Ubuntu Linux

Ubuntu gains another win in major server certification quest

The little distribution that could, Ubuntu Linux Server Edition supported by Canonical Ltd., announced that it was on its way to achieving certification on Hewlett-Packard’s ProLiant x86 servers. According to Canonical’s blog post on the topic:

The certification means HP will list Ubuntu as a supported operating system and verify the work undertaken by Canonical to ensure full certified compatibility. Furthermore both companies are fully co-operating at the engineering level to provide full underlying confidence for HP customers using the certified servers.

HP won’t be shipping servers with Ubuntu preloaded. But, as Canonical marketing manager Gerry Carr explained to me, the certification will provide HP customers with assurance that if they sideload Ubuntu, it will work with specific information regarding performance. This news follows Canonical’s announcement of user survey results that revealed an uptick in adoption of the server-based operating system in a variety of mission-critical Web and database applications. The surveyed Ubuntu users shared that they mostly use the OS on assembled servers and tower and desktop PCs.

However, Carr explained that “It appears to be that HP ProLiant is the second most popular [server] brand behind Dell PowerEdge servers. I expect that is consistent across the unknown Ubuntu users out there.”

For an example of who is using Ubuntu, Canonical shared the story of a Chicago-based finance house that runs entirely on Ubuntu server and runs their open and proprietary stack on primarily HP machines, with some Dell in the mix.

In his blog post regarding the announcement, Joe Panettieri of WorksWithU, an Ubuntu dedicated news website, explained the history of Canonical’s Ubuntu Server edition initiative. He shared that a recent site reader survey revealed growing momentum for Ubuntu in the enterprise market. However, the big players (Windows Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell SUSE Linux) continue to lead the way in both mind and market share.

Al Gillen, VP in charge of system software research with IDC, echoed this perspective in a statement to Ed Scannell of Information Week:

“In terms of noise level, Ubuntu has been hot lately. But the ecosystem simply isn’t as mature for Ubuntu as it is for Red Hat and SUSE Linux. They do not have the level of application support and data base support, and some other things that you need to be enterprise ready.”

Ubuntu achieved certification on Sun’s x64 servers in early 2008, around the time Canonical released Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

Carr shared that Canonical is working to see Ubuntu certified on all the major manufacturer servers in the next few years. The timing of certification on HP’s servers is unclear, but is underway and Carr expects to see it “sometime soon.”

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.”

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.”

Ubuntu’s mascot menagerie is a zoo of characters

Keeping track of the ever-changing ranks of the Ubuntu mascot menagerie is not for the faint of heart. My debut into LinuxLand was shortly before the introduction of the Hardy Heron and Ubuntu 8.04 LTS last April. Simple enough. Until today.

Today I learned that on Monday, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth announced the future addition of another mascot, the Jaunty Jackalope. A Jackalope, I learned, thanks to a folklore reference in the Gospel of Wikipedia, is a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope.

The Jaunty Jackalope is just one in a series of Ubuntu motivational mascots. Intrepid Ibex the mountain goat, Jaunty Jackalope’s immediate predecessor, gets crowned for his work on Oct. 28 with the release of Ubuntu version 8.10. Jaunty Jackalope takes over from Ibex, and will lead the team until the release of Ubuntu 9.04 the following April. Then, of course there’s Hardy Heron 8.04, my first mascot acquaintance, whose reign began last April and lasts three years for desktops, five years for servers.

Shuttleworth must be placing a lot of stock in the Jaunty Jackalope, because his lofty goals for the Ubuntu team over the ensuing seven months include nothing less than catching up to Apple and Microsoft Windows in eye appeal and user-friendliness, and forging ahead of them in merging Web services and applications into “weblications” that straddle online/offline environments.

I suppose if you can keep track of herons, rabbit-antelopes and mountain goats, an ambitious software development track is no problem at all. Perhaps that’s Shuttleworth’s way of weeding out job candidates who aren’t great at multitasking.

Canonical, VMware: Start of a new wave at Linux Foundation?

Less than two weeks after VMware Inc., the proprietary virtualization software leader, signed up for membership in the Linux Foundation, Canonical Ltd., the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu open source software, joined as well.

Of the two, VMware is the more surprising since its software isn’t open source, despite its recent decision to make its ESXi virtualization server available for free. In fact, however, VMware recently contributed its Virtual Machine Interface for paravirtualization to the open source community and is working on other ongoing community projects. But Canonical’s joining seems, if anything, overdue; its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, also helped launch the Linux Foundation and is a current board member.

So what’s going on? Is this the beginning of a wave of new members? Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s executive director, thinks so. “You will be seeing many more new members of the Linux Foundation in the near future,” Zemlin predicted. Collaboration is critical in the open source community, and the Foundation is a place to meet and solve problems, he said.

Well-known tech blogger Jason Perlow wasn’t quite in agreement. He said Canonical’s joining is “almost a nonevent” because of its “huge support” of the community. Nevertheless, its membership puts it on an equal footing with multibillion-dollar firms in a “somewhat exclusive club” and might prompt Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. “to take the snappy little upstart” more seriously, he said. Jay Lyman, an analyst at the New York-based 451 Group, said the two new members — especially Canonical — are both “key” to the Foundation because of the popularity and innovation of Canonical’s Ubuntu software. VMware’s membership is not as important to the organization overall, but should help Linux to stay at the forefront of virtualization, he said. Canonical’s silver-level membership (the lowest of three full membership levels) puts it one up on open source leader Red Hat, which is at the same support level but, unlike Canonical, doesn’t have a seat on the board. (Novell is a top-level platinum member.)

Hmmm …perhaps the popular open source software company from across the ocean will start getting a lot more respect.

Ubuntu growing its ecosystem of apps, partners, Canonical says

Malcolm Yates, the global independent software vendor (ISV) alliance manager at Canonical Ltd., traveled halfway around the world, flying from London to San Francisco with a message for LinuxWorld: Ubuntu is growing up. No longer just an operating system for geeks, Ubuntu has begun to evolve into a mature ecosystem with a small but growing cache of applications to run on top of an OS and more partners to expand its reach, he said.

Addressing an oft-cited shortcoming, Canonical is in the process of adding numerous key partnerships to expand the desktop and server offerings on top of Ubuntu’s OS and forging pacts with hardware vendors as well, Yates said. Parallels virtualization software and IBM DB2 database software already are downloadable from Canonical’s website and enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications in the works, he said. The desktop is beefing up, too, with OBM messaging and collaboration software and IBM groupware are coming soon, he said.

Canonical also has strengthened its development team to nearly a dozen members during the last year and has built a mini-operating system to enable ISVs to develop Ubuntu-based applications quickly and bring them to market, Yates said.

Although he didn’t have solid numbers, Yates estimated that Ubuntu’s share of the open source operating system market has doubled or tripled from IDC’s 9% projection last year, with the number of users opting for paid support rising proportionately. Server and desktop users both are growing but desktops – boosted by a 50,000 deployment by French police – are increasing faster, he said. But the coming addition of IBM groupware to Ubuntu’s desktop should boost Ubuntu’s momentum in the corporate market, both desktops and servers, he said.

Canonical’s goal is to make Ubuntu available via any partner and any business model and deliver it to users on the server as well as the desktop, Yates said.

Reporter reflections on LinuxWorld 2008

The 11th annual LinuxWorld Conference & Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco has packed up and gone, but organizers did a lot this year to make it more informative, with special sessions such as the Executive Summit on innovative technologies and entertainment like the Golden Penguin Bowl geek challenge.

Other organizations joined in the fun, with Groundwork Open Source hosting a mascot American Idol-like contest between Tux the Penguin, Mozilla Firefox, Beastie the BSD Demon and GNU Gnu, each of whom appeared in costume to drum up support for their respective candidacies in the exhibit hall. As of late Thursday afternoon, Mozilla Firefox was the runaway winner with 49% of the votes. Beastie the BSD Daemon trailed in second with 31%; Tux the Penguin, 6.6% and GNU Gnu, 2%.

In addition, the Open Voting Consortium featured costumed singers luring attendees to participate in its mock presidential election between Barack Obama and John McCain on machines running Ubuntu. Obama was the big winner, tallying 545 votes to 135 for McCain. In other categories, Canonical Ltd. scored a big win for the top exhibit. The purpose of the exhibit was to showcase the use of Linux-run voting machines, which the group is promoting in California as a more secure operating system.

Open Voting Consortium booth at LinuxWorld 2008

The expo also enlisted attendees in an “Installfest” to fix discarded computers and install open source software. Installfest’s goal is 1,000 repaired computers for donation to local schools. The effort also will reduce the 300,000 pounds of electronic waste abandoned monthly at two county dumps, according to organizer James Burgett.

During the four-day event, the tables outside the exhibit hall with free Wi-Fi Internet access were quite popular, as well as the Dice booth which attracted crowds of job seekers. But Dice wasn’t the only one searching for those with Linux skills. I shared a lunch table with a Google recruiter who faced an uphill battle trying to convince a 30-something attendee that, as a Google employee, he would still have time for his family, despite Google’s apparently intense work environment.

The Dice booth at LinuxWorld

Later that evening having dinner at a local sports bar, I met a Dell recruiter who also was head-hunting for talent at LinuxWorld. The Dell rep was enthused about Dell’s acquisition last year of EqualLogic, a New Hampshire-based storage networking company, that offers an all-in-one-box server solution for small offices with no IT staff, similar to IBM’s just-announced Lotus Foundations product for a self-managing appliance server, also targeted at small and medium-sized business. Sounds like a trend worth watching.

As far as show attendance, while organizers won’t release the final numbers for months, it seems clear that attendance couldn’t possibly equal the past few years’ tallies of 10,000 each. There were too many empty seats at the keynotes and too much room to walk around on the show floor. Lower attendance was likely attributable to a combination of a slow economy and high airplane fares as well as the maturity of the market. Further Linux doesn’t have the cool factor it once did; it’s now mainstream and simply part of how we work and live. With the maturity of the market, there’s less of a gee-whiz factor that drives users to computing shows. The good news is that attendees tended to be higher level and in a position to make decisions. Just curious: how come Red Hat Inc. and Novell Inc. weren’t among the exhibitors?

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?

Partnering up for a showdown? Red Hat Summit 2008

This post was contributed jointly by SearchEnterpriseLinux editors Lauren S. Horwitz and Caroline Hunter

As the VAR Guy noted in a recent blog post on the upcoming Red Hat Summit, Red Hat has some gumption. The Raleigh, N.C.-based company has crossed the Mason-Dixon line to hold its annual event in Boston, the territory of its rival, Waltham, Mass-based Novell: What chutzpah!

Not to be outshined, Novell has made its presence known, posting some conspicuous advertising in the Hynes Convention Center, the location for this year’s Red Hat Summit, the VAR Guy reported.

But whether Red Hat’s choice of venue is a real shot across the bow or not, there’s little doubt that that over the past several years, the Red Hat/Novell rivalry has gotten pretty heated. One could date the boiling tensions to 2006, when Novell signed an agreement with Microsoft to share product patents. In 2007, the two companies agreed to work toward interoperability and have even dedicated a lab to that purpose.

By joining forces, Microsoft and Novell aim to gain an even stronger foothold in the open source market, though some data indicates that both the Red Hat and Ubuntu distributions have made strides against Novell SUSE. A new survey on open source adoption may support these findings.

The VAR Guy also noted Cisco’s expected prominence at the Summit and wondered whether it might signal an upcoming Cisco/Red Hat partnership, much like Microsoft’s with Novell. Or maybe Cisco’s “cozying up,” as the VAR Guy characterized it, is more a case of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Consider this user comment in response to the Var Guy’s musings:

“Cisco now views Microsoft as its #1 threat in unified communications and other areas,” the user wrote. “I think they are just solidly placing themselves on the other side to be honest. They see a cost/competitive advantage and want to help set the ‘other’ standard.”

Stay tuned from the frontlines for more Red Hat Summit coverage.