Practical Technology

for practical people.

July 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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RIP OpenSolaris

Goodbye, OpenSolaris. It’s been fun knowing you. Unfortunately for you, it’s become all too clear that your new parent company, Oracle, doesn’t want a thing to do with you.

I predicted that Oracle, which is a Linux company, was going to let OpenSolaris die from neglect, but most people disagreed with me. Folks insisted that Solaris was better than Linux and that Oracle would never let OpenSolaris die.

Sorry, folks. I may not be right a lot of the time, but I was right on this one. By April of this year, the OpenSolaris Governing Board had seen the handwriting on the wall. Or, to be more exact, they saw that Oracle wasn’t even giving them the time of day.

Now, since Oracle has continued to ignore them, some members the OpenSolaris Governing Board (OGB) are demanding that Oracle at least appoint a liaison to OpenSolaris’ leadership by Aug. 16, or they’ll disband the board.

I bet that “threat” has Oracle shaking in its boots. Oracle wants nothing more than OpenSolaris to vanish from the landscape. According to the OGB’s minutes, Jeb Dasteel, Oracle Senior VP and Chief Customer Officer, who never showed up for meeting, is reputed to have indicated that “The bottom line is that Oracle don’t have any information to pass on and that they’d like us to wait a couple of months before we make any moves to disband.”

I would have just killed the organization then and there myself — an option that was considered. Instead, the OGB has decided, rather forlornly, to give Oracle more time to ignore them before pulling the plug. As Simon Phipps, formerly Sun’s Chief Open Source Officer and member of the OGB, points out: “It became obvious to the OGB quite some time ago that Oracle is not interested in the sort of OpenSolaris open source community that the [OpenSolaris] Charter envisages.”

Exactly. It’s over. OpenSolaris’ only real future is as a fork, which would not be easy to pull off. Still, with enough interest from developers it could be done.

I’ve always had serious doubts about OpenSolaris’ future. By the time the “supported” version appeared in 2008, Linux wasn’t just established; it was already chasing Solaris, OpenSolaris’ commercial big brother, out of server rooms. And that was with Sun’s support.

Looking ahead, I doubt very much that OpenSolaris could be anything than it is already: a niche operating system. Yes, I know the arguments for why OpenSolaris is better than Linux. I also know the market hasn’t cared. In addition, for every OpenSolaris developer, they’re probably two dozen Linux developers. On the commercial front, Red Hat and IBM have just launched a new campaign to get people to move to Linux from OpenSolaris and Solaris entitled, “Where will you be when the Sun burns out?” Ouch!

OpenSolaris’ future was bleak even if Oracle had cared to support it. Without Oracle, the question for the OpenSolaris community now is where they will go next. I fear it will drop from being a niche operating system to first being an operating system just for hobbyists and then to the computer graveyard with the likes of OS/2. That’s a pity, since there really were great ideas in it and top-notch developers working on it. But, I see nothing else for it. Do you?

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

July 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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Ready or Not: Your Network is Moving to IPv6

You may have avoided moving your network to IPv6 for years, but you won’t be able to put it off much longer. Here’s why you need to plan for a transition.

Every few years there’s another panic about everyone running out of IP addresses. The terror that the Internet would simply run out of room is finally coming true. It’s not so much that computers are consuming the IP addresses; it’s all those smartphones, iPads, and other devices that require Internet access.

The Number Resource Organization (NRO), the organization that oversees the allocation of all Internet number resources, announced in January 2010 that less than 10% of available IPv4 addresses remain unallocated.

“It is vital that the Internet community take considered and determined action to ensure the global adoption of IPv6,” Axel Pawlik, chairman of the NRO, said in a statement. “The limited IPv4 addresses will not allow us enough resources to achieve the ambitions we all hold for global Internet access.”

IP addresses are allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which in turn is run by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). IANA distributes IP addresses to regional Internet registry (RIRs) who issue these addresses to ISPs and from the ISPs to you. “This is the time for the Internet community to act,” said Rod Beckstrom, ICANN’s president and CEO. “For the global Internet to grow and prosper without limitation, we need to encourage the rapid widespread adoption of the IPv6 protocol.”

When the Internet began (then called APRPANet), IPv4’s possible 32-bit 4.3 billion addresses looked like it would be more than enough. That was then. This is now.

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July 16, 2010
by sjvn01
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OpenSUSE 11.3: The Linux distribution for KDE lovers

I’ve been using SUSE Linux since its start in 1994 and then, as now, I like this strong desktop Linux distribution. Of course, openSUSE 11.3, the latest version, doesn’t look a lot like that vintage Slackware variant, but one thing has remained the same. Today’s OpenSUSE is a Linux for users, not developers or Linux technicians.

In particular, openSUSE 11.3 is the distribution for people who like the KDE 4.x desktop. While openSUSE offers baked-in support for more other desktop interfaces than most Linux distributions, such as GNOME 2.30.1 with a preview of GNOME 3.0 and the lightweight XFCE 4.6.2, it’s really the showcase for the latest in the KDE 4.4.4. While I’m still fond of the older KDE 3.5.x desktop interface, many users are fond of KDE 4.4 and, if you’re one of those people, openSUSE 11.3 is the Linux distribution for you.

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July 13, 2010
by sjvn01
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Windows 7 SP 1: You Don’t Need to Wait

If your business is like many, you’ve been waiting for Windows 7 SP1 before even thinking about moving from Windows XP to Windows 7. But with Windows 7, you haven’t really needed to do that. Out of the box, Windows 7 was ready to go.

Mind you, I say that as someone with little love for Windows. I think Linux makes a better desktop. That said, if you’re sticking with Windows and there was some reason to avoid moving to Windows 7, I’d be the first to say so. Instead, I find myself agreeing with Michael Silver, a research director in Gartner’s client computing group, who said, “The first Service Pack for Windows 7 is not necessary for the operating system’s stability and security readiness.”

Indeed, if you look closely at the Windows 7 SP1 beta, which I have (and you can download the Windows 7 SP1 beta here), you’ll see that – unlike, say, the jump from Windows XP SP 2 to Windows XP SP3 – this is not a significant upgrade. Indeed, Windows 7 SP1 is nothing more than a round-up of previous fixes already delivered through Windows Update.

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July 13, 2010
by sjvn01
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XP lives! Windows 7 dies?

OK, color me surprised. The last thing I expected from Microsoft was for the company to extend Windows XP’s life for an unbelievable ten-more years. I thought Microsoft might extend XP Home’s life for a while to try to keep Linux-powered netbooks at bay, especially those with Google’s forthcoming Chrome operating system under the hood, but the business XP line? Until 2020!? I never saw that coming.

You see I had though Microsoft was selling a lot of copies of Windows 7. Certainly, that’s what Microsoft has been saying. Last January, Microsoft CEO and chief cheerleader Steve Ballmer had claimed that, “U.S. retail data shows that Windows PC sales jumped almost 50% the week it launched.”On Black Friday, [NPD] reported that retailers sold 33% more Windows PCs than the year before. And for the 2009 holiday season a 50% increase in Windows PC sales from last year. Last year was a tough year, but these are still phenomenal numbers.”

I guess the word we should have been paying attention to in this speech was “tough.” A lot of other people have theories about why Microsoft is doing this. Of them all, I find Preston Gralla’s theory, that Microsoft did it to con… ah “get enterprises to buy Windows 7 now rather than later” to be the most persuasive. But, I don’t quite buy that one either.

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July 12, 2010
by sjvn01
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Will you be taking an e-reader or tablet to school this fall?

When I went to college, there were days I’d carry over 20-pounds of books to school in a backpack. Of course, we had it tough back then, “We used to ‘ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o’clock at night and lick the road clean wit’ tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit’ bread knife.”

Seriously, though, textbooks were, and still is, a major pain to the back, not to mention hurting my wallet. That’s changing now. The rise of e-readers, like the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook and, what I see e-readers’ replacements, tablets like Apple’s iPad, the Cisco Cius and the upcoming wave of Android Linux powered tablets will replace textbooks.

You can already use tablets to highlight sections in your e-books and add notes to them. It’s a bit clumsy though now. Barnes & Noble wants to make it easier.
In its just announced NOOKstudy program study, this application will integrates instant eTextbooks downloads with support for searchable lecture notes, the class syllabus, color slides and images, and other course-related documents, and more. If all goes well with the closed beta testing, you’ll be able to download the free NOOKstudy this fall.

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