Export, you can choose to output text as HTML or LaTex (the latter being useful for Linux/Unix typesetting but the former being useful for just about everything I do).

Ubuntu 6.06 LTS -- the distribution's first "long term support" release -- now has a new installer that incorporates some 600 bug and security fixes and makes installation easier, especially on servers.

It's no secret that Canonical, the company that runs Ubuntu, is making a big play both for the desktop and more-lucrative server markets, and a big part of that play is the LTS release. And even though the next Ubuntu release -- 8.04 (due 4/08 ... also known as April 2008) -- is going to be a Long Term Support release, with fixes, patches and the like for three years on the desktop, five years on the server, there's still quite a bit of time left for the current Ubuntu LTS, which will be supported until June 2009 on the desktop and June 2011 on the server.

The new installer -- you don't really need it if you can successfully use the old installer, already have a 6.06 LTS install (like I do) and have done all the updates -- underscores Canonical's commitment to the LTS concept. While the twice-yearly releases of Ubuntu get most of the light and heat in the uber-geek community, there are many who depend on the relative stability of the LTS release to keep their hardware running. That's especially true on servers, where major upgrades every six months are impractical at best and detrimential at worst -- nobody wants to break a system that's been running well.

And the LTS is vital as a counterweight to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server/Desktop, both of which are supported for years on end.

I'd like to say that Debian Stable (currently Etch) and Old Stable (Sarge) are equivalents, but since you can't pin down a date certain for length of their support, there is a bit of an unknown factor there, although once the Stable release goes to Old Stable, you pretty much know that the new Stable release won't give you too many problems.

Sure, many desktop users generally want something more cutting-edge, mainly something like the regular Ubuntu releases, but there are many people -- and many situations -- that warrant hanging on to a Linux installation as long as possible. Over the time I've used Ubuntu and Xubuntu (from 6.06 LTS through 6.10, 7.04 and 7.10), I've seen some parts of the installation improve dramatically, I've seen hardware work better, then worse, and occasionally not at all.

And we all know an individual or organization that hates doing major upgrades, ever. Those coming from a Windows or Macintosh background aren't all used to major OS upgrades. In the case of Windows AND Mac's OS X, major upgrades almost always cost money. $129 for an OS X upgrade might not sound like much, but paying that much every couple of years when your computer runs just fine the way it is? No thanks. That's why I'm still running OS X 10.3 on my Mac. And Windows? I have a disc for Windows 2000, and I'm not about to pay ANYTHING for the privilege of upgrading my sole Windows box (which I boot maybe twice a year) to XP.

And in Linux, just because we can change out distros 10 times a day if we wish, it doesn't mean that we have to -- or should. For people who crave the stability of long-term releases, one thing generally drives upgrade: newer software they need to get their work done, and new hardware that needs new software to run properly.

I did this most recent Ubuntu 6.06 LTS installation for testing purposes, but I've stuck with it because it just works. On this test box, it's flawless. On my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, it manages the fan as well as 7.10 (i.e. not at all without a cron job; but well with said cron job), but less well than 7.04 (which has the ACPI working with no coding needed). (Note: I'm not currently running Ubuntu at all on the Gateway laptop, which is currently dual-booting the Slackware 11-based Wolvix Hunter 1.1.0 and Debian Lenny, which I upgraded from the stable Etch.)

Using Ubuntu 6.06 LTS on this test box, sure I'm stuck with Firefox 1.5, OpenOffice 2.0, GMOME 2.14.3 and Evolution 2.6.1, but everything works. And there's nothing I do that I can't do with applications of this "vintage." If I this machine had wireless and it didn't work with 6.06, I might feel differently about LTS, but with the hardware I have now, LTS is a good fit.

So if you're looking for stable, supported releases, especially ones that won't cost you anything, it's nice to have Ubuntu LTS as a choice along with CentOS and Scientific Linux (both free versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux), SUSE, Debian and Slackware.

As far as stable, long-term releases go, I have run CentOS (3.9. 4.2 and 5), Debian (Etch and Lenny) and Slackware (12), as well as Ubuntu LTS, and Ubuntu holds up very well on the desktop in this crowd. It's more flexible, as far as adding software, than CentOS and Slackware -- it doesn't have as many packages as Debian, but it does have plenty -- and the desktop and menus are a bit more tame than Debian's, with a better out-of-the-box experience, especially for inexperienced users.

And the support available from other Ubuntu users is a major component of the distro's success. All the advice may not be of the best quality, but there's just so much of it that you're bound to find the right answer to whatever it is you're asking. Not that the Debian community isn't helpful (I love DebianHELP and the Debian User Forums, but they just don't have the sheer volume of the Ubuntu Forums. Like I said, there's a lot more noise among the Ubuntu people ... but that's the price you pay, I guess.

And since Ubuntu is based on Debian, what you learn in one community is more often than not directly applicable in the other.

Another thing I discovered today: I enjoy reading the Planet Debian blog posts from Debian developers, and I had no idea that there's a Planet Ubuntu as well. Both are more than worth adding to your favorites and checking on from time to time.

Over the past year, I've used both Debian and Ubuntu extensively, and I always say that Debian isn't as "hard" to use as some would make it appear. Nor is Ubuntu a relative cakewalk. Both require, at times, a bit of wading into the muck to make things work. As far as installation goes, Debian's installer -- upon which Ubuntu's "alternate" installer is very closely based, is quite good, and has succeeded for me many more times than Ubuntu's live CD and alternate-CD discs, but Ubuntu works often enough.

What Ubuntu has that Debian lacks is a marketing plan. For some -- especially the average Linux user (read: geek) -- having no marketing plan is, in and of itself, a marketing plan of sorts. Nobody's trying to make Debian "cool," or giving you reasons why you should or shouldn't run it. And while there are a few Debian evangelists out there, and a few for Slackware as well, there's nothing approaching the fervor over Ubuntu.

That might be good, or bad, depending on how you look at it.

A lot of people are running Debian and Slackware -- they're just quieter about it, I guess.

Anyhow, this post has gone on for far too long. All I want to say is that I'm in favor of long-term, "stable" releases with defined periods of support and a smooth upgrade path, and I'm glad that Ubuntu has pretty big foot in this very door.

And I like the fact that 6.06 LTS will be supported for over a year after the next LTS -- 8.04 -- is released a few months from now.