Linux blogs and news

Java virtual machine performance: Ubuntu wins over Windows

In May we reported results of a Windows Server 2008 power test conducted by Michael Larabel at Phoronix. Last week he released the results of his most recent open source versus Windows test, a test of Java virtual machine performance running in Ubuntu Linux, Windows Vista Premium, and Sun’s OpenJDK.

For this round-up we had used a Dell Inspiron 1525 notebook (PM965 + ICH8M Chipset) with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5800 processor clocked at 2.0GHz, 3GB of DDR2 memory, 250GB Hitachi HTS543225L9A300 HDD, integrated Intel 965 graphics, and a screen resolution of 1280 x 800. On the Windows side we were using Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 while with Ubuntu we were using Ubuntu 8.10 and the stock packages (Linux 2.6.27 kernel, X Server 1.5, etc). Each OS was left to its default settings, including the use of the standard desktop effects.

Larabel’s graphs and detailed technical specifications and analysis tell the full story, but the good news to Linux fans is that Ubuntu was a clear winner, and OpenJDK seemed to hold its own compared to Vista.

Well, Java on Ubuntu was pretty much the hands-down winner compared to Microsoft Windows Vista Premium SP1. Running the Java tests on Ubuntu had experienced significant advantages when it came to file encryption, Fast Fourier Transforms, Successive Over Relaxation, Monte Carlo, and the composite Java SciMark performance. In only the Sunflow test were the results between Ubuntu and Windows even close. With the Java 2D Microbenchmark, Windows was faster but that likely falls on the Intel Linux graphics driver having little in the way of performance optimizations and Java on Linux not yet utilizing the X Render extension.

Comparing Sun’s Java and OpenJDK / IcedTea on Ubuntu had roughly the same performance between the two except for a few areas (FFT and Monte Carlo) where the official JVM was noticeably faster.

Last time we reported on these tests and it appeared that Windows had the lead, you responded. Larabel’s article includes a discussion link, and a brief review of some of the comments reveals that some Windows fans don’t like the results.

Linux got owned where it matters the most: Graphics.

But RealNC’s comment about graphics doesn’t quite align with a recent article reporting the results of the 2008 Linux Graphics Survey compiled by Phoronix.

What do you think? Are Linux graphics lacking? Are you surprised by the Java VM performance?

Celebrating the holidays with Linux

This week I went and picked up two ornaments from my local “Giving Tree,” did some shopping, and returned some gifts to be distributed to children in need. This is the third year that I’ve participated in this community giving project, and this year I noticed that the tree was absolutely covered with ornaments for needy children. In these tough economic times, I think it’s important to help out our communities if we are able. We’ve reported that Red Hat has donated the money for the company party to a local food bank. And employees at mobile phone company Funambol have organized a food drive. Whether you’re ready or not (and whether you’ve been good or bad this year), the holiday season is here! I found some stories and ideas about how you might make the most of it this year from the Linux community.

Just in time for the holidays, HP released it’s preinstalled SLED (SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop) 10 SP2 on its HP Compaq dc5850. (I wonder if the name SLED is a coincidence, or if they held off the release to get it out with the snowy weather?) Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has already been reviewing SLED 10 SP2 on his blog, noting that the main improvements surround interoperability with Microsoft. He shares that the new version of SLED supports read and write access to local NTFS drive partitions and has better active directory integration. Vaughn-Nichols installed SLED and encountered a few kinks — a hassle that can be avoided in HP’s preinstalled offering.

But if all of that sounds too practical, or dare I say too boring, fear not — Ken Hess has provided a Linux geek wish list for the 2008 holiday season.You may already have a Linux mobile phone, but do you have a Chumby? Hess points out that all of these gadgets have Linux inside. What more could you want?

1. Asus Eee PC
2. Chumby
3. MusicPal
4. LimeBook
5. Linux-based phones
6. Amazon Kindle
7. MVIX MX-760HD
8. Garmin Nuvi880
9. Nokia N810
10. TiVo

But if you don’t want to spend a bunch of dough, Matt Hartley provides some ideas of “homemade” items that you can give your family and friends by putting your Linux skills to use.

… by utilizing your existing computer system, chances are you already have access to what you need to build a really great gaming rig, with the right open source videos games. Enter PlayDeb for Ubuntu. Whether you download each game individually or opt to give the “gift of plenty” all at once, there are more games here than most people would likely have ever imagined.

From Second Life to a number of very well done first-person shooters, even 3D strategy games, just about anything you might conceive of is available here — at no cost whatsoever.

Hartley also suggests updating an unused notebook and giving the gift of Internet, anywhere, to a loved one. Or spread the joy to your community and give “an off-lease or even totally used PC preloaded with Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE or PCLinuxOS.”

SUSE Linux is growth engine for Novell

Linux is alive and well at Novell Inc.

In its year-end fiscal report yesterday, the Waltham, Mass.-based company reported that open source products, primarily Linux, rose $34.8 million or 37% to $128.8 million in 2008. Fourth-quarter open source revenues rose just a whisker less or 36.1% to $35.7 million.

The increases far outstripped Novell’s other three product divisions, which are identity and security management, systems and resource management, and its workgroup division.

For the 2008 fiscal year, Novell’s total revenues were $957 million, compared with $932 million in 2007, and its net annual loss was $9 million in 2008, compared with a net loss of $44 million the previous year.

Thanks to aggressive pricing and key partnerships with companies such as Microsoft and SAP, the company’s Linux growth rates far exceeded the 22% increase in the overall Linux market, said Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian. SUSE Linux Enterprise, which grew its market share an additional 3% in 2007, added 3,000 new Linux customers this year, including many large enterprises, he said.

Hovsepian added that Microsoft has sold $195 million of the $240 million in SUSE Linux certificates it bought as part of the 2006 pact between the two companies and has purchased an additional $25 million so far this year, Hovsepian said. In 2008, Novell also has increased its independent software vendor agreements significantly, he added.

Discussing the company as a whole, Hovsepian said Novell has made great progress over the past two years, achieved all its milestones for 2008 and, in turn, stabilized and strengthened the company. While acknowledging that the current uncertain economic climate doesn’t lend to detailed forecasts, Hovsepian said Novell will continue to strive for operational improvement and long-term profitability.

Red Hat donates holiday party money to feed the poor

Despite a year of enviable revenue growth, Red Hat Inc. will not be throwing its customary all-out holiday bash this year. Due to concerns about ostentatious spending during an economic downturn, the Raleigh. N.C. software company decided to host a low-key office gathering instead of the lavish affair originally scheduled at the Raleigh Convention Center. As part of the North Carolina’s high-tech Research Triangle, Raleigh appears to be faring better than many regions but, according to news accounts, the city still has residents who are hurting financially due to the national fiscal turmoil.

Therefore, Red Hat decided to donate the money it would have spent on its annual party to charity. Following the results of an employee poll, Red Hat will send the funds to Chicago, Ill.-based Feeding America, a national organization that funds more than 200 food banks, including several in North Carolina.

Although Red Hat declined to reveal the amount of its donation, the company said the funds were enough to pay for 800,000 meals by Feeding America or 1 million pounds of food and grocery products, a Red Hat spokeswoman said.

In addition, Red Hat offices in Raleigh as well as Westford, Mass., are organizing canned food drives for the hungry; Raleigh executives have pledged a donation for every 500 cans donated at its headquarters office.

“We just felt it was the wrong time to be spending a lot of money on ourselves,” DeLisa Alexander, Red Hat’s senior vice president for people and band, told the Raleigh News & Observer. “I don’t see us going back [to big parties]. People want to work for a company that is socially responsible.”

Novell hurts itself with Red Hat swipe

In an obvious swipe at its larger rival, Waltham, Mass.-based Novell Inc. crowed this week that SUSE Linux Enterprise has surpassed all other Linux distros with 2,500 vendor-certified applications running on top of its operating system. If true, this would be quite astonishing since Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat Inc. has a far larger Linux market share.

Upon querying Novell’s PR agency, Andover, Mass.-based Pan Communications Inc. responded with a link to the Red Hat  Software Catalog which lists 2,166 certified software vendors, not applications, so Novell isn’t comparing apples to apples.

A Red Hat spokeswoman said, however, that there are 3,400 vendor applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This is silliness. I feel like a mom telling two toddlers to go back to their sandboxes. (Red Hat is not really at fault here since it didn’t rush forth with a counterpunch.)  I’m probably more fascinated than the competition between these two companies and their strategies than anyone else I know. But this little self-promotion was a waste of time. And Novell, with its carefully worded misleading statements, has a lot to lose: its credibility. Let’s declare the “I’m bigger than you are” nonsense all over. Let’s all get back to work.

LAMP stack story overlooks impact of cloud, reader says

My recent story on the dimming of the LAMP stack sparked a thoughtful reader response from John Locke, the manager of Seattle-based Freelock Computing. The story concluded that while an all-open source stack is still a valid concept, there are many more open source options that LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Perl, Python, PHP) is largely irrelevant.  I made a single exception for Apache, the popular Web server.

Locke argued, however, that even Apache has a growing array of alternatives such as the Lighttpd Web server, the Apache FastCGI Web interface,  the Nginx proxy server and others.

But what undercuts the LAMP stack more than the advent of additional open source options is the emergence of cloud frameworks, Locke said.

Initially, cloud computing meant renting compute power on demand from the likes of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). This meant renting a host virtual machine, programming the top layer, adding libraries and then when it was all done, managing the host and the virtual application, Locke said.

The problem with this model is that data centers are responsible for scaling the application up or down in response to changing volume requirements, he said. To solve this problem, Google, as well as Microsoft’s recently announced Azure platform, go beyond computing-on demand and manage the entire process with frameworks. All you do is write the application code (yes, you still need the P in LAMP), put it atop an application framework, and the framework will scale the application up and down as needed. No further involvement required. No LAMP stack required either.

Two successful examples of cloud frameworks are Salesforce.com and Facebook, he said.

The downside of frameworks, however, are loss of control and potential vendor lock-in, Locke said. The risk is less with Amazon EC2 since its controls are far more limited, he said. When writing an application for a specific vendor’s framework, however, a customer can lose portability because the provisioning and scaling mechanisms are behind-the-scenes and the source code and licensing are not necessarily readily available, he said.

The biggest challenge to LAMP as well as the Java and .NET stacks, therefore, is not the growth of additional choices but the cloud frameworks which may make all the stacks irrelevant. While handing over management and control is convenient, it also has its downside: you have to live by someone else’s rules, Locke said. Just  like a condo or regulated housing community, you’ve delegated the work, but you’ve also lost your freedom. Time will tell if you’ve made a good bet.

Red Hat scoops up accolades

Recently, Red Hat Inc. has scooped up some impressive awards. Last Saturday, Matthew Szulik, the chairman of the Raleigh, N.C.-based company was named the Ernst & Young entrepreneur of the year and the Ernst & Young national winner in technology for growing the open source company into a successful business.

 In presenting the award, James S. Turley, the chairman and CEO of Ernst & Young said that “Szulik follows a proud tradition of pioneering entrepreneurs who overcame skeptics and brought a novel, seemingly improbable business idea to market successfully.”

 Joining Red Hat as president and CEO in 1998, five years after the company was founded, Szulik headed day-to-day operations during almost a decade of expansion. He was replaced as president and CEO nearly a year ago by Jim Whitehurst and now serves as chairman.

 Three days later after Szulik received his award, Red Hat itself was named public company of the year by the North Carolina Technology Association. The award was given on the basis of sustained company growth, solid operating results and stock price appreciation.

 In these turbulent times, accolades are hard to come by.

Microsoft’s embrace of open source could signal turnaround

Microsoft used last week’s ApacheCon as a platform to reach out to the open source community in a public way.

In his keynote last Friday, Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s senior director of platform strategy, told the Apache faithful that Microsoft is serious about partnering with the open source community to create open standards and interoperability. Collaboration on the fundamentals will promote healthy growth, competition and a new round of innovation and will enable customers to allocate IT dollars for constructive uses instead of overcoming infrastructure bottlenecks.

The most recent example of Microsoft’s collaboration with its open source counterparts was its recent decision to join the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) Working Group for improving message interoperability at the application level, which is currently very difficult without expensive proprietary solutions. But Microsoft is also boosting interoperability with open source in Web services, security, databases and network monitoring, Ramji said. This past spring, Microsoft reached an interoperability “milestone” between Soap and Apache’s Axis Web services protocols, he added.

“I’m an eternal optimist. I’d have to be after three years of leading open source at Microsoft,” Ramji said. “There’s been a big shift in a short period of time,” involving hundreds of steps in a company with 93,000 employees, he said.

Ramji’s embrace of open source was echoed, if somewhat less strongly, in a speech last Friday in Australia by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and reported in a CNET blog by Matt Asay. In response to a question about its Internet Explorer browser, Ballmer said Microsoft is unlikely to make Explorer open source because of its proprietary extensions, but he didn’t reject the suggestion out of hand. The measured tone of Ballmer’s response, Asay wrote, “could well be the most rational, pragmatic, open-source-related comment from Ballmer that I’ve ever read.”

Ballmer’s comment suggests that Microsoft has finally recognized that open source can be a useful component of its overall software strategy, Asay concluded.

In other words, Microsoft may finally have decided to stop fighting open source and instead begin to find areas where the two communities can help each other. And that’s a good thing.

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.

In SourceForge.net election, Torvalds and Gates tie for first

If the U.S. presidential election were strictly in the hands of U.S.-based open source developers and aficionados, Democratic candidate Barack Obama would be the hands-down winner, with 56% of the vote compared with 30% for John McCain and 14% for an unspecified independent candidate. Hardly surprising in view of national polls, the results were tallied on SourceForge.net, an open source code repository, of SourceForge.net users and Slashdot.com readers. But the SourceForge.net poll had a number of other questions and this is where the results get interesting, humorous and embarrassing.

The pollsters asked if the U.S. should appoint a national chief technology officer. Surprisingly, the votes were evenly divided, with yeas narrowly edging out the nays, 51% to 49%. The funny and embarrassing part is that the pollster then asked  respondents, open source developers and readers, mind you, to choose their top candidate for the job. And Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, tied for first with the king of proprietary software, Bill Gates. On an open source software site. Is there a disconnect here?

Even worse, the night before the official results were posted, the draft version of the results misspelled Torvalds’ last name as Torvolds. Given Torvalds’ creation of software that has been a huge success — running servers and desktops all around the world — couldn’t SourceForge.net spell his name correctly? (The mistake has since been corrected.)

And while we’re on the subject of Torvalds, he gave a candid 10-minute video interview on –what else — Linux (what else?) last month during the Linux Foundation Kernel Summit in Portland, Ore.

Torvalds said that this year’s attendees were more concerned about the development process itself than pressing technical issues, but he gathered that the process wasn’t irretrievably broken since no one complained. “That’s a good sign,” but some tweaking of the process might be in order, he admitted.

 The Linux community continues to create first-rate code by involving people who really care about the work, Torvalds added. “The secret of real quality is making sure people are proud of the code they write,” he said. “It’s making sure people are involved and taking it personally.” Sounds like good advice for just about any workplace.