Archive for the 'Linux' Category
Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
Did hell freeze over? Broadcom releases an open source, Linux wireless driver
I had to read this article twice to ensure I was actually reading it correctly. Then I visited the Broadcom website and downloaded it just to be certain this wasn’t a hoax. Yes, Broadcom, the most open only about not supporting Linux has released an open source Linux wireless driver. And it’s really under an open source license. The source files I opened were clearly GPLv2.
So Dell and Canonical forced them into it – but they did it. I’m honestly shocked.
Linux has hit a critical mass. It may not be taking over the desktop world, but it has at least reached “Mac” support status.
http://blogs.computerworld.com/new_linux_broadcom_wi_fi_drivers_arrive
Thursday, September 25th, 2008
NY Times: “Is Sun Solaris on its deathbed?”
Interesting article on the last ditch efforts of Sun to keep Solaris from dying. Personally, I think Solaris will die a similar death as IBM’s OS/2 did – slowly, with stalwarts hanging on as long as they can.
http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_852573C400693880002574CE00371FE1.html
I’m not sure UNIX in general is dead as AIX and I think even HP-UX have seen fairly strong growth recently, but Linux is certainly tearing up the industry like the good disruptor it is. I think another angle that was missed is the outstanding growth of Linux on Power and mainframe platforms – heck, even Sun has tried to put Solaris on an IBM mainframe.
Another point that is often overlooked is that a lot of Solaris migrations also go to Windows. It’s the drive to high volume platforms that triggers the shift.
However, aside from those minor conflicts in views, Jim Zemlin is right on. I think this quote says it all. It amazes me that any company would try to compete with that level of momentum head on and not try to join in on the growth opportunity. Just look at Red Hat’s earnings yesterday if you’re still skeptical.
By contrast, Linux is the overwhelming choice for new deployments on x86 systems, Zemlin says. Sun has had its strength in applications such as ERP systems with a seven- to 20-year life cycle, he adds. “What’s starting to happen is those life cycles are starting to be completed,” and those customers are moving to Linux.
That move to Linux is accelerated by Linux’s strength in Web applications, where developers today are focused, Zemlin adds. “You can’t really talk to any Web-based application company these days that’s not using Linux,” he says.
Wednesday, September 24th, 2008
Red Hat beats estimates and Ohio Linux Fest is Almost Here
I can’t make sense of the “all eggs in a Solaris basket” strategy Sun is on especially when I see Red Hat just launched economic concerns back into the faces of Wall St. analysts by posting 24% growth over last year. Jim Whitehurst seems to be doing just fine in the new role – the Qumranet buy was also brilliant. I have high hopes for what we might see come from the acquisition.
And in other news, Oracle launched its own branded storage hardware product (made by HP) that is based on Linux. All around it’s been a positive day for accelerating growth of Linux.
And for those who haven’t registered, Ohio Linux Fest is coming up soon. I’m proud to say that IBM is once again the primary platinum sponsor (thanks for the funding Alena!). You can sign up here. I can’t say for sure yet, but it looks like Brian Warner from IBM’s Linux Strategy team will be joining me in person. If you’ll be present, send me an email and let’s meet up. There’s a great list of speakers for the event. I’ve never met Joe Brockmeier but I’m hoping to introduce myself at some point.
Monday, September 22nd, 2008
Get involved in the Linux Foundation – now accepting individual memberships
The LF is branching out to include individual members interesting in participating and collaborating on Linux topics. For just $50/year you too can become a member.
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2023858186.html
After announcing its first event for “end users,” the Linux Foundation has begun to promote “individual memberships.” Available now for $50 a year, memberships include a T-shirt, quarterly newsletter, and the “ability to run for and vote for a Linux Foundation board seat,” says the organization.
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Repost: 2008 NYC Software Freedom Day Reception
From James Vasile at the SFLC for NYLUG (and I suspect other) interested parties.
———————————–
The Software Freedom Law Center cordially invites you to the 2008 NYC Software Freedom Day Reception! Industry leaders, lawyers, advocates
and hackers alike will be gathering to commemorate and celebrate the state of the movement; from the inception of the GNU Project 25 years
ago to the present day, the lives of millions of people all around the world have been forever changed by software freedom.
More information about Software Freedom Day can be found at http://softwarefreedomday.org/about
When: Saturday, Sept. 20th from 6pm to 9pm.
Where: Limewire is hosting us in their rooftop garden at 377 Broadway, between White St. and Franklin St. It’s just a few blocks south of
Canal. http://maps.google.com/maps?q=377+broadway+10013
Activities will include guest speakers from around the movement, as well as music and a raffle, with a focus on mixing, meeting, and
greeting. The reception is a rooftop affair, providing ample time and space to celebrate, meet new people and reconnect with old friends.
RSVP required to: rsvp@softwarefreedom.org
We look forward to seeing you there!
Your Friends of Freedom,
The Software Freedom Law Center
softwarefreedom.org
Tuesday, September 9th, 2008
Shameless Plug: IBM offers developers, customers access to its Chiphopper tools
The Chiphipper program is an interesting program where IBM gives its ISV partners access to a toolset that allowed them to validate their x86 Linux applications for Linux on POWER and z mainframe platforms. It may seem trivial, but ask any developer and the challenge of moving from one architecture to another without tools can be a pain.
With Chiphopper, the process becomes fairly automated in discovering what needs changed before starting a port and makes it fairly easy to offer an application on multiple platforms. Developers use these tools on their x86 code so you don’t even need access to Power or mainframe hardware to use them. You can even use the tools with open source applications.
Now IBM is offering these tools to any developer or customer that wants to port their x86/Linux application to Linux on Power or System z (mainframes). The IBM team has been collaborating with the Linux Foundation and I think some of the tools overlap with the LF’s LSB application testing tools. If fact, these tools can be used as a step toward LSB certification of your application.
The first set of tools used in the Chiphopper offering comes from the Linux Standard Base (LSB), a project of the Linux Foundation. When using standard interfaces, the developer can have confidence that these interfaces will be stable over time. Developers can focus on adding new functionality to enhance the application instead of having to rewrite over and over for changing interfaces. Developers can use the LSB Application Testkit Manager, located on the Linux Foundation Web site, to check whether the interfaces used by an application are part of an LSB standard.
Monday, September 8th, 2008
London Stock Exchange servers go down; halts trading
I can’t believe that in this day we have an exchange actually going down during the day… this would never happen on a mainframe platform.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/08/lse_down/
But at 9am trading was suspended as big banks lost their connection to the exchange. Some traders blamed an overloaded system following the US government decision.
I wonder if the issue has to do with their choice of Windows Server over Linux? Of course you never really do see the implications of that choice on Microsoft’s “Get the Facts” or “Compare” websites now do you… :-)
The London Stock Exchange needed a scalable, reliable, high-performance stock exchange ticker plant to win more trading business and new customers and replace its earlier system. Roughly 40 per cent of the Exchange’s revenues are generated by the sale of real-time information about stock prices.
Thursday, September 4th, 2008
Red Hat Acquires Qumranet For $107M
Red Hat announced today that it will acquire Qumranet, the company behind KVM. Now Qumranet does not make its money on KVM, instead it uses KVM as part of its desktop virtualization solutions. Qumranet is also behind the very efficient SPICE protocol. I think this is a great move on both sides and I’m excited to hear a former IBM colleague’s bold move into a startup has paid off. I knew it would only be a matter of time before Qumranet was acquired, but it’s great to see it finally went through. Great ideas and technology leadership deserve to be rewarded.
I think you can expect to see an increase in KVM usage in RHEL going forward ;-)
I saw the press release here:
Monday, September 1st, 2008
Google “Chrome” browser is here. Google still treats Linux as second class?
I’m honestly surprised that we continuously see Google support Linux second. Google just announced “Chrome” on Labor Day stating a release for Windows and an “in the future” support for Linux and Mac. By all accounts, Windows is obviously the largest base, but why not wait just a little and do a simultaneous release? Heck, Google uses a ton of Linux on the desktop internally. Then I also have to remember, Linux already has a dominant penetration for non-Microsoft web browsers and already supports open standards… so maybe it’s just not needed – or is it? I think it’s too early to tell at the moment but Google is making its case with a compelling story.
You can see the “story” behind Chrome’s purpose on Google’s website at the URL below. Google put its argument for Chrome and its approach in comic format which I found quite entertaining. For engineers out there, this is a great medium (in my opinion) for communicating the benefit/value of an architecture decision. The technology and impact on the users are clearly defined.
http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
I’m actually quite excited to see Chrome in action. First, there’s been a lot of work going on with Javascript engines and I’m sure Google did some performance work that should help Google Maps, Gmail, etc. Second, there appears to be a very strong integration of Google Gears into Chrome which should lend to great offline performance and features. Finally, it also looks like Google is going to revolutionize the “behind the scenes” processing your browser does. Instead of implementing a single threaded web processing model as we’re all used to, Google is going to split each tab into its own process. This gives you a multitasking performance boost if you’re a big time power user with multiple tabs executing at the same time. More important though should be the isolation – if Google Maps crashes, it shouldn’t take out the entire browser.
Google Inc. is releasing its own Web browser in a long-anticipated move aimed at countering the dominance of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer and ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine.
The Mountain View-based company took the unusual step of announcing its latest product on the Labor Day holiday after it prematurely sent out a comic book drawn up to herald the new browser’s arrival.
The free browser, called “Chrome,” is supposed to be available for downloading Tuesday in more than 100 countries for computers running on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Google said it’s still working on versions compatible with Apple Inc.’s Mac computer and the Linux operating system.
Now, yet another question is why do we need another web browser for Windows, Mac and Linux? How about one that supports open standards for the iPhone? Unfortunately Apple is unlikely to budge on its Apps policies which will, I can guarantee, limit its enterprise adoption for the iPhone. I’m honestly shocked that Apple has been touting its “enterprise” potential in some circles and been so standoffish towards enterprise applications vendors who those “enterprise” clients would need. Wake up Apple. You need Symantec, Cisco, AT&T and other network/AV/etc providers. Not everyone uses Microsoft Exchange so you’ll need Lotus Notes, IMAP support, etc. Oh well, I can only hope Apple will one day “get it”.
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Navigating Linux virtualization options
Via the LF VAC mailing list I stumbled across this wiki site for people interested in understanding all the available virtualization options for Linux. I actually learned a few things reading through the content.
Check it out here: http://virt.kernelnewbies.org/
Thursday, August 14th, 2008
How to participate in the Linux kernel development process/community
There’s a great book published over at the Linux Foundation that helps developers who are interested in participating in Linux kernel development and the process for contributing. This is a great resource and is probably one of the most difficult “cultural” and procedural issues for new, aspiring kernel hackers. I think it’s absolutely fantastic the kernel community itself has published a guide on how to participate. This will help significantly as the developer community has scaled already to a very large number of participants.
The LF should publish a PDF version… I’ll send them a suggestion. One other suggestion would be about how a developer should work with their internal legal team to get permission for submitting code. Perhaps we’ll see that in version 2.0.
Oh, and of course it’s free (as in beer) – until O’Reilly buys the rights ;-)
http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/book/how-participate-linux-community
Thursday, August 7th, 2008
Virtualized Linux on Power Boom
Internally within IBM we get to see a number of great adoption statistics for technologies and IBM products. One that has been increasing over time is the usage of Linux virtualized on Power Systems (e.g. POWER6 processor based servers). These systems were always considered “UNIX servers” and that was true in the old days. Today, with virtualization, how do you count a system that has 30% of its capacity dedicated to Linux partitions and 70% to AIX? How about 90% Linux, 10% AIX? The same trend for adoption of Linux on scalable systems is true for Mainframes as well. These systems offer customers a significant amount of flexibility to match workloads and applications to the best hardware without disrupting the OS, tools, etc.
Every now and then IBMers know we’ve clearly done something the competition is unlikely to ever catch up to even if we let them know it’s working. The numbers below speak for themselves. It takes commitment to drive change. To use a poker reference, if you know the odds are in your favor, go all in pre-flop or someone without the odds will potentially take you out on the river card. If Sun had a real Linux strategy, this could be Linux on UltraSPARC Tx. If HP had a real processor strategy, this could be Linux on Superdome.
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2223362/virtualisation-booming-ibm
The company is reporting a threefold increase in the number of virtualised Power Systems servers sold. Sixty four per cent of Big Blue’s customers opted for a virtualised Linux setup on the new servers, compared to just 21 per cent a year ago.
“Even I was stunned by the uptake,” admitted Scott Handy, IBM’s vice president of Power Systems.
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
LinkedIn runs on the LAMP stack – and it’s suddenly news?
I couldn’t help but find myself perplexed when I got an email on my iPhone yesterday from a well known figure in the Linux world. He (and subsequently I) were baffled that Sun must be combing through existing LAMP users for new references – LinkedIn uses LAMP. Well call me shocked… don’t 90% of the web companies out there run LAMP? (excluding those Microsoft has bought) I’m guessing the “new news” is that Sun signed up LinkedIn for a MySQL support contract for the first time, but are we going through a second LAMP hype cycle?
http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/080728/20080728005247.html?.v=1
Monday, July 14th, 2008
Linux Kernel 2.6.26 is out; so is Gentoo 2008.0
I actually haven’t been using Gentoo at all recently. It’s on an older laptop that just doesn’t keep up with all the compiling. However I have a very fast AMD64 desktop at home just waiting to try out the latest Gentoo. I was also waiting for the latest kernel to come out b/c there are some KVM, webcam, and other driver updates I’m interested in taking advantage of. In other news, 2.6.26 adds KVM support for S/390 (IBM Mainframe), PPC (IBM Power) and Itanium processors.
I also noticed KGDB (kernel debugger) supports x86 and SPARC right now – SPARC? Hmm…
You can read more about the new kernel features here: http://kernelnewbies.org/Linux_2_6_26
And you can get the latest Gentoo LiveCD over here: http://www.gentoo.org/main/en/where.xml
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
Bob Sutor goes 100% Linux on the desktop; Mac surges; where’s Windows?
Nice to see Bob Sutor has made the complete switch to Linux for laptop use at work. I remember the day I wiped out my Windows partition on my laptop – it was memorable. I then went an entire year booting Windows in VMWare only about 3-5 times.
It’s great to see the transition starting to happen everywhere. Even if some of the transitions are to Mac, it’s greater choice.
This is all going to be even easier as technologies like Firefox, OpenOffice/ODF and open standards start to permeate the set of options available to users.
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
The Register Open Season Podcast
This was another interesting podcast. I’m obviously a fan of Mr. Vance (has anyone ever called him “Mr.”?) – maybe I’m the first. I also need to meet Matt Asay at some point… have much to discuss.
Thursday, June 26th, 2008
Ubuntu Mobile Internet Device (MID) Edition is here
Ubuntu has officially released its MID Edition. There is a KVM image you can download to try it out. I haven’t seen any news on what devices or vendors will be bundling MID, but I’m sure Mark has some ideas for that.
http://linuxdevices.com/news/NS4429818312.html
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008
Shameless Analyst Report Plug: “IBM & Linux – 9 Years Later”
A colleague sent me a link to this analyst paper today that takes a look at whether IBM has made good on the Linux promises it made back in 1999. I’m obviously biased, but I’m interested in hearing if anyone has thoughts on this topic.
Here’s the report: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/linux/pdfs/GCG_IBM_and_Linux-9_years_later.pdf
The opening teaser:
In 1999, IBM issued a series of announcements fully committing the company to supporting Linux. IBM vowed to Linux-enable all of their hardware platforms, including their non-x86 based mainframe, mini, and RISC-based systems. They also promised to release Linux versions of their software products and develop
Linux-centric service practices. Moreover, they pledged significant resources to the Linux community with the goal of advancing Linux and open source technology.So, nine years later, did IBM deliver on these promises? Was their commitment to Linux genuine or just lip service? This report examines IBM’s current Linux products, services, and community support in light of the promises they made in 1999…
While I think it’s obvious IBM has been a huge investor in the Linux community, one thing that I noticed reading the report is just how much IBM is actually different from other community members. There are some noticeable differences in the investments and approach to supporting the Linux platform and community. I often forget to just take in all the Linux technologies IBM has been heavily involved in from Xen, KVM and libvirt to filesystems, to systemtap, kprobes and then there’s RAS, scalability and performance enhancements.
Another interesting thought to reflect on is just how important it has been that there are multiple investors in this field. If this report captures just what IBM did, think of the industry combined. IBM couldn’t have done anything this big with Linux if it weren’t for co-creating with a community of enthusiasts, researchers, governments, Intel, AMD, Google, Nokia, Motorola, Oracle and thousands more. What would the report look like if you compiled all the investments and work the entire community leveraged across the industry. Linux is “bigger than huge” when you stop to think about it. This is also why I’ve said for a couple years now when you extend the investment model 3 to 5 years into the future, Sun and its anti-Linux, Solaris push against the tide of the industry loses in the end. I think we’re starting to witness that now. Sure, OpenSolaris is a great idea… it’s just 9 years late and it’s too late to matter now.
I’m interested in outside perspectives too – where do you think IBM stands? Has the community development and investment model worked? Where will this lead in the future and what will be the next evolution of the model? Red Hat seems to think the model will evolve to include increased customer co-creation – I tend to agree. Why? Because the incentive model to invest aligns very well – and when you have alignment, it almost naturally will happen.
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
Red Hat adds more virtualization and KVM into the mix
Anthony points out some interesting news regarding Red Hat, virtualization and in particular, KVM. IBM is also involved in building out these capabilities. If you read my site often, you know I’m already a big KVM fan.
“IBM works closely with Red Hat and the open source community to drive innovation within the Linux kernel,” said Daniel Frye, vice president, open systems development at IBM. “IBM has a heterogenous approach toward virtualization, with KVM one of several options. KVM leverages the core features of the Linux kernel, including paravirtualization interfaces contributed by IBM engineers. By combining Linux virtualization infrastructure with open management interfaces such as CIM and libvirt, we gain a solution that eliminates lock-in and open source community innovations, we are able to offer our customers a solution with outstanding performance, scalability and agility.”
Sunday, June 15th, 2008
Wall Street’s Linux Frenzy continues; so does FUD
Just saw this on Slashdot today:
Market watcher Tabb Group estimates that Linux adoption among the 14 biggest investment firms this year will reach more than 72% of the installed operating server base vs. 60% in 2006
I’ve always known the financial markets companies in NY were big on Linux, but even I was a bit surprised the percentage has gone up from 60% to now being 72% of the installed OS base. 72% – wow!
Now aside from that reference to Linux dominating the install base, this article was very, very poor. It’s littered with nonsense about open source software licensing being an issue and companies being fearful of having to give up the code they change. Rubbish. First, I know that the investment firms that would have been surveyed know far more about open source software licensing than just about any IT user set. They know exactly what they’re doing, and believe me, they’re not afraid (heck, they’re using Linux everywhere!).
I don’t know Ellen, but I really wish authors would spend more time talking to the users they portray knowing insights about and not vendors or analysts pushing an agenda… Perhaps Ellen cross-checked with actual users, but knowing who I’ve spoken to, this is not that big an issue with the Wall Street crowd as the article makes it out to be.
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