Ubuntu fans debunk Windows win of power test

Our recent power story reporting that Windows Server 2008 eked out a narrow two-watt power savings over Ubuntu 8.04 Long Term Support has emitted some sparks of protest from Ubuntu fans. The latest is from Fred Marsico, the chief technology officer of Quantum Mechanics R&D in Corvallis, Ore., and a Ubuntu desktop user.

Like another reader who responded to the story but preferred to remain anonymous, Marsico said the test would have been more meaningful if it had compared energy use while the servers were active rather than in idle mode and if the test had been done on multiple hardware platforms instead of just one. We agree in principle with Marsico, but once you open the door to testing on different applications, the task would be endless. (This doesn’t mean Marsico is wrong, of course.)

Michael Larabel, the editor of the Phoronix website that tests Linux hardware, was kind enough to add a test of the respective servers in time for our story. No one claims the test is definitive. But its results were surprising, given Windows’ reputation for bloatware and Linux’s for minimalist agility.

Thanks for writing, readers. Keep the comments coming.

If a Linux distribution is not named after a Red Hat, does it still exist? Do sports teams improve their chances with Linux-inspired monikers? Do Linux administrators need to learn fencing to keep up with the tech industry?

No, I’m not trying to throw you back into the fog that was the college philosophy class in which the only question on the final exam was “Why?” Rather, as a former philosophy student working as an assistant site editor at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, I have pondered these questions of late.

Many Linux distributions have names that one would not expect of an open source software product, and some of these names have begun to grow into the broader culture because of it.

The Boston Celtics, for example, recently adopted the word Ubuntu. The word Ubuntu is South African for “a philosophy of life that promotes the greater good rather than individual success.”  CNET cited Ubuntu as also having the connotation, “I am what I am because of who we all are.”

Apparently, athletes and open source software developers draw from the same inspirational pool. Perhaps they operate on the same principles.

Before making that jump, though, let’s take a look at the differences between sports and open source software.

Athletes are well paid; open source developers are lucky to have a salary. Athletes are viewed as social and sexual heroes; open source developers are not. Athletes each play a defined role on a team to achieve a win, while open source software developers work independently to lose all limitations upon their engineering creativity. Athletes have simplified public personas and often resort to assuming imaginative names to represent themselves to society; open source developers do … too.

Red Sox, Red Hat; EnGarde, Cavaliers; Ubuntu, Saints; Seattle Seahawks, Linux Penguin.

All right, so the last one might stretch things a bit. Yet all of this name talk highlights a broader fact: Creativity is green and made of paper in these fields. Both the Linux software developers who succeed and the athletes who do the same cast their work in mythical terms.

If you’re looking for a sports team or a Linux distribution on which to place your bets, look at the stats. Read the records. Then consider the options and choose the one with the Odyssean name.

Ubuntu may not be a household word, but the increasingly popular Linux operating system is no stranger at Fox News. A Ubuntu blogger who complained that he couldn’t view video on FoxNews.com got a personal response from David Denis, Fox News Digital’s director of development. Denis not only went to the trouble to solve the problem (which actually stemmed from Fox’s video vendor, Maven Networks) but acknowledged the growing use of Ubuntu.

“Most of our developers actually run Ubuntu, so we’re definitely focused on correcting [the problem],” he wrote, according to the ERACC Web Log.

Martin Owens, the leader of the Massachusetts Ubuntu Local Community Organization, said, on the one hand, that he was surprised that Fox would allow its employees to use Ubuntu. On the other hand, technical people “are on the cusp of understanding what all this IT mumbo jumbo is about,” so it’s only natural that they would want to use Ubuntu’s advanced features at work, he said. Maybe the feedback from technical teams will convince the rest of the Fox gang to try it too, he added.

Move over, Windows … Ubuntu wants more room in the nest.