Archive for March, 2013

What’s going on with Ubuntu Certified Professional?

Monday, March 25th, 2013

Last week, I took the official Apple “Mac OS X 10.8 Essential Support Course” followed up by the official test. I passed so I’m a Apple Certified Technical Coordinator (ACTC) on top of all the other acronyms I hold.

Although I don’t work on Mac OS X every day, I have a good working knowledge of the general handling and the underlying OS. The course, which ran at quite a fast pace, summed up all the important points very nicely. The test featured the occasional tricky question and a score of 73% or higher was required to pass. And I passed.

We used the official Mac OS X 10.8 course book which contains precise information on Mountain Lion (although to be fair, the author probably only had to replace ‘Lion’ with ‘Mountain Lion’ to release a ‘new’ version or so). I actually understand now what happens after the kernel is loaded and what processes produce the login screen and what happens when a user logs in and so on.

On the other hand, the last official book on Ubuntu Certified Professional (UCP) was released in 2008 and was already out of date half a year later because of the energetic activism the good people at Canonical display all year round. No wonder that with all the changes that happened to Linux and all the changes that Ubuntu brought on itself, I still don’t feel secure about the internal workings on Ubuntu. Sure, there’s source code but I don’t think anyone actually reads that to get a general understanding of an OS. The man pages? Please! You mean those cryptic writings where the overview section is never really helpful because you need to have a PhD for reading man pages in order to understand them? Ah yes, the lack of useful examples is another gripe I have with man pages.

After passing LPIC 1, I was all fired up to become an UCP as well. But the lack of concise information put me off and the ever growing gap between the OS and the documentation put me off even more. Until today, no update to the Ubuntu Certified Professional book (available on amazon.com) has been released. I guess, even the author got fed up and felt he could use his time in better ways.  I sincerely doubt anything useful will be released in the future on that particular topic. And with Canonical pushing Ubuntu into a its own niche a bit more with every release, Ubuntu will have a hard time to become a viable candidate to compete against Windows in the enterprises – if that was ever their goal. Accordingly, the value of being a UCP shrinks and shrinks. Actually I’ve never really met anyone who was certified.

Maybe I should focus on LPIC 2 again, too…