Introductory comment: I realize that April 15th is a special
day for many of us, and that a lot of folks may be spending
time working for an employer who doesn't pay them (the IRS).
I apologize for the timing, although perhaps a little diversion
might be welcome for some. In any case, April 15 was the trigger...
I would like to share a Linux success story, or actually, several small
stories.
I am now a real Linux user. At last. After all these years. After all
those LUG meetings. I'm a happy penguin.
And benefits just keep rolling in - some of them quite unexpected.
Background: We have successfully converted our little shop to Linux over
the past few months. After several earlier false starts, with several
Linux distributions. Converting to Linux is still not easy, and Linux
still is not for your grandma. Not yet.
We bought Libranet in January of this year, and received one of the first
V2.0 CD kits.
Side note: Every chance I get, I praise the work Jon and Tal
have done with Libranet. They've made Debian accessible in the
same way big outfits like Red Hat have made other compilations
of Linux accessible. Mostly, they've made available a
breathtakingly complete distribution which I WAS ABLE TO INSTALL
AND GET WORKING. (A personal, perhaps peculiar, figure of merit.)
There is, of course, real help available from the mailing list,
and from Libranet directly. Libranet deserves wider recognition.
It's true that we wanted the installation to be Debian if possible;
it has been great that Libranet did the job. 1,566 packages installed
on each of the workstations!
So at last we're running Linux, for real, and for all of our everyday
business tasks: Libranet V2.0, sylpheed, galeon, OpenOffice, NFS, CUPS,
and more. The conversion wasn't quick. And it wasn't easy - winmodems,
arrgh! But it is accomplished. And unlike anything related to Microsoft,
when you do get something done and working in Linux, it STAYS done and
working.
Of course, we jad a few applications which were sure to be hard for us
to get away from. Many of you know, for instance, that I'm enamored of
a superb, obsolete, proprietary spreadsheet named Lotus Improv.
Unfortunately, whenever you use proprietary software you accept a set
of risks. One risk is that the vendor may sell out the product; another
risk is that the vendor itself may be bought out; still another is that
the vendor may lose interest in the product. (Or combinations of the
above - Lotus was bought out by IBM. But that was after Lotus itself
had sent Improv to /dev/null, killing it in favor of that Source of
Nutrients for Vice Presidents, Lotus 1-2-3.) Or a risk that vendor may
use secrecy in the product to hold you hostage. (See RMS's excellent
mini-treatise on the subject of entrusting your data to proprietary
formats.) Or to invade your privacy, or to do things the vendor just
doesn't tell you about. More on that later.
Improv - nothing else works anything like as nicely, in my opinion.
And we have a few applications programmed in Improv which do such things
as pilot logbooks, which we neither easily do without nor convert. So
our conversion to Linux was influenced by a not uncommon need: for a
"few" legacy applications to continue to work. Our "few" applications
were dominated by only one which I felt was irreplaceable (Improv), but
even one would have been enough to require being able to simulate a
Microsoft environment.
For this, what everyone interested in Free Software wants to use is Wine,
but Wine isn't ready yet. What we chose is Win4Lin. It is another nice
piece of software, after Improv, although again proprietary <ugh>, and
again owned by a company willing to be sold. (It has been.) But still
a very nice piece of software, written (like Improv) by very capable
people with a vision. (And, come to think of it, no more proprietary
than the Microsoft stuff it's replacing.)
Win4Lin creates a DOS environment which is sufficiently authentic to
convince Microsoft Windows(tm) 9x that it has a DOS system to run on.
The environment is lightweight, flexible, and fast. Windows runs, and
Improv runs. (So does every other application which I have tried.)
Side note: On the obvious question, Microsoft Office(tm), I can't
comment - we had never been forced to sink low enough to buy any
Microsoft applications. But others report that Win4Lin emulates
DOS well enough for even Office to run.
So we got Improv working; we can still read and write our spreadsheets.
And Visio, which we bought before it was assimilated; we can still read
our diagrams. And WordPro; we can still read our contracts and
correspondence. We hope that most needs for legacy applications will
wither over time. Actually, we see it happening already. OpenOffice is
MUCH better than we expected; it looks like we'll be free of WordPro
sooner than we had dared to hope.
Side note: a recent, and unexpected, surprise: OpenOffice makes
it easy, even trivial, to create documents in PDF. When it came
to sharing formatted documents on the 'Net or in e-mail, WordPro
was no better than Microsoft Word(tm): a non-standard format which
not everyone could view, a proprietary, secret format. With
OpenOffice's PDF hooks we solved a problem in half an hour which
we had expected would eventually take weeks of research. This
certainly hastens the demise of our old, proprietary word processor.
For Visio, prospects are less bright, but the likes of DIA are coming along.
Improv will probably remain in service indefinitely, at least until some
happy day when there's a GNU version. (Gnumeric is VERY good for what
it is, and is suitable for casual use, but its user paradigm is the
despicable Excel "standard". Alas, when Microsoft was assimilating
spreadsheet competition, what it chose to embrace and extend was 1-2-3.)
Now, some essential characteristics of Win4Lin: the Win4Lin simulation
of DOS (and therefore of Windows 9x) environments comprises a small
directory tree in the Linux filesystem together with a Linux user ID.
You can make the directory tree belong to an existing Linux user, or
you can create a special user just for running Win4Lin. Or you can
create a number of users, each with its own DOS environment, and each
isolated from the others, and all of the isolated from your real
operating system and hardware.
Once you've done the initial Win4Lin setup, creating an entire new
"Windows system" is 30 seconds' work - you copy three directories.
Back to our story: here comes April. And the once-a-year need to run
another of those applications which is only available for a Microsoft(tm)
environment: in this case, tax-return-preparation software. Let me call
my chosen software "Turbotax".
In previous years it would have been necessary to find a Microsoft-based
system on which to do the &%$#$ taxes. (I find software help at taxtime
obligatory; I doubt if, by hand, I could even get the numbers to balance
in the bloated sheaf of forms the IRS requires today.)
This year it looked like everthing was in place to run the tax program
under Linux!
Guess what? It was true. Turbotax works fine. Win4Lin fakes a DOS
environment; Windows(tm) is happy and provides a real, bug-for-bug
compatible (although insulated) Windows environment; Turbotax is happy.
They all think they have a real machine to play with, but they're
actually just one (non-privileged) user on a real operating system.
They think they're accessing the hardware, although they're being fooled.
Their "C:" drive is just a small dedicated /home/win directory in the
Linux filesystem. They can't see the larger filesystem. They can't
access memory mapping registers. A segfault, if/when it happens, will
terminate just the Win4Lin user task - no more Blue Screen Of Death.
Side note: for some reason, segfaults seem less frequent under
Win4Lin. Perhaps most of the bugs were never in the applications
to begin with, but in Microsoft's so-called kernel?
(It's also true that applications seem to run faster on Win4Lin
than they do on "real" Windows, er, real DOS. But that may be
subjective.)
So I've been very pleased, and I'm happy to be able to share a story of
Linux squeezing Bill Gates's so-called software out of one small
enterprise.
Finally, here's the latest little success story, which started me writing
up all of this, having to do with privacy. (Or maybe privacy isn't so
little; you judge.)
The Turbotax "Windows system" (the Turbotax Win4Lin instance) is
isolated and has no other applications installed on it, having been
created in 30 seconds with a single bash command. Cheap. Far easier
than building a real Windows installation, even if spare hardware had
been available. Far more suitable, too - easily backed up in a tar
file and saved away afterwards. Completely unconnected to any other
work on that computer, or on any computer.
With the single exception described below, the Internet was not visible
during any time Turbotax was running. The computer was not connected to
any network. Conversely, that "Windows system" (i.e., that instance of
Win4Lin) will never again run when the system is connected to any network.
In fact, that instance of Win4Lin will probably never run again at all.
The whole thing (the three Linux directories) is now in a tar file on
CD-ROM.
The one exception: when, at initial startup, Turbotax asked to go to the
Internet to download the latest forms and changes in the law, I was willing
to give my permission. The "Windows system" in which Turbotax was running
had been created from scratch two minutes earlier. It contained no user
data.
After Turbotax downloaded its updates, I disconnected the computer from
the Internet. It had already been disconnected from the LAN. I then
indulged in all the pleasant tasks associated with entering another year's
worth of data for review by the IRS. Private work.
It was during this phase that I discovered something new in this year's
Turbotax: something which seems to be consistent, unfortunately, with a
spreading trend: "commercials" for other companies, and a "partners"
program. Several times I was greeted by an offer for Turbotax to pull up
a URL for 401(k) advisors, or for investment funds, or to helpfully
transfer information from someone on the 'Net to (or from?) my tax
return. SO convenient. SO very friendly of them. With the information
I had provided they'd surely be able to construct an ideal match with
one of their "partners".
I get nervous when ANY proprietary application initiates contact with
the Internet. Unless you do something like installing a packet sniffer,
you don't know, and can't know, what the application is doing - either
what it's bringing in, or what it's reporting back to the mother ship.
Side notes: from just my e-mail today (4/15/02) came pointers to:
"Win-XP Search Assistant silently downloads files",
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24815.html
"...Windows Media Player 'phones home' when you're watching DVDs..."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/24152.html
I believe I see several articles about this issue each week.
On a Microsoft system you cannot even know that an application run while
your computer is disconnected from the Internet is safe. It could write
a special file for a helper program to upload later. (I believe this
technique has been documented.) Or make entries - your SSN? - in the
"Registry"? And so on.
None of this untrustworthy computing has any place on a system into which
I load personal or financial data. My tax data! Yikes.
Although I didn't know it when I started, what I was going to need this
year was a one-time "Windows system". Isolate it (easy to do under Linux);
use it for one task; and then archive it.
Yeah, that's the ticket. "Throw-away Windows systems".
(But that's a tautology, isn't it? :)
-Bill
Thanks for reading, if you did. This was longer than I wanted.
---------------------------
If any of the things which I've learned during the conversion we did
here would be of use to others, I'll be happy to share and/or to help
out. Just give a call.
Oh yes. Good luck with your taxes!
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