Practical Technology

for practical people.

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
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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
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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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October 7, 2008
by sjvn01
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Going to a Linux or Open-Source Show?

The Linux Foundation recently announced that they’d be holding a new get-together, LinuxCon and a few days later IDG announced that they were transforming LinuxWorld into OpenSource World. My question: Will you be going to either one? Or, to any of the other major open-source shows like OSCon?

Before saying more, let me say that I’m friends with everyone at the Linux Foundation and I’m on the LinuxWorld, now OpenSource World, Program Committee. I’m also a technology journalist who specializes in Linux, so I’ll be at many of the Linux and open-source shows.

The two moves were not, to the best of my knowledge connected. LinuxCon isn’t a trade show. It’s meant to be more of a technical conference. OpenSource World has been transforming into a business trade show for years now. This name change was no surprise. Businesses’ interest in open source has expanded well beyond Linux so the new name makes perfect sense.

I’m not at all sure though I’ll see many of you at these shows. While I hate, and I mean hate, travel, I travel to shows anyway because nothing can replace face-to-face meetings. Social networks, e-mail, IM, they’re all great. They all help us share ideas and work together, but they can’t replace the decisive decision making that can happen at real meetings.

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October 7, 2008
by sjvn01
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New Linux Broadcom Wi-Fi drivers arrive

One of the most annoying experiences for any desktop Linux user is installing a Linux on a laptop, switching it on, and… discovering that the Wi-Fi chipset doesn’t support Linux. That used to be a commonplace experience, but over the years it’s gotten much better. Unless, of course, you were using a laptop with a Broadcom chipset; then, chances were, you were in for some trouble.

Other Wi-Fi chipset companies like Intel and Atheros have gotten with the program and do a reasonable job of supporting Linux. Atheros even recently went the extra mile and released the Atheros HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) for its 802.11abg chipsets under the ISC license. In July, Atheros had open-sourced its 802.11n driver under the same liberal license.

Broadcom, on the other hand, well Broadcom continues to be a pain. In all fairness, Broadcom has made some progress. In February 2007, Broadcom engineers showed up at the Linux Wireless Summit. Then, in the summer of 2007, Broadcom finally gave Linux some driver support for its NetXtreme, NetXtreme II, NetLink and 4401 product lines. In July of this year, Broadcom engineers at the Linux Foundation Summit told me that they’d be giving Linux more support.

Well, I’m still waiting for more direct support from Broadcom. In the meantime, though, some championship reverse-engineering has given us support for the Broadcom B43 chipsets starting in the Linux 2.6.24 kernel.

Now Dell, with some help from Broadcom and Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has just released a Linux friendly Broadcom Wi-Fi driver for both 32 and 64-bit Linuxes. According to John Hull, Dell’s Manager of Linux OS Engineering, "updated Linux wireless drivers that support cards based on the Broadcom 4311, 4312, 4321, and 4322 chipsets" are now available.

For Dell users, this means that they now have Wi-Fi support for the Dell 1490, 1395, 1397, 1505, and 1510 Wireless cards. Specifically, Hull wrote that, "We’re currently offering the Dell 1397 card with the Studio 15 system with Ubuntu 8.04 and the 1395 card is supported on our new Inspiron Mini 9." But, this isn’t a Dell or Ubuntu only deal. The drivers should work with any Broadcom card using one of the supported chipsets on any modern Linux.

Now, the drivers aren’t, as Hull points out, completely open source. "It is currently only partially open-source, similar to ATI or NVIDIA video drivers, so keep this in mind when deciding if you want to use it." In other words, you’ll still need the proprietary Broadcom firmware. If you’re not a free-software absolutist though, you’ll be able to use these drivers.

Hull went on to say that "This driver is included in the Ubuntu 8.10 release," which is due out at the end of October, "and should be added to Ubuntu 8.04." If you can’t wait, you can download the driver, the Broadcom Linux STA driver today from a Broadcom site. The link in the Dell blog is broken, but this link, as of October 7th, was working. Enjoy!

A version of this story first appeared in ComputerWorld.