From showusthecode.com, an open letter to Steve Ballmer.

It’s come to many in the Linux community’s attention you have claimed again and again, that Linux violates Microsoft’s intellectual property. Not only that, but it’s been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can’t provide. Therefore, this website will serve as a response to this accusation, and within it, a request. The request is simple, since you, Microsoft, claim to be so sure of yourself: Show Us the Code.

Desktop Linux is great. I’ve discovered KMail and Kontact which so far seems to be a little nicer to use than Evolution. Still having a few issues with sound which is a bummer as I love the interface on amaroK and can’t wait to start using it properly.

The other day I upgraded the old IBM Netfinity with a 250GB hard drive. Had no major issues changing over the home partition. Picked up a printer on Trademe for a fiver, and got that installed and set up with CUPS in no time. Can now print from anywhere around the house (or garden) thanks to that and the wireless network.

I’m having plenty of fun with Linux on the laptop at the moment. Ha ha – I love the penguins at easy urpmi. I get the feeling that I’m going to love urpmi too.

I was asked to download a copy of Sun’s Solaris and in the process needed to install the Java runtime environment on my Linux server/mess-about-workstation. Sun have redesigned their website since I was last there, and it looks great.

I found it odd that it didn’t work correctly in Konqueror as it’s a browser for Unix and Linux, and that it didn’t look right in Firefox on Windows 2000 either. I found it particularly odd as the CSS was invalidated by the inclusion of Proprietary Mozilla CSS Properties. So you think they’d have checked it in Firefox right? So why the overlapping blocks of text?

And it’s a shame to see that the HTML didn’t validate either. Still, I guess there’s still a few more years of being able to use the excuse “well our site is run by a CMS so you see we couldn’t quite get it to validate”.

Anyhoo, not to focus on the negative for too long, I think it’s a great looking site and I’ve been able to find all the stuff I’ve needed during my visits.

Update:OK, the visual rendering now seems to be fixed in both browsers – they were probably updating the homepage.