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.

It must be the warmer weather. Ubuntu happenings are springing up everywhere in Boston. Just five days after Boston fans gathered at an upscale downtown nightspot to celebrate the release of Hardy Heron, Ubuntu’s latest operating system, a local school technologist kicked off a new organization to promote open source software in education.

Michael Selva, who works at Saint Stephen’s Armenian Elementary School in Watertown, Mass., attracted some 25 teachers and technologists to the kickoff event for a new group called Moving to Open Source Software in Schools, or MOSSIG, drawing attendees from many nearby communities and as far away as New Hampshire and Maine.

An offshoot of Massachusetts Computer Using Educators (MassCUE), the new group aims to wean educators from proprietary software. In November 2006, Selva himself became an advocate of open source after finding Saint Stephens’ computer hardware and software out of date and too expensive to replace. Converting a Dell server and 11 workstations to Kubuntu, a version of Ubuntu, and obtaining open source software for work and education proved just the ticket, he said.

Selva plans to follow up with working meetings on the first Tuesday of every month during the school year, starting at 7 p.m. May 6, at the school. He also plans an adult education program in open source for teachers and a hotline at mossig@googlegroups.com. He can be reached at (617) 605-7429 or atms@saes.org.

Ubuntu fans may be passionate geeks when it comes to free software, but last night’s happy love fest at the Globe Bar & Grill in Copley Place was more about enjoying the moment and being together than serial computer installs. Nearly two dozen members of the Massachusetts Ubuntu LoCo (Local Community) cozied into the mezzanine of the downtown Boston night spot to celebrate the launch of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Long-Term Support) for desktops and servers.

“I’m here for the cake,” joked Craig Andrews, a software engineer with girlfriend in tow. “I want to see who’s here. This is a social opportunity.”

And Andrews got his wish.

A highlight of the event was the arrival of Jono Bacon and his London entourage midway through the event. Bacon, the Ubuntu community leader worldwide, made his way from the office in Lexington, Mass., which he had been visiting on business, and stopped in to mingle with the crowd and cheer the troops. No doubt, Bacon’s appearance was due in part to the hard work by the active, certified local chapter, which generally meets across the river, in Cambridge at MIT.

Although there were a few laptops running Ubuntu 8.04 on tables about the room, the kickoff event was more about clusters of Ubuntu fans, mostly longtime users but also a smattering of newbies, talking up the new release and sharing the excitement of Ubuntu’s growing popularity and added features.

“There’s more people than I thought,” said Martin Owens, a programmer and one of the leaders of the group. “I see a lot of new faces.”

Owens, who prides himself on “not working for anybody who doesn’t use Linux,” added that he particularly appreciates that the new release includes a Likewise Open plug-in to Microsoft’s Active Directory.

Michael Rushton, leader of the group, said the event was one of many worldwide all celebrating the new Ubuntu software release.

Rushton explained his love for Linux in just a few words. “You install it,” he said. “And it just works.”

The refreshments may have been a mite on the skimpy side, but the “Hardy Heron” cake was a feast, indeed.

You have to run pretty fast to keep up with Red Hat these days.

The leading open source vendor just broke two speed records for the financial industry. First, it broke the gold standard for real-time status by processing updates in less than one millisecond, completing a single transaction in .9 of a millisecond. Typically, the fastest processing rates are 10 milliseconds to 20 milliseconds per transaction.

Second, Red Hat had the lowest standard deviation ever recorded or less than .5 milliseconds, which in layman’s terms translates into greater consistency. And third, a single server with a stacked Reuters Market Data System (RMDS) completed a very high ‑- but not record-breaking ­­­­­- volume of transactions, 5.8 million updates per second.

The Securities Technology Analysis Center, which provides performance measurement services to the financial service industry, performed the tests, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, the latest version, with RDMS 6.0 on IBM BladeCenter H and 10 gigabit Ethernet.

“In financial services, speed is the difference between making money and losing money,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president of Red Hat’s platform business unit. “The result is clear: more data, faster data, means better trades and better decisions.”

As if that weren’t enough, Crenshaw struck a blow to proprietary software. “We were 2.4 times faster than Sun Microsystems,” he crowed, comparing Red Hat’s 5.8 million updates with Sun Solaris’ record of 2.4 million updates.

Go, open source! Guess you should have been here for the Boston Marathon!

Sun Microsystems Inc. just did a smart about-face.
According to well-known open source analyst and blogger Bill Weinberg, a few years ago Sun quit the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) Carrier- Grade Linux working group when OSDL declined to grant Solaris equal status with Linux for Carrier-Grade networking applications. (For those of you who don’t eat and sleep networking trivia, Carrier Grade is a networking classification that signifies high availability and fast recovery.)

Well, it seems that the passage of time and the knock of opportunity have overcome any hard feelings, judging from Sun’s deal with Wind River Systems Inc., which was announced recently at the MySQL trade show.

Here’s the deal: Wind River, whose technology helps embedded devices run faster, has agreed to port its Carrier Grade systems to Sun’s latest and greatest UltraSparc T2 chip multithreading (CMT) processor, which runs much faster than a conventional single-core processor.

The deal is good for Sun, giving it an entrée into embedded networking applications, and good for the networking industry, which would benefit from Sun’s newest and most powerful CMT processors. This could in turn benefit data center managers who already use Sparc processors and are thinking about beefing up their telecom networks, Weinberg said.

Whether they’ll think to ask for Sun processors is anyone’s guess, Weinberg cautioned, since the processor brand isn’t highlighted in the hardware packages.”This is a bet on both sides,” Weinberg said. “It’s not a sure thing.”

But forgiveness is good medicine for the soul — and for business too. Sounds like a good move.

The thought of moving to Microsoft Vista has put many Windows users into a panic, writes Ubuntu Linux user and IT pro Fred Marsico, the chief technology officer of Quantum Mechanics R&D in Corvallis, Ore., in this guest blog post.

In trade mags and blogs, I have read about the Vista-versus-Linux issue, and it’s now my turn to say something.

Since December, I have used Ubuntu Desktop. Aside from the fact that I have no virus warnings, no malware and no bots downloading themselves, it has been business as usual. I use Open Office and have no problems with reading and writing MS Office documents. My old Windows Me PC would not let me do that with a new version of MS Office, and of course that meant upgrading to XP as a prerequisite before installing Office. Total cost would have been about $300.

My wife has an older HP notebook running Windows XP Media Center. I chuckle as she reboots each time she gets an update or adds and removes programs. I have been running nonstop with only one required restart for a patch to the Linux kernel.

I read all of these horror stories about Vista on the blogs and comments on many sites about the same. I also see many intentionally derogatory messages posted by Windows users on the open source sites. According to them, Linux is for geeks; “normal” people don’t need to constantly tweak settings and such, as Windows is “automated.” This means that all of Windows software installs without much intervention.

In an honest comparison, it is true that Linux would greatly benefit from an Install Shield application that would make software installs and removal ubiquitous, but I also remember when Windows users complained about the same things.

Another point to ponder is that most of the back-end computers handling banking and ATMs are running Linux. And regarding security, if the banks trust Linux, we should have no problem doing so too.

With faster and multiple-core processors used today, I would have thought that Vista would have been written from the ground up with optimization in mind. With the hefty hardware requirements, it seems Vista is now the most bloated version Microsoft has rolled out to date. Just because I have 2 GB DDR RAM and a 100 GB HDD does not mean that I want my OS to hog most of them. I thought it would make having several applications running concurrently faster, and cause less hangs and crashes.

With the end of the software’s service life rapidly approaching, Windows XP users are panicked. They dread the thought of moving to Vista . Many are starting to look at the Mac OS or Linux as an alternative. Perhaps Bill Gates stepped down because he could foretell the future, and it begins to look like Microsoft is faltering.

With the state of affairs as it is, software developers should move to open source in droves. They can still write proprietary code, and can still sell it at retailers and online.

They just won’t have to pay homage to Microsoft. Monopoly software is dead; long live open source!

Rumor has it that Linux and virtualization provider Levanta, whose recent release of Levanta 6.0 earned it a SearchEnterpriseLinux.com Product of the Year award, may have gone belly up.

At Levanta’s offices, no one is answering the phones, and a press release has yet to be issued; but on the Mikes Thoughts blog former Levanta Senior Director of Services Michael Perry said that the writing is on the wall. He shared a teary-eyed reminiscence of his time at the 9-year old Linux venture:

Levanta is gone dear reader. I will miss it and what it might have been; but I’ll never miss a whole subset of the cast of characters who thought they were above the laws of space and time. No you were not as it turns out. You made the failure as much as if you drove the car. You simply cannot run the company like its your personal kingdom. Sorry. So, it will be gone and people will wonder whether it was good or bad.

This came as a shock to outspoken user and Levanta advocate Arty Ecock, manager of VM enterprise systems at the City University of New York (CUNY), Computing and Information Systems (CIS). “If the news is true, then it will be a great loss to our organization,” Ecock said, adding that Levanta’s product was “a perfect fit” for his organization and that they were just months away from making a new Intrepid X purchase. “We were very big fans.”

According to Ecock, the Levanta product was superior; if anyone is to blame, it is an inferior sales and marketing team. “They had a winning product but they didn’t know how to market it.” Ecock added that the sales team was “garbage.” As one of the first open source commercial startups, Levanta always faced an uphill battle. There was virtually no market for enterprise Linux when Levanta started. But after companies discovered Linux, several players moved in, and apparently Levanta couldn’t get its act together. “There’s nothing that I know of on the market that will easily replace what we have. Now we’ll have to go back to square one,” Ecock said.

But Levanta users may not have to worry. If some analysts are correct, the company may be in the process of being acquired. Should this be the case, users like Ecock would expect Levanta to rise from the ashes and dominate the market under the direction of a better marketing strategy.

So is Levanta really dead, or is it in the process of being bought? If you have information on the company’s status, please let us know. But it appears that this is no belated April Fool’s joke.

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.