Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 27, 2014
by sjvn01
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Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is sticking with MySQL

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu and its parent company, Canonical, said on Google+ that Ubuntu 14.04 would include MySQL 5.6. I asked Shuttleworth why he wasn’t using such MySQL forks as MariaDB. Shuttleworth answered, “We’ll be happy to include solid code from MySQL forks as they mature. Percona, SkySQL, MariaDB are all interesting and would be nice to make easily available.”

One major reason why Ubuntu is sticking with Oracle’s MySQL is that Oracle made the effort to get MySQL 5.6 to work properly with Debian and Ubuntu. Yngve Svendsen, Oracle’s Director of MySQL Engineering Services, apologized in a blog posting for Oracle’s neglect of some Linux distributions in the past. Svendsen wrote, “We closed a gaping hole in our distribution on Linux.”

Shuttleworth says Ubuntu is sticking with MySQL. More >

February 26, 2014
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu Unity to bring back local menus

Back in 2011, the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution made a major and controversial user-interface (UI) change. It moved from GNOME 3.x to its own GNOME-based UI design: Unity. One of its bigger design changes was to force all in-focus applications to use a single global menu. Things are different now. Marco Trevisan, one of Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, senior Unity developers announced that, with today’s HiDPI Retina-style displays, it is time to return to local application menus.

Ubuntu Unity to bring back local menus. More>

February 26, 2014
by sjvn01
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Back on track again

My apologies for Practical-Tech going dark for so long. I’ve been busy with other projects. I’ll be updating the site shortly with my newest stories and back-filling my older, missing tales.

Thanks for your patience.

Steven

February 25, 2014
by sjvn01
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Hello, MS-Android. Good-bye, Windows Phone

One Operating System to rule them all;
One Operating System to find them;
One Operating System to bring them all and in Android bind them.*

Or, some people would add, “in Google bind them.” But that’s not true: Android is much too open for Google to lock vendors in. Amazon proved that with its Kindle line, and now Microsoft’s smartphone company, Nokia, wants to show that Android will work well with Microsoft services too.

Yes, Microsoft is supporting Linux by way of Android. Do you really think — with the clock running down on Microsoft’s final acquisition of Nokia — that the Finnish phone company would make such a move without Microsoft’s full backing? I don’t.

I think Microsoft and Nokia have made a smart move. I’m not the only one.

Hello, MS-Android. Good-bye, Windows Phone. More>

February 24, 2014
by sjvn01
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Windows 7 lives!

More and more for Windows users, there’s no OS like an old OS

XP fans might finally have to get over it. Their favorite Windows operating system is on its deathbed. Oh, die-hards can keep running XP, but that’s just asking for trouble. If you can’t bring yourself to give up on Windows — and you can’t stand Windows 8.x — I’ve suggested that you stick with Windows 7. So guess what. Microsoft is going to let you keep buying new business PCs with Windows 7 Professional installed until at least February 2015, and it may be longer — a lot longer.

Consumer PCs are another matter. New PCs with Windows 7 Home Basic, Home Premium or Ultimate will no longer be available after Oct. 31, 2014. Or, will they?

Hewlett-Packard recently made headlines with an online promotion that discounts Windows 7 consumer PCs by $150, saying the four-year-old operating system was “back by popular demand.”

More than a month later, in late February, HP is selling new consumer PCs with Windows 7 at from $70 to $200 off. One model has sold out, suggesting that HP isn’t just talking a good game. Windows 7 is still popular.

Windows 7 lives! More>

February 24, 2014
by sjvn01
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IBM places billion dollar bet on BlueMix PaaS cloud

IBM believes it’s making a safe bet by opening its middleware stack to its SoftLayer Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)  cloud. They’d better be. Big Blue’s putting a billion dollars on the table.

This combination, called BlueMix, also makes use of Cloud Foundry, an open-source PaaS. BlueMix’s goal is to “enable developers to rapidly build, deploy, and manage their cloud applications, while tapping a growing ecosystem of available services and runtime frameworks.”

IBM places billion dollar bet on BlueMix PaaS cloud. More >