Practical Technology

for practical people.

October 25, 2006
by sjvn01
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Oracle adopts Red Hat Linux as its own

Oracle Corp. on Oct. 25 announced that it would provide the same enterprise class support for Linux as it provides for its database, middleware, and applications products. Essentially, this means that Oracle, after removing Red Hat trademarks, will be distributing Oracle Unbreakable Linux, derived from Red Hat’s open-source Linux technology.

Oracle, however, claims that it is merely “supporting” Unbreakable Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Other, far smaller companies, such as CentOS and White Box Enterprise Linux, have taken Red Hat’s code, removed the Red Hat trademarks, and spun their own Linux distributions from it. No major business, until now, though, has made such a move.

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October 17, 2006
by sjvn01
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LDN: an MSDN for Linux developers

One major advantage Microsoft developers have over their Linux counterparts is that they have access to MSDN (Microsoft Software Developer Network), a magnificent online developer resource. Linux has had nothing to compare. Until now.

The Free Standards Group (FSG), a nonprofit organization dedicated to developing and promoting open-source software standards, announced today that it has partnered with O’Reilly Media to offer similar services to Linux application developers as part of its LSB (Linux Standard Base) Developer Network.

The LSB Developer Network (LDN) is meant to serve as the central, community-based source of information for software developers writing portable Linux applications. The beta site is now open for business.

The newly-minted LDN website currently contains a custom library of Linux content via Safari Books Online, an online reference library that’s a joint venture of O’Reilly and the Pearson Technology Group. With this, Linux developers can go to one place for their programming information needs instead of cobbling it together from hither and yon.

The site also includes FSG-provided software tools, standards, forums, and content. By using the tools and information on the site, software developers can build their applications according to the LSB specification, and certify it using the FSG’s certification and testing services, receiving the ability for their application to run on multiple distributions of Linux.

Specifically, LDN offers these features:

  • A social networking bookmarker where users can import their existing del.ic.io.us bookmarks according to tag, and share them with other members of the community. This approach leverages, instead of replaces, existing bookmarking tools already used by the majority of the development community.
  • A directory of resources for building portable Linux applications; this includes tutorials on building applications with the LSB and other information needed by developers.
  • Software development kits where ISVs can build and test their applications against the LSB, including tools that query accepted interfaces already in the standard.
  • LSB roadmap tools that give software developers the insight needed to plan which versions of standards-compliant compilers, distributions and libraries to use in future versions of their software.
  • Certification services and an application directory for LSB-certified applications so end users can easily find portable Linux applications and certified distributions.

To make this happen, Linux Magazine editor Martin Streicher will serve as LDN’s editorial director. The LDN is also being supported by such leading Linux companies as IBM, HP, MySQL, Novell, Real Networks, and Red Hat.

FSG CTO and Debian Linux founder Ian Murdock noted that “In order for Linux to be a truly competitive platform, there must be a central information source for developers building portable Linux applications.”

“Microsoft has done a great job with [MSDN]; we aim to do the same for the Linux Standard Base using the “bottom up” community-based development model exemplified by open source and Linux.” The “main difference,” Murdock went on to say, “Is we’re doing this in a community-based, bottom-up style. The Free Standards Group provides a platform for collaboration on standards and interoperability. This will be no different. We’re providing a platform for collaboration on developer tools with the support of IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat, and other members.”

“Partnering with the undisputed leader in developer content, O’Reilly, is the first step in this project. We urge the community to join and help build the network,” concluded Murdock.

Some of the community is already there. “Application developer support is critical to the continued growth of the Linux market,” said Chris Cooper, Novell‘s director of developer services. “While there are now more than 1000 applications certified on SUSE Linux Enterprise, we are committed to bringing even more applications to our platform. Working with the Linux Standard Base Developer Network will provide yet another avenue for application developers to write applications that work on multiple distributions, increasing broad market adoption of Linux.”

There’s no question that there’s a real and pressing need for such a service. Jeremy White, founder and CEO of CodeWeavers Inc., said, “I think that most Linux developers and advocates have a rose colored view of what the Linux development process and market really is, at least for a an ISV that wants to create a Desktop application for sale. It takes a lot of hard work to create a Desktop product for Linux.”

“Even worse, that market is highly fragmented. Yes, it really does matter to an ISV [independent software vendor] that there is Ubuntu, Red Hat, SuSE, and on and on; yes, they are ‘close’, but this isn’t horseshoes. The sooner we face that truth and get on with doing what we can to improve the situation (yay for xdg-utils!), the better,” White added.

Kathy Bennett, IBM Linux Technology Center director, commented that “This is yet another step by supporters of the open community to make Linux a better and more competitive computing platform.”

A version of this story first appeared in Linux-Watch.

October 17, 2006
by sjvn01
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There is no Oracle Linux

Repeat after me: “There is no Oracle Linux.” I don’t care how many times you hear stock analysts say that Oracle is about to launch its own Linux. It’s just not going to happen.

The latest example of wishful thinking comes from Jefferies & Co. analyst Katherine Egbert, who wrote on October 13, “Our independent checks in the past two weeks indicate that Oracle seems to be close to introducing its own software ‘stack.'”

Jefferies, an investment bank, then cut its price target on Red Hat from $24 to $21. Red Hat’s stock price then fell more than 7 percent that day. Since then it’s been continuing to fall.

This is, by my count, the third time that the “Oracle is going to come out with its own Linux” rumor has surfaced. And, of course, there have been variations on the theme, such as: Oracle is going to buy Red Hat, Novell, or Ubuntu.

I’ve had enough of this nonsense. Oracle isn’t going to buy a Linux company to make its own distribution, and the company isn’t going to make its very own Linux.

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October 15, 2006
by sjvn01
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There Goes My Baby

You’ve nurtured your company since day one. now it’s time to hand the business to professional management. here’s how to make the transition successfully.

You’ve built your business from the ground up with your own hands. You still can see your router lighting up, as you T1 “backbone” connected to the Internet for the first time. You remember the thrill you got when your first product went out the door, like it was only yesterday.

Now, for the troubling twist: Your title remains CEO, but you’re a techie and your company is growing too fast for you to manage. In short, you’re an MCSE–not an MBA.

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October 13, 2006
by sjvn01
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Let the Browser Wars begin

Firefox 2.0 is almost here, and Microsoft is expected to start pushing out Internet Explorer 7 to users via the Windows Automatic Update software-distribution mechanism by year’s end. In short, the browser wars are about to begin again.

Depending on whose numbers you believe, Firefox has been continuing to erode IE’s (Internet Explorer’s) lead.

According to Janco Associates, Internet Explorer has continued to lose market share in 2006. It bottomed out to 75.88 percent share in July, which was down from 77.01 percent in January, and from 84.05 in July of 2005.

OneStat.com, meanwhile, reported earlier this week that the global usage share of IE has grown to 85.85 percent. That’s a jump of 2.8 percent since July, by their counting. Firefox, on the other hand, is at 11.49 percent, a decrease of 1.44 percent since the web analytics specialist reported its July data. The rest of IE’s gain came at the expense of Opera and the other browsers.

NetApplications, however, sees a very different picture. According to Ars Technica’s reporting, IE hit a two-year low at 82.10 percent in September, while Firefox grew to a 12.46 percent market share. Safari, the Mac OS X browser, came in third with 3.53 percent.

As for Linux and browsers, DesktopLinux’s recent survey of Linux users found that Mozilla’s Firefox browser dominates the field. Firefox came in with 58.2 percent usage, followed by Konqueror at 16.3 percent, and Opera at 12 percent. Of all the other browsers, only Mozilla, at 4.7 percent and Epiphany, GNOME’s default browser, at 2.7 percent, grabbed more than 2 percent of the users.

With new browser versions coming out from both Mozilla and Microsoft in the coming weeks, however, we can expect to see dramatic changes in the overall browser market.

Both browsers face challenges of their own. IE 7 is already causing, as Windows technical writer and editor John Mueller puts it, “developer heartburn.” That’s because many of the changes will break existing IE applications.

In particular, Mueller notes that the change in how ActiveX controls are handled “is going to break many applications; everything from shopping carts to data collaboration.” Another potential problem is that some IE developers have also been dragging their feet in getting ready for IE 7.

As for Firefox, the recent rebellion of some open-source developers over the use of the Firefox trademarked name and icon has resulted in a fork, IceWeasel. This split has been led largely by Debian Linux developers.

Not everyone who is pro-Debian has cared for what they see as a totally unneeded fork. Indeed, Ian Murdoch, the founder of Debian and head of the Linux Standard Base, said, “This is so maddeningly stupid I’m embarrassed to be even remotely associated with this.”

Problems and all, though, the new browsers are on their way. Will Firefox 2 continue to dominate outside of Windows, and eat away at IE 7’s lead within Windows? With big changes from both browsers on the way, it’s too early to tell.

A version of this story first appeared in DesktopLinux.

October 12, 2006
by sjvn01
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Enhanced Linux filesystem nears production kernel

Ext3 has become one of the most popular Linux filesystems. However, with hard drives sneaking up on a terabyte, concerns exist that ext3 won’t be able to handle 21st-century storage requirements. With this in mind, the Linux kernel developers have just released the first real-world test version of ext4.

Andrew Morton, the well-known Linux developer, added the new experimental filesystem on Oct. 10 to the Linux kernel.

This new filesystem features support for storage up to for 1024 petabytes per volume. A petabyte is 250 (two to the fiftieth power) bytes. If that sounds insanely large, think again. Individual supercomputers such as Lawrence Livermore National Labs’s BlueGene/L already have over a petabyte of storage and several storage networks are reputed to have well over a dozen petabytes.

Ext4 also supports extent file writing. In extent, when a file is created, it is given a contiguous area of storage. Then, when the file is written to in the future, the new information is written at the end of the earlier file. This is meant to reduce file fragmentation and improve drive performance.

Extent isn’t new twith Ext4. It’s already present in the Reiser4 filesystem as well as in IBM’s JFS (Journaling filesystem), which is used in AIX and Linux.

Like most other modern filesystems, Ext4 is also a journaling filesystem. This is a filesystem that logs file changes to a journal before actually committing them to the filesystem. The reason for this functionality is that, in the event of a file read or write problem, a journaling system makes it much easier to recover data.

The ext4 filesystem is somewhat compatible with ext3. That is, while you can mount it as an ext3 partition, you’ll lose the power to use extents. Thus, it’s more of a way for older Linux systems to access future ext4 data stores than true backwards compatibility.

The new filesystem is currently in the Linux 2.16.19rc1-mm1 release candidate kernel. If all goes well, it’s hoped that it will be ready for production systems within the next six to nine months.