Practical Technology

for practical people.

December 4, 2008
by sjvn01
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Ubuntu + IBM = Choice corporate Linux desktop?

I can set up a Linux desktop from bare metal to working customized desktop in about an hour. I can set up several dozens Linux desktops for an SMB (small to medium sized business) in a day. I can’t, however, roll out several hundred or thousands Linux desktops without a lot of help, time and work. Now, thanks to a partnership between Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, and IBM, there’s a way to roll out corporate Linux desktops almost as fast as you can plug them into the network.

IBM pulls this trick up by using the old thin-client approach. Instead of having a full-out desktop on every desk, users have computers that pick up their desktop applications using Virtual Bridges’ VERDE (Virtual Enterprise Remote Desktop Environment) virtualization software.

Even old Linux hands may not recognize the Virtual Bridges name, but they will know its products. Virtual Bridges is the company behind Win4Lin, one of the first and best of the Windows on Linux virtualization programs.

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December 4, 2008
by sjvn01
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Will a Linux Certification Help You Get a Linux Job?

Will a Linux certification help you get a Linux job? The answer is: “Probably.”

There are a host of Linux certifications. They range from the high-end Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) and Novell’s Novell Linux Certified Engineer (NLCE ) to ones that are appropriate for entry-level Linux system managers, such as the Linux Professional Institute’s entry-level LPIC-1. Each are meant to show that those who have them are Linux professionals of one level or another. How much help are they though when it comes from turning your Linux expertise into a Linux job?

David Stokes, a certification manager for Sun’s MySQL division, said, “I like to see the LPI or Red Hat certs but that is not a requirement. You do need to find out how many Linux/Unix systems they setup, managed, or have used to eliminate the home hobby-level candidate. Next find out how long, what level of experience, and what type of problems they have solved. It also helps if they have experience beyond the Linux sphere.”

So, that’s one vote for Linux certifications in general, but, on the other hand, Nicholas Accada, a Linux administrator and Network Infrastructure Specialist at Nokia thinks that “The only certificate that I consider a plus is Red Hat, the others are mostly noise.” Accada, who doesn’t have a certification adds, “It depends on the hiring manager, but managers who know Linux, always look beyond the certifications, they prefer the ‘what can you do’ approach.”

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December 3, 2008
by sjvn01
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The world’s worst way to market Linux

At first, it sounds like a good idea. Nanchang, the capital of China’s eastern Jiangxi province, is requiring Internet cafe operators to replace pirated server software with legal copies of Red Flag Linux or Windows Server. What’s not to like? It’s estimated that China has an 82% software piracy rate. Getting businesses to go legal with a native Chinese Linux sounded like a win to me. Until, I saw the Red Flag Linux price tag: 5,000 yuan, that’s $725 U.S. That’s way over the line for a small Chinese business.

Nanchang has about 600 Internet cafes for its approximately 4-million citizens. In China, for most people, Internet cafes are still the way they use to connect with the Internet. China made be home for Lenovo and many other PC vendors, but you’re not going to find PCs and broadband in most homes.

That said, no one’s getting rich from the Internet cafes. They’re small mom and pop businesses. They can’t afford $725 for an operating system and they’re letting the officials know about it. Unfortunately, it’s not doing much good. One said, “When you talk to officials from the Culture Department, they tell you, ‘If you’re willing to pay, pay; if not, you have the option not to pay.’ Hearing words like that turns your heart cold. We really can’t make a living.” In other words, you can either pay to play or you can go out of business.

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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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