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.

October 11, 2006
by sjvn01
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Portland points desktop Linux at $10 billion market

Nearly a year in the making, the OSDL and freedesktop.org today announced general availability of Portland 1.0, the first set of common interfaces for GNOME and KDE desktops. This support may be a small step for GNOME and KDE, but it’s a giant leap for the Linux desktop.

These first common interfaces are a set of command line tools, xdg-utils. These first command line tools can be used by ISVs (independent software vendors) to help install software and provide access to the system while the application is running.

Specifically, these tools make installing and uninstalling menus, icons, and icon-resources easier for developers. They also can obtain the system’s settings on how to handle different file types, and program access to email, the root account, preferred applications, and the screensaver.

There’s nothing new in this kind of functionality. What is new is that developers can use these regardless of which desktop environment — KDE or GNOME — they’re targeting. This means ISVs can design programs much more easily for both environments.

Unlike some theoretical standards, Portland 1.0 environments are already available in several major community distributions, including Debian, Fedora, and openSUSE. The corporate Red Flag and Xandros distributions have also committed to including Portland in their next releases. Sources said that Linspire, Novell, and Turbolinux are also expected to announce Portland adoption shortly. TrollTech’s Qt 4.2, the primary KDE application framework, is also using Portland 1.0 to provide developers with tighter integration with the GNOME desktop environment.

John Cherry, the OSDL’s (Open Source Development Labs) Desktop Linux initiative manager, said that this support from the actual movers and shakers of desktop Linux is vital. “The important part of this release is that we have real distros and they’re putting the tools in their development trees.”

The release of Portland 1.0 is expected to accelerate adoption of Linux on the desktop. According to market analyst IDG, this will help the desktop Linux market grow to around $10 billion by 2008.

OSDL CEO Stuart Cohen stated, “For the first time, ISVs are able to port their applications to Linux regardless of desktop environment. This release gives ISVs the opportunity to increase their customer base and for users to gain access to new applications. Portland is a success story for vendors, developers and users alike — it’s a perfect example of how a common need, combined with a distinct community interest, produces collaboration and increased adoption of technology.”

Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos added, “Portland 1.0 opens the way to the creation of a rich Linux application infrastructure that will address the diverse needs of our business clients,” said “We will see an accelerated rollout of real-world Linux solutions since third party software developers can now integrate their applications regardless of the desktop deployed.”

It’s not just the Linux businesses that are excited by Portland. Agustin Benito, development coordinator for mEDUXa, the educational Linux distribution of the Canary Islands Government, said that “Compatibility for educational applications and other free software projects across graphical desktop environments is critical, especially as we customize menus to include applications from other products. This makes the job OSDL is doing with the Portland Project so important for the community.”

This is only the first Portland release. A similar set of interface tools will be offered in the form of desktop services, in the form of a DAPI (Desktop Application Programming Interface) that applications can use via the DBUS message bus system.

In addition, through Portland, desktop developers are working on other ways to find common programming ground to make Linux more ISV friendly.

The Portland Project was born from the first OSDL Desktop Architects Meeting in December 2005. A Portland preview was made available in April 2006, and beta versions were released throughout the summer. The Portland Project is expected to be included in the Linux Standard Base (LSB), the industry standard for interoperability between applications and the Linux platform.

If it’s not already in your development tree or toolkit, xdg-utils is available for download.

October 9, 2006
by sjvn01
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Open Source Madness

I love free software. I use open-source programs and operating systems every day. But once in a while, I want to take some free software developers and shake them until their teeth rattle. At the moment, I’m ticked off because the Debian community’s recent hissy-fit over the Mozilla Corp.‘s trademarked Firefox logo has led them, and others, to forking the Firefox code to avoid the use of the logo.

Gnuzilla, part of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU Project, is creating “the ‘GNU/Linux’ version of same, to be dubbed ‘IceWeasel.'” This may, or may not, become the logo-free version of Firefox that Debian will ship in its next distribution.

Regardless of how this turns out, the Firefox “bug” has been removed from Debian.

What are these people thinking!

Don Armstrong, a Debian developer who is active in legal issues affecting free software, told me, “The issue here is purely the license on the firefox logo; all parts of the Debian distribution have to be modifiable by those to whom we distribute. The firefox logo cannot be modified, and so we cannot ship it. Instead, we have been shipping the logo which is freely licensed.”

I guess we can’t keep the Firefox baby if the bathwater of logo-hackers might be offended!

Yes, I know, I know, it’s against a strict interpretation of the Debian Social Contract. You know what. I don’t care for fundamentalists.

There’s also another problem. The Gnuzilla version is an honest-to-goodness fork of Firefox. The first change is an automatic block for Web sites that use zero-size images on other hosts to keep track of cookies. The second change alerts users when a site tries to rewrite the host name in links, which redirect the user to another site, to track clicks.

This is great. That’s just what we need, a fork of perhaps the single most important open-source application.

It will mean more work for programmers. It will mean more work for Firefox, or should I say IceWeasel, extension developers. It will be what all forks are: a major pain for both users and developers.

By winning this “battle,” the pedantic Debian developers have helped the proprietary forces of Microsoft and friends far more then the cause of Open Source.

Think. When you get a Windows box, you know Internet Explorer is the default browser. When you get Linux, there may be several browsers available to you, but you always know that Firefox will be one of your choices. Or, rather, it used to be.

If the IceWeasel forks gains popularity, we’ll also have people having to deal with two slightly different browsers.

This will make would-be Debian users just a touch confused. And, you know what? It doesn’t take much to befuddle users. A confused user isn’t a happy user.

Given a choice between the Firefox they already know about and “IceWeasel,” they’re going to go for Firefox. Or, maybe, just maybe, instead of dealing with this confusing Linux stuff, they’ll stick with Windows after all.

That will be just fine with some Linux users. You know the ones. The ones who grumble about that damn upstart Ubuntu, the ones who “correct” people that it’s not “Linux” it’s “GNU/Linux.” In short, it’s the ones who want Linux to stay a techie paradise and freedom trumps common sense.

Sorry, that’s not my crew. I want Linux to be as user-friendly as Mac OS X, as powerful as AIX, and without this nonsense of having different names and icons for the same blasted programs.

A version of this story first appeared in DesktopLinux.

October 4, 2006
by sjvn01
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Mandriva Corporate Server 4 misses the mark

Some people think that I’m always pro-Linux and anti-Microsoft. Nope. That’s not true. I’m pro what works, and I’m anti what doesn’t work. Most of the time, Linux has been a winner. But, sometimes, it isn’t. And, that brings me to Mandriva Corporate Server 4.

This distribution was to be Mandriva‘s big step up into the business Linux world. This was to be the Linux that would challenge SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) and RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) in the climb to the top of the corporate ladder.

Ah… it’s not.

For starters, as eWEEK Labs found out in its recent Mandriva review, it just doesn’t work that well.

One of Mandriva’s strong points was to be that it supported three of the major Linux-friendly virtualization hypervisors: Xen, OpenVZ, and VMware. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do well by any of them. SLED and RHEL both outdid it with Xen, Debian does OpenVZ better, and VMware… well, the VMware programs aren’t there yet, although they’re supposed to become available RSN (real soon now).

This is the kind of thing that usually annoys me about Microsoft products. When I buy software, I expect it to at least have all the parts in the box in somewhat working condition. Mandriva should have held off shipping this Linux until it was ready for prime-time.

The Labs also found that Mandriva’s three different system management and configuration tool sets were not at all well-integrated. I can live with different management tools when they handle different jobs. I’m not crazy about it, but I can live with it.

For what it’s worth, I agree with the Labs. Since Mandriva is making use of the popular free Webmin administration program set, they should just go ahead and make it their standard administration console.

Yes, Webmin, which is based on Perl, is a bit slow, but there’s little you can’t do with it once you have the right Webmin modules in place and you get the hang of the system.

As for Mandriva, the French Linux distributor still needs to get the hang of a business-ready server before they’ll be ready to compete with Novell/SUSE and Red Hat.

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

October 3, 2006
by sjvn01
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Why Linux will Dominate the Future of Servers

George Weiss, Gartner’s open-source analyst, recently said that Microsoft Windows will not suffer irreparable damage on the server side at the hands of Linux over the next five years. He’s right. Microsoft will fall flat on its face all by itself, and Linux will pick up afterwards.

It’s very simple.

What does any business want from servers today?

Go, ahead, take a look at the latest server software and hardware news, I’ll wait for you.

Continue Reading →

October 3, 2006
by sjvn01
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HDMI 1.0 vs. HDMI 1.1

A friend was in the market for an HDTV recently and she ran into the perplexing question of: “Which is better HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) 1.0 or HDMI 1.1?”

It’s a good question, people who can talk intelligently about the differences between 1080i (interlaced) and 720p (progressive) can be stumped by this one.