In the PC world lately it’s update madness. But as many are flocking to upgrade to Microsoft’s Windows 7 and for the most part impressed that it’s a smoother process than Windows Vista was, there’s another update that’s also important to note: Linux distro Ubuntu 9.10 – Karmic Koala.

In a perfect world Linux would be as easy to install (or upgrade) as well as use as Windows.  That, and software compatibility (with Windows) are without question the two reasons why no Linux distribution has as of yet been able to seriously challenge the market of Microsoft.  Linux is, for better or worse, still an operating system for experts.

And Ubuntu’s Karmic Koala is by no means an exception.  In fact, it seems to be taking Linux back to the dark ages.

Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala - Some Bad JuJu

Even the Linux experts are running into insurmountable problems with this new distro.  More so than ever before.  And many of the problems (like with the video drivers) are causing the “upgrade” to render the computer unusable.

To give you an idea of the numbers involved, a poll on the Ubuntu forums gives you some idea of just why many PC users still prefer Windows to Linux.  At the time of writing, of the 734 people who upgraded to Karmic Koala, only 190 – 26% – had absolute success.  That means less than one third of all upgrades to Karmic Koala actually worked right.  Fortunately, Linux being the OS of experts, 275 upgraders – 37% – were capable of solving their own problems.  So even with experts behind the upgrades, only 63% of Karmic Koala upgrades are actually running right now.

The funny thing is that anecdotally a lot of Karmic Koala supporters are saying that clean installs are going better than upgrades.  The poll’s numbers however don’t back this up.  There of the 596 people who tried to do a clean install of Karmic Koala only 144 – 24% – managed to do so without problems.  That’s 2% less clean success than the upgrades.  Likewise only 178 of the clean installs – 30% – could solve their own problems when things didn’t go smoothly.  For a total of only 54% getting the clean install to Karmic Koala to work.  That’s far below the 63% of those who upgraded instead of doing a clean install.  So then how can anyone say that you’ll have better luck with a clean install then when the numbers show you’re actually 9% more likely to fail?

Don’t get me wrong.  I love free and open source software.  I have great respect for people who devote their time to writing code without thought of compensation, simply for the betterment of mankind.  And when running a server I’d almost always choose Linux over Windows.  But if you want to know why Linux isn’t setting the world on fire and replacing the Microsoft Monopoly, well, there’s your problem.  Could you imagine if a Microsoft product had success rates these low with any of their Windows installs or upgrades?  Or even Apple?  IBM?  Sun?  And then imagine what those numbers would be like with the common person buying a Karmic Koala box off the shelf and trying to install it instead of Linux users who already know what they’re getting into!

It’s moments like these where you’re reminded just why things are as they are.  If this is Ubuntu’s idea of karma, then Karmic Koala must have been a mass murderer in a past life because Ubuntu 9.10 is not the shiny happy reincarnation that we were hoping for.  In all too many cases, it’s flat out deadly.

If Linux contributors and users want the world to embrace the FOSS dogma then they’re going to need better karma than this.

It’s not often that you actually hear about a security hole being found in Linux.  Most of that is because Linux is eminently more secure than most operating systems.  Part of it though, is something of a conspiracy to downplay Linux vulnerabilities as a “denial of service” and not a “security hole in the kernel”.

Still, bugs do happen.  Security holes do pop up, even in Linux.  And Brad Spengler of grsecurity has found himself one.  It’s the “Null pointer dereference” bug, and it’s found even in versions 2.6.30 and 2.6.30.1 of the Linux kernel.  Strangely enough, it seems that the exploit only works when SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) is enabled.  Turn on security for insecurity?  So it seems.  Though it has been also found when other features are installed, like PulseAudio.

The basic bug comes down to just what the name suggests.  When compiling the kernel there are places in the code where it is supposed to check to ensure that a variable doesn’t point to NULL.  Such as in net/tun.  However, when compiling with optimizations as is so often done, the compiler removes the code to perform these checks.  Thereby creating a nice security hole where the kernel can be made to access code in forbidden places in memory.

The odd thing is, so far, most of the Linux community, including Linus Torvalds himself, is unimpressed as to the danger of the security hole.  And perhaps they have some bit of a point, in that so far it can’t actually be used for remote access, and the only proof of concept that Spengler is offering involves using Setuid, which is itself a rather embarrassing gaping security hole in Linux.

But it of course brings up a lot of tricky security questions which the Linux community rather doesn’t want to admit or answer, like why holes such as these aren’t immediately and permanently fixed, as is so often done in the open-source community when bugs are found?

Sometimes you almost feel like everyone is Microsoft these days…

You may have heard that Microsoft has been making a tremendous commitment to system and file interoperability lately.  That Microsoft is even helping Open Source.  What you may not have heard though, what none of us had seen coming, is this:

Microsoft releases their own Linux distro: Windux!

Microsoft has released their own distribution of Linux, named Windux, based on the Windows 7 kernel!

Unlike most distros of Linux that have to use things like Wine for interoperability with Windows-based software, Windux actually includes a Microsoft-kernel core with all of the features of Windows, wrapped up in an intermediary layer to work with the Linux kernel.  This allows every Windows application that can run on Windows Vista (and the soon to be released Windows 7) to run on Windux natively.  And yet, it’s still Linux!

The Microsoft announcement and a beta version for download is all available at http://www.Microsoft.com/Windux.

I’ve got to say, I’ve tried the beta version of Windux myself, and so far it seems to be pretty good.  It has everything I’d expect from Linux.  Even the speed doesn’t seem to be slowed down any by Microsoft’s Windows kernel wrapped up in there somewhere.  And it has full video hardware support when it runs Windows apps, letting me play all of my games at speeds that are only insignificantly slower than in Windows itself.  It’s actually quite amazing!  I keep expecting something to fail horribly somewhere, forcing me to go back to a VMware dual-OS solution, but surprisingly … no.  So far it’s all good.

I really never would have guessed that Microsoft had it in them.  Yay for Microsoft Windux!

The downside, of course, is that the full release versions won’t be available until Windows 7 launches, and will be priced similarly to Windows 7.  This is one Linux distro that isn’t free.  But considering all that it offers, I have to say, I really don’t mind.

Microsoft Windows 7.  The more people fail to embrace Windows Vista, the More Windows 7 gets a mention in the media.  In many ways Windows Vista has become the Windows ME of our (computer) generation.  But in some ways Windows Vista is also like Windows 2000.  This may just be the edge Microsoft needs.

Windows ME – oh how we hated it.  It was the last of the Win9x generation.  It might not have been, but in a stroke of bitness-cleansing, Microsoft tried to re-engineer the Win9x kernel from a 16-bit/ 32-bit cross-species into a purebred 32-bit kernel.  It might have even worked … had there not been so many 16-bit drivers of old still left around.  Or perhaps more accurately, had Microsoft engineered a more stable way to continue supporting such a large 16-bit world.

Microsoft knew that they had to do something.  Thanks to WinME, they had a growing wealth of unhappy Windows users.  Windows 2000 was their salvation.  It was a workstation-derived operating system, based on their Windows NT line.  The kernet was a complete rewrite, Microsoft’s transition from NT4 to NT5, Windows 2000 being their first NT5-based operating system.  It wasn’t meant to play games with.  It wasn’t meant to be pretty.  It wasn’t meant for novices.  It was meant to be a workhorse.

And it was rock solid.

It didn’t take long to see the obvious.  Home users had Win ME, a highly unstable course in anger management.  Work users had Win 2K, the most stable OS Microsoft had made to date.  Could Microsoft pretty up Win 2K and make a replacement for disgruntled home users of Win ME out of it?

The answer was yes.  The answer, was Windows XP.  It took time for drivers to catch up, but when they did, it was the miracle that Microsoft had needed.

And in a lot of ways, Microsoft made the same mistake all over again, but in all new ways.  Windows Vista was itself a complete rewrite.  Only not the NT kind of rewrite.  It had been the ME kind of rewrite.  It used more resources, but ended up less stable.  It gave better eye candy, but it also gave far more headaches.

Yet, strangely, Vista is also its own possible salvation.  Like tweaks and additions to the kernel turned Windows 2000 into Windows XP, the same can be done with Windows Vista to make it Windows 7.  With enough effort put into stability, and with enough polishing of the user interface, Vista just might become the next XP. And bring to Windows 7 all of the much needed drivers and applications needed at launch, because they weren’t written for the new Windows 7, they were written for the old Windows Vista.

At the latest Professional Developers Conference (PDC), Microsoft revealed yet more of Microsoft Windows 7 and the future of Microsoft Windows.  Admittedly, mostly to get people to stop thinking about how bad Vista is, to give people hope for the future.  But it’s a future that may be less far off than we fear, and a future that’s starting to look like it actually may be brighter.

The interface for example is being cleaned up.  Now it is more resembling something that works, that people enjoy, namely Apple’s Mac OS X.  The taskbar is becoming more, well, usable again.  Annoying pop-ups are being made more managable.  And let us not forget docking.

Multiple networks will be supported better, which will no doubt please anyone using a portable system.  As will the simple fact that Windows 7 should run noticably faster and cleaner on the same hardware.  And should even, finally, run well on, again, a portable system.  I don’t think that the actual hardware requirements will go down, so much as you’ll just actually finally be capable of doing something on a system that hovers around those dreaded minimums.

And, of course, at its heart it’s related to the same kernel as Windows Vista.  So when it comes out, Windows 7 will have much better driver support, because it’ll use the same drivers as Windows Vista.  And when it comes out, Windows 7 will have more applications designed to work specifically with the new features introduced since Windows Vista.

So all around, Windows 7 will have better 3rd party support in both apps and drivers, will run faster, will run better on low-end hardware, will network better, and will have a more refined and usable user interface.  What’s not to love?

Microsoft is learning.  From their own mistakes.  From Apple.  And from Linux.

It might be years after its release before Windows 7 is actually refined enough to no longer make Windows XP lovers pine for XP, but then, look how long it really took Windows XP to become that refined itself.  We’ve had it for so long, and seen it grow to such stability, that it’s no wonder that we’ve grown jaded to any new Microsoft OS.  But if anything is going to make Windows XP users forget the follies of Vista, Microsoft is actually doing a good job of making sure that it will be Windows 7.  It has to be.  They can’t really afford anything less.  Both Apple and Linux are all too happy to take in those weary of the battle.

Well we knew that they had to be working on it.  Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 had hardly made the operating system foolproof, so a second service pack had to be in the works.  And now Microsoft has confirmed it.  A private beta of Win Vista SP2 is getting ready for testing.

What exactly is fixed by it remains to be seen.  One can only hope that the (in)security barage of “Do you really really really want to allow this?” “Are you sure?” nuicanse questions (that could have been an actual security feature if Microsoft had only paid attention to long standing operating systems like Linux) that force you to turn the security feature off will be fixed.  For that matter, let’s hope that basics like simply deleting a file will be fixed once and for all.

You know, the little things.

Like basically the actual functionality of an operating system.

Instead of just its gee-wiz look and feel eye candy.

Let’s hope SP2 makes Windows Vista usable.

And if not, let’s hope that Windows 7 comes out quickly and is everything that Windows Vista should have been, thereby turning Windows Vista officially into Windows ME 2.

Or something like that.