Posted on October 31st, 2008 by Jim
Category: Code, Linux, Open-source
Tags: Linux
Ubuntu 8.10 Cruft Remover
Updated my Ubuntu to 8.10 this week and have been poking around the new features.
Yesterday I found “Cruft Remover” under the System > Administration menu. I assumed it was something similar to CCleaner on Windows. CCleaner scans your system and finds UNused items which are safe to remove. Unfortunately the Cruft Remover tool itself provides no information or help only a “Cleanup” button which I gleefully pressed.
Unfortunately it appears to have deleted several apps I use regularly. Oops.
VirtualBox? Gone.
Air/Twhirl? Gone.
Not sure what else is missing. But they definately need to improve the usability of this tool. So if you have upgraded - beware of Cruft Remover!
Posted on October 30th, 2008 by Jim
Category: Code, Open-source, Tools
A few years ago when I first became enamored with wikis I looked around and found Twiki. It was a great tool and since then I’ve occasionally checked on its progress. Once again I’m looking for a wiki for work and while we are considering purchasing a copy of Confluence, Twiki has been my second choice if funding doesn’t come through.
Today however I was shocked to see the Twiki community has imploded. It appears Peter Thoeny (Twiki’s creator) has created a new company Twiki.net with the hopes of selling a commercial version of Twiki and in the process has completely fractured the Twiki community. Slashdot has a great post about it here: TWiki.net Kicks Out All TWiki Contributors. The comments as always are great.
It will be very interesting to see how this plays out in the open souce community. Without a developer base I can’t see how the new company will survive unless it has money to hire people to write code. Luckily it IS open source and the community is already working on a fork tentatively titled NextWiki and they have a lot of news and links on their site.
Will people leave Twiki for the new fork? Will people pay for a commercial version of Twiki with so many other free wiki products (Mediawiki) flooding the market?
A few years ago the Mambo (CMS) project broke down in a similar fashion and Joomla was created which has gone on to become a very successful project so there is the possibility this could end positively as well. Only time will tell.
