Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 9, 2010
by sjvn01
3 Comments

Arch Linux for Linux fundamentalists

Most users like their operating system to be like their cars. They stick in the key, turn on the ignition, and off they go. For these users, I recommend Ubuntu. But, if you’re the kind of person who likes a car with manual transmission and getting your hands dirty under the hood, then Arch Linux deserves your consideration.

You can, of course, just build Linux from source code, or use a distribution such as Gentoo or Linux from Scratch (LFS) that relies heavily on Linux source code. Those distributions though are best left to developers and other people who know their way around programming. Arch Linux, on the other hand, is suitable for Linux power users who still prefer the command line interface (CLI) to GNOME or KDE.

Believe it or not, there are still people who find the CLI to be the most comfortable way to get the most out of Unix or Linux. I should know. I’m one of them. It’s not that Arch doesn’t let you use a GUI; it’s just optional.

I strongly suspect that’s why Arch is as popular as it is. Arch Linux is currently, as of early December 2010, number eight on DistroWatch’s Linux distribution page hit list.

You see, Arch Linux, without requiring you to master kernel compiling 101 gives you an enormous amount of control over how Linux will run for you. That starts from the get-go.

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December 8, 2010
by sjvn01
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Verizon gets into the Business IPv6 Market

Some of the major ISPs are finally getting a clue and realizing that they need to help their corporate and government customers move to IPv6. Verizon, with its new Verizon IPv6 Transition Professional Services, has announced that its ready to help organizations navigate through IPv6 omplexity to assess and ensure their readiness for the IPv6 Internet.

It’s about time! The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced at the end of the November that we’re down to 2.73% of the Internet’s available IPv4 addresses). In short, we’re running out of IPv4 addresses even faster than the experts had predicted.

According to Waliur Rahman, Verizon’s Professional Service Manager of its IPv6 Practice, the new Verizon IPv6 Transition Professional Services will span the IPv6 implementation lifecycle and comes in three divisions:

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December 8, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Well-known, open-source advocate Matt Asay leaves Canonical/Ubuntu

In an unexpected move, Matt Asay, Chief Operating Officer (COO) for Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, will be leaving Ubuntu.

In an e-mail to me, Asay, former VP of Business Development at Alfresco, the open-source enterprise Content Management System (CMS), told me that the news of his depature from Canonical would be be announced internally at Canonical today, December 8th.

Asay is leaving Canonical, because “Basically, I needed to get back to a customer-facing role but hadn’t realized that until my good friend, Bryce Roberts, pinged me about a company he had invested in (Strobe). I hadn’t been looking around but agreed to meet with Charles [Jolley], the founder.”

Strobe, has already raised $2.5M from Tim O’Reilly’s venture fund, O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures (OATV) and Hummer Winblad. The company is using the money to build a platform for delivering touch-driven web applications, based around the open-source SproutCore framework and HTML5.

Asay continued, “It’s a very early stage company (founded in July) and as we talked, I realized that much of what they needed was what I had enjoyed so much at Alfresco: early spadework with customers and partners, plus figuring out business models and evangelizing new ways to be open. It didn’t hurt that that company’s early focus is on the publishing industry, a market and challenge I love.”

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December 8, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Google’s Chrome OS is here… sort of, kind of

Ready to get a copy of Google Chrome OS and test the heck out of it? I was. But, neither of us is going to be able to do it anytime soon. Feh!

Unlike some people I could mention-cough, Zack Whittaker, cough-I do think Google’s Linux-based Chrome OS is far from being redundant and does matter. Potentially, it will matter a lot for business users. Unfortunately, I can’t tell for certain yet.

I can’t tell because instead of releasing a CD or DVD image of the operating system, or even source code for those of us who aren’t afraid to compile operating systems. Google just announced today, December 7th, 2010, that in its Chrome OS “pilot program” that a beta netbook, the Cr-48, will be available to a select group of beta-testers.

Boo! I wanted a beta I could slap on my netbook, an older Dell Mini 9, or into a VirtualBox virtual machine (VM). I think Google is missing a trick here. I, and a few thousand other Linux users who change operating systems and Linux distribution at the drop of a Red Hat, would love to take Chrome OS out for a ride. Most of us would then be more than happy to report back what we found and how it could be improved.

Oh well, so much for that idea. Instead, I’ll just have to petition Google for one of its un-branded Chrome netbooks along with everyone else.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/googles-chrome-os-is-here-sort-of-kind-of/7930

December 6, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

The Internet’s IPv4’s Clock is Ticking Down

We all know that the Internet’s supply of Ipv4 addresses is running ever lower. What you may not know is that IPv4 exhaustion, when we’re completely out of available IPv4 addresses, is approaching even faster than the experts expected.

The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) announced at the end of the November that we’re down to 2.73% of the Internet’s available IPv4 addresses. In case you haven’t been watching, that indicates that the long expected run on IPv4 Internet addresses has begun.

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December 5, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

The Three Differences between Chrome OS and Android

On December 7th, Google is expected to announce the release of a laptop with the first version of the Chrome operating system. Concurrently, Google is going great guns with Android. Does Google really need two operating systems? So what’s going on here?

Here’s what Google is up to. Yes, both Android and Chrome OS are Linux-based operating systems. Neither, at the application level, uses the common Linux desktop application programming interfaces (API) that are used by the GNOME or KDE desktops and their applications.

They’re also similar in that both use a common set of techniques to make them more secure. The most important of these is process sand-boxing. What this means is that any Chrome or Android application has just enough access to the system to do its job.

Once you’re past this, the two look and act in very different ways. Here are their main points of difference:

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