Practical Technology

for practical people.

August 27, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

New Low-Cost Ubuntu Linux equipped Dell PCs and Laptops Arriving

While we’re still waiting for Dell to roll-out its Inspiron 910 mini-notebook, Dell had just announced, on August 27th, that it is now selling two more desktops and two more laptops that will come pre-installed with Ubuntu 8.04.

These low-priced systems consist of the two pre-configured laptops—the Vostro A840 and A860—and two pre-configured desktops—the Vostro A100 and A180. Unfortunately, for North American buyers, only the Vostro A860 notebook with its 15.6″ display will be available to North American desktop Linux customers. The Vostro A860 will also be Dell’s first globally available Ubuntu-powered PC. Earlier Dell computers with Ubuntu, like the XPS M1530n and Inspiron E1505n were only available in the U.S. or in other limited regions.

Both of the new Dell lines are meant for small business users. And, in particular, they’re meant for what John Hull, Dell’s manager of Linux engineering, calls “greenfields.” Greenfields are countries that, until recently, haven’t had many PCs. Dell, along with other PC vendors like HP and Lenovo, believes that greenfield nations, which haven’t been locked into Microsoft’s Windows monopoly, are an ideal Linux desktop audience.

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August 26, 2008
by sjvn01
4 Comments

MEPIS is coming back

I’m pleased to report that one of my favorite desktop Linux distributions, MEPIS, is returning. The beta of the next version, MEPIS 8, is now available.

Warren Woodford, MEPIS‘ designer, has been unable to devote much time to his Linux distribution since late last year because, as Woodford put it at the time, “MEPIS was slowed down, because I finally had to reenter the workforce as a consultant in order to pay the bills. I can net more in two weeks of consulting, then in a year with MEPIS.”

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August 26, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Can Open Source replace Microsoft Exchange?

Once upon a time at a NASA space flight center a long way away, I was an e-mail administrator. At the time, the 1980s, e-mail was still chaotic. The RFC 822 standard was only beginning to bring rhyme and reason to e-mail. One of RFC 822’s competitors, the Common Messaging Calls (CMC) X.400 standard, wasn’t making much progress, but then Microsoft adopted it in 1992, added the concepts of folders to it, and re-named the result Mail Application Programming Interface (MAPI). And, ever since, the e-mail world can broadly be divided into two camps: the RFC 822 Internet compliant e-mail group and the MAPI-compliant Microsoft Outlook/Exchange pack.

Many of us assume that all e-mail works by using such RFC-822isms as e-mail addresses that look like “name@SomePlaceOrTheOther.com.” Not so. MAPI takes a quite different approach. In addition to simply handling e-mail, extended MAPI and Collaboration Data Objects (CDO), which became Microsoft’s default protocol set in Exchange 2003, added the power to manage calendars and addresses. So it is that Exchange and Outlook, while primarily used for e-mail, is also a groupware package.

And, I might add, a very popular one. A recent survey by Ferris Research revealed that Exchange has about 65% market share across all organizations. Lotus Notes/Domino is a distant number two with 10% of the market. POP/IMAP, (Post Office Protocol/Internet Message Access Protocol), the usual way incoming RFC-822 mail is handled? All the dozens of RFC-822 mail servers, including Sendmail, Qmail, and Postfix combined, have only 15% of the business/organization e-mail market.

As for the open-source groupware servers that try to directly compete with Exchange, such as Scalix, Open-Xchange, and Zimbra, Richi Jennings, a Ferris Research analyst, dismissed them as being mere ‘noise’ in the business e-mail market.

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August 26, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

Why does Apple get a break?

Want to know a dirty little secret? We, Linux and open-source users, love Apple’s devices.

Of course, that’s not true of all of us. I’m sure Richard M. Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation, wouldn’t be caught dead with an iPhone in his pocket and a MacBook Pro in his laptop bag. But, as Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation pointed out in a recent blog posting, Why does Apple Always Seem to Get a Break??? “Walking around LinuxWorld this year it was interesting to see the number of Apple notebooks in the halls and various sessions. It wasn’t necessarily that there were more Apple notebooks than Linux machines, but it was a good number and begs the question: why do open source people seem to cut Apple some slack when it comes to their very closed proprietary platform?”

I was also at LinuxWorld and I saw the same thing. By my estimate, I’d say about a third of the laptops were from Apple, with about half of the rest either running Linux natively — largely Asus EEE mini-notebooks, Lenovo ThinkPads, and Dell laptops – or had had Linux installed on them by their owners. Only about 10% of the computers at the show were running Windows, none of these, I might add, were running Vista.

Of course, not all those Macs were running Mac OS X exclusively. I noticed many of them were running Ubuntu. Still, Zemlin’s right. We’re always ready to throw bricks at Microsoft, but we do tend to give Apple a free pass.

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August 25, 2008
by sjvn01
2 Comments

A modest Linux USB suggestion

Did you know that there are two basic kinds of USB 2.0 drives? I didn’t. But, now thanks to Robert L. Scheier’s article, Not all USB drives are created equal, I now know that are significant differences between drives. And, in particular those differences matter a lot to live USB capable Linux distributions like Fedora 9.

The differences, in short, is differences in the memory type and their I/O controllers. The results are anything but trivial. One type of USB drive will run two to three times faster than their slower brothers and, potentially, last 10 times longer.
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August 25, 2008
by sjvn01
0 comments

To trust or not to trust Red Hat, that is the question

I like Linux. I like Red Hat and Fedora Linux. I use them every day. What I don’t like, though, is not knowing what’s what with the recent security break-in into the RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and Fedora file servers.

What happened, we’re told by Paul W. Frields, the Fedora project leader, “some Fedora servers were illegally accessed” during the week of August 11th. OK, fair enough, Web servers are broken into all the time. Frields then added, “The intrusion into the servers was quickly discovered, and the servers were taken offline.” OK, that’s what they should have done, but then things get more interesting.

As a result of the Fedora break-in, Red Hat checked into its RHEL servers and, Frields wrote, “Detected an intrusion of certain of its computer systems and has issued a communication to Red Hat Enterprise Linux users.” Excuse me, your people found out that your community Linux servers had been compromised before they found out that there were problems with the business Linux servers?

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