September 11, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Ubuntu to work more with larger Linux community

Some people hate Ubuntu. I know, I know, far, far more people love Ubuntu, but that doesn’t change the fact that others really dislike it. Hate is not too strong a word.

Those who hate Ubuntu tend to fall into two groups. There are those who dislike Ubuntu because it makes Linux too easy. To these people, I say: "Get over it. Linux isn’t just for people with EMACS macros hard-wired into their fingers anymore." The other group are those, usually Debian Linux users, who think Ubuntu, which is based on Debian, has ‘stolen’ their work and that its developers haven’t contributed enough back to Debian or the other open-source communities that create Linux-related software.

That’s about to change. Mark Shuttleworth, CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, announced in his blog that Canonical will be "hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality." "Those desktop experiences ideas" are Ubuntu’s design ideas. Shuttleworth recently said he wanted the Linux desktop to be better than the Mac’s interface. He’s now putting his money behind this idea.

Shuttleworth knows that achieving such a goal won’t be easy. "When I laid out the goal of ‘delivering a user experience that can compete with Apple in two years’ at OSCON, I had many questions afterwards about how on earth we could achieve that.’Everyone scratches their own itch, how can you possibly make the UI consistent?’ was a common theme. And it’s true – the free software desktop is often patchy and inconsistent. But I see the lack of consistency as both a weakness (GNOME, OpenOffice and Firefox all have different UI toolkits, and it’s very difficult to make them seamless) and as a strength — people are free to innovate, and the results are world-leading. Our challenge is to get the best of both of those worlds."

Mark Shuttleworth is well aware that some people see Ubuntu as not being a contributor. "In Ubuntu we have in general considered upstream to be "our ROCK", by which we mean that we want upstream to be happy with the way we express their ideas and their work." The upstream is Debian, the Linux kernel developers, and Linux-related software programmers." Shuttleworth continued, "More than happy – we want upstream to be delighted! We focus most of our effort on integration. Our competitors turn that into "Canonical doesn’t contribute" but it’s more accurate to say we measure our contribution in the effectiveness with which we get the latest stable work of upstream, with security maintenance, to the widest possible audience for testing and love. To my mind, that’s a huge contribution."

But, that’s no longer enough. Shuttleworth opened his comments by writing, "When you present yourself on the web, you have 15 seconds to make an impression, so aspiring champions of the web 2.0 industry have converged on a good recipe for success:

1. Make your site visually appealing,
2. Do something different and do it very, very well,
3. Call users to action and give them an immediate, rewarding experience.

We need the same urgency, immediacy and elegance as part of the free software desktop experience, and that’s an area where Canonical will, I hope, make a significant contribution. We are hiring designers, user experience champions and interaction design visionaries and challenging them to lead not only Canonical’s distinctive projects but also to participate in GNOME, KDE and other upstream efforts to improve FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) usability."

So, starting now, Ubuntu is going to contribute in a big way to desktop Linux. Shuttleworth wrote, "Canonical is in a position to drive real change in the software that is part of Ubuntu. If we just showed up with pictures and prototypes and asked people to shape their projects differently, I can’t imagine that being well received! So we are also hiring a team who will work on X, OpenGL, Gtk, Qt, GNOME and KDE, with a view to doing some of the heavy lifting required to turn those desktop experience ideas into reality. Those teams will publish their Bazaar branches in Launchpad and of course submit their work upstream, and participate in upstream sprints and events. Some of the folks we have hired into those positions are familiar contributors in the FLOSS world; others will be developers with relevant technical expertise from other industries."

I was one of those that doubted that desktop Linux could ever equal the smooth, graceful integration of the Mac OS. Now, between the driving pace of open-source development, and Shuttleworth’s millions, I can see it happening. Why not? After all, Mac OS itself is based on FreeBSD. Desktop Linux’s future, despite Lenovo’s recent retirement from retail desktop Linux sales, is starting to look brighter.

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.

September 10, 2008
by sjvn01
1 Comment

Lenovo blows the Linux desktop off

I’m ticked off. Lenovo, after years of dancing around the question of would they or wouldn’t they, offer a ThinkPad with pre-installed Linux finally offered one, and, less than a year later, Lenovo has decided to take its Linux-powered ThinkPads off the retail market.

What the heck is this?

I like ThinkPads. I like them a lot. They are other good laptops, and I wouldn’t turn down a MacBook Air, but when it comes right down to it, I’ll pay the extra money to get a ThinkPad. They’re little tanks in laptop-form.

There was only one thing they lacked from where I sat: pre-installed Linux. Then, finally, in January of this year, Lenovo finally made good their promises of desktop Linux support and shipped the ThinkPad T61 and R61 notebooks with Novell SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop).

More >

September 9, 2008
by sjvn01
13 Comments

Lenovo Exits pre-Installed Linux Desktop Business

Desktop Linux reported that Lenovo seems to have quietly exited the desktop Linux business. Unfortunately for desktop Linux users, that news has turned out to be correct. Lenovo, in a note to Practical Technology, confirmed that it was exiting the pre-installed desktop Linux business.

In an e-mail from Lenovo, Ray Gorman, executive director of Lenovo external communications, tried to put the best spin he could on the decision. “Our commitment to Linux has not changed. What’s changed is that customers will no longer be able to order Lenovo ThinkPads and ThinkCentres with pre-installed Linux via the lenovo.com website. We are still certifying Linux pre-loads, but most of those customers typically order either through their Lenovo Sales team or Lenovo Business Partner.”

Continue Reading →

September 9, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

London Stock Exchange suffers .NET Crash

It should have been a great day on the London Stock Exchange. The U.S. government had announced on the Sunday before that it was coming to the rescue of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Trading would have been extremely brisk, but then, at 9:15 AM GMT, the Exchange’s software failed due to "connectivity issues." Six-hours and 45-minutes later, the London Exchange, along with the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, which uses the LSE’s trading platform TradElec, were finally back up.

That was no consolation to traders. As Reuters reported, "We have the biggest takeover in the history of the known world … and then we can’t trade. It’s terrible," one trader said.

So what happened? Officially, the LSE first said that, "We will be investigating this and will do everything we can to make sure this doesn’t reoccur." Later the LSE gave the vague explanation, that "It was software-related, a coincidence, due to two processes we couldn’t have foreseen," and not caused by high-volume. The spokesperson added, "We’ve introduced a fix and we’re confident it will not happen again."

Somehow "we couldn’t have foreseen" and "we’re confident it will not happen again" don’t fit very well together.

So what really happened? I doubt we’ll ever get a detailed, nitty-gritty explanation, but I have friends in London and… Well, let me just make the following points about TradElec. First, TradElec runs on more than a 100 HP ProLiant servers in several locations in London. These servers are running Windows Server 2003.

On top of this runs the TradElec software itself. This is a custom set of C# and .NET programs, which was created by Microsoft and Accenture, the global consulting firm. Its back-end databases, believe it or not, run on Microsoft SQL Server 2000. The goal was to maintain sub-ten millisecond response times. In short, it’s meant to be a real-time system.

The programmers and serious database administrators in the audience can already see where this is going. Sorry, Microsoft, .NET Framework is simply incapable of performing this kind of work, and SQL Server 2000, or any version of SQL Server really, can’t possibly handle the world’s number three stock exchange’s transaction load on a consistent basis.

I’d been hearing from friends who trade on the LSE for ages about how slow the system could get. Now, I know why.

What I find really amazing is that the LSE’s software stack hadn’t blown its top earlier. Even setting aside my feelings for Linux, there’s simply no way I’d recommend Server 2003, .NET and SQL Server for a job even a tenth this size. If a customer of mine insisted that they didn’t want open source – more fool them – I’d recommended Sun Solaris, JEE (Java Enterprise Edition) and Oracle or IBM AIX or z/OS, WebSphere and DB2.

What I’d really prefer to see is RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), JBoss, and MySQL or Oracle or Novell’s SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), JEE, and, again MySQL or Oracle for the DBMS engine. In any case, though, the real moral of this story is that if you really want HA (high availability) or HPC (high performance computing), Microsoft’s products should be at the bottom of your list. Unix, mainframes, and, yes Linux, are far, far better for companies that need fast and reliable computing.

You don’t have to believe me though. The New York Stock Exchange has already started to use Linux on its servers.

A version of London Stock Exchange suffers .NET Crash first appeared in ComputerWorld.

September 8, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

B.G. (Before Google)

I started using the Internet in the 1970s. It didn’t look anything like it does today, and our search tools were, well, awful.

Still compared to what we started with, they were great. Before I ever turned my hand to writing, I put myself through graduate school by doing research on the very first online database systems: NASA RECON, Dialog, and OCLC. These systems, which are still around, are part of what’s called the Matrix, and, no, I don’t mean the movie. The Matrix, as defined by John S. Quarterman, is the superset of all interconnected networks. Now, unlike then, you can get to these networks over the Internet, but you’ll find yourself blocked from getting very deep into them without permission.

As for the Internet itself, it didn’t really have search tools then. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that the Internet became searchable. For example, today, if you want to find a particular file, Google is your friend and sites like Mininova make finding BitTorrent files easy. When I started, we had to go through ftp file directories screen by screen and hope that the file was in there somewhere.

More >

September 5, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Has the head of MySQL left Sun?

It’s not easy going from being number one of a small company, MySQL, even one worth a cool billion, to being one of many number twos in an even bigger company, Sun. Many former CEOs in that position quickly quit and it sounds like Monty Widenius, founder of MySQL, will be the next to leave his company’s new owner.

Sheeri Cabral, a leading MySQL developer, wrote in The Pythian Group blog, that while he doesn’t know if Widenius has resigned but he wrote, “Some folks have known that Monty has not been happy in his current position; this leads me to believe the rumor is true” While I can’t claim to know Widenius at all well, I had heard similar stories.

More >