Practical Technology

for practical people.

November 2, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Do open-source projects need strong leaders?

GNOME, the popular Linux desktop interface, took a hit today. Its popular leader Stormy Peters left GNOME for Mozilla to work on the open Web. GNOME, which has been struggling with getting its critical 3.0 release out the door, will be the poorer for her absence.

This got me thinking. How important our “leaders” to open-source projects? We tend to think of open-source projects being lead by top developers. Sometimes that’s true. Without Linux Torvalds, the top developer, would we have Linux, the major operating system or, as is the case the BSD Unix family, a handful of relatively minor operating systems? I don’t think so.

I’m not saying, just to get this out of the way, that FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the other BSDs are technically great and that they’re not used in many important sites. They are darn good and many top Websites and data centers use them. All that said though there are probably a hundred Linux users to every BSD user.

Without Linus though, I think “Linux” would just be another somewhat obscure Unix-like operating system. But do you have to be a coding wizard to lead an open-source project to success?

More >

November 1, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

ITworld review: Fedora 14 is leading-edge Linux

I like Fedora, Red Hat’s community Linux distribution, a lot. But, let me warn you right now, that it’s not a Linux for beginners. That’s not to say that the newest version of Fedora, Fedora 14 Laughlin, is hard to use. It’s not. But, if you need a lot of handholding as you explore Linux, I think you’ll be better off with Ubuntu.

To see what the latest and greatest Fedora could do I put it on my reliable laptop buddy, a Lenovo ThinkPad R61. This 2008-vintage notebook is powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500 and has 2GBs of RAM. I also tried it out on a Dell Inspiron 530S powered by a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800-MHz front-side bus. This box has 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chip set.

In addition, I tried, and failed, to get it to install on VirtualBox, Oracle’s desktop virtualization program. This turned out to be a known problem with VirtualBox and Fedora 14 betas. There are ways to work around it, however. I was finally successful in installing Fedora 14 on a VirtualBox virtual machine (VM) using Virtual Network Computing (VNC) to remotely connect to Fedora’s Xserver, but I can’t see many people jumping through this many hoops to get it to run on VirtualBox. I was, I should add, able to run Fedora 14 on VMware Player.

No matter the platform, once it was up, Fedora 14 basically worked fine. I add the qualifier because I did run into a number of small, but annoying, problems.

More >

November 1, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Herding Firesheep

The more I think about Firesheep, the network packet sniffer for dummies, the more I realize that end-users are never going to be able to deal with the problems that it brings to the table. Sure, there are lots of ways to handle Wi-Fi vulnerabilities from a user’s desktop. But, at the end of the day, the easier methods, such as forcing a site to set up a secure HTTP connection, won’t work with all sites and some people are too dumb to use any protection even after they’ve been told that they’re letting anyone look over their virtual shoulders.

Yes, there is now a Windows program, FireShepherd that knocks out near-by Firesheep users with a brute-force attack of junk packets. But, as the author of FireShepherd wrote, “the user is still in danger of all other session hijacking mechanisms” and “this is only a temporary solution to the Firesheep problem.” Exactly. I also wonder what transmitting a bunch of junk every 400-milliseconds or so is going to do to both your, and the network’s, overall throughput-nothing good I’m sure.

So, bottom line, the real solution to Firesheep, is going to have come from the Web sites and their owners. Firesheep’s author, Eric Butler, point that “The only effective fix for this problem [open, unencrypted Wi-Fi] is full end-to-end encryption, known on the web as HTTPS or SSL” is correct. There really isn’t any other answer.

More >

November 1, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Ubuntu 11.04 won’t be the same old Linux desktop

Ubuntu’s new Unity Linux desktop interface is the change that everyone is talking about, but it was far from the only change that Canonical and Ubuntu‘s developers are making to Ubuntu’s desktop. In fact, even without the change from straight GNOME to Unity, the developers are planning on major changes to the Ubuntu desktop.

We knew some of these changes were coming. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s founder, had already announced that Ubuntu would be moving from OpenOffice to LibreOffice for its default office suite. At this point, LibreOffice is 99.9% identical to OpenOffice. By the time Ubuntu 11.04 is released in April, LibreOffice is expected to have improved performance and increased interoperability with Microsoft Office 2007 and 2010 formats.

Some people had expected to see Ubuntu switch from Evolution to Mozilla Thunderbird for e-mail. That did not happen. Although many dislike Evolution — I’ve never understood this myself since I like Evolution’s do-it-all functionality — it was decided that Thunderbird simply wasn’t ready yet.

I’m not sure Thunderbird will be ready anytime soon. Although I was a Thunderbird supporter early on, the Mozilla Foundation hasn’t spent much time or effot in keeping Thunderbird up-to-date. The two main reasons why the Ubuntu programmers have deferred making Thunderbird the default e-mail choice are it’s lack of a built-in calendar and no Microsoft Exchange support. There were also my main problems with Thunderbird last year.

If you want a better, full-featured e-mail client in Ubuntu, my suggestion is to start working on cleaning up Evolution. I don’t see Thunderbird taking its place.

The most controversial change, other the switch to Unity for the main interface, is that Ubuntu is changing its default music player from Rhythmbox to Banshee. Personally, I welcome this move. Banshee is my favorite Linux music application. As I said when it was first introduced in 2006, Banshee is as close as you can get to an iTunes for Linux. I still think that’s true.

Banshee Media Player

While some people love Rhythmbox, and other music players like Amarok and Clementine have their fans, Banshee’s biggest opposition will come from those who hate that it uses Mono, the open-source version of Microsoft’s .NET infrastructure. For some people, the mere presence of Mono in a Linux distribution endangers it from Microsoft software patents taxes.

I don’t think that’s the case. Software patents are an evil that, as the current mobile phone sue-me, sue-you circus shows, don’t require the explicit use of a named technology. Besides, Mono users and developers already have Microsoft’s blessing. You may dislike using a program built on top of a Microsoft technology, but I don’t see any special legal danger in using it.

In any case, if you really can’t stand Banshee, Unity, or LibreOffice in the forthcoming Ubuntu, you’ll still be able to switch back to Rhythmbox, pure GNOME and/or OpenOffice. Personally, I’m looking forward to Canonical’s new take on the Linux desktop, but if you can’t stand it, you can have your desktop your way. After all one of Linux’s beauties is that you can always set it up just the want you want, not how someone else wants it to be.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

October 28, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Five Ways to Shear Firesheep

While bad Wi-Fi security is my major Firesheep worry, I know it’s already a major pain in the ass for everyone. Even as I wrote this, I see my fellow ZDNet blogger Ed Bott had his Twitter account hijacked by someone else in the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference press room. Fortunately, it was a friend so it all came out well. Since it wasn’t you that might strike you as funny. Just wait until it happens to you though and someone changes your Twitter or Facebook password on you. You won’t be laughing then.

So what can you do? Well, there are a lot of things. Some of them aren’t perfect, but they will protect you on most of the major sites. Here they are in their order of efficiency.

More >

October 28, 2010
by sjvn01
1 Comment

China has the top supercomputer in the world but it still runs Linux

If you want a really, really fast computer, there are all kind of ways to build the hardware architecture, but one thing that almost all of them have in common is that they run Linux. The top spot now appears to belong to the Tianhe-1A , which means "Milky Way," at a research center at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China.

I say "appears" because the official Top 500 Supercomputer List won’t be out until early November. Still, according to a New York Times report, Jack Dongarra, the University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the Top 500 ranking, said, the Tianhe-1A "blows away the existing No. 1 machine," which is a Cray XT5 Jaguar at the National Center for Computational Sciences. Dongarra concluded, "We don’t close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster."

How much faster? NUDT claims the machine is 1.4 times faster than Cray XT5 Jaguar. NUDT claims that the computer’s peak performance can hit 1.206 petaflops and jogs along at 563.1 teraflops. To do this, the Tianhe-1A system covers a square kilometer, weights in at 155-tons and uses 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs.

The software behind it? Linux of course. Linux has long been the operating system of choice for the world’s fastest computers. While NUDT hasn’t said which specific Linux they used, I strongly suspect it’s a high-speed optimized version of China’s Red Flag Software’s Red Flag Linux.

It’s not just supercomputers that have become Linux fans. Other high-speed, no-room-for-failure systems have moved to Linux. The one that comes first to my mind is the London Stock Exchange, which dumped its slow Windows/.NET system for Linux. It’s not the only one. Many of the world’s stock exchanges, where every millisecond counts, have either already switched to Linux or are planning on it.

The bottom line: when speed and reliability is what you have to have, Linux is the operating system you have to use.

A version of this story was first published in ComputerWorld.