Linux desktops

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.”

Ubuntu founder’s new mantra: Free the clouds

In a webcast to announce the release of Ubuntu 8.10 on Thursday, Oct. 30, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth said he believes the emerging layer of cloud frameworks should remain free open source just like the hypervisor. Instead of making money from the frameworks themselves, companies should seek to make money from tech support and intellectual property assurance, he said.

Shuttleworth wasn’t sure exactly how many people use Ubuntu software for free or with paid support. “‘I have absolutely no idea,” he said. “But our growth is outpacing anyone else.”

An indicator that seems to support that growth is that 25% of those who have downloaded Ubuntu said they use it in production versus development, he said.

The three key metrics for measuring platform success are levels of user adoption, commercial partnerships and user satisfaction, Shuttleworth said. It’s hard to quantify adoption without compromising privacy, he said. But users have grown so fast that the London-based Canonical Ltd. has taken extra care to ensure that the core base doesn’t feel neglected because of the expanding base of new users, he said.

As for partnerships, Canonical is working with as many of the top 10 original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) as it can and, in fact, is in the position of having to choose from competing hardware vendors, he said. London-based Canonical Ltd., the commercial backer of Ubuntu, has “several million” dollars in annual revenues but has not yet earned a profit.

“I have the patience to see the company through any downturn, but I think [the current global fiscal troubles] will be good for Canonical,” he added. “There’s no prospect of a squeeze on Canonical.”

“Our core business has had very positive growth” and could be in the black, but Canonical has chosen instead to devote resources instead to advancing the desktop in three ways: enhancing touch, bringing games close to three-dimensional imaging and adding additional Web capabilities and cloudlike computing to the desktop, he said.

Without those research initiatives, Canonical could be profitable in two years, but Shuttleworth said he doesn’t mind waiting three to five years if the extra time helps the company create the futuristic desktop he envisions. Shuttleworth also said he doesn’t believe that anyone can make money selling a Linux desktop, and he considers that positive. The only way to make money on the desktop is through services, which is a trend affecting the whole industry now, even Microsoft, he said.

“I remain confident that this is the right business model for the industry,” Shuttleworth predicted. “Software will shift away from licensing.”

Red Hat mystifies with Qumranet purchase

Less than a week after Red Hat Inc.’s surprise $107 million purchase of Qumranet Inc., I remain mystified by this acquisition. Qumranet is the Israeli-based creator of the KVM open source hypervisor, which is incorporated into the Linux kernel; SolidIce virtual desktop, which Qumranet launched earlier this year but has yet to gain serious traction, and Spice, a super-fast communications protocol for transmitting bandwidth-heavy multimedia content at high speed that other vendors currently can’t match.
.
The first person to raise questions about this buy to me was George Weiss, executive vice president of Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Inc., who said this dual hypervisor strategy would make life more difficult for Red Hat customers, who would have to buy a management console to control the two hypervisors, Xen, which is already in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5, and KVM, which will be added in subsequent versions.

Burton Group analysts Chris Wolf and Richard Jones pointed out that KVM enters a crowded market late in the game. Despite a solid architecture, KVM is still immature and lacks the momentum and multi-vendor support of more-established Xen, Wolf said. To be the No. 2 virtualization vendor based on KVM, Red Hat must end its isolation from the Microsoft camp and attain certification under Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program so its hypervisor will be optimized for Microsoft guests, he said.

KVM needs the support of another big vendor or two, added Jones. The Qumranet acquisition will pull Red Hat in the direction of desktop virtualization while Xen will continue to dominate the server market, he predicted.

Tech blogger Jason Perlow said Red Hat told him that it plans to open source the Spice protocol and other components of the SolidIce desktop virtualization. If so, Red Hat will have positioned itself as a solid competitor to VMware and Citrix’s desktop and server virtualization, assuming an attractive pricing model, Perlow predicted. “At the end of the day, it’s not about raw technical merit. It’s about how well the vendor markets the solution and how palatable it is to end users,” he said.

Daniel Kusnetzky, principal analyst of Osprey, Fl.-based Kusnetzky Group, who recently counted Qumranet as a client, raised another rationale for Red Hat’s purchase of Qumranet: control over the hypervisor. Red Hat lost leverage over Xen when Xen was bought by Citrix; this acquisition gives Red Hat control over KVM, he said. Good point.

The bottom line: Maybe it’s just that I’m a frugal New England Yankee, but I wouldn’t pay $107 million for a giveaway hypervisor and a promising-but-wannabe desktop virtualization product. Especially since desktop virtualization is not yet ready for mainstream adoption since it shifts storage to the data center, which is more costly. This acquisition is all the more surprising since Red Hat hasn’t done much with the desktop to date. Kusnetzky may have hit the bull’s eye on Red Hat’s motivation but Wolf also is correct that it’s time for Red Hat to mend fences with Microsoft if it wants to be relevant to the overwhelming majority of the computing universe, desktop or server.

User frustration with Vista prompts Ubuntu test-drive

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?

Boston’s Ubuntu Hardy Herons party with London bigwigs

Ubuntu fans may be passionate geeks when it comes to free software, but last night’s happy love fest at the Globe Bar & Grill in Copley Place was more about enjoying the moment and being together than serial computer installs. Nearly two dozen members of the Massachusetts Ubuntu LoCo (Local Community) cozied into the mezzanine of the downtown Boston night spot to celebrate the launch of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) for desktops and servers.

“I’m here for the cake,” joked Craig Andrews, a software engineer with girlfriend in tow. “I want to see who’s here. This is a social opportunity.”

And Andrews got his wish.

A highlight of the event was the arrival of Jono Bacon and his London entourage midway through the event. Bacon, the Ubuntu community leader worldwide, made his way from the office in Lexington, Mass., which he had been visiting on business, and stopped in to mingle with the crowd and cheer the troops. No doubt, Bacon’s appearance was due in part to the hard work by the active, certified local chapter, which generally meets across the river, in Cambridge at MIT.

Although there were a few laptops running Ubuntu 8.04 on tables about the room, the kickoff event was more about clusters of Ubuntu fans, mostly longtime users but also a smattering of newbies, talking up the new release and sharing the excitement of Ubuntu’s growing popularity and added features.

“There’s more people than I thought,” said Martin Owens, a programmer and one of the leaders of the group. “I see a lot of new faces.”

Owens, who prides himself on “not working for anybody who doesn’t use Linux,” added that he particularly appreciates that the new release includes a Likewise Open plug-in to Microsoft’s Active Directory.

Michael Rushton, leader of the group, said the event was one of many worldwide all celebrating the new Ubuntu software release.

Rushton explained his love for Linux in just a few words. “You install it,” he said. “And it just works.”

The refreshments may have been a mite on the skimpy side, but the “Hardy Heron” cake was a feast, indeed.

Linux on the desktop: Soon, but not yet

This blog was contributed by SearchEnterpriseLinux.com expert Sander van Vugt.

At Novell Inc.’s annual BrainShare user conference in Salt Lake City, I talked to Guy Lunardi, one of the most important guys behind Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). I had one pressing question for him. I showed him my new Dell XPS laptop, which has a lot of fancy stuff and runs out of factory Windows Vista (since that is the only OS that will allow me to use all the fancy stuff). So I asked him, “When will I install SUSE Linux on that?”

He responded, “Sander, if you go to a shop, buy a Vista DVD and install it on your laptop, do you think it will all work?” The answer was of course not.

When you introduce new hardware, one of the major issues is driver support. “Currently we are talking a lot with the people that develop the devices that are in these new computers to make sure that Linux drivers will be available,” Lunardi explained. “We help them wherever we can and it’s only getting better. It helps that we have some major customers like the Peugeot car manufacturer in France that demand specific functionality. They ask [for] a feature, we’ll make sure they get it and the result of all the effort will be in our new software.”

So there have been lots of developments recently. As a result, when it comes out later this year, openSUSE 11 will be as good as Windows Vista in supporting devices. “But,” Lunardi assured me, “you’ll always have to complete the installation of your operating system by downloading and installing additional drivers. That’s the case for Linux, [just] as it is the case for Windows.”

Fair enough. I’ll give it a try when openSUSE 11 comes out.

Installing Google Desktop on Linux

For individuals who have used Google Desktop in the Windows world, having the tool available on Linux may ease the transition to a new desktop operating system. I started using the Google Desktop on my Linux system. This blog will go through the installation process and show how it works on a Linux desktop.

Installing Google Desktop
The Google Desktop recently added 64-bit support for Linux operating systems, so now is a good time to consider enterprise-wide deployment. From the Google Desktop Linux version website, a quick 7.7 MB download will have the application on your system. I have been installing the 64-bit version on Red Hat with a .RPM install file option. The quick and painless installation has Google Desktop listed in the window manager environment after reboot:

When you have the Quick Search Box open, you can search for all kinds of stuff on your file system, on the web and within system control operations. For example, enter “Display” here and the display applet from /usr/share/applications will be executed to select screen resolution, color depths and dual-monitor configuration. And of course, you can make Google Internet searches within the Google Desktop application.

Local web server
It is important to note that installing the Google Desktop application on Linux starts a local web service to access your data. The default configuration is to run on port 38642 TCP as the local host. In most configurations, the port and web service are not available outside of the local host’s browser. The website makes a great interface for you to do searches on your local file system as well as Internet resources, but a rather extensive indexing needs to occur to organize all content locally available. When accessing the local web service, an indexing status message will appear similar to the image below:

Once the indexing is complete, and this is entirely dependent on the contents of your local system, you will have your own personal Google running locally. Give it a test drive and throw in some search items. Even try searching for log message entries, as the Google Desktop engine will spider your local log messages as well as your file system contents of normal content such as OpenOffice documents. Your search results will be broken out into categories such as emails from a local email application, files locally available on the file system and your own web history.

Learning curve tool
Having the Google desktop on Linux operating systems can aide users who are new to the Linux environment and help ease the transition. One issue to watch is policy aberration. By having this type of tool available, standards such as authoritative storage may not be enforced. Overall, the Google Desktop application gets a thumbs up from me in being able to find files locally.

Use virtual keyboards to support international Linux systems

Should you be so privileged as to be in a position to have to support international enterprise Linux installs or distributions, you may run into the occasional situation where you need local characters and your keyboard can’t offer much help. I had a chance to run a tool called Javascript VirtualKeyboard (JVKb) that you can host locally to give you access to the international keyboard and the characters contained. This tool will offer a floating keyboard localized in your choice of many languages. I’ll show you how I used it and how it may help any of your situations where you need local characters or on a remote system need an English (US) keyboard.

Getting Started is Straightforward

JVKb is obtained as a single tar file that you extract, and then access via an HTML page. There is no install required for JVKb, but a Java runtime environment (jre) is required to execute the Javascript (.js) files. Most current Linux builds will provide a compatible jre for JVKb. You could also extract the files and host them centrally to keep an even smaller footprint for your systems where you may need another language in the form of a keyboard.

Running JVKb on Demand

Because there is no install, we can launch the JVKb as needed. I opened up the HTML file and launched a pop-up keyboard, here is a Czech keyboard popping up on my CentOS Linux console in GNOME:

I also am able to access the JVKb within a VNC session, which would be helpful if the system is remote. Here is a Greek keyboard floating within a VNC session:

Limitations

JVKb is not robust, but since it is free we should not complain too much. It would save time if it mapped over the sessions keyboard instead of relying on copy and paste. Also, all characters that appear may not be available in the virtual keyboards. The other limitation is that it cannot be launched or used within a terminal or SSH session. 

This application is helpful in several different ways, but the missing character problem may also be a nuisance if you come across a password that is set to contain a character from the other language. Watch your remote installations for this.

The Big Three of Linux: Looking ahead to 2008

What are Red Hat, Novell and Canonical going to have to do in 2008 to in order to dominate the desktop and server Linux market?

Let’s take a moment and assess the situation. Red Hat is the dominant force in Linux right now. They own the enterprise market. SUSE is also supported by many IHVs as a ready-to-install operating system (OS), but does not have nearly the market share as flouted by the fedora. Ubuntu is the little Linux OS that could and, in the last three years, it has gripped the desktop Linux market with a stranglehold and will not let go.

It seems that each distribution has found a niche: Red Hat and Ubuntu are the leaders in their markets, and SUSE is a comfortable runner-up. However, history has shown us that businesses are not content to stay still too long or play second fiddle. So, what will Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu have to do in the new year to gain new ground?

Red Hat

I’ve been using Red Hat Linux since the mid-90s. They are arguably the most successful proprietors of Linux ever. Red Hat figured out what many companies are just now figuring out about virtualization: it’s not always about the core technology, it is about how you support and manage that technology. Red Hat provides a better support and management structure for their products than any other Linux vendor. It is no wonder they dominate the enterprise market.

On the flip side of the coin, Red Hat has long since been usurped as leaders on desktops. There was Slackware, then Gentoo and now Ubuntu. Sure, Red Hat sponsors the Fedora Core project, but it does not have the market share to be considered in the same game as Red Hat. In the coming year, Red Hat needs to get rid of the Fedora Core moniker and reel its desktop community back in under the auspices of the Red Hat name. Red Hat is associated with stability and the enterprise: they need to create a desktop product that also has these associations. True, Red Hat offers its Enterprise Linux Desktop product, but it lacks the bleeding-edge features of Fedora Core that make the latter so appealing to the desktop crowds. Red Hat must figure out how to transition the passion of the Fedora Core audience back into the house that the Fedora built. Once Red Hat is able to recapture those users, then it can finally offer a datacenter-to-desktop computing solution that can dominate servers and workstations everywhere.

Novell SUSE

Novell has been one of the most prolific innovators in the IT industry for over the past two decades. Unfortunately, the company that should be a global IT leader today has suffered one bad management and marketing decision after another. Case in point: all this nifty, gee-whiz technology called Compiz for desktops originated with Novell. Do most people know that? I doubt it. They’re probably more familiar with the rift between Beryl and the original Compiz developers (and subsequent kiss-and-make up).

The reason that Novell barely gets credit for its work is that its marketing team never leads with anything remotely innovative. If they played it any safer they’d be asleep! Remember iFolder? Unless you’re a fan of information synchronization software you probably do not. iFolder was a Novell project that offered unparalleled functionality in the arena of client compatibility and server features. What happened to it? Novell did not know what to do with it and open sourced the code in order to wash their hands of the project.

In the next 52 weeks Novell needs to do what they do best: innovate. Then they need to do well the thing they do worst: they need to lead with their innovation. They need to create a mass marketing campaign around SUSE Linux and its new innovative features that will leave the other vendors in the dust. Novell needs to stop playing the shrinking violet and give a new generation of Linux users a reason to hold Novell SUSE Linux high above the other distributions.

Canonical Ubuntu

Ubuntu has become the desktop user’s Linux of choice in the past three years and shows no signs of slowing down. Canonical understands what Novell does not, and that is marketing. The marketing machine behind Ubuntu has been working non-stop. Additionally, it does not hurt that Mark Shuttleworth, Canonical’s founder and CEO, is as charismatic as Steve Jobs and is forming deals with independent hardware vendors that results in Ubuntu being offered by the likes of Dell on their laptops and desktops.

Canonical is correct in that their next move should be to penetrate the server market. From their server and JeOS versions of Ubuntu to their alliances with IHVs in hopes of getting Ubuntu officially supported on server hardware, they are doing everything correct. However, they could be doing more. Canonical is in the unique position of having herds of passionate users behind them. (Actually Apple is in the same position, but they seem to have forgotten that they are a computer company.) They have a loyalty base not seen on this side of OS X. Canonical needs to leverage this loyalty and create a vertical initiative that will provide even more features to its desktop users as long as the servers said users are connecting to run the Ubuntu OS. Think Bonjour for Ubuntu. There is no reason that Canonical cannot achieve this with Open Source projects either. From integrating Beagle with ZeroConf to collaborative TomBoy notes-sharing technology. It is all possible.

The ultimate achievement would be when Canonical finally creates an Active Directory-like system to integrate its server OS and desktop OS into a single, manageable environment.

A three-way see-saw

The Linux market is currently a three-way see-saw. Any of the big three vendors could change the balance of things. Do you have a different outlook? I’d love to hear it!

Ubuntu server momentum builds toward ‘critical mass’

At CIO.com today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth gives a nice year-ending top ten list on a topic he’s surely familiar with on the most intimate of levels: Ubuntu.

More specifically, Shuttleworth talks about the Top Ten Reasons Why Ubuntu Is Best for Enterprise Use. In the list Shuttleworth runs down the usual laundry list of pro-Linux items, including flexibility, cost, support chops and its strong security track record; and addressed a few new ones as well like application selection. “There are more than 20,000 packages immediately available to Ubuntu users. These include the largest selection of open-source tools and a growing list of proprietary applications,” he said.

Normally, a CEO waxing positively about his own product is nothing new, but this year has been a roller coaster ride for Ubuntu and I can’t help but think this column is a harbinger of things to come for the OS.

First, there were two substantial releases for Ubuntu this year. In April Feisty Fawn (7.04) launched, and Canonical was again beating the server drum full-force to get users to notice that this free little distro had matured over the past two years. Deploying it on the server was now an option said Jane Silber, Canonical’s director of operations. “On the server side, we have increased support for virtualization, and Ubuntu now supports a number of virtualization technologies. We have been working with VMware on some performance testing with Ubuntu as a guest operating system and as the host OS. We have seen very good performance numbers there. We also have Xen in the universe repository, and we’ve added [Kernel-based Virtual Machine] support,” she said.

I had already written about this a few times over the past year and I was looking for something beyond what Canonical was already saying about what was being put into Ubuntu’s code.

We go that response in May, and it was a small landslide victory for Canonical. In a joint statement released May 3, Dell Inc.. and Canonical announced that Dell would offer laptops and desktop computers pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux 7.04. Dell CEO Michael Dell acquired a Precision M90 mobile workstation and loaded it with Ubuntu 7.04 and a host of open source applications just to cap the whole announcement off. At the time, Raven Zachary, a senior analyst with New York-based 451 Group, said the news also meant users could expect an Ubuntu server offering from Dell in the near future. “I think you will find Dell, over time, also offering Ubuntu across its server product line as Ubuntu grows in popularity in the data center,” he said.

Nice segue, Raven, because what happened next was right up that alley. During a qucik call with Canonical’s marketing director Gerry Carr in August, he and I started talking about hardware vendors and which among them might be ideal candidates for pre-installed Ubuntu. “[Pre-installed Ubuntu on the server] is something we would like to do, and we’ve made no secret about it,” Carr said. “Customers have asked for this, and if people want to see Ubuntu pre-installed on Dell servers, then they should go to [Dell] IdeaStorm and continue to ask for it.” The Dell/Ubuntu program was expanded to encompass Europe in August, and observers at the time said it was yet another indicator of Ubuntu’s building momentum.

Carr said that while the deal will “hopefully be with Dell,” Canonical is also considering server vendors other than Dell, and at a later date the company will reveal the results of those talks. “This doesn’t mean a deal is imminent, but those who want and require Ubuntu on the server will have something available reasonably soon,” he said.

Which leads us to the present. Last week, at Linux-Watch.com, Rick Becker, Dell Product Group’s vice president of applications, said Dell is currently in the process of certifying Ubuntu for all its server lines. “But we are still several months away from announcing a certification. I’d say it’ll be announced in Q1 next year,” he said.

The Ubuntu firehose is now open, but there are still a few obstacles to address before the prerequisite “touchdown” articles are written (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) How big is the demand, you ask? Dell IdeaStorm received more than 130,000 requests for pre-installed desktop Ubuntu in early 2007, but that number is a pin drop compared to the number of Red Hat and Novell instances in the enterprise today. And that number pales in comparison to the number of Microsoft Windows deployments worldwide. There’s also the recently raised concerns about Ubuntu’s documentation to address as well.

Regardless, the momentum is building around Ubuntu on both the desktop and the server. Whether or not it reaches critical mass is something we’ll have to dig into now, won’t we?