July, 2008

Jul 29 2008   2:37PM GMT

User frustration with Vista prompts Ubuntu test-drive

Posted by: Pam Derringer
Windows, Microsoft Windows, Linux, desktops, Ubuntu Linux, TechTarget Blogs, Linux versus Windows, Linux desktops, Linux blogs and news

I was relaxing, reading personal email on a leisurely Sunday afternoon when a note from a long-lost friend brought work, and Linux, front and center. The friend, from whom I hadn’t heard in years, reported that her husband, frustrated beyond belief with Microsoft Vista, just bought a new laptop specifically to test-drive Linux. “Which operating system?” I had to know. “Ubuntu,” she responded in a follow-up email. “We want to be ready to abandon ship when the next Microsoft OS comes out … or seriously consider jumping overboard.”

How can Microsoft be so kludgy as to create an operating system so bad that users race back to the previous OS (Windows XP), and Microsoft’s response is to discontinue support for XP? she asked.

“James [her husband] is learning to use Ubuntu. Actually he’s still learning to install it,” our friend writes. “So far, it recognizes that we have a printer but not that it ought to run it.”

As James struggles to learn Ubuntu, he keeps reminding himself that Vista “is a flaccid, overstuffed OS that has crashed in the middle of every task he’s tried to do. [Microsoft] will be lucky if the whole planet doesn’t go Mac and Linux.”

I’ll bet there are many Penguin fans out there who would be happy to help our North Carolina friend. Anyone?

Jul 29 2008   2:10PM GMT

Navy’s ship cancelation a blow for real-time Linux, IBM

Posted by: Pam Derringer
IBM, Linux, Enterprise applications for Linux, Red Hat, TechTarget Blogs, Linux kernel, Linux blogs and news

The U.S. Navy’s cancelation of its $20 billion Zumwalt destroyer contract last week because of a 50% price hike is disappointing for the Linux community and surely must be for IBM The Armonk, N.Y.-based computer company developed Java-based, real-time capabilities to the Linux kernel specifically for the Zumwalt to ensure that all shipboard systems will run with precision timing, particularly battle systems. The Zumwalt’s unified computing system, developed by general contractor Raytheon Co.. in Waltham, Mass., runs on an IBM BladeCenter and IBM x86 servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Since the 2005-2006 Navy design undertaking, IBM has incorporated its technology in IBM WebSphere Real Time, a computing environment for running real-time Linux applications, and recently won an innovation award for its real-time kernel project at this year’s Red Hat Summit.

Now, after the completion of only two destroyers, the contract has been aborted, which surely means a hefty chunk of lost hardware sales for IBM but, more significantly, a step backward for shipboard computing technology, in general, and Linux in particular.

IBM spokesman Mike Darcy said he didn’t know the impact of cancelation on future IBM revenues but said that IBM will continue to work with other customers, defense and financial sectors among them, as interest “continues to grow” in real-time Linux operations.

“Real-time Linux will continue,” Darcy said. “This [the Zumwalt project] is a great showcase for Linux technology.”

Raytheon spokesman Jonathan Kasle agreed.

“We don’t believe the Navy can afford to put old technologies onto any ships,” he told the Boston Globe last week. “Zumwalt technologies advance mission capabilities to address current and evolving threats and support … lower ship personnel levels and lower operating costs. These technologies can be leveraged for future or existing ships.”

According to Darcy’s general reference to current “defense” customers, it appears that the military is already doing so. Let’s hope so. Reverting to old technology on new Navy ships is not the way to go.

Jul 28 2008   4:34PM GMT

Package managers: Downloaders beware

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Security, Linux, DataCenter, authentication, Systems Management, Updates and upgrades, Administration, interoperability and integration

Package management—the process of determining which update packages should be installed on a host and then downloading and installing those package—invites a dilemma : OSes need to updated, but the process of updating them can invite security breaches.

A recent study at the University of Arizona explored nine feasible attacks on the popular package managers APT and YUM. As part of their research, the study’s conductors posed as a group of administrators from a nonexistent company and leased a server from a hosting provider. Thousands of clients, including government agencies, downloaded upgrades, which prompted their operating systems to endlessly replicate data, misidentify dependencies, and install unnecessary software. It also left these clients vulnerable to other attacks on their systems, including hackers gaining root access to OSes, system crashes and erased files . Researchers concluded that many public storage spaces for upgrade downloads are in fact maliciously established “mirrors,” or software repositories , that have become infected with sources of attack. You can prevent most of these issues by downloading from only signed metadata repositories, the study counseled. A signature verifies that the repository was created benevolently.

Protecting against mirror threats
In response, readers suggested a number of additional ways to protect a package manager from such threats.

• An OpenSUSE page suggested its internally developed tool, download redirector.
• One blogger wrote that the risks posed by infected repositories are not great enough to merit changes to package manager security.
• Another acknowledged the risk and argued that simply allowing the number of open source package manager products available to increase will maintain or improve current open source package manager security.
• A Gentoo administrator promoted rotating mirrors to ensure security.

Package manager security, as pointed out by this report, is crucial to the success of your operating system. With the present drive for continuous upgrades for your data center, you may feel pressure to download from the most accessible source available. Don’t: the risk of downloading insecure software is greater than the time it will take to check out the above links.

For more on package managers, check out these links: How to manage software on Ubuntu Server with “aptitude” and “apt-get”

Managing Software on Ubuntu Server Edition

Jul 23 2008   9:17PM GMT

Surprise! Open source is growing fast, report concludes

Posted by: Pam Derringer
Linux

This probably comes as no surprise to faithful Enterprise Linux Log readers, but the use of open source software grew at a whopping 55% a year. No kidding. That figure is courtesy of a study by well-known Linux author and consultant Bernard Golden, CEO of San Carlos, Calif.-based Navica Inc. for O’Reilly Media and released this week during the ongoing OSCON convention in Portland, Ore.

The 47-page Open Source in the Enterprise report based its growth SourceForge.net’s estimates on the number of open source software downloads, which, according to the site, grew from 12,500 to nearly 200,000 between 2000 and 2007 and are predicted to grow to 1 billion or more annually over the next year or two, according to the report.

Although admittedly imprecise, another growth indicator is an estimate that open source skills are requested in 5% to 15% of open IT jobs. According to a federal government study, 2.3% of jobs in large enterprises are IT related and 1.3% or more than half of all IT jobs involve open source to some extent, although both totals are higher than average in technology companies, the study concluded.

The O’Reilly Media report also found that, although only about half of the businesses queried knew they were using open source software in the enterprise, in fact, nearly all of them were using open source products in one form or another, sparking the need for an action plan to deal with it, the report said.

Despite company concerns that open source is risky without vendor support, open source use has grown because of its relative low cost, easy access and great licensing terms, all of which add up to a compelling value proposition, Golden wrote.

There are six key drivers for open source adoption including agility and scalability, breaking vendor lock-in, quality, security, low cost, national sovereignty/independence issues and innovation, he said.

Open source drivers
To cite a few examples, San Francisco-based Coverity Inc. found the Linux kernel averaged 0.17 bugs per thousand lines of code compared wwith a Carnegie Mellon study that detected 30 to 40 bugs per thousand in commercial software.

Open source also fosters innovation by spreading the cost of research and development and enlisting assistance from the broader open source community. For example, JP Morgan Chase began work on what is now called Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) with the goal of speeding transaction processing times for financial institutions but decided to open the project to others and forgo intellectual property rights in order to save development and software costs.

Available for download from the O’Reilly Web site, the report is probably more helpful to a company considering open source adoption rather than one than is an open source evangelist. The only thing is: a billion downloads from SourceForge by this year or next? Seems like a stretch to me. And, by the way, the report may be downloadable and concern open source — but it’s not free.

Jul 18 2008   4:57PM GMT

Open source: Get a (marketing) life, Yegge says

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Linux, CRM, Linux versus Windows, Linux blogs and news

“You are a brand,” Steve Yegge, technology prodigy and renowned industry blogger, told listeners in a podcast on software marketing last July. Yegge stressed that branding is essential for open source technologies that strive to compete with Microsoft and other proprietary vendors.

Corporate software vendors like Microsoft have been all over the branding game for a while, but open source vendors have been slower to embrace dogmatic self-promotion.
There is still a gap between IT consumers’ perceptions of open source software and the ideological fuel driving the work of its developers. Corporations are hesitant to weaken their brand appeal by associating their software with open source.

As pointed out in a recent article on customer relationship management software branding, the danger for open source in this environment is that it’s a buyer’s, rather than a seller’s, market. The saying “If you build it, they will come,” doesn’t hold anymore, says Yegge.

Open source’s next big move will not be the decision on whether to go commercial. Rather, it will be its ability to produce an identity that buyers — ideological and commercial — can brand as a positive thing.

Jul 16 2008   6:47PM GMT

Novell’s Steinman upbeat on growth, partnerships

Posted by: Pam Derringer
Linux, SUSE/Novell, Interviews, TechTarget Blogs

Novell Inc. may be a distant No. 2 to Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat. Inc. in sales of its open source operating system. But that doesn’t daunt Justin Steinman, Novell’s director of product marketing, Linux and Open Platform Solutions.

In an informal chat over lunch at the Naked Fish around the corner from Novell headquarters in Waltham, Ma., Steinman said his landing at Novell four years ago, right out of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, was great timing ahead of the current growth curve and a great opportunity to be part of Roger Levy’s management team. (Levy is senior vice president, general manager, Open Platform Solutions.)

Growth is the story with Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise, with billings climbing 200 percent last year, due to $156 million in sales of Microsoft SUSE certificates during the past six quarters, plus organic growth in SUSE’s core customer base, Steinman said. SUSE added 4,700 new customers last year, which collectively are an “arrowhead for growth,” helping to boost new business orders by 69% in the first quarter of 2008 and 38% in the second, he said. Novell’s status as a preferred partner to Microsoft and SAP might sway some prospects into the customer column as well, he said.

”But Microsoft (which committed to selling $240 million in SUSE certificates as part of its 2006 agreement with Novell), is less and less a part of our Linux business because the core [customer base]is growing,” he said. “I’m very bullish on Novell.”

The economics of open source are “very compelling,” and businesses like having the control that comes with access to the source code, he added.

Steinman wasn’t divulging any secrets over lunch but he did say hat Platespin, which was acquired earlier this year, should be fully integrated into SUSE by Nov. 1 and that SUSE 11 is on track for release in the first half of next year.

Novell also is busy completing work on open-source translators for Microsoft’s System Center, he added, including systems management, document format, accessibility for the disabled, directory and identity, virtualization and the Moonlight open source version of Microsoft’s Silverlight web browser plug-in.

With customers like Wal-Mart, Southwest Airlines and German Air Traffic Control, Novell is proving that Linux is ready for mission-critical workloads, he added. At the same time, Novell SUSE is reaching out to small- and medium-sized businesses with its JeOS (Just Enough Operating System) mini-operating system appliance for building applications because it enables ISV’s to serve that market, he said. JeOS is downloadale in beta. More building tools for JeOS are expected soon.

Jul 9 2008   6:49PM GMT

Harvard Law professor outlines OS evolution

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Windows, Linux, videos, Microsoft, Linux versus Windows, Legal, licensing issues, Linux blogs and news, GPL issues

According to Yochai Benkler, Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, open source software is part of a shift to an economy driven by de-centralized non-market transactions. What the heck does that mean?

Yochai could probably tell you better himself, but it means that commerce is moving away from its home in the marketplace. The power to purchase is taking the place of the authority of institutions.

It means that a basic kindergarten tenet is coming into its own in our economy: sharing. The freedom to socially share is undermining Microsoft, the government and most centralized authorities’ ability to determine the course of events and money. Listen to Professor Benkler above to determine whether you agree.

Jul 7 2008   1:20PM GMT

Subversion releases 1.5.0: Right for the enterprise

Posted by: Caroline Hunter
Linux, DataCenter, DataManagement, Enterprise applications for Linux, Administration, interoperability and integration, Open source applications, Updates and upgrades

Subversion (SVN) 1.5 has finally been released. Why should you care? For enterprise software managers who seek an open source software solution with a great feature set whose server and client run on Unix, Linux, Mac and/or MS Windows, SVN is a great choice.

The Subversion project, licensed as free and open software by CollabNet, began as a replacement for Concurrent Versions System (CVS). SVN has since grown beyond just fixing what was wrong with CVS and has come into its own as a great software configuration management tool. SVN 1.5 has upped the ante with support for tasks like the following:

• merge tracking;
• sparse checkouts;
• interactive conflict resolution;
• changelists, as well as
• WebDAV transparent write-through proxy; and
• several back-end improvements for speed and reliability.

Merge tracking is probably the most anticipated feature. During development, a developer sometimes creates a new branch in the code repository while creating a new feature. During this process, a developer merges code that gets added to the stable mainline while he continues the new feature work. When the new feature is complete, the feature branch is merged into the mainline.

Previously, the developer would have had to keep track of which revision he began the branch at - and which revisions were merged into the feature branch. With SVN 1.5.x, a server keeps track of this for you. You just issue the svn merge command with the source you want to merge from, and it records what has been done. When you want to bring your branch into the mainline, svn merge --reintegrate brings it in. To top it off, in the event of a conflict, interactive conflict resolution during a merge makes the process much easier.

The second biggest feature is the WebDAV transparent write-through proxy. Imagine that your SVN server is in the U.S., but there are developers working on the project in Asia as well. SVN operations done from that distance can be slow, especially with a large repository and a fresh checkout. With this feature, you can place a server in Asia for developers there to use. It will serve “read” requests like checkouts and updates locally, and write requests will be passed along to the “master” server back in the U.S. As an added bonus, this “proxy” server in Asia is a mirror of your “master” server in the U.S. in case disaster strikes.

Merge tracking and WebDAV transparent write-through proxy, as well as everything else that Subversion can do, make it a great enterprise software configuration management tool.

Jul 3 2008   3:49PM GMT

Xandros’ Linspire buy is great spectator sport

Posted by: Pam Derringer
Microsoft Windows, Linux, Red Hat, Linux versus Windows, Linux blogs and news, TechTarget Blogs

Sometimes company acquisitions are just fun to sit back and watch. Xandros Inc.’s recent acquisition of Linspire Inc. is a case in point. Xandros is building its muscle as the go-to interoperability player, getting Microsoft’s nod to create open source management packs for Microsoft’s new System Center and then creating Bridgeways for Red Hat, dual-purpose monitors for mixed operating environments.

While Xandros is purely a desktop/consumer play at the moment, its purchase of Linspire is intriguing because it bulks up its capabilities and reputation as a source of all things Linux. As you may recall, Linspire was the free open source operating system called Lindows. It changed its name after Microsoft, alleging violation of its Windows trademark, shelled out more than $20 million to end the matter.

The common thread: Xandros and Linspire both offer digital downloads, Xandros of open source tools and Linspire of open source operating systems.

Although no new products have yet been announced, Xandros CEO Andreas Typaldos said that the two companies will soon begin to integrate their products more closely.

This merger won’t affect data centers today. But it looks like a smart move. And it just might result in an enterprise tool down the road. Stay tuned.