Practical Technology

for practical people.

April 17, 2008
by sjvn01
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Will MySQL Keep Lighting up LAMP?

For an executive who had just had his company bought for a cool billion a few months ago and was on the eve of announcing a major update to his business’ flagship database program, former MySQL CEO Marten Mickos, now Sun Microsystems’ senior vice president for databases, didn’t look comfortable. Mickos had come to the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center to explain that MySQL was not about to abandon Linux. His audience, the movers and shakers of Linux business and development circles, were not overly impressed.

The pro-Linux crowd of 200-plus were worried that now, with Sun in charge of MySQL, Sun’s focus would be on creating a SAMP (Solaris, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) software ecosystem instead of supporting the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python) stack, which has enabled Linux to gain $21 billion worth of traction in the server market.

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April 17, 2008
by sjvn01
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Why there won’t be a Red Hat Consumer Linux Desktop

Last May, Red Hat announced that, with Intel, it would soon be releasing Red Hat Global Desktop, a consumer Linux desktop for emerging markets. But, then one delay followed another. Now, on April 16th 2008, Red Hat has announced that it has no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.”

What happened?

Officially, in its desktop group blog, Red Hat states “The desktop market suffers from having one dominant vendor, and some people still perceive that today’s Linux desktops simply don’t provide a practical alternative. Of course, a growing number of technically savvy users and companies have discovered that today’s Linux desktop is indeed a practical alternative. Nevertheless, building a sustainable business around the Linux desktop is tough, and history is littered with example efforts that have either failed outright, are stalled or are run as charities.”

Off-the-record, according to sources close to Red Hat and Intel, it’s a different story.

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April 17, 2008
by sjvn01
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Shuttleworth starts countdown to Ubuntu 8.04 release

The next red-letter day for Ubuntu fans will be April 24, when Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long Term Support) arrives. Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, guarantees that the next version of the popular Linux distribution will make it on time, with something for enterprise, desktop, and Internet users.

In an interview, Shuttleworth made the point that, while many executives have yet to realize it, “Open source software projects and Linux distros are actually better than proprietary companies at hitting deadlines.” In particular, Shuttleworth says, “Companies are now comparing Linux with Vista, and it’s clear that’s Linux does a better job of meeting people’s expectations.

“When you look at people’s expectations, proprietary software gives the impression that its makers can deliver on time. It’s top-down, it’s how people think businesses should work, but bottom-up innovation actually is more timely. This is a real credit for free software, and it’s also a real challenge for the proprietary guys to meet.” Nowadays, it’s “very difficult to know when proprietary software and operating systems will be out.”

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April 14, 2008
by sjvn01
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The State of the Linux Driver Address

Everyone grumbles about Linux driver problems, but kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman actually did something about it. Kroah-Hartman created a program by which open-source developers would create drivers for hardware vendors even if their equipment was proprietary. Over a year later, though, Kroah-Hartman has found that the vast majority of hardware OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) already offer Linux support.

As Kroah-Hartman explains in his Linux Driver Project Status Report as of April 2008, “The Linux Driver Project (LDP) is alive and well, with over 300 developers wanting to participate, many drivers already written and accepted into the Linux kernel tree, and many more being currently developed. The main problem is a lack of projects. It turns out that there really isn’t much hardware that Linux doesn’t already support. Almost all new hardware produced is coming with a Linux driver already written by the company, or by the community with help from the company.”

Be that as it may, there are two classes of hardware where Linux users face perpetual hardware driver woes. These are “video input devices and wireless network cards, that is not well supported by Linux, but large efforts are already underway to resolve this issue, with the wireless driver issue pretty much taken care of already, however there are a few notable exceptions,” said Kroah-Hartman.

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April 13, 2008
by sjvn01
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Windows is on its Last Legs!?

Last week, while I was at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center in Austin Texas, I was surprised to find that if I had wanted to cover the week’s most surprising Linux-related news, I should at been at the Gartner Conference in Las Vegas where two Gartner analysts declared, “Windows Is Collapsing.”

It is? Even I wouldn’t go that far and I have little love for Windows.

Never-the-less, that’s what Gartner’s analysts Michael Silver and Neil MacDonald said. Greg Keizer at ComputerWorld quotes them as saying, “”For Microsoft, its ecosystem and its customers, the situation is untenable.”

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