Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 26, 2010
by sjvn01
2 Comments

Desktop Linux: When and how to add proprietary software to your desktop Linux

Some people hate the idea of adding proprietary software to their desktop Linux. For these people, there are Linux distributions such as gNewSense that use only free software. For the rest of us, who use distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE and Ubuntu, there are times we either want to, or feel forced to, add proprietary programs such as Adobe Flash or Skype or the ability to play proprietary audio and video formats such as MP3 or commercial DVDs to your Linux desktop. Here’s how to do it.

Before taking this path though, you should consider that there are many open-source programs that can deliver the same goods as proprietary software. For instance, Gnash plays most Flash animations and videos just as well as Adobe’s own Flash does. For an overview of free and open-source software that can give you the same functionality as Windows software, check out the Ubuntu’s Free Software Alternatives page. You may well find that you can get by without proprietary software after all.

If you can’t though, some distributions make adding proprietary programs easier than others. Linux Mint and openSUSE, for example, both include a great deal of proprietary software in their installation libraries. For these Linuxes, all you need to do to add Adobe Acrobat Reader to your desktop is just run the distribution’s default application installation program and in a minute or two, you’ll be viewing PDF files.

With other distributions, for example, the Ubuntu family of distributions, you must add a special repository to get access to the most popular proprietary programs and media codecs. In the case of Ubuntu, you’ll find the information you need in the Restricted Formats and the Mediabuntu pages. Fedora takes a harder line with such programs. The Fedora community does have a “Forbidden Items” page that explains how to go about installing proprietary software and some open-source alternatives.

So, your first move is clearly to see if your distribution has what you need to run non-free programs. If that doesn’t work, there are still ways to add these programs and codecs to your setup.

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July 26, 2010
by sjvn01
5 Comments

The most popular Web server Linux is…

Even a Linux fan might not have heard of CentOS Linux but, if you’re a Web or other edge-server administrator, I can guarantee you know about CentOS. That’s because, according to Web Technology Surveys, in July 2010, "For the first time, CentOS is now leading the Linux distribution statistics on web servers with almost 30% of all Linux servers."

What’s CentOS other than number 15 on DistroWatch’s list of popular Linux distributions? Officially, CentOS is an "Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.)."

What that really means is that CentOS is built from Red Hat‘s RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) source code, which is freely available at the Raleigh, NC company’s ftp site. It’s positioned as a free or low-cost server alternative to RHEL 5.

In short, it’s the RHEL for expert Linux users who don’t require Red Hat’s support contracts. Mind you, there are also CentOS support companies, but CentOS’ real market is businesses that don’t need hand-holding.

As the CTO of a major West coast Web site told me at OSCon, "We have a large commercial Web site serving tens of millions of page views a month with lots of advertising revenue. We like RHEL, and of course we looked at Red Hat. However, Red Hat’s subscription prices, at about a grand per server per year, were too much for us. We just didn’t see enough value in paying them for support since we already had experts in-house."

Another reason for CentOS’ data-center popularity is that CentOS is easy to set up as a server. I use it myself on my own Web servers. I find it easy to maintain, easier to manage, and very fast.

There you have the CentOS story in short. It’s not just Linux-savvy Web sites, though, that have adopted CentOS as their favorite flavor of Linux. Oracle, to create its Unbreakable Linux, an RHEL clone, uses CentOS as its template.

So, if you already have a lot of Linux expertise at your fingertips and want to run some serious Web servers, give CentOS a try. It’s not for everyone — there’s a reason why Red Hat does so well with its RHEL subscriptions — but for Linux experts, CentOS is a worthy Linux server alternative.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

July 22, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Android may have the phones, but MeeGo may get the cars

PORTLAND, Ore., — Google’s Android is already hot in smartphones, and it’s going to be hotter than hot in Linux-powered tablets. So, where does that leave Intel and Nokia’s embedded Linux, MeeGo? In the dust? Actually, it looks now like MeeGo is going to have its own niche where it will be the embedded Linux of choice: Car entertainment, Internet, and navigation systems.

Tomorrow, the Linux Foundation will announce that GENIVI, a non-profit auto industry alliance committed to driving the adoption of an open-source IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) reference platform. With members like BMW, GM, Peugeot Citroen, and Renault this is a big deal. These aren’t hangers-on in the car business; these are core car companies.

MeeGo will now officially be the next IVI reference release, Apollo. As such MeeGo will supply the Internet-aware multimedia in IVI such as rear-seat entertainment and built-in navigation and entertainment. Yes, you might even be able to Twitter by voice while driving your car if that’s what floats your boat.

MeeGo won’t be providing just the Linux. MeeGo, as Dirk Hohndel, Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist said at OSCon, MeeGo provides not just Linux, but the “full client Linux open-source software stack.” Android, by the by, uses its own Java-based middleware and interface instead of the more familiar Linux. This means that open-source developers with Linux desktop chops will find it relatively easier to program for tomorrow’s ‘smart’ cars.

As Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, said in a statement, “MeeGo has been built from the ground up for these types of applications. Because MeeGo is a truly open platform, the work GENIVI will do to extend the platform can benefit the project and all who use it. For developers, this is a great opportunity to harness the power of the MeeGo APIs (application programming interfaces) to target a variety of devices and architectures and extend their work on handset applications toward vehicles.”

Interested? You can start working with MeeGo today by downloading the platform. According to Hohndel, new releases of MeeGo will be coming out every six months, with the next edition coming out this fall.

And, presumably by the time the 2013 car models come out in 2012, end users, aka your kids in the back seat, will be able to watch streaming 4G videos on MeeGo-powered IVI entertainment centers.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

July 22, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Hack the government

Code for America has a rather novel notion. It is that the U.S. would be a far, far better place if we stopped complaining about local government and started hacking it

No, no, they don’t mean hacking it open. Well, actually, they do in a way. What Code for America would like to do is to open up city governments to citizens and move into the 21st century. That’s because, as Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media stated at the The O’Reilly Open Source Convention, we need to stop thinking of the government as a semi-broken candy machine and get to work on fixing it.

The “fixing it” part is where non-profit Code for America Executive Director Jennifer Pahlka wants to see developers start devoting their efforts. Why? Because she’s found that much of the government isn’t just using out-dated IT, it’s using idiotic IT practices.

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July 21, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Ubuntu Linux Brings IBM DB2 to the cloud

Portland, OR- Canonical., the company behind Ubuntu, has always had many user and developer fans. Enterprise business fans though? Not so much. Canonical hopes to change that with today’s, July 21st, launch of a virtual appliance of IBM’s DB2 Express-C software running on the Ubuntu cloud computing platform in private and public cloud configurations. The company also announced that IBM has validated the full version of DB2 software on Ubuntu 10.04.

This is all part of Canonical’s plan to make Ubuntu just as much an enterprise business player as Novell or Red Hat. Quietly Ubuntu has already, according to the company, “become one of the most popular guest operating systems on cloud services like Rackspace and Amazon EC2. Increasingly, it is also eing deployed as the host cloud infrastructure layer by private organizations and ISPs. IBM DB2 Express-C software will be available however Ubuntu is deployed on a cloud.”

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July 21, 2010
by sjvn01
0 comments

Are the days of books numbered?

Amazon has just announced that in the last quarter it sold 143 Kindle e-books for every 100 hardcover books it sold. Actually, that’s just the tip of the e-book iceberg. You see, Amazon also announced that in the last four weeks, it has sold 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover books. And, of course, that’s not counting free e-books or e-books sold in the Barnes & Noble Nook format, Apple’s iPad format and so on.

Paperback sales still dwarf both, but think about it. E-books have only really gotten popular since Amazon introduced the Kindle less then three years ago. Since then e-book readers, and what I see as their inevitable replacements, tablet computers like Apple’s iPad, have exploded in popularity. Vendors are now aggressively positioning e-books as textbook replacements and, lead by Barnes & Nobles, retailers are slashing e-book reader prices.

At the rate e-book sales are going, I think that the traditional hardbound book might be on its way to being a collector’s item as early as 2015. By 2020, paperbacks may well have joined them there. And, when 2050 rolls around, books may be seen in the same way we now see 78-RPM records — odd historical relics with little relevance to how we spend our lives.

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