Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 14, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Linux Standard Base 4 is coming in for a landing

If you write software for the Mac, you must obey Apple’s rules. Period. End of statement. If you write software for Windows, you have more lee-way, but Microsoft pretty much calls the shots. If you write software for Linux though you can pretty much do whatever you want, except, of course, you shouldn’t. Because if you do re-invent the wheel every time you write for Linux, we end up with software that doesn’t work or play well with other Linux software. That’s where the LSB (Linux Standard Base) comes in.

The LSB is a set of guidelines on how you should program for Linux. You don’t have to obey its rules. It’s just a really good idea if you do.

This isn’t just a truism. Thanks to Unix, we know exactly what happens when everyone does things their own way on the same system: utter chaos. Even if you were on the same hardware and used the same basic Unix you ended up with a mess. For example, UHC, Consensys, Interactive, and Dell (yes, the Dell you’re thinking about), briefly all had their own versions of Unix SVR4 (System V Release 4) on i386 processors. You could no more run a program designed for UHC Unix on Dell’s Unix than you could run a Toyota Prius on diesel fuel.

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October 13, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Which Linux makes the best business Windows replacement desktop?

Some of my Linux-savvy friends and I have been hashing out what the best Linux desktop would be for a SMB (small to medium sized business). Out of that conversation, Ken Hess came up with a list of ten best Linux desktop distributions that has Ubuntu at the top and Jason Perlow, while dividing distributions into community and commercial versions, also sees Ubuntu as the best Linux desktop. Ah… I disagree.

It’s not that I don’t like Ubuntu. I do. I just stayed focused on the full question, which was: “If an SMB wants to upgrade from XP, what Linux variants would you recommend? Consider this would be for an SMB with limited in-house tech expertise.”

Note that last phrase: “limited in-house tech expertise.” There goes Ubuntu. Yes, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, does offer professional technical support, but Canonical is still new at the support business and its offerings are rather generic.

My answer is that those requirements pretty much narrow it down to Novell and SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop). Novell, and its resellers, knows support and SMB.

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October 13, 2008
by sjvn01
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High-performance nonsense

Quiz time. Get out your No. 2 computers and answer the following question: For the fastest and most reliable high-end computing for your enterprise, will your operating system be 1) Linux, 2) Solaris, 3) OpenVMS or 4) Windows?

OK, put your mice down. If you answered Linux, give yourself 10 points; Solaris, 9 points; OpenVMS, 8 points; Windows — pardon me, what are you doing in this class? Remedial IT is down the hall. Just listen for the chorus of “Are you sure your PC’s power cord is plugged into the wall socket?” You can’t miss it.

Microsoft, after spending decades paying no real attention to high-performance computing, wants to be an HPC player with the release of HPC Server 2008. Can you believe it? Yes, there was Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003. After a long search, I found one user. He told me, “Updates that require reboots are far too frequent for production-use systems,” “Jobs randomly crash,” and “Few HPC applications actually support Windows compute nodes.”

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October 10, 2008
by sjvn01
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Debian Linux needs your help

Debian, for all that it’s a very popular and important community Linux has a problem with hitting deadlines. I mean it’s not like how Microsoft can miss its deadlines by years, but still Debian has had its troubles. The community was doing much better this time for the forthcoming release of Debian 5, Lenny, but some last-minute problems still need cleaning up and the Debian developers would like you to help.

In a note to the Debian developer list, Alexander ‘Tollmar’ Reichle-Schmehl, a leading Debian developer and spokesman, wrote, “You probably noticed by now, that Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 aka “Lenny” hasn’t been released in September. Well, that’s a shame, but very easy to explain: Too many release critical bugs.”

As is so often the case with any software project, Reichle-Schmehl explained, “Our release team coordinated several transitions, took care of release goals, but it’s pretty hard to estimate, how fast RC (release candidate) bugs will be fixed, and apparently they were a bit to optimistic”

What he’d like from developers is “pretty easy: Fix rc-bugs, take care, that the fixed packages are migrated to “Lenny,” do upgrade tests, document problems in the release-notes. Pretty simple, isn’t it?” Well, it is if you’re a Linux developer, but otherwise, not really.

However, Reichle-Schmehl continued, “Even as a “simple user” (aren’t we all just users?) you may help getting “Lenny” released.” Specifically, he suggests that if you’re already running Debian 4, Etch, “you could consider upgrading to “Lenny” and see, if everything works fine. Currently there are no detailed release notes documenting the procedure, so you best way to test upgrades are to:

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October 9, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Ubuntu scores major Wikipedia win

While I find Wikipedia about as trustworthy as any random stranger at a pub, I can’t deny that Wikipedia is incredibly popular. According to the Web traffic monitoring site Alexa on an average day 8.5% of the world’s Internet users will visit the site. That’s a lot of hits. Now, to manage this incredible load of approximately two-million unique visitors a day, Wikipedia is moving from a hodge-podge of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux http://www.redhat.com/rhel/) and Fedora (http://fedoraproject.org/) servers to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long Term Service).

This switch-over from Red Hat to Ubuntu has been taking place over a period of several years. According to Brion Vibber, CTO of the San Francisco-based Wikimedia Foundation, Wikipedia made the move because the “mix of things, some Red Hat 9, some Fedora, several different versions,” made it harder and harder for Wikipedia’s tiny five-person IT staff to maintain Wikipedia’s approximately 400 servers.

So Vibber and the rest of the IT staff shifted to Ubuntu so that it could make “our own administration and maintenance simpler.” In short, they “decided that we want to standardize on something.”

That’s always a smart choice. People like yours truly can play operating systems like hop-scotch, jumping from one to the other, but that’s no way for even the smallest of companies to handle operating systems and platforms. I’m surprised that an operation like Wikipedia, with its millions of daily readers, never mind the load of the eternal editing and re-editing of stories managed for so long.

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October 8, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Can Microsoft’s Ballmer get away with it?

Sometimes Microsoft makes it too easy to point out how slow and stupid the company has gotten with little Stevie Ballmer in charge. Take, for example, Microsoft’s claim that Ballmer knew next to nothing about his company’s “Vista Capable” marketing campaign. And, therefore he shouldn’t have to testify in the Vista class-action lawsuit that accuses the company of deceiving customers with the campaign.

In a statement to the court, Ballmer said, “I was not involved in any of the operational decisions about the Windows Vista Capable program I was not involved in establishing the requirements computers must satisfy to qualify for the Windows Vista Capable program. I was not involved in formulating any marketing strategy or any public messaging surrounding the Windows Vista Capable program. To the best of my recollection, I do not have any unique knowledge of, nor did I have any unique involvement in any decisions regarding the Windows Vista Capable program.”

There’s so much that’s wrong with this that it’s hard to know where to begin.

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