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.

The success of open source software (OSS) has software giants like Microsoft running scared, OSS pioneer Bruce Perens says. Although most IT shops today use OSS such as Nagios, Samba, Apache and other programs, the open source community is still in a vulnerable spot, as software vendors use their patents to gain unfair market advantage and even take control of OSS products and standards.

I talked with Perens recently, and our topic was what IT managers need to know and do about the state of open source software. Perens says that IT managers are in the best position to lobby proprietary software vendors to protect and not attack the OSS community. IT shops are those vendors’ customers, after all, and have some clout; whereas, the large majority of open source developers — mostly self-employed or volunteers — are poorly equipped to stand up to major corporations that are trying to grab ownership of OSS.

Proprietary software vendors are both co-opting open source and, as stealthily as possible, trying to destroy OSS with software patent threats. If proprietary software vendors succeed in stymieing OSS development, technology innovation will slow down, and interoperability in heterogeneous environments will be difficult, if not impossible, to attain.

Protecting OSS will help IT organizations retain the ability “to purchase software without becoming tied to that [software vendor] for other software” to manage or complement it, Perens told me.

The protection of open standards should also be on IT pros’ agenda. Once a proprietary software vendor gets hold of rights to software standards, there are few obstacles to that vendor expanding those rights. Perens urges IT organizations to support the International Standards Organization (ISO). Established to govern the process of patent distribution, ISO working to adapt standards to the reality of the current marketplace. Most companies need interoperable software for many functions, from exchanging Microsoft Office documents to sharing databases across systems. The ISO needs the support of IT leaders in order to support the development of software interoperability amid pressure applied by proprietary vendors.

“Software patents are a problem especially for open standards, because they may prevent a standard from being usable by everyone,” Perens told me. ” If there’s a royalty or discriminatory licensing to the patent, that usually rules out open source implementations.”

With ISO/IEC 26300, Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) v1.0., the ISO did address business software interoperability in 2006. This requires all office documents to be able to be sent from one software system to a competing software system without having to be re-formatted.
In the U.S., it has been hard to stop software vendors from filing or expanding software patents that lack integrity and bankrupting OSS startups with lawsuits. U.S. “lawmakers are so in thrall to big-media lobbyists that they do not even realize that counterarguments to copyright extensions exist,” said Professor at Stanford Law School and founder of the Center for Internet and Society Lawrence Lessig.

U.S. antitrust suits have gotten few results; but, in 2007, the European Commission filed the largest antitrust suit against Microsoft yet, for withholding information that would let rival vendors defend themselves from product integration, rolling out a penalty of $1.3 billion.

But, Perens pointed out, this was merely one step forward in a larger struggle.

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.

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.

If you are like me, you are passionate about your browser preferences. Lately, I have been installing Opera 9.25 as my browser of choice. To make it the preferred web browser in Gnome, follow along as I install the browser on a RHEL 4 system.

Opera does a good job making the install distribution specific for 13 distributions. Some generic class distributions are also available. I choose to install via the .rpm file for convenience. I download and run the small 5 MB  opera-9.25-20071214.5-shared-qt.i386-en.rpm file.

Opera requires a few dependancies during the install, such as libstdc++.so.5, that may not be available on all distributions. For my RHEL 4.6 system, I had to provide disc 2 of the installation to satisfy the Opera requirements. After that small administrative task, Opera is ready to go in my Gnome environment:

Now that Opera is installed, right-click the generic web browser icon, and by selecting properties, change the settings to use Opera as the default web browser. In the Launcher properties window, set the command to ‘opera’ and change the name to Opera Browser. The Gnome environment will also replace the generic web icon with the slick Opera ‘O’ which looks much better.

The Novell-sponsored openSUSE Build Service recently added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS. This community project provides a development platform for future openSUSE Linux distributions . This is in addition to distributions including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu and others. With this build service framework, developers can make packages with increased compatibility across distributions. The openSUSE build service with additional distribution compatibility is available now.

The management of the openSUSE Build Service has a direct line to Novell for influence of future releases. More information on the new compatibility can be found at the openSUSE news site.

One of our users, James Lowden, emailed us to say that our recent 77 useful Linux commands and utilities guide missed a couple of his favorites:

I’m a NetBSD guy, but I have RHEL at work.

As for commands, I like:

1. pax better than tar

2. hexdump better than od

3. tnfpt better than wget

Pax has a much better command-line interface than tar, especially for copying trees. Consider:

$ pax -rw -pe src dest # to copy a tree

$ pax -wzf file.pax.gz src # to create and archive

hexdump -C is what you almost always want.

Tnftp (a port of the NetBSD FTP client to other systems) is a much saner way to fetch stuff. Why the GNU world focuses on wget instead is a mystery to me. It doesn’t do anything tnftp doesn’t do, and it doesn’t do anything better, either.

If you would like to share your opinions of our essential Linux command guide, feel free to drop us line and share some of your favorite commands with the Enterprise Linux Log.

I was faced with the decision to implement an additional system on the RHEL 4.x series, or make our first jump to the version 5 releases. I decided to have this additional system to stay on RHEL 4.x because of our support situation. As admins are aware, there are many factors that affect a decision like this one.

RHEL 4.x vs. RHEL 5
RHEL is a stable platform among its competition. At just over a year old, its latest build, RHEL 5, is still new to the scene. But RHEL version5.1 was recently released and has enjoyed initial success thus far. The biggest factor in choosing to remain on the 4.x platform was Red Hat’s recent release of version 4.6, keeping the 4.x a current product. With this release, all of our versions remain within the realm of support, so our internal support requirements have not been impacted by another platform. This also keeps us in line with base configuration of applications that are running on the RHEL systems.

You can’t stay on version 4.x forever!
I know, but we made the decision based on what we can best support internally by not multiplying our scope of platforms. But, the version 5.x test bed is just around the corner, and we will increase our comfort with version 5.x (curiously awaiting a 5.2). At that point we would welcome version 5.x by ceasing the version 4.x installs, and migrating to version 5.x if possible.

What is your strategy?
Do you have multiple versions running in your enterprise? What is your thought process in regards to introducing a new distribution? Share your strategies below in a comment.

I had an opportunity this week to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5 (64-bit version) for a system running a specialized vendor application. I’d like to share my frustration with you so that you can avoid such learning experiences in your future server builds. 

On a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III server, we were unable to assign the Dell Remote Assistance Card virtual media capability or DRAC for a floppy image that contained the array controller driver for the OS install. As we did not have a floppy, our install came to a halt when trying to load the driver:

Installation stopped, now what?
This is not a show stopper. In fact, you have two options that can get this situation resolved. One option is access the files in a floppy image format, extract them to a CD-ROM and make an ISO image with only those files. The other option is hook up a USB floppy drive (the Dell BIOS will make this appear as a normal floppy) with the driver files extracted on a legacy floppy.

Rapid rebuilding process
Should you have multiple systems to re-install either for build or restore process, take the time to determine the quickest way to rebuild a server on your hardware. I’d recommend the CD-ROM ISO image simply because I find it easier to manage files than actual media.

Today’s top server hardware vendors have expanded the line of Linux compatible server systems. HP and Dell, for example, have Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Novell SUSE Enterprise Linux available as OEM build installations, the same hardware that a Windows server can be built on. As recommended configurations from the vendors are quite similar, this can make any server purchases a little easier to swallow. Because configurations are similar for Windows and Enterprise Linux builds, these servers can be repurposed to change their roles to Windows or Linux without additional equipment.

Take for example the HP ProLiant DL 380 G5 and the Dell PowerEdge 2950 III, which can be configured for a general purpose Windows or Linux server and can have most connectivity options available: fiber networking interfaces, storage area network (SAN) fiber channel adapters and any additional copper networking. The local drive configurations currently use serial attached SCSI (SAS) drives with local array controller. 

Dell and HP generally divide models by Intel and AMD processor offerings, so the selection process is aided by that distinction. If you strive for a common server for the Enterprise Linux builds and the Windows server space, a uniform processor brand platform is a must. 

Choose wisely

If you embark on the single server across software groups, be sure to get all members on board and mutually agree on a server specification. If the needs are different, it may be more likely to work in terms of base server and customize up as required. This can save the incremental cost of a small number of under-utilized servers in a mixed environment.