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.

At CIO.com today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth gives a nice year-ending top ten list on a topic he’s surely familiar with on the most intimate of levels: Ubuntu.

More specifically, Shuttleworth talks about the Top Ten Reasons Why Ubuntu Is Best for Enterprise Use. In the list Shuttleworth runs down the usual laundry list of pro-Linux items, including flexibility, cost, support chops and its strong security track record; and addressed a few new ones as well like application selection. “There are more than 20,000 packages immediately available to Ubuntu users. These include the largest selection of open-source tools and a growing list of proprietary applications,” he said.

Normally, a CEO waxing positively about his own product is nothing new, but this year has been a roller coaster ride for Ubuntu and I can’t help but think this column is a harbinger of things to come for the OS.

First, there were two substantial releases for Ubuntu this year. In April Feisty Fawn (7.04) launched, and Canonical was again beating the server drum full-force to get users to notice that this free little distro had matured over the past two years. Deploying it on the server was now an option said Jane Silber, Canonical’s director of operations. “On the server side, we have increased support for virtualization, and Ubuntu now supports a number of virtualization technologies. We have been working with VMware on some performance testing with Ubuntu as a guest operating system and as the host OS. We have seen very good performance numbers there. We also have Xen in the universe repository, and we’ve added [Kernel-based Virtual Machine] support,” she said.

I had already written about this a few times over the past year and I was looking for something beyond what Canonical was already saying about what was being put into Ubuntu’s code.

We go that response in May, and it was a small landslide victory for Canonical. In a joint statement released May 3, Dell Inc.. and Canonical announced that Dell would offer laptops and desktop computers pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux 7.04. Dell CEO Michael Dell acquired a Precision M90 mobile workstation and loaded it with Ubuntu 7.04 and a host of open source applications just to cap the whole announcement off. At the time, Raven Zachary, a senior analyst with New York-based 451 Group, said the news also meant users could expect an Ubuntu server offering from Dell in the near future. “I think you will find Dell, over time, also offering Ubuntu across its server product line as Ubuntu grows in popularity in the data center,” he said.

Nice segue, Raven, because what happened next was right up that alley. During a qucik call with Canonical’s marketing director Gerry Carr in August, he and I started talking about hardware vendors and which among them might be ideal candidates for pre-installed Ubuntu. “[Pre-installed Ubuntu on the server] is something we would like to do, and we’ve made no secret about it,” Carr said. “Customers have asked for this, and if people want to see Ubuntu pre-installed on Dell servers, then they should go to [Dell] IdeaStorm and continue to ask for it.” The Dell/Ubuntu program was expanded to encompass Europe in August, and observers at the time said it was yet another indicator of Ubuntu’s building momentum.

Carr said that while the deal will “hopefully be with Dell,” Canonical is also considering server vendors other than Dell, and at a later date the company will reveal the results of those talks. “This doesn’t mean a deal is imminent, but those who want and require Ubuntu on the server will have something available reasonably soon,” he said.

Which leads us to the present. Last week, at Linux-Watch.com, Rick Becker, Dell Product Group’s vice president of applications, said Dell is currently in the process of certifying Ubuntu for all its server lines. “But we are still several months away from announcing a certification. I’d say it’ll be announced in Q1 next year,” he said.

The Ubuntu firehose is now open, but there are still a few obstacles to address before the prerequisite “touchdown” articles are written (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) How big is the demand, you ask? Dell IdeaStorm received more than 130,000 requests for pre-installed desktop Ubuntu in early 2007, but that number is a pin drop compared to the number of Red Hat and Novell instances in the enterprise today. And that number pales in comparison to the number of Microsoft Windows deployments worldwide. There’s also the recently raised concerns about Ubuntu’s documentation to address as well.

Regardless, the momentum is building around Ubuntu on both the desktop and the server. Whether or not it reaches critical mass is something we’ll have to dig into now, won’t we?

On October 31, Wired Blogs wrote about Wal-Mart’s $200 Linux-based PC. Today, about a month and a half later, the Linux PC (sans monitor) has sold all 10,000 units. The customer reviews are glowing, to say the least. “It’s $200, with no gimmicks or subsidies,” Everex spokesman David Liu said.

Score one for the good guys. That is, score one if you treat operating system sales like you treat religious wars.

Are Linux server sales increasing faster than Windows? Previous research from IDC said no, but Dell’s Michael Dell said otherwise at the Gartner Symposium/IT Expo last week.

Silicon.com:

Dell said his company has seen Linux uptake for servers increase faster than Windows server products, despite Microsoft’s claims.

He said: “On the server side Linux continues to grow nicely, a bit faster than Windows. We’re seeing a move to Linux in critical applications, and Linux migration has not slowed down.”

However, for those customers who might be concerned about whether Microsoft’s claims of patent violation could result in legal action, Dell added that there were “certainly mechanisms if customers are concerned about patents”.

With the arrival of Ubuntu 7.10 only a few days away, consider the Linux on the server stories to reach a feverish pitch — again. Will Dell start pre-installing Ubuntu on its servers after the Ubuntu Server tweaking that’s gone on for the past six months? Will they continue to watch what happens with the Ubuntu desktops and laptops it started selling earlier this year?

Hopefully, we’ll get the answers to these questions and more during a Q&A with Canonical’s Mark Shuttleworth tomorrow at 12 EST. The rest, as always, is up to Dell. Comments like these are encouraging, however.

Quick: If I were to tell you that a German educational institution selected Novell SUSE Linux for its desktop and server needs, would you be terribly surprised?

No? Me neither. The Germans and SUSE (and Linux in general, for that matter) are like peas in a pod, but it’s always cool to see students getting their hands on Linux and open source technology.

From today’s Novell press announcement:

Novell today announced that state universities across the Federal State of North Rhine Westphalia in Germany have selected Novell for their critical IT infrastructure systems. The agreement will give 560,000 students and employees across 33 universities access to enterprise management and Linux services from Novell, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

Novell is working closely with each of the universities of North Rhine Westphalia to customize solutions to meet their individual needs. This deal covers a wide range of Linux and enterprise management technologies from Novell, including SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop, Novell Open Enterprise Server, Novell Identity Manager and Novell ZENworks. To date, 10 universities have already developed plans to implement Identity Manager to manage student, faculty and employee identities. Thirteen universities will use Novell ZENworks to manage their complex heterogeneous IT infrastructures, while nine universities are implementing Novell GroupWise for collaboration. On the Linux front, 15 universities to date have committed to deploying SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.

The addition of more than half a million new SUSE users means that 40% of all German university students will have access to Linux and management applications from Novell. Not too shabby.
Now we’ll all just wait until some enterprising young columnist touts this news as the year of the Linux desktop. It will be aaaaaany minute now…