You might be wondering why you’re reading something about Linux in a blog related to design.  I’m about to answer that question.

I’ve always had a geeky side which has led to experimentation with other operating systems, such as FreeBSD, Solaris, and Linux.  I had a brief period about three years ago where I got rid of Windows completely and used Linux for about a year.  I had to go back to Windows to be able to run stuff like Flight Simulator (a secret addiction of mine), among others.  I also got tired of troubleshooting stuff.  When things work, Linux is great.  When something breaks, it can be a nightmare.

One of the things I’ve always thought is that, even though the Linux community is very talented with programming and development, they were seriously flawed in the design department, both in general taste and usability. Dominic Humphries states in his Linux is not Windows paper:

Projects frequently start out as one man’s toy. He does everything himself, and therefore the interface has no need of any kind of “user friendly” features: The user knows everything there is to know about the software, he doesn’t need help.

He’s right. You should see the Ahlera intranet.  Everyone here understands it and knows how to use it, but if you bring someone new they stare at the screen completely clueless.  That’s because our intranet is for our use and we know the level of competence that the people that work here have.  Our intranet does not work for any other company because it wouldn’t pass the minimum usability standards.  And yes, I know how weird that sounds considering that our studio focuses on usability.

This weekend I started to wonder what the Linux community was up to so I headed over to DistroWatch to read up on the news.  A good way of seeing which distros are hot is by checking out the Page Hit Ranking column to the right.  I saw a distro that I had never heard of before in the number 3 spot: Linux Mint.

I headed over to their website and was immediately impressed with the neat web design.  Compared to web designs such as the ones Damn Small Linux, CentOS, or Slackware have, this design is rockin’!  It is also funny to see how the first three third-party ad banners to the right highly contrast with the general design.

I downloaded a copy of their Elyssa release and ran it on VirtualBox.

Here’s Mint’s opening statement in their About Us page:

Linux Mint’s purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.

The tagline also stated that the distro was elegant:

From freedom came elegance

That’s what I was expecting.  An elegant distro.

When I got to the login screen I remember thinking: “Hmmm, will this be the one?”

A very neat, clean, and elegant login screen

The login screen was very nice and it started the long chain of neatness that ended up in me writing up this post.  As you can see it is very simple and it introduces the pinstripe concept that is present throughout the default UI to the user.

This is what Mints GNOME desktop looks like

The desktop is almost icon-free and very minimal.  The task bar is small and the “Start” button shows the codename of the version.  Notice how the pinstripes are present in the taskbar as well.  Very nice, very minimal, very good.

A clean menu that will let you find what you need immediately

The menu is very clean and elegant, as well as highly intuitive.

Mint has a standard terminal with quotes that can be turned off on installation

Mint has a custom feature added to the terminal with funny quotes and phrases along with simple ASCII art.  Some people might find some of them offensive so they can be turned off at the installation screen.  Notice that the daiver@mint appears in “mint green” color.  Nice touch.

Mint comes with GIMP

The GIMP is also included by default with the distro.  I still can’t use it with the dexterity that I have with Photoshop, but it has come a long way since I last used it.

Mint has an elegant and clean Control Panel

The control panel included with MINT was very intuitive, offering both icons and text.  Those of you used to Windows will feel right at home with it.

Visually, I’d say that this is one of the nicest default themes I’ve seen on a Linux distribution, even though I’m more of a KDE guy because of Amarok mostly, but I have to admit that I love what Mint did with GNOME.

Technically, I also have to say that Mint has been the easiest distribution to install and use that I’ve ever tried.  Up until mint PCLinuxOS was the easiest distro to deal with, but it has been officially displaced by Mint.  There’s a new version of PCLinuxOS coming out soon, so who knows…

Congratulations to the Mint team for putting together a visually appealing Linux distribution that is easy to use. It seems that the Linux community is starting to focus on the graphical aspect of their things, which is great news for everyone.  There’s nothing wrong with functional stuff.  The question is, why not make functional stuff that also looks good?

I think Mint and Ubuntu are two distributions that are working hard on it.

Today’s entry is of extreme importance.  It is about data safety.

A lot of people call us up and ask about the cost of making a website.  We almost always start out by saying that they will need two things before talking to us: hosting and a domain.  They’re usually surprised about the hosting part.  For some reason they seem to assume that we can actually host their website.

Why don’t we offer a hosting service?  Because we’re not engineers or system administrators.  We design websites and develop web applications.  That is our area of expertise. We do not have the preparation or the experience to take responsibility for fixing stuff on a Linux server when things break.  Because of this, we cannot assure the safety and continuity of our client’s data in a server.

This is a room full of people at most web design studios that are ready to help you should something serious happen to your server

What we can do at Ahlera is build robust applications and websites that interact with stuff installed in the server to obtain results, as long as the server itself is up and running. That bold part is the hard part to guarantee by a design studio.

I can think of two cases right now that will serve as good examples of this.  Six years ago I lost a server with several personal projects because it simply caught fire. I was hosting with a top company and the datacenter had all sorts of fire, intrusion, and flood security, but it happened.

What major Internet-related event took place in May 2006? If you’re addicted to tech news like us, you’d know that this was the month were The Pirate Bay’s servers were raided by Swedish police.  They pretty much came in and seized servers, routers, cables, harddrives, and other important stuff.  The problem is that those servers didn’t only contain data from The Pirate Bay; they also contained data for dozens of other clients of the same hosting company that had unquestionably legal content on it.  People that had nothing to do with The Pirate Bay (other than hosting with a company that has strong ties to it) saw their sites offline for a couple of days.  For someone who does business primarily on the Internet, “a couple of days” can be a lot more costly than you think.

There’s a variety of possible scenarios of things that can go wrong at hosting companies.  I just thought of two extreme cases, but think of the hundreds of simpler ones that I didn’t mention that could happen any given day.

Right now we’re developing and app for a client that needs two servers with two different configurations.  We planned the server specs based on our little app and helped in the hosting company selection process, but our client knows that our responsibility only goes as far our application. We guarantee our application and will fix any bug in it, but if those servers break, catch fire, or simply disappear, he has to call the hosting company.  Of course that we’ll help him out with what we can, as we’ve done many times, but he knows that we are not responsible for it.

If you have a design studio that offers hosting and don’t have a system admin on payroll, you should ask yourself the following questions:

• Does my client know and understand my responsibility limits?
• Do I have a signed document from my client stating that he knows my limits?
• Do I make remote nightly backups of every email, database, log, and other file that belongs to my client should RAID1 fail?
• Am I in a position to withstand going to court if a client loses all the data he’s hosting with me?

If you’re a client that hosts with the same people that made your website maybe you should call them up and ask them the following:

• Do you have backups of all my data, including emails, databases, logs, and other files on a server other than my own?  There’s no point in keeping a backup in the same computer for obvious reasons.
• How often do you make these backups?
• If something bad were to happen right now and all data on the live server was lost, how long would it take to have me back up and running?

Web design and hosting are two completely different things.  They are almost as different as apples and oranges.

We hope that this helps both clients and studios realize the importance of data and why it is best to let real engineers handle it.

Welcome to Ahlera’s new website! My name is Daiver Pedemonte and I manage client accounts in Ahlera.  My job is to make sure that our clients know at all times the status of their projects and make sure that I have answers when they need them.  My tasks also involve planning projects, setting deadlines and making sure that we keep them! This allows designers to design and programmers to program, without worrying about anything else.

Our blog will hopefully help maintain an open communication channel between the studio and “the outside”.  We’re looking forward to letting people know what we’re up to but, most importantly, hear what you have to say about us!

If you want to follow us through Twitter, please feel free to do so.  You can also keep up with what’s playing in the studio via our Last.fm account.

Anyway, we’re still finishing our website, so please excuse the mess.