Fedora Linux

Red Hat debuts Fedora 10 preview

A preview of Fedora 10 is now available for download from the Fedora website, with improved virtualization, package management and policy controls, and faster startups.

The latest version, which we previewed on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com in Fedora foreshadows Red Hat Enterprise Linux nearly two months ago, introduces new features that Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc., will further test and refine and then ultimately add to the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, due out in 2010.

These include the ability to perform virtual machine installs, provisioning and storage management, all remotely, via libvirt. Libvirt is a Red Hat-initiated virtualization interface that neutralizes differences for common commands among many hypervisors, including Xen and KVM.

Fedora 10 also promises faster startup times based on a new Plymouth engine and adds the ability to set up ad hoc Wi-Fi networks to share an Internet connection among multiple computers. In addition, Fedora 10 simplifies software package management with PackageKit, which bundles all components required for a software install together, and improves security with PolicyKit, which refines user authentication privileges. Fedora 10 also includes a First Aid Kit for detecting and repairing problems automatically and numerous other features.

The final version of Fedora 10 will be released later this month.

Collective Linux development model will be tough to beat, report says

The humble penguin is mascot of quite a treasure.

According to an updated Linux Foundation study, to build from scratch today, the Linux kernel would cost $1.4 billion; a typical Linux distro, $1.2 billion. In addition, Fedora 9, the current community version of Red Hat’s operating system, would cost a whopping $10.8 billion to replicate in current dollars.

The study also quoted a report from Framingham, Mass.-based IDC that appraised the collective value of the entire Linux computing ecosystem at $25 billion. That’s quite a trajectory for Linux Torvalds’ kernel in just 17 years.

The conclusion underlines the obvious: Linux has become a computing powerhouse, running everything from tiny mobile devices to the largest banks and supercomputers. While the software’s open code and modular construction are inherent advantages, the massive Linux community of individual and corporate developers who share the task and cost of improving the software are key to the platform’s success, the report concludes. In contrast, proprietary software companies, which must shoulder their development costs in isolation, will ultimately be hard put to compete with the open source model, the report concludes.

No kidding. As far as this blog is concerned, the report and its conclusions preach to the converted.

Linux Foundation caves to pressure, closes summit to press

The Linux Foundation’s job is promote the use of Linux-based open source software, whose code is freely available for anyone to examine, modify and distribute as they please.

Yet the foundation’s first End User Collaboration Summit in New York City this week was closed to the press and the public, open only to guests by invitation.

Does anyone see a contradiction here?

While the purpose of the Linux Foundation is to promote the use of open source software, the foundation will hold a closed conference with several hundred attendees to discuss how to accelerate innovation in the platform.

In declining my request to attend the summit, the foundation wrote that “the end users there are completely paranoid about getting quoted in the press and made us close it.” The end users. That means the big IT guns in the audience. No doubt they came from many industries but had a heavy representation from Wall Street firms who like having access to open source code and modifying it for their own competitive advantage without allowing their rivals (who might be in the next seat) in on the secret. It’s a tight-lipped group.

Exactly how would the presence of the press infringe on the confidentiality of the conference attendees? Would it make them reticent to ask questions? Even with the press absent, their competitors were still there to pick up any nuance in a question. If the insistence on secrecy comes from the “end users,” the confidentiality problem would have been better solved by simply having attendees ask speakers questions privately, as I did to the CIO of Merrill Lynch following his keynote at LinuxWorld. (To his very evident annoyance, I might add.)

If the push for a closed meeting came from speakers, that’s bad, too. One summit speaker defended the closed meeting by saying his company requires advance permission to give presentations at a public event, and it makes such permission difficult to obtain. (That sounds like the recent Chinese Olympics, which created special locations for protests  but didn’t grant speaking permits.) How sad this is if corporations in the land of the free and the brave prevent their brightest developers from leading workshops and helping others because they might divulge corporate secrets. (And based on the workshops I’ve attended, that’s highly unlikely.)

Just this week, I struggled to find a user who would speak to me about his experience with a Fedora community project and a Red Hat spokeswoman explained that the Fedora project participants couldn’t speak to me either without getting prior corporate permission. (All this fuss over a new installer.)

Under the same principle of “protectionism,” what if the U.S. decided to close its borders to imports to boost local manufacturers and businesses? What if federal, state and local governments decided to close public meetings and decisions to avoid holding officials accountable for difficult (or slimy) actions?

I think the Linux Foundation caved on this issue. By closing the door on the press, it also closed the door to everyone except an elite handful. The thousands of Linux users who might have benefited directly or indirectly from the idea exchange and thought up new ideas on their own will never get that cross-fertilization opportunity.

Conferences on open source software should be open to the press and the public — period.

Fedora gets mixed review in ‘girlfriend test’

Everyone agrees that the Linux desktop has a lot of work ahead to transform itself from a techie obsession to the intuitive, user-friendly desktop of a Macintosh or Windows machine. Even Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the popular Ubuntu Linux desktop, blogged about the shortcoming in a recent column and vowed to close the gap.

In the meantime, however, U.K.-based TechRadar.com recently published Linux: The Girlfriend Test, and a tough test it was indeed. The goal: to find out if a first-time Linux user, presumably a female college student, could accomplish nine familiar Windows tasks using Fedora 9, the community version of Red Hat.

Here are the tasks and how she fared on each one:
1. Bookmark a website in Firefox. No problem.
2. Write and print a letter in OpenOffice. The first part was easy but the letter wouldn’t print and no error message appeared with a reason or resolution.
3. Rip a CD. Task accomplished. But Fedora failed to identify all the output options.
4. Send an instant message. After several unsuccessful attempts, she succeeded by going to msn.com and inputting user data from her Windows Live Messenger account.
5. Create a pie chart in OpenOffice. No problem.
6. Transfer the ripped CD to her iPod. Attempt failed because of a protocol problem. Again, no error message appeared to identify or fix the difficulty.
7. Move a photo of her head onto a photo of her boyfriend’s body using Photoshop. Easy.
8. Watch a video on YouTube. Failed because Firefox was unable to install Flash player due to a malformed file. There was no work-around explanation.
9. Make an international phone call using Skype. Application installation was successful but audio playback problems prevented communication.

The writer concluded that Linux needs to do more with wizards and pop-up instructions to help new users without a technical background successfully transition from Windows or Macintosh to the Linux desktop.

I agree. But I have to say it was a pretty tough test, and the writer never mentioned how he fared in the “Boyfriend Shopping Test” that was his part of the bargain. Inquiring readers want to know.

Red Hat boosts open source at new CUNY lab, national campus tour

Red Hat Inc. is forging open source inroads in education these days.

For starters, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company teamed up with Intel Corp. to help equip the new New York City Open Source Solutions Lab on the City University of New York (CUNY) campus. With software donated by Red Hat and hardware by Intel, the new center will help the city and public agencies develop and test open source applications for municipal and state use.

In addition to government use, however, the lab also will be used to train students in working with open source software.

Ted Brown, executive director of the CUNY Institute for Software Design and Development, said that students need to learn how to work with open source software because open source is a large and growing trend.

Closer to Red Hat’s home base, Red Hat engineer Will Cohen is teaching a graduate course in free and open source (FOSS) software at North Carolina State University. Introduced last spring, the FOSS course enables students to join in ongoing projects of their choice and learn skills such as fixing bugs, testing software and adding new features as well as strengthening their project management and collaboration skills.

Promoting these higher education efforts is the Fedora Project Team, which conducted a three-week tour last spring, visiting 15 of the nation’s top universities to encourage use and instruction in open source software.

Jack Aboutboul, one of the tour participants, told Red Hat News that the faculty and students were very responsive to Fedora’s message about open source software.

“When you have the chance to fundamentally re-architect modern computer science education in the U.S. you take it,” he said. “The time is right to begin incorporating open source into both the campus environment and the curriculum.”

Fedora 9 LiveUSB: Operating systems on the go

This blog post was written by Matt McDonough, assistant editor.

If the enthusiasm of Fedora Project leader Paul Frields and Red Hat software engineer Jesse Keating is any indication, Fedora 9 LiveUSB Creator will likely be the most popular new feature in the next release. As they discussed LiveUSB at the fourth annual Red Hat Summit in Boston last week, Frields and Keating almost glowed about the prospects for the new offering and provided some hints on new features for Fedora as well.

And the capabilities aren’t shoddy. A user, for example, can load Fedora 9 onto a USB drive in the form of a live image, enabling duplication of an entire OS as a live image, complete with an entire hard disk’s worth of files and applications. That’s impressive, because you can shrink down a complex infrastructure and place it on a USB drive as small as 2 GB. Of course, the more memory you have on your USB drive, the more operating systems you can carry around in your pocket or on your key chain. Another benefit of creating a live image of an OS is that a user can download and integrate software updates, applications and files whenever they are needed.

The best feature by far of LiveUSB is the ability to take the USB drive, plug it into any machine, and then boot that machine off of the USB drive so that users have their entire OS in front of them no matter where they are. As you can see in the video below, the USB key with the live image can boot on any machine with no difference in functionality.

Not surprisingly, this technology has received a lot of attention at Red Hat. “All of the things we’ve talked about today we’re looking to capitalize on in our next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL),” Keating said. “I can’t tell you exactly what will be in the next version because it’s not my responsibility to know, … but I can say there is a lot of interest in using this technology.”

While it’s questionable how useful the technology will be for enterprise-level IT professionals in its current form, Fedora 9 and LiveUSB could have broad capabilities if modified for enterprise purposes. IT professionals could transfer broad interfaces to a physical or virtual server with just a USB stick. But for IT novices, it’s a cool program that to take your home OS almost anywhere without lugging a tower around with you.

For more on LiveUSB and Fedora 9, check out the Fedora Project homepage. as well as this video, where Frields discusses Fedora 9 in greater depth and where Red Hat plans to take it.

Red Hat blog: Caffeine needed

Don’t read Red Hat’s latest blog on its desktop policy unless you’ve just chugged a few bottles of Red Bull. In a blog update on its desktop product direction, it says, ” We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.” I’ll bet I’m not the only caffeine-deprived reader who skipped — or might skip — right over that word, consumer. Then I scan down to the bold print which reads: ” our desktop product plans for 2008 and 2009 include …” and thinking, “Huh?” OK, so this is a reader error. Still …

Red Hat then lists three initiatives, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, which, contrary to its name, is a niche product for specialzed uses in manufacturing and other verticals. Not what the term “enterprise” brings to mind at all. The other two are Fedora, the free, community-based desktop version, and, finally, we’re getting to the news here, the Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD), a desktop project currently in development targeted to countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America that are severely undersupplied with computers.

Announced last June and stalled by marketing and assorted other issues, this project, which is still not a done deal. Companies often fall behind in their projects so that’s hardly a crime. But couldn’t Red Hat have simply blogged about the news: it’s late with the Global Desktop project, and be done with it instead of making readers embark on a verbal treasure hunt? And, by the way, mum’s the word on when this initiative is going to happen. It would be nice to know, after all that time wasted.

Installing VMware Server on Fedora 7

Fedora 7 just launched the other day, so let’s throw up a handy tip for installing VMware Server, shall we?

HowtoForge’s into on the install:

This tutorial provides step-by-step instructions on how to install VMware Server on a Fedora 7 desktop system. With VMware Server you can create and run guest operating systems (”virtual machines”) such as Linux, Windows, FreeBSD, etc. under a host operating system. This has the benefit that you can run multiple operating systems on the same hardware which saves a lot of money, and you can move virtual machines from one VMware Server to the next one (or to a system that has the VMware Player which is also free).

Also, with VMware Server you can let your old Windows desktop (that you previously converted into a VMware virtual machine with VMware Converter, as described in this tutorial: http://www.howtoforge.com/vmware_converter_windows_linux) run under your Fedora desktop. This can be useful if you depend on some applications that exist for Windows only, or if you want to switch to Linux slowly.

Step-by-step instructions and some glossy screenshots of the VMware on Fedora 7 install in action can be found at the HowtoForge web site.

Fedora 7 goes live with virtualization, community updates

Fedora 7 went live today and I forgot to buy it a cake. Next year, I swear.

Red Hat’s press release on the news:

The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc. sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration, today announced that the latest version of its distribution, Fedora 7, is now available. The Fedora Project provides the best of next-generation open source technologies and, in its latest version, features a new build capacity that allows for the creation of custom distributions. Fedora 7 now offers a completely open source build process that greatly simplifies the creation of appliances that can be targeted to meet individual needs.

Fedora 7 provides the first appliance development platform that is 100 percent open source with an entirely free distribution build toolchain. The Fedora 7 source code is hosted in a public version control system, the RPMs are built on an external build system and the distributions are built with an external, open source compose tool that allows access by the entire Fedora community.

Through Fedora 7, the community is given an enhanced role that encourages greater openness and collaboration. As a result of its flexible, public build environment, Fedora 7 provides users with the ability to customize like never before. With these capabilities, combined with live CD, DVD and USB technology, the possibilities for appliance creation are endless. After customization, Fedora can be loaded onto various forms of bootable media, allowing users to run their operating system without a hard disk installation.

There’s also some virtualization news to be had, as Fedora 7 features Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and Qemu virtualization technologies (in addition to Xen). This makes sense given the inclusion of KVM in the mainline kernel. All implementations can be managed using the Fedora graphical virtualization manager.

On the community level, Fedora 7’s new single repository is accessible to Red Hat employees and community members alike, giving the community more influence over Fedora than ever before, Red Hat said in its statement.