Practical Technology

for practical people.

March 26, 2009
by sjvn01
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How to make a half-a-billion bucks with Linux

I find it hard to believe that there are still fools out there who don’t think you can make money, serious as heart attack money, with Linux and open source. Let Red Hat spell it out for you.

Red Hat reported its 4th quarter results last night, March 25th. I quote: “Total revenue for the quarter was $166.2 million, an increase of 18% from the year ago quarter and 1% from the prior quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $139.4 million, up 14% year-over-year and 3% from the prior quarter. For the full year, total revenue was $652.6 million, an increase of 25% over the prior year, and subscription revenue was $541.2 million, up 20% year-over-year.”

Anyone want to bet Red Hat’s total revenue will top a billion in 2011?

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March 25, 2009
by sjvn01
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Five great, obsolete operating systems

Before jumping into my own list, I should say up-front that not all of these systems are dead, or really even obsolete. My first two, OS/2 and NeXTStep, actually live on in evolved versions.

1) OS/2 Warp – Put aside all the fan-boy ranting about how it was the greatest thing since TOPS-20 (and if you get that reference, congratulations you really are a fellow operating system geek), OS/2 really was a great, solid 32-bit operating system, when everything else running on a PC was 16-bit.

Even now, there are parts of OS/2 I’d like to see revived and made open-source. In particular, I think OS/2’s SOM (System Object Model) could work well in Linux today.

So, if it was so wonderful why aren’t we using it? In part, it’s because Microsoft made it impossible for the PC vendors to profitably install any other desktop operating system. OS/2 was Microsoft’s first serious PC rival, and they did their best to bury it. The other reason why OS/2 isn’t a household name is that IBM never really gave it the support it needed to be successful.

OS/2, however, isn’t dead. It lives on in Serenity System’s eComStation desktop. If you want to see for yourself what all the excitement was about, try eComStation. Heck, you may even find yourself becoming a new OS/2 user.

2) NeXTStep – I was lucky enough once to own a Color Turbo NeXTStation. I still wish I had one. To this day, that 33MHz system gave me the smoothest combination of graphics, interface, and hardware I’ve ever seen on a PC. Mac OS X, the next best thing, is a direct descendant of NeXTStep.

You don’t have to have a Mac, a NeXT box, or a copy of the old NeXTStep for 486 installation disks, to see why I liked it so much. The Linux/Unix Window Maker GUI is designed to look and feel like the NeXTStep GUI. If you want to build NeXTStep-style programs, the 21st century version of the application framework, GNUStep, which uses a Cocoa/OpenStep API (application program interface), is still an active open-source project.

3) Interactive Unix SVR3.2 and RVR4 – Long, long before there was Linux, I was using Unix on everything from PCs to mini-computers. My first PC Unix was SCO/Microsoft Xenix on a 4.77MHz 8086 processor. Yes, you read that right; SCO and Microsoft once worked together and release a version of Unix. And, yes, Xenix on that processor was S L O W. The first Unix I really liked on the x86 family though was Interactive Unix back in the late 80s.

It worked well and it was quite fast. Unlike many Unix users, I didn’t have any trouble picking up System V’s command syntax, so I didn’t have the almost allergic reaction that many BSD Unix users had to Interactive and all the other System V Unixes of the late 80s and early 90s. To this day, System V style commands spring to my fingers faster than BSD equivalents.

Sun bought Interactive Unix and that was pretty much the end of it. Sun went on to create Solaris from System V Unix and its own BSD-based SunOS.

4) SunOS 4.1.4 – Speaking of SunOS, I’m one of those cranky people who still liked ye old Sun operating system. It’s always seemed to me that while adding System V goodies to SunOS was a fine idea, Solaris ended up having too many odds and ends added to it.

SunOS, which I used back in the day on everything from Sun-3 workstations to SPARCstations, was a very clean and fast operating system. OK, I admit Solaris has a lot of good stuff in it, like Dtrace and ZFS, but I’m sure I’m not the only one that liked the mean, trim, and ready to process SunOS.

5) BSD/OS – The BSD Unix operating systems, such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DesktopBSD and NetBSD, are all alive and well, but BSD/OS didn’t make it. I always rather liked BSD/OS, which was a commercial BSD, and I’m sorry that it disappeared from the scene.

It was fast, it has commercial support, and, unlike SunOS, it was going stay true to its BSD roots. It wasn’t to be though.

In a way, it’s because of BSD/OS that we have Linux now. BSD/OS’ creator, (BSDi) Berkeley Software Design Inc., ended up in what you could describe as the first of the open-source lawsuits — AT&T/USL vs. BSDi-in 1992. After Novell bought Unix and AT&T’s Unix System Laboratories, Novell dropped the lawsuit. In the meantime, though, little work was done with any of the BSDs. And, so a Finnish college student named Linus Torvalds decided to build his own Unix-like operating system. And, the rest as they say, is history.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

March 24, 2009
by sjvn01
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Novell’s marriage of Linux and Windows

Novell has just released the latest versions of its flagship operating system: SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) and SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) 11. You don’t have to be a Linux expert to quickly see what’s different about these Linux distributions. SLE is easily the most Windows-friendly of any edition of Linux in history.

How friendly? I’ve already been using SLED 11 for a few days and I can now say that you can manage SLED workstations with AD (Active Directory); read and write Office 2007 file formats; watch and listen to Microsoft Silverlight and Windows Media videos and audio; and work smoothly and fully with Exchange server. SLED’s the closest thing you’ve ever seen to a Windows desktop that’s actually Linux. For more on that, look for my SLED review in ComputerWorld later this week.

Novell and Microsoft’s partnership doesn’t stop at the desktop. Novell states that SLE will run at near-native performance on Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization. While I haven’t done any extensive testing of this, I have used a SLES 11 beta on Hyper-V running on Windows Server 2008, and it was darn fast.

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March 23, 2009
by sjvn01
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Oracle is not buying Red Hat

Oracle is not buying Red Hat The rumor mill has it that Oracle may be buying Red Hat. Don’t believe it. All it took was one mention that Oracle might do well to own Red Hat, but that the timing wasn’t right, by Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert for people to start talking up Oracle buying Red Hat. Folks, it’s not going to happen. IBM will buy Sun. Oracle buying Red Hat? No.

This isn’t the first time that Egbert has dreamed up fantasies of Oracle buying Red Hat in the minds of silly investors. She was wrong then. She’s wrong now.

Why? The reasons why it didn’t make sense in 2006 are still the reasons the move makes no sense today.

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March 23, 2009
by sjvn01
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TomTom gets allies in Microsoft Linux patent lawsuit fight

When Microsoft first sued TomTom for patent violations in TomTom’s Linux-powered navigation devices, I wasn’t sure how much of a fight TomTom would put up. Legally TomTom was between a rock and a hard place. You can’t use restricted use patents in GPLed software. If Microsoft just wanted to use the lawsuit as a hostile takeover tactic, TomTom didn’t have anything like Microsoft’s financial resources to fight them with.

But, while TomTom may be out-gunned by Microsoft, the OIN (Open Invention Network/) isn’t. TomTom joined OIN on March 23. The OIN is an intellectual property company that was formed to promote Linux by using patents to create a collaborative ecosystem. Its members include IBM, Novell, Sony, and Red Hat.

One of OIN’s initiatives is Linux Defenders, which also brings the resources of the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) and the Linux Foundation to bear against anyone who wants to try patent lawsuits against Linux.

Now, neither TomTom nor the OIN is saying they’ll use the OIN and friends’ patent resources against Microsoft. But, you’ have to be an idiot not to see that that exactly what they’re implying will happen if Microsoft want to keep pushing forward with its patent lawsuits.

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March 20, 2009
by sjvn01
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GNOME 2.26’s 5 Best Features

ince I’ve grown disillusioned with the KDE 4.x interface to Linux, I’ve been spending more time using the GNOME desktop. With the recent release of GNOME 2.26, I’m really happy I made the move.

I started running GNOME 2.26 on the Ubuntu 9.04 alpha a few days ago, and I’ve been pleasantly surprised. While the Ubuntu 9.04 alpha 6 is still very much a work in progress, GNOME 2.26 manages to run like a charm on it. I’ll soon be installing it on my other Linux distributions.

So why do I like it so much? Let me count the ways:

1) Exchange/Outlook mail compatibility.

The reason I hear the most anymore about why people don’t switch to the Linux desktop isn’t about the desktop itself or office applications. It’s always about not being able to get to Exchange or not wanting to leave years of Outlook mail in the virtual trash can. Those excuses won’t fly any more.

That’s because the latest version of Evolution, my all time favorite e-mail/groupware client, now has two killer features for users who might migrate from Windows and Outlook to Linux and Evolution.

The first one is that you can now directly import Outlook PST (Personal Folders) files directly to Evolution. That means you can bring your e-mail, contacts, appointments, tasks, everything from Outlook to Evolution. In the past, the only way you could move PST files, was to jury-rig an export/import system. This, by the way, isn’t just a Linux problem. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to help people move their PST data just from one PC to another with different versions of Outlook, and I don’t even want talk about the pain I’ve had in getting Outlook PST information into Microsoft’s Entourage for Mac.

The new Evolution, in my experience with Outlook 2003 and 2007 PST files, just does it. No fuss, no muss. Frankly, I found it easier to get PST data into Evolution than it is to move it from one version of Outlook to another.

Evolution also now has support for Microsoft Exchange’s MAPI (Messaging Application Programming Interface) protocol. This is Outlook’s native protocol. You could always get Evolution to work with Exchange using its SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) protocol and OWA (Outlook Web Access), but older versions of Exchange didn’t support it and some system administrators didn’t enable this option. Now, no matter what version of Exchange you’re using, or how it’s set up, you’ll be able to replace Outlook with Evolution.

For business use, I think this may be the single most important update for the Linux desktop in years.

2) Improved and integrated CD/DVD burning

And, now for a completely fun change, Brasero, GNOME’s CD/DVD burner has seen some really nice improvements. The new feature list is impressive: audio CD burning with audio track preview, track splitting, and volume normalization; multi-session support; integrity checks; a cover editor; and support for multiple burning back-ends. But, what I really like is that the disc burning is now incorporated into the other GNOME application. So, if you’re enjoying the video you’re watching in the Media Player, you can just burn it right from the player on a DVD.

3) Media Player extender support

Speaking of Media Player, the GNOME 2.26 version can now play video and music from UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) or DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) compatible servers. So, for example, you can use your GNOME desktop to watch say a movie from your TVersity, TwonkyMedia, or even Windows Media Player 11 video library. Apple’s iTunes, however, is neither UPnP nor DLNA compatible so you can forget about streaming media from it to your GNOME desktop.

I was, however, able to easily stream media to my GNOME desktop with the other three media servers mentioned. GNOME makes this happen with the Coherence DLNA/UPnP client. I have no doubt that many other Linux audio and video player programmers will shortly be adding Coherence to their back-end. Since its open source and use the DBus API (application programming interface), it’s easy to implement in other media programs.

4) PulseAudio/Sound Preference integration

Going hand-in-hand with the improved Media Player, GNOME has integrated the PulseAudio audio server with a new Sound Preferences tool. The result is that you not only get great sound, you get a remarkable level of control over your audio system. It makes it much easier to pick and choose which devices you’ll use to play or record audio and how each device will handle the audio signal.

You could do this in the past, but it usually involved a lot of manual tweaking to get things just right. Now, you do it on the fly from an easy to use GUI. This may be a small thing, but, to me, it’s a very useful one.

5) Improved support for multiple monitors.

I don’t often use multiple monitors. Multiple computers with KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) switches, yes; multiple monitors, no. Except, and this is a big one, when I’m making a speech or teaching a class. Then, I really, really want to be able to see both my computer’s display and the one that everyone else is seeing.

With the revised Display Settings tool, I not only get a lot more control over my displays, the system will automatically reset each display individually to its last known good setting if something goes terribly wrong. And, as anyone who’s done much public speaking knows, something always goes terribly wrong with projectors when you most need them to work flawlessly.

Finally, GNOME 2.26 just looks good and it’s faster than its immediate ancestor. I’m running it on a Gateway 503GR. This PC uses a 3GHz Pentium IV CPU, 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 250 graphics card, and a 300GB SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard drive. It is not, by 2009 standards, anything like a fast computer. Even so, I could tell in just a few minutes that the new GNOME was much more responsive on it than the last version had been.

Put it all together and you have an outstanding Linux desktop experience. If you’re already a GNOME user, I’d switch over as soon as your distribution supports it. If you’re a KDE user, you might want to give it a try, or at the least, look at its applications like Evolution and Brasero. I think you’ll like what you see.

A version of this story was first published in ComputerWorld.