September 28, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Night of the Living Vista

Today, I think of Vista as the zombie operating system. It stumbles around, and from a distance you might think its alive, but close up its the walking dead.

The first sign that Vista was in real trouble was when major vendors started to offer XP again on new machines. In February, Microsoft insisted it had already sold more than 20 million copies of Windows Vista. Oh yeah, like there were actually 20 million copies of Vista already out there and running. Pull the other leg, its got bells on.

If Vista was doing great, then why did Dell break ranks with the other major OEMs to start offering XP again and
become the first top-tier vendor to offer XP in replacement for Vista in April? Adding insult to injury, Dell
actually had the effrontery to offer desktop Linux to its customers.

Other OEMs followed Dells lead, or to be more precise, its customers demands. Lenovo, for example, when it rolled out its revamped high-end ThinkPad T61p workstation notebooks in July, made a point of offering not just Vista but XP Pro and, yes, several Linux distributions, including Novells SUSE, Red Hat and Turbo Linux.

So it came as no surprise at all to me when Mike Nash, Microsofts corporate vice president for Windows product management, announced that, due to OEM demand, Microsoft will keep selling XP until June 2008. Of course, he also claims there is little chance the June 30 date will be extended.

Want to bet?

Nash and Microsoft apologist Rob Enderle claim that its no fault with Vista thats causing customers to stay away from it. Indeed, Nash insists that Vista is on track to become the fastest-selling operating system of all time. Really? Then why in the world is Microsoft continuing to offer in-house competition?

At the same time, Enderle, an analyst who counts Microsoft as a customer, said, “Vista adoption is well below where I thought it would be by now…Corporations arent even close to being ready for Vista, and many of us have been expecting this move. The biggest issue is that most dont seem to see the value in the product. Right now the majority of the comments Im getting would indicate the people [who] dont want Vista right now are in the majority.”

Enderle, mind you, is about as pro-Microsoft an analyst there is in the business today. If hes saying that people dont want Vista, and the OEMs, which at the end of the day are all about selling units, dont want to sell it, the only conclusion you can come to is that Vista is failing to win the market.

There are many reasons why Vista is doing the zombie stumble. Microsoft has and continues to mislead
customers about how much PC is really needed to run Vista. Even some of Windows most loyal users are finding that its poor performance, lousy software support and pathetic driver support is too much to stomach. People who wouldnt touch any Microsoft product until the first service patch appears. And, last but never ever least, if XP isnt broke, why “fix” it with Vista?

Now you might think some of this is legacy backlash. People dont like change. Theyd rather use Windows 2000 than XP, Windows 98 SE than 2000,and Windows ME more than…well, OK, no one liked ME. But Ive been through these cycles many times before. This is different.

XP SP2, with XP SP3 finally due to show up soon, is not only the best Windows to date, I cant think of a single reason to switch from XP to Vista. Im not talking a good reason, I really mean any reason.

If you want a better operating system than XP, may I recommend Xandros as the most painless way for an XP user to give Linux a try, or if the idea of installing Linux gives you hives, you can just buy an Ubuntu-powered Dell 1420 laptop, which is a very sweet machine. Or just bite the bullet and go ahead and buy, say, the new MacBook Pro 15-inch to give Mac OS a try.

Whatever you do, even if its just sticking with XP, youll be doing better than moving to Vista. Vista is the walking dead of the operating-system world.

A version of “Night of the Living Vista” was first published in eWEEK.

September 25, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Xandros 4: The best desktop Linux for Windows users

What’s the best desktop Linux? For me, it’s SimplyMEPIS 6.5, soon to be replaced by 7.0. But this is both a dumb question and a dumb answer. The real question is: What’s the best desktop operating system for you?

If I told you the best 2007 car is a Mazda MX-5 Miata, I’d also be right, according to Consumer Reports. But what’s right for me, a middle-aged gent with a lovely wife and no kids at home, is not what’s right for a family of four. For them, a Honda Accord or a Toyota Sienna makes more sense.

It’s the exact same thing with desktop operating systems. With that idea firmly in mind, I’ve started looking at Linux desktops not for me but for particular groups of users.

For my tests, I’m going to use my Insignia 300a, an older, Best Buy house-brand desktop PC with a 2.8GHz Pentium IV CPU, a GB of RAM and an Ultra ATA/100 60GB hard drive. In short, it’s a decent, but in no way, shape or form, cutting-edge system.

I’m going to be starting my “best Linux desktop” series with a review of the best Linux for a Windows user who’s willing to install his or her own distribution. Don’t get me wrong. My pick for this user, Xandros’ Xandros Desktop Professional 4.1, could be installed by anyone who’s ever used a computer, but, and it’s a big but, some people get twitchy at the very idea of touching an operating system. For those users, there’s another story, but that’s a tale for another day.

Let’s start with the basics. Why is Xandros a good Linux for Windows users? Well, for starters, you can use it as a drop-in replacement for most Windows XP uses.

It works in both Linux- and Windows-based office networks. I’ve used Xandros Pro 4 on NT domains, AD (Active Directory) forests and Linux/Unix NIS (Network Information Service)-based LANs with no trouble at all. It just works. Frankly, it’s a lot easier to integrate Xandros into a Windows network than it is Vista.

Xandros 4 is designed for seamless integration into existing Windows-centric networks. It doesn’t just support the basics of domain and AD authentication. It also supports logon scripts and group policy profiles.

If you use the pre-installed Evolution 2.6.3 for your e-mail client and organizer, which I highly recommend, you’ll also find it integrates very smoothly with Microsoft Exchange e-mail and groupware. Since I consider Outlook as a security hole that pretends to be an e-mail client, I vastly prefer Evolution for use with Exchange or any other mail server, including Xandros recently acquired Scalix, a well-regarded open-source mail server. In addition, Microsoft recently licensed its Exchange protocols to Xandros for use in Scalix. This, in turn, means we can expect even better Exchange compatibility in Xandros Pro.

OK, so let’s say you’re not a Windows business user. What’s in Xandros for you? For starters, this distribution enables to both read and write to Microsoft’s NTFS (New Technology File System) partitions with Paragon Software Group’s NTFS for Linux 5.0. With it, you can read and write to your hard drive’s Windows NTFS partitions. Other Linuxes will let you read from NTFS, but Xandros makes it easy to get full use out of a dual Windows/Linux boot PC’s hard disk.

In addition, Xandros Professional deploys a customized KDE 3.4.2 desktop interface that looks and acts a great deal like the Windows XP interface. Trick the desktop out with Windows applications and an XP user could probably use Xandros for several days before figuring out that it really wasn’t XP.

Oh, yes, I did say Windows applications. Xandros includes CodeWeavers’s CrossOver Office 5.9.1. While not the newest version of this program that enables users to run many of the most popular Windows applications on Linux (that honor goes to CrossOver 6.1), it will give many Windows users all the applications they need. I’ve successfully run Office 2000 and 2003 suites, Quicken 2005, Windows Media Player 6.4 and iTunes 5.01 on it.

If you can live without Microsoft Office, the distribution also includes OpenOffice.org 2.0.6. It also includes a selection of some of the latest open-source software that appears on both Linux and Windows, such as Firefox and Thunderbird.

Xandros also includes the Xandros Network Connection System. I have to say it, combined with the file manager, makes accessing wired, wireless, mobile and VPN network-connected file and print servers easier than on any other system I’ve ever used. Hooking it up to any network is mindlessly easy. Want to use a printer on a Samba server? An NTFS drive hanging off an AD server? An NFS (Network File System) RAID running on Solaris? Click it, put in your user ID and password and you’re in business.

Underneath all this Windows-friendly goodness beats a heart based on Debian 3.1 Sarge. The Linux kernel, however, has been upgraded to version 2.6.18, with additional updates to proprietary ATI and NVIDIA graphics drivers. This is certainly no bleeding-edge distribution. On the other hand, even by Linux’s high standards, Xandros is remarkably stable. Short of a power outage, I haven’t found anything that will take it down.

The distribution is also LSB (Linux Standards Base) 3.1 compliant. It is also one of the first commercial distributions to integrate the Portland 1.0 tools. Developers can use these tools to create applications that can easily integrate into a Linux desktop regardless of whether the desktop is GNOME or KDE based.

That’s all well and good, but here’s the important part. This really is a Linux distribution that a Windows user can use without tears. To quote Kim Brebach, from his recent overview of Linux desktops, “Xandros did exactly what it claimed: open an easy passage for Windows users through the mountains of Linux.”

Exactly. That’s why, for me, Xandros is the Linux for Windows users who have grown sick and tired of Windows’ endless security holes and the occasional crash. Xandros just works, and it works enough like Windows XP that even the most Linux-phobic user will be able to appreciate it.

Xandros Desktop Professional pricing starts at $99.99 per desktop. There is also a free version of Xandros 4.1, this Open Circulation edition, but for some reason Xandros makes it difficult to find. A BitTorrent link to it can be found on an otherwise idle Xandros fan site. You can also download a 30-day trial version for free.

A version of this story first appeared in DesktopLinux/

September 24, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

First U.S. GPL lawsuit heads for quick settlement

The first U.S. GPL-related lawsuit appears to be headed for a quick out-of-court settlement. Monsoon Multimedia admitted today that it had violated the GPLv2 (GNU General Public License version 2), and said it will release its modified BusyBox code in full compliance with the license.

Monsoon Multimedia has stated that it is currently in settlement negotiations with the BusyBox project to resolve the matter without going to court. The company also said in a statement that it intends to fully comply with all open-source software license requirements. The company plans to make its modified BusyBox source code publicly available on on its website in the coming weeks, it said.

This matter came to the public attention when the SFLC (Software Freedom Law Center) announced on Sept. 20 that it had just filed the first-ever U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of the GPL on behalf of its clients, BusyBox’s two principal developers. GPLv2-licensed BusyBox is a small-footprint application that implements a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities. It is commonly used in embedded systems.

The developers of BusyBox came to the SFLC after unsuccessfully trying to resolve the issue with Monsoon into on their own. One of the conditions of the GPL is that re-distributors of GPL-licensed software are required to ensure that each downstream recipient is provided access to the source code of the program. On the company’s own website, Monsoon Multimedia had publicly acknowledged that its products and firmware contain BusyBox. However, the company has not provided access to the underlying source code.

While not well known in most open-source circles, BusyBox is used in virtually all Linux-based devices. First created by Bruce Perens, the well known open-source software advocate and developer, it combines tiny versions of many common Unix/Linux utilities into a single small executable. By providing mini-replacements for many of the GNU utilities, embedded developers get much of the expected functionality of the GNU utilities without the space requirements.

Monsoon makes consumer devices primarily for home multimedia users. Its line includes such products as Hava, a place- and time-shifting TV recorder. This is an embedded Linux device that’s similar to the Slingbox. The company also offers SnappySoft, Windows Media Center video capture software.

The original SFLC complaint (PDF Link) on behalf of the BusyBox developers requests that an injunction be issued against Monsoon Media. It also requests that damages and litigation costs be awarded to the plaintiffs.

However, in a statement, Eben Moglen, Founding Director of the SFLC, explained, “Free software licenses such as the GPL exist to protect the freedom of computer users. If we don’t ensure that these licenses are respected, then they will not be able to achieve their goal. Our goal is simply to ensure that Monsoon Multimedia complies with the terms of the GPL.”

“Since we intend to and always intended to comply with all open source software license requirements, we are confident that the matter will be quickly resolved,” Graham Radstone, chairman and COO at Monsoon Multimedia said today in a statement.

The SFLC was unable to comment about Monsoon’s announcement since Daniel Ravicher, the primary attorney working on this case, is traveling today.

A version of this story was first published in LinuxDevices.

September 22, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Coming soon: automatic Linux driver upgrades

Linux users want two things for their hardware: drivers; and easy access to those drivers. The first is finally happening; and now, thanks to a Dell Linux project called DKMS (Dynamic Kernel Module Support), the other is on its way.

Dell and Linux distributors have been working on DKMS for about five years now. Its purpose is to create a framework where kernel-dependent module source can reside, so that it is very easy to rebuild modules. In turn, this enables Linux distributors and driver developers to create driver drops without having to wait for new kernel releases. For users, all this makes it easier to get up-to-the-minute drivers without hand compiling device drivers.

According to Dell, this separate framework for delivering drivers will remove kernel releases as a blocking mechanism for distributing code. The net effect, Dell hopes, is to speed up driver development by enabling quicker testing cycles. This also means that better tested code can be pushed back into the kernel at a more rapid pace. It’s also nice for developers and maintainers, as DKMS only requires a source tarball in conjunction with a small configuration file in order to function correctly.

What makes this project more interesting for all Linux users is that another project related to the DKMS project, mkrpm (make RPM), now adds automatic lines with modalias information. Modalias, for those of you who aren’t Linux device driver developers, is a data structure that’s used to hold the information that a device presents to the kernel.

Why is this important? Because, as Matt Domsch, Dell’s Linux technology strategist, explains, “This will eventually be used to automatically download drivers that match the hardware you have in your system but which aren’t presently in your $distro’s kernel.”

This isn’t pie in the sky technology. Dell already uses it. “Dell uses DKMS to distribute updated device drivers for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server), and Ubuntu built against those products’ gold kernels. “This lets us fix and replace individual device drivers to support new hardware without having to respin the whole CD like we wound up doing for Ubuntu,” said Domsch.

DKMS also has other advantages. While it currently works with Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu, DKMS was always designed (PDF link) to be both Linux distribution and hardware architecture agnostic. It was also built to be used by a variety of software distribution tools such as RHN (Red Hat Network), Kickstart and PXE (Pre-Execution Environment), and YUM (Yellow Dog Updater).

The current source code can be downloaded from the DKMS file site. Alternatively, it’s also available at this time on several distribution repositories, including Ubuntu Universe for Gutsy, Fedora Rawhide, and Fedora 7 testing.

Basic information on the project is in a paper from the Proceedings of the Linux Symposium, Dynamic Kernel Module Support: From Theory to Practice (PDF Link) by Matt Domsch and Gary Lerhaupt. If you’re interesting in working on the project, you can join the dkms-devel mailing list.

September 18, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

Mozilla spins off Thunderbird

In July, Mozilla executives admitted that they weren’t quite sure what to do with Thunderbird, the open-source e-mail client, since Firefox, the popular open-source Web browser, demanded most of the company’s attention. On Sept. 17, Mozilla announced that it had decided to spin Thunderbird off into a company of its own: MailCo.

The plan is for Mozilla to establish a new company to develop Internet communications software based on the Thunderbird program, code and brand. The new initiative also aims to nurture a robust developer ecosystem in order to drive improvements through open source and community innovation. This was the same path that Mozilla took with Firefox.

Mozilla CEO Mitchell Baker had admitted that the popular e-mail client had taken second place in July, and the company was looking beyond Mozilla to find another way to advance Thunderbird.

Both the Mozilla company and the Mozilla Foundation considered several options for Thunderbird. These included creating a new non-profit organization like the Mozilla Foundation, making Thunderbird a new subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation, or release Thunderbird as a community project supported by a small independent services and consulting company being “formed by the Thunderbird developers to continue development and care for Thunderbird users,” said Baker.

In a more recent blog, Baker described what Mozilla plans for MailCo. The goals for the new company are:

* Take care of Thunderbird users
* Move Thunderbird forward to provide better, deeper e-mail solutions
* Create a better user experience for a range of Internet communications — how does/should e-mail work with IM, RSS, VOIP, SMS, site-specific e-mail, etc?
* Spark the types of community involvement and innovation that we’ve seen around Web “browsing” and Firefox.

To make this happen, David Ascher, currently CTO and vice president of engineering at ActiveState, an open-source development tools company, will join Mozilla to establish MailCo. Ascher has been an active member of the Mozilla community since 2000, initially as the lead of Komodo, a Mozilla-based IDE (integrated development environment). He is also an established leader in the open-source community, including his role as a director of the Python Software Foundation.

Mozilla will provide $3 million seed funding to establish this new company. According to Baker, “We’ll be setting up MailCo in the coming weeks. Part of this is forming the team of people, part is developing a transition plan to move Thunderbird into MailCo gracefully while supporting the Thunderbird users. That will take some time. We’re on the path now, though, and that’s a great thing.”

A version of this story first appeared in DesktopLinux.

September 14, 2007
by sjvn01
0 comments

SCO goes belly-up

Years after it was first predicted, The SCO Group, a Unix and mobile software distributor better known for its Linux litigation, has filed a voluntary petition for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.

SCO’s Board of Directors unanimously decided that Chapter 11 reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries, as well as its customers, shareholders and employees. At the same time, SCO’s subsidiary, SCO Operations, has also filed a petition for reorganization.

In the U.S. court system, a case filed under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code is often called a “reorganization” bankruptcy. In the case of a corporation going Chapter 11, its funds exist separately and apart from its owners, the stockholders. Therefore, a Chapter 11 doesn’t put the personal assets of the stockholders at risk aside from the value of their investment in the company’s stock.

When SCO filed for Chapter 11 it was also given an automatic stay of time during which all judgments, collection activities, foreclosures and repossessions of property are suspended and may not be pursued by the creditors on any debt or claim that arose before the bankruptcy petition filing.

Continue Reading →

Practical Technology

for practical people.