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.

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.