Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 4, 2012
by sjvn01
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Open-source MariaDB, a MySQL fork, challenges Oracle

MariaDB, an open-source database management system (DBMS) and MySQL fork has been gaining inroads in enterprise software and its founders formed a foundation, the MariaDB Foundation, to promote its software.

Specifically, “the MariaDB Foundation exists to improve database technology, including standards implementation, interoperability with other databases, and building bridges to other types of database such as transactional and NoSQL. To deliver this the Foundation provides technical work in reviewing, merging, testing, and releasing the MariaDB product suite. The Foundation also provides infrastructure for the MariaDB project and the user and developer communities.”

This might strike you as much ado about nothing. What’s another DBMS in a world where Oracle owns the most popular open-source DBMS: MySQL? What makes it noteworthy is that a year after Sun brought MySQL in 2008 for a billion dollars, Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, MySQL’s founder went his own way and started his own fork of the DBMS. Today, we know that fork as MariaDB.

Open-source MariaDB, a MySQL fork, challenges Oracle. More >

December 4, 2012
by sjvn01
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 beta now available

On December 4th, Red Hat announced the release of the next beta for its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4 is now available. According to the company, the release includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature set and provides rich new functionality in the areas of identity management, file system, virtualization, and storage as well as productivity tools.

While still primarily a server operating system RHEL 6.4 is designed “for optimized performance, stability and flexibility to cater to today’s diverse workloads running in physical, virtual and cloud environments.” The shipping version of RHEL 6.4 is due out in the first quarter of 2013.

Perhaps RHEL 6.4 most significant improvement is that it will include Microsoft’s Hyper-V Linux drivers.These will improve RHEL’s overall performance on Microsoft Hyper-V and enable Microsoft Azure users to run RHEL 6.4 as persistent virtual machines.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 beta now available. More >

December 4, 2012
by sjvn01
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Apple TV and iTunes update news for cord-cutters

Setting aside the fantasies of Apple rolling out an Apple TV with a 40″ screen, Apple has been making some small, but significant, improvements in the mark 2 and 3 Apple TVs (ATV) with its latest 5.1.1 firmware update, and with the iTunes 11 release. 

The good news is that with the recently released Apple TV 5.1 firmware upgrade you’re able to use AirPlay to send audio content to AirPlay-enabled speakers and devices and use your ATV with multiple iTunes accounts. With the even newer 5.1.1 you get support for the Up Next option which gives you greater control over your musical selections. The bad news? Installing either or both is a pain in the rump.

Apple TV and iTunes update news for cord-cutters. More >

December 3, 2012
by sjvn01
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Shimming your way to Linux on Windows 8 PCs

Getting Linux to boot and install on PCs locked down with Windows 8’s UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot is still a major headache. However, Matthew Garrett, a well-known Linux developer who’s been working on fixing the Secure Boot problem, has just released a working UEFI boot solution for Linux distributors. This should enable many more versions of Linux to run on Secure Boot-imprisoned PCs.

Garrett, formerly a Red Hat programmer and now a security developer at Nebula, an OpenStack private-cloud company, announced on November 30th that he was “pleased to say that a usable version of shim is now available for download. … This is intended for distributions that want to support secure boot but don’t want to deal with Microsoft.”

This approach is not the same as the one that Garrett devised for use with Fedora Linux. That approach uses a Fedora-specific key that’s based on a Microsoft/Verisign-supplied Secure Boot key.

While that meant dealing with Microsoft, it was as Garrett had written earlier, “Easy enough for us [Red Hat] to do, but not necessarily practical for smaller distributions.” It’s also, as The Linux Foundation has found, in its so-far failed attempts to obtain a universal Secure Boot key for Linux distributions, really not that easy at all.

Shimming your way to Linux on Windows 8 PCs. More >

December 3, 2012
by sjvn01
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Windows 8: Desperately seeking mobile

For Steve Ballmer, the good news is that people are using Windows 8. Both StatCounter and NetMarketShare show Windows 8 has cracked the entry-level 1 percent of the desktop market barrier in its first full month of availability. Unfortunately for Microsoft, a close reading of its adoption numbers shows bad news as well.

First, here are the numbers. Windows 8 has popped up from from 0.41 percent to 1.09 percent, a gain of 0.68 percent. That’s not too surprising since, as anyone who went shopping on Black Friday knows, it was almost impossible to find PCs without Windows 8. However, Windows 7 hit a mark of 1.46 percent in its first full month out.

Thus, some of Windows 8’s gains came at Windows 7’s expense. Windows 7 barely moved up with a gain of 0.02 percent to reach 44.71 percent. Windows Vista–remember Vista?–continues to be the Windows that dare not speak its name with a loss of 0.10 percent to 5.70 percent, and XP dropped a quite large 0.84 percent to 39.82 percent. If you can do basic math, you can see the bad news for Microsoft here. Overall, Windows dropped 0.22 percent.

It’s a tiny decline, but with as much energy as Microsoft has been putting into marketing Windows 8, it still has to be disappointing. For PC vendors, who were already worried by desktop sales declines, it’s even worse news.

Windows 8: Desperately seeking mobile. More >

December 3, 2012
by sjvn01
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OSs are leaving the user out of user interfaces

We seem to have entered an age of computing that I didn’t see coming: the age of the terrible user interface. Windows 8 is leading the charge with not one, but two awful interfaces. That’s what I think, and so does the lord of all interface analysts, Jakob Nielsen. He said Windows 8 is “weak on tablets, terrible for PCs.”

But it’s not just Microsoft. GNOME, once the leading Linux desktop, is rapidly fading into the background because of bad design choices in GNOME 3.x. What’s going on?

I think the problem is that far too many people have forgotten UI 101 — make it easy — despite the availability of the handy acronym KISS (keep it simple, stupid).

Since back when Microsoft was still calling its brand-new interface Metro, I saw Windows 8 as a disaster in the making.

OSs are leaving the user out of user interfaces. More >