I burned an Ubuntu Hardy live cd with Brasero (the GNOME default burning utility) the other day and it had problems booting.  Kept getting some error about SQUASHFS over and over again and never go to the login screen.

After seeing some hints about a bad burn and some unconfirmed discussion about TAO versus DAO, I burned a new copy with K3B (the software I normally use).  This disc worked perfectly.  Not sure what the difference may be in the default burn settings, but I now have very low confidence in Brasero.

Anyone aware of issues in Brasero?

Anyone looking to relieve the pain of no non-Windows support from their hardware VPN vendor or that has issues wading through the IPSec options to get vpn working from their Linux or Mac machines should take a look at OpenVPN.  This firewall project is based on the SSL standard that has been battle tested by all the ecommerce applications out there and is fairly easy to set up.  I had a test server up and running in about 30 minutes on Ubuntu and that included reading a bunch of documentation before actually doing the install.  Ubuntu repositories have a recent version that is a good place to start.  Here's a decent tutorial to follow.

Last year, there was a bit of discussion about how the launch of Vista was going to open a lot of doors for Linux on the desktop.  I’m not going to go into a discussion about the pros and cons of Windows Vista and why the door is open to alternatives, but I have been very interested in seeing how this would turn out.

Linux has been making great strides on the desktop for quite a while.  I remember that the first time I thought that Linux was really getting there was in 2002 with SUSE 8.  In the last 12 months, Ubuntu has finally made Linux on (my) laptop feasible by finally getting over the last hurdles that had been plaguing me for a long time (projector support with nvidia-settings, and easy WPA Wi-Fi support from the network manager).  My wife recently switched to Linux (after her Windows install corrupted) and her first comment was “This isn’t as bad as I thought it would be”.  Linux still has some very frustrating issues: Multiple monitor support for all video cards (without knowing how to edit your xorg.conf file and without restarting X), VPN configuration (check out OpenVPN), and the number one issue for corporate desktop use, Microsoft Exchange integration (specifically full group calendaring support).

Mac has long been known for creating a nice desktop experience, but has often been left out of the corporate world for business interop issues.  IBM apparently has a pilot to test switching to Mac.  New statistics also show that Apple is picking up a lot of steam in the US.  At OpenLogic, we have a pretty typical split.  The vast majority of non-engineering users are on Windows.  The vast majority of engineering users are on Linux (typically Ubuntu is the Linux of choice on the desktop).  What both sides are starting to agree on is that Mac’s are an attractive option and we’ve started refreshing older machines with Mac’s.  Engineering will not replace all Linux machines, but Macs will have an increased presence in our development environments, particularly for laptops.

I recently participated in a survey about Windows Vista adoption and results indicated that more companies are planning or considering switching from desktop Windows to an alternative and Apple was the top choice for switchers with nearly 1/3 considering Mac.  But if you look a bit deeper and combine all the Linux distro’s together, 2/3 of switchers are looking at some distribution of Linux.  The report did not take into account server vs. desktop use though and that is an important distinction here.

Linux really needs to keep making strides at creating an environment that I can hand to my grandparents and feel comfortable that they will be up and running without constant support from a “techie”.  This is the model that Apple has been so successful with.  A coordinated push with a big supplier such as Dell would go a long way.  Otherwise, Linux may miss this boat to the desktop and have to wait for the next one.

 

(OpenLogic Engineer) Brad's 9 yo daughter uses a program called Hackety Hack to learn and write Ruby. She wrote a program to download an mp3 and play it the other day. When she asked Brad what he was working on, he replied "basically the same thing". 

Cheesy movies are so quotable. The "landmark" news that Microsoft and Novell are going to be collaborating reminds me of a scene from Ghostbusters.

Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath-of-God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boiling.
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes…
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together – mass hysteria.

After the initial shock wore off and I started thinking about what this announcement really meant, one thing really came to the forefront. Virtualization. There are a couple of things that make me think that virtualization is a driving force here.

1) Many customers and companies I talk to, install at, etc. are diving deep into virtualization technologies. Most of them are using VMware (use it, love it, wish the support pages didn't give me the run around) but I know Novell has been putting a lot of weight behind Xen (haven't used it, want to).

2) For many years I've seen large companies reluctancant to deploy Windows servers in their data centers. I'm sure info from Microsoft would state the contrary and I have no stats to back that up. I just have my experiences with both ISV's and large companies. One ISV I was working with was switching their entire product from .Net to Java specifically because their target audience wouldn't use a Windows server in their production environment.

Given these two observations, I think Microsoft is evaluating all Virtualization offerings and figuring out how to make sure that they maximize their potential, especially if companies are more inclined to run their virtualization hosts on *nix OS's (VMware Infrastructure 3 is Linux based). If Windows works great with Xen, then there is still a chance that they can keep virtualized user desktops running MS software. A virtualized Windows 2003 server is probably easier to manage as well (if it dies, bring up the snapshot) so they may be able to open up new opportunities there as well.

From Novell's perspective, they need ways to catch up to VMware and hopping in bed with the juggernaut that is Microsoft gives them extra clout in pursuing their own objectives. I think the legal benefits that are a part of the agreement are really just a nice sales/marketing tool given the current legal landscape. Stormy has a very insightful post on that topic.

Only time will tell what really comes from this relationship. Now if only we could get more native Linux support for PC gaming.

Travel tip: If you find yourself checking into a hotel at 1 am (after being up for 23 hours) and the clerk offers you a lesser room because the one you booked is near an elevator, take the other room. Near an elevator doesn't mean there may be people walking outside your room. It really means that they located the elevator motor in your room and it will run intermittently all night long.

You've probably seen the big news in the Open Source world already. Oracle is hijacking Red Hat's Linux distribution and will ship a version named Unbreakable Linux, undercutting Red Hat's support pricing. Thanks for doing all the work Red Hat, we'll take it from here. To me, it appears that Oracle cares nothing about the open source community. The open source community thus far has thrived using a culture of collaboration and friendly competition (competition of alternative options). Oracle is getting into open source with the mentality of cut-throat competition. They previously bought the company behind the transaction engine that MySQL used, forcing many to reevaluate if they could rely on MySQL features owned by another proprietary database company. And the problem I see is not that they are going to offer a competitive Linux distribution at a lower price point. It's that they don't even have the decency to build their own competing distribution like Novell/SUSE.

I've never really been a big fan of Oracle software myself, mostly because of the big monolithic lump that they ship. It's not exactly a light solution. I've also always found their claims of having the most used application server a bit dubious considering they seem to count every cd they ship whether someone uses the app server or not.

I'm sure they'll get some traction in the corporate world. There is still a great divide between the corporate open source circles and the technical open source community. Companies will be willing to lump their Linux support in with that giant Oracle contract that they already have. It will be interesting to see how the technical community reacts to this news though. I don't think the community traditionally supports this kind of behavior. I think we'd all be better off if we could foster more cooperation between corporate and community groups.

One thing I find very ironic is that Red Hat just purchased the JBoss Group, which made waves by proclaiming they owned open source by buying up projects such as Hibernate and listing (Apache) Tomcat as one of their projects on their website. I've heard that Oracle has been making similar proclamations that they wanted to own open source as well. No wonder they were trying to buy JBoss before.

Perhaps some good will come of this. There are many companies that are dumping their products into the OSS space. Some are trying to give new life to an uncompetitive product. Others are "donating" code they don't want to maintain into groups such as the Eclipse Foundation to try to get publicity. Then there are companies open sourcing projects that truly add value to the whole community. This creates so much noise out there that you sometimes have to look deep to find the gems that are available. Hopefully this event will make other companies think long and hard about why they are considering open sourcing their projects so that both the company and the community benefit from the contributions.

And in the end, a little disruption to force companies to improve can be good thing. Just watch out for those sharks in the pool.

BTW, CentOS has been producing a non-Red Hat branded version of RHEL for a long time making the core features of RHEL available to everyone (This is great for product testing). I wonder if Oracle has poached some of the CentOS developers or if they are launching this initiative with an internal team.

Interesting developments keep happening in the Open Source world. "Oracle's Open-Source Shopping Spree" says that Oracle is negotiating to purchase the JBoss Group (JBoss Application Server), Zend (PHP), and Sleepy Cat (database). The acquisition is already announced on the Sleepy Cat page.

This follows news that Oracle purchased InnoDB, the company behind a key piece of technology for the MySQL database (InnoDB technology adds transaction support to MySQL, a feature that my friends that know more than I do about databases say is what elevates MySQL above toy status). Could this be Oracle's way of forcing MySQL's technology hand? Realistically, MySQL should now focus on adding the InnoDB functionality natively.

2 database technologies, both from the C world, a Java-based middleware suite, and a non-Java web framework technology. Somewhat strange bedfellows. Both PHP and JBoss can be made to work with the "C world" databases so that's not a real stretch (other, but the PHP world and Java aren't common bedfellows. There are attempts going on to bring them closer together, but as far as I can tell, there isn't anything exciting happening in that realm just yet. Maybe they picked based on name recognition in those 3 different areas. I guess we'll wait and see how Oracle plans to tie all of this together or if they are just spreading the wealth.

Speaking of strange bedfellows, this also presents some strange business relationships as well. Novell has picked JBoss as a core component of their stack support in SUSE Linux (Red Hat went with Jonas. Even more interesting is the recent partnership announcement between JBoss and Microsoft.

How will the community handle big companies gobbling up smaller OSS project parents? With JBoss havin has kept a stable of the most important developers so losing some external community support is probably not a big deal. I'm sure Oracle can throw a few hundred people on it anyway. Will communities rebel against the leadership (e.g. Mambo)? Will we start seeing project forks?

What remains to be seen is what would happen when Oracle's priorities shift. Would they drop providing resources to these projects? Would they then whither and die or have a new champion take up the cause?

The important moral of this story is… OSS is a major factor now and isn't going away. The big companies are starting to pay attention. If you can't beat them, join them.

UPDATE: This News.com article says Oracle tried to buy MySQL but Marten Mickos was having none of it. Very interesting. If you can't beat them, buy them?

As I was looking over the keynote speakers for the OSBC conference next week, I was reminded once again of an interesting dichotomy in the open source community. The Who's Who of Open Source is often radically different depending on if you are looking at it from the business perspective or from the developer perspective. Sure, you have some of the really big names that will be known across the board such as Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, Eric Raymond, etc. But these are really some of the early pioneers that really launched the whole OSS ship. How many higher ups in companies are throwing around names like James Duncan Davidson, Craig McClanahan, James Strachan, Erik Hatcher, Jason Hunter, etc? How many OSS developers and users are waiting for the next revelation from… well pick an OSBC keynote speaker.

OSS doesn't have a monopoly on this dichotomy (I've seen this sort of thing in many industries) but the OSS field seems particularly divided in this regard, especially considering the fact that OSS is an industry cross-cutter.

I think this just underscores the fact that we need more cross boundary communication in both camps. Business decision makers would be much more comfortable with the adoption of OSS if they understood the nature of the community and the software. OSS projects could improve adoption rate if they truly understood the factors that make businesses nervous.