dotBSD
The ongoing browser and OS wars at work are heating up. Even though all our phone support staff needs to do is troubleshoot windows problems (and the occasional Mac problem) we have begun installing Linux and FreeBSD on machines in order to be cooler. We also have one Mac in the office which has been recently upgraded to OS X 10.2. It’s very cool I think. I’ll get to the Mac thing in a second.
Browser wars:
Our boss gave us to go ahead to drop Netscape 4.x support after we showed her numbers that IE was at 90%+ market share in most surveys. I’ve been using Mozilla for over two years now as my primary web browser, and at work I had managed to convert a few of our developers to use it occasionally. Phoenix changed all that. Since I move around machines each time I’m in the office, every machine in there has a different nightly build of Phoenix on it, with a slightly different set of bookmarks. About a month ago, random people from work started talking to me about Phoenix and how it is their new default browser on their home machine. Wow I thought. Next thing I know it’s on a staff CD with drivers and ad-aware and the IE 6 install. Turns out the staff is installing Phoenix on students computers where IE is too hosed to work. Since Phoenix is based on Mozilla and has a totally different networking code than IE, it usually works when IE doesn’t.
OS wars:
There are a few die-hard Mac fans at our work. I have used OS X 10.1 a few times and grew to like its mail client and its overall simplicity. Now that we have OS X 10.2 I’ve given it another whirl, and I am pretty impressed. ICal is pretty sweet and I made a few calendars with my schedule today. Then I got to thinking… All of these die-hard Mac fans paid for .Mac accounts and that always bothered me because all they are getting is access to a few web-apps, and about 100MB of storage on a webserver. So I export my iCal calendars to home and set out to create my own .Mac service: dotBSD. That’s right, I run FreeBSD as my server, and I’m gonna show it off. I can offer webmail, calendar browsing, and Gig’s of storage all for free! Now I still need to nail down which webmail package to use, but right now I’m using squirrel mail and it’s pretty decent. The coolest part of the package is phpicalendar. It supports the open standard ical. This format can be used in Apple’s iCal, Ximian’s Evolution, and of course the Mozilla calendar. I can share calendars between all those programs. Over the next few weeks I’m gonna try and spiff up the look and feel so its consistent across the webmail and calendar portions.