Practical Technology

for practical people.

February 18, 2009
by sjvn01
15 Comments

Citrix to offer free XenServer virtualization

In a shot across VMware’s bows, Citrix will announce next week that it will be offering free licenses to its full XenServer virtualization program and new partnering with Microsoft to provide system management, Citrix Essentials, for Hyper-V and, in return, Microsoft’s System Center will support XenServer
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The virtualization wars are heating up. According to sources, Citrix Systems, the Xen virtualization company and long-time Microsoft partner, will announce on February 23rd that it will no longer charge for its flagship program, XenServer.

Citrix will not, however be open-sourcing XenServer. While Xen, the hypervisor itself, is open source, XenServer, according to Citrix, contains proprietary code that makes it much easier to setup and maintain and is a much more polished and reliable virtualization platform. In the past, XenServer 5 pricing started at a suggested retail price of $900 per server, regardless of how many CPUs or sockets were on the system. Starting soon, XenServer 5 won’t cost users a penny.

So how does Citrix plan to make money? By offering a new Citrix virtualization management product line that adds advanced virtualization management capabilities to both XenServer and Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization technology.

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February 18, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

How Many Linux Users Are There (Really)?

How many Linux users are there really?

It’s a darn good question, and there isn’t a darn good answer.

In one way, we’re all Linux users now.

As Jim Zemlin, the executive director of The Linux Foundation, points out, “I am not joking or trying to be trite, but the answer to this question is: every single person in the modern world every day. Everyone who searches Google, picks up a phone and uses telecommunication infrastructure, watches a new televisions, use a new camera, makes a call on many modern cell phones, trades a stock on a major exchange, watches a weather forecast generated on a supercomputer, logs into Facebook, navigates via air traffic control systems, buys a netbook computer, checks out at a cash register, withdraws cash at an ATM machine, fires up a quick-boot desktop (even those with Windows), or uses one of many medical devices; the list goes on and on.”

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February 17, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Debian 5’s Five Best Features

Despite delays and internal arguments, Debian 5, Lenny, has finally arrived, and it’s a darn nice Linux distribution.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Consider what Warren Woodford, the well-regarded Linux developer, who uses Debian for the foundation of his SimplyMEPIS Linux distribution. Woodford, who switched MEPIS’ cornerstone distribution from Ubuntu to Debian in 2007, said, “Behind the scenes, MEPIS is being used more and more in demanding environments, so I was happy the Debian teams decided to use the hardening features in gcc to increase the security of Debian in Lenny.

Woodford added, “I know a lot of our users were happy that Debian decided to continue supporting KDE 3.5. They like what they have and don’t want to be forced to learn the KDE 4 look and feel.”

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February 16, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Red Hat & Microsoft partner up!

In what came as a surprise to many Linux observers, Red Hat announced on the morning of February 16th that it has signed reciprocal agreements with Microsoft to enable increased interoperability for the companies’ virtualization platforms.

While Red Hat, after Novell partnered with Microsoft, had talked with Microsoft in 2007 about partnering, those talks came to nothing since Red Hat would not have anything to do with Microsoft’s various IP (intellectual property) claims.

Things have changed. Red Hat announced that each company will join the other’s virtualization validation/certification program and will provide coordinated technical support for their mutual server virtualization customers. The object according to Red Hat’s press statement is: “The reciprocal validations will allow customers to deploy heterogeneous, virtualized Red Hat and Microsoft solutions with confidence.”

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February 15, 2009
by sjvn01
0 comments

Ubuntu partners with HP on Servers

While HP was slow in supporting Linux on the desktop, HP has long supported Linux on the server. HP currently supports RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Novell’s SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), Oracle Enterprise Linux and even the community’s own Linux, Debian on its server hardware. Now, HP is about to start supporting Ubuntu on its ProLiant server line.

Canonical, Ubuntu’s parent company, has been working towards moving Ubuntu into enterprise servers for some time now. We tend to think of Ubuntu as the community favorite Linux and on desktops. Ubuntu started coming into its own as a server operating system in mid-2006 with Ubuntu 6.06LTS-the first Long Term Supported version. When Wikipedia chose Ubuntu to run its servers, Ubuntu officially arrived as a world-case server operating system.

HP agrees.

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February 13, 2009
by sjvn01
7 Comments

Moonshine brings Windows Media to Linux

When I first looked at Moonlight, Novell’s open-source version of Microsoft’s Sliverlight, I liked it, but I didn’t really see much of a point to it. Silverlight, Microsoft’s latest answer to Adobe Flash, isn’t used in many sites. What I liked the most about Silverlight was that it provided a fully legal way to access WMV and WMA (Windows Media Video and Audio) from Linux. Unfortunately, since you could only use it to get to content hidden in Silverlight streams, that didn’t seem to matter much. Now, it does matter.

It matters because Aaron Bockover has created Moonshine, a program that encapsulates any WMV or WMA content into a Silverlight container so you can view or listen to this content from your Firefox browser. Neat!

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