Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 2, 2008
by sjvn01
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MySQL 5.1 released with crashing bugs

Wow. Talk about your disgruntled employees. Michael ‘Monty’ Widenius, MySQL’s founder and, for the moment, still Sun’s CTO for its MySQL division, greeted the GA (general availability) of the latest version of the popular open-source database system MySQL 5.1 by writing, “I am asking you to be very cautious about MySQL 5.1 is that there are still many known and unknown fatal bugs in the new features that are still not addressed.”

This is the GA release!? This sure doesn’t sound like a ready to go to work software release to me! In fact, according to Widenius, the long-delayed release of MySQL 5.1, is anything but ready for production use.

Widenius went on to write in his blog, Monty Says, “If you are using MySQL 5.1 just as a ‘better’ version of MySQL 5.0 and you don’t plan to use any of the new features in MySQL 5.1 then you are probably fine to try out MySQL 5.1. You should however not put it into production without testing it fully, preferably by running it on a couple of slaves for some weeks. It may even be the best to wait for a couple of minor/patch releases before putting the MySQL 5.1 server into production.”

But, Widenius goes on, “Don’t expect that all critical bugs that you may have encountered in 5.0 to be fixed in 5.1. Even if we have fixed a big majority of the bugs from 5.0 some really critical ones still haven’t been addressed.” That’s not exactly reassuring.

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November 30, 2008
by sjvn01
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Atheros Wi-Fi goes open-source, Linux friendly

If you use Wi-Fi on your laptop, there’s an excellent chance you’re using Atheros chipsets for your wireless networking. Atheros’ silicon is in gear from Linksys, D-Link and Netgear to name but a few vendors. However, although Atheros has been popular, they haven’t always been friendly to open-source and Linux developers. That has been changing over the years and now, thanks to Sam Leffler, noted open-source developer, the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) for Atheros’ ath5k and ath9k chip families.

This is another major step in opening up hardware for Linux, Free BSD, and the other open-source operating systems. Earlier this year, Atheros released an open-source driver for its latest 802.11n chipsets.

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November 28, 2008
by sjvn01
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Picasa 3: Great Linux photo software

I have a confession to make. There’s no software on earth I can’t make dance and sing… except for photography programs. Whether it’s Adobe Photoshop CS4 on a Mac or GIMP 2.6.3 on Linux, I’m a klutz. So, when I need to make my holiday photos look halfway decent, I try my best with easy to use photo programs like Photoshop Elements 7 or Google Picasa. While I’d like to see more Adobe programs, on Linux with Google’s new release of Picasa 3 for Linux now here, I’m in no hurry to see Photoshop Elements on Linux.

Don’t get me wrong, Picasa doesn’t has all of Elements’ features. After all, these days Elements is really just the low-end version of Photoshop rather than a program for casual photographers like yours truly. For me, and for the millions of others who find getting rid of red-eye in photos the biggest challenge they’ll ever tackle, Picasa is more than enough program.

I installed the new Picasa, which like all Google programs is a free download and labeled as beta software on two systems. The first is my new main Linux desktop system. This is a Dell Inspiron 530s, powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front side bus, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive, and an integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) running the Debian-based SimplyMEPIS 8. My other test computer is my openSUSE 11 powered ThinkPad R61 with a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor T7500, 2GBs of RAM, an 80GB hard drive and an integrated Intel 965 GMA.

Underneath the hood, Picasa isn’t a native Linux application. It’s actually a Windows program running under Wine, an open-source version of the Windows API (application programming interface). No matter, on both computers, the program ran flawlessly. And, better still, it did a flawless job of making my photos presentable.

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November 26, 2008
by sjvn01
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The world’s fastest computers are Linux computers

There are fast computers, and then there are Linux fast computers. Every six months, the Top 500 organization announces “its ranked list of general purpose systems that are in common use for high end applications.” In other words, supercomputers. And, as has been the case for years now, the fastest of the fast are Linux computers.

As Jay Lyman, an analyst at The 451 Group points out, Linux is only growing stronger in supercomputing. “When considered as the primary OS or part of a mixed-OS supersystem, Linux is now present in 469 of the supercomputer sites, 93.8% of the Top500 list. This represents about 10 more sites than in November 2007, when Linux had presence in 91.8% of the systems. In fact, Linux is the only operating system that managed gains in the November 2008 list. A year ago, Linux was the OS for 84.6% of the top supercomputers. In November 2008, the open source OS was used in 87.8% of the systems. Compare this to Unix, which dropped from 6% to 4.6%, mixed-OS use which dropped from 7.2% to 6.2% and other operating systems, including BSD, Mac OS X and Windows, which were all down this year from the November 2007 list.”

Microsoft is proud that a system running Windows HPC Server 2008 took 10th place… behind nine supercomputers running Linux. Even then, this was really more of a stunt than a demonstration that the HPC Server system is ready to compete with the big boys.

You see, there are no Microsoft programming tools to write supercomputer compatible applications. That will come years from now with Visual Studio 2010 and when Microsoft’s F# is more than a research project language. In short, Windows HPC isn’t ready for prime-time.

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November 25, 2008
by sjvn01
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Red Hat’s winning Fedora 10 Linux arrives

What’s the difference between a cutting-edge and a bleeding-edge product? A cutting-edge product is the newest of the new and it works. A bleeding-edge product is the newest of the new and it ‘sort of’ works. You’ll end up making a bloody mess of yourself with most bleeding-edge programs. Fedora 10, however, is a true cutting-edge Linux distribution.

Paul Frields, Red Hat’s Fedora project leader, told me that this ‘decade’ release of Fedora was the best ever without any significant bugs. Yeah. I’ve heard that before.

You know what though? Based on my early work with Fedora 10, Frields’ right. This is one clean, mean cutting-edge Linux distribution.

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November 21, 2008
by sjvn01
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SimplyMEPIS: The best desktop Linux you haven’t tried

Nowadays, everyone uses Ubuntu, most people have used Fedora, and many folks have tried openSUSE. SimplyMEPIS … not so many. That’s a shame, because this relatively obscure Debian-based desktop distribution from Morgantown, WV, is an outstanding desktop operating system. With SimplyMEPIS 8 at beta 5 and closing in on release, I tested the distribution and found it to be a keeper.

I downloaded SimplyMEPIS from one of its mirror sites and burned the ISO file to a CD, then installed it on a Dell Inspiron 530s, powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front side bus, 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 Graphics Media Accelerator.

On this system, I started by running SimplyMEPIS from its live CD. It ran without a hitch, so I moved on to installing the distribution. The SimplyMEPIS installation took approximately 15 minutes. I opted to use ext3 for my filesystem, rather than ext2 and ReiserFS; it’s not the fastest or most up-to-date journaled file system, but it’s about as stable as they come.

Like most modern Linuxes, SimplyMEPIS can use the entire hard dark for the distribution, or you can modify an existing partition table with GParted. I opted to shrink down the existing Windows NTFS partition, delete the factory-installed recovery partition, and create a main primary partition and a separate primary swap partition. GParted made it easy to do, and reminded me that not so long ago changing and configuring hard drive partitions required equal parts magic and hope.

single CD distribution, MEPIS offers a limited selection of KDE 3.5.* packages out of the box. To get other software choices, you’ll need to download them from the Debian and MEPIS software repositories. SimplyMEPIS boots into a KDE 3.5.9 desktop. SimplyMEPIS’s developer, Warren Woodford doesn’t care for KDE 4.x, so he’s elected to stick with classic KDE. The older software works just fine.

The distribution itself is built on top of Debian 5 (Lenny), which hasn’t yet been released. Even so, Woodford isn’t waiting on Lenny’s release to include newer software. For example, SimplyMEPIS uses the 2.6.27.5 kernel.

You’ll also find the newest software among SimplyMEPIS’s applications. The distribution includes the newest version of Sun’s VirtualBox virtual machine, virtualbox-ose 2.0.4; the latest OpenOffice.org office suite, 3.0.0-4; and Firefox 3.0.3-3. Curiously, SimplyMEPIS 8 doesn’t include Firefox’s email sibling, Thunderbird, in its basic package. Instead, its default email program is KMail.

Of course, since SimplyMEPIS comes with the Synaptic package manager and the Debian Lenny and SimplyMEPIS repositories ready to go, installing Thunderbird, or in my case, the GNOME Evolution mail client, is no trouble at all.

While working with the applications, I found one odd error. While the distribution came with the new Adobe Flash Player 10 browser plugin installed, it would not display Flash video in Firefox. I finally solved the problem by reinstalling Flash Player from the repository.

For all other purposes, over days of use, SimplyMEPIS worked flawlessly. I used my usual applications — Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice.org, Pidgin for IM, Banshee for music, and Konqueror for file management — and everything went as smooth as silk.

Of course, I could have used any other KDE-based distribution and gotten pretty much the same results, but SimplyMEPIS’s greatest charm is that it works so well as a seamless whole.

While you might get similar results from any KDE-based distribution, SimplyMEPIS offers something extra in its collection of four system tuning tools: MEPIS Network Assistant, MEPIS System Assistant, MEPIS User Assistant, and MEPIS X-Windows Assistant. You can get to these from the main KDE menu’s System option.

Each of these brings together important Linux controls in a logical, easy-to-use way. For example, the Network Assistant gives you control over all your network interfaces, both Ethernet and Wi-Fi, as well as DHCP and DNS settings, and lets you stop and restart network interfaces. Sure, you can do that with other Linux distributions, but SimplyMEPIS puts all the network controls you need in one place so you don’t need to search for them.

Two of the other assistants add even more functionality. The System Assistant, besides enabling you to change your computer’s name, domain, and Samba/Windows workgroup/domain and repair your boot or partitions, also lets you clone your existing desktop to a bootable USB drive. Lots of distributions, including Fedora 9, let you set up a Linux desktop on a USB drive, but, to the best of my knowledge, SimplyMEPIS is the only one to make it duplicate the one you’re already using to take with you on the road.

The MEPIS User Assistant enables you to copy or sync between desktops. Your choices include copying or syncing your entire home directory or just your mail, Mozilla, documents, or configuration directories. It’s a pretty darn handy tool both for backups and for moving from one PC to another.

The overall impact of SimplyMEPIS’s smooth integration and its user-friendly utilities is to make it a truly outstanding Linux desktop. I’ve been using desktop Linux for more than a decade, and I keep coming back to SimplyMEPIS. Version 8 is good enough that I’m not taking it off my test machine. Instead, I’ve migrated all my files to the SimplyMEPIS PC and made it my main desktop system. That’s how good it is: good enough that SimplyMEPIS is now my number one desktop.

A version of this story first appeared in Linux.com.