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.

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!

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 post was written by Pam Derringer, news writer for SearchEnterpriseLinux.com.

Last week, lots of IT guys from New York’s biggest banks and stock brokerages took a day off to attend the sixth annual Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference at the Roosevelt Hotel in the heart of Manhattan.

All ears they were, but suddenly attendees turned shy when the lectures ended and they were asked to share their own views on Linux. Surely, the firms’ PR police or legal watchdogs would find them out and ruin their prospects for career advancement. Promised a mask of anonymity, however, a few attendees opined on the show, and here are their thoughts.

Lack of management tools cited. “I’m a strong Linux advocate,” said one enthusiastic IT manager. “It’s free, open and secure. And if we find issues, we’re able to fix them.”

Five or six years ago, his firm was one of the first in financial services to introduce Linux servers to data centers. Now about 30% or 40% of its machines run on Linux, with most of the remainder running Windows. The firm’s direction, he said, is definitely off Unix and Solaris and onto Linux.

And he couldn’t be more pleased that Red Hat Inc., in turn, incorporated his team’s enhancements, such as changing storage allocations without a reboot into future versions of the operating system. This way, all Red Hat customers benefit and his staff doesn’t have to maintain the improvement separately with every future fix or upgrade.

He is also concerned about improving data center energy efficiency and has explored various options, to reduce energy consumption, including CPUs, memory and lower wattage.

He has also researched the stateless, single-image data center that can be booted up all at once. “Management would be much better,” he said. “We’d only have one operating system image to manage.”

What is Linux’ most telling shortcoming? “Enterprise-class management tools,” he answered, not unpredictably. “But the good news is: Linux is getting there.”

Rising support costs lamented. Another anonymous big-gun attendee said that for about six years his firm has used Linux — mainly Red Hat — on everything from mainframes to blades and servers.

“Linux is getting a faster, better infrastructure,” he said. “But if these vendors want to remain a viable solution, they need to remain competitive with other data center providers. They’re getting like everyone else, adding more middleware and getting more expensive. It’s getting so that the support and maintenance are costing more than the servers themselves. We need to drive competitiveness back.”

More third-party software urged. A third attendee said the main problem with Linux is the lack of third-party software and inadequate vendor support. For five or six years, he has used Linux to run Web applications and noted that the third-party software shortage is less severe for Web apps than for migrations off AIX or Solaris, for example, simply because of higher volume.

The good news is, he said, that vendor support is on the upswing, citing the presence of Oracle and IBM at the trade show.

“The demand for Linux is there but the growth of third-party software products is slower,” he said. “But we will start to see this [third-party software] materialize more and more.”

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.

Last week, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com editorial director Jan Stafford mentioned that the new Microsoft Windows Server 2008, which launched on February 27, has features designed to give it a Linux feel:

Any new Microsoft OS prompts Linux users to scratch their heads and ask, “Why pay lots to upgrade from one Windows release that doesn’t work very well to another that doesn’t work well either?” Users say that a Windows Server release launch is ultimately an opportunity for any Microsoft IT shop to evaluate Linux. Even a Linux-like Windows won’t provide the stability, flexibility and migration freedom of Linux.

We received several responses, including one from Steve Dasey in the UK who asks the immortal question, to be or not to be… proprietary:

Surely that is the question
Whether it is nobler to pay for support on an open source OS or for a proprietary OS.

Are either then free ?
How viable is it to run mission critical applications on a non commercially supported OS.
Are there price differences? - of course.
Are there advantages to both? - of course.
But the TCO is about a lot more than the cost of purchasing the boxed product.

I am pro choice, pro Linux, pro open source, but commercially apples need to be likened to apples

Alas, poor Tux. I knew him, Bill Gates. I think if Hamlet were running Windows Server 2008, he might remark “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I…to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous pricing.” Server 2008 Enterprise will run $3,999 versus $0 for RHEL. The enterprise support package that Red Hat offers is still significantly less, too, at $2,500.

Got a rebuttal? Philosophize in the comment section.

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. 

I recently tried out a test system with an Ubuntu Server 7.10 JeOS build. The JeOS (Just Enough Operating System, pronounced “juice” ) concept for Linux works well if one needs just enough to run a test system. JeOS builds are popular for software vendors that are making purpose built systems, small footprint test systems, or a virtual appliance environment for popular virtualization technologies.

What composes a JeOS distro?

Simply put, not much. JeOS distributions are a skinny, bare-bones build made to occupy a small footprint and provide only explicit system services on the install. The JeOS distributions follow their full build counterparts in the same versioning and install interface, just with less options for install from the CD media.

Start with nothing, add only what is needed

JeOS distributions are perfect for this practice for many reasons. My particular need was an external facing DNS server, so the skinny JeOS did a great job and installed the DNS server, a boot loader and the OS essentials. This also made for a smaller drive footprint - only 500 MB (as a virtual system). The JeOS install CDs are smaller than the full version counterparts, but have a similar look and feel for the install process.

Playing nicely

Should you need to add a package that was not on the CD, you can use the standard retrieval tools. For my Ubuntu 7.10 JeOS system, this included sudo apt-get. This option is handy should I need to add a web server engine or database. Also, you can make the JeOS builds fit your existing enterprise Linux environments by adding the tools and packages you expect to be installed, but starting with less on the base install. 

JeOS distributions do not run a different Linux kernel than the full version equivalent, they simply have less packages. Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon and the JeOS equivalent are both at kernel 2.6.22. Plus, Canonical Ltd. provides support options for the Ubuntu JeOS - which is nice.

When Google launched Android earlier this month, many people assumed that because it was an open, Linux-based mobile operating system, the target was Microsoft. Throughout the relatively brief history of Linux, the first competition was with legacy Unix systems and Microsoft Windows. Closed versus open, proprietary versus open source. It’s David versus Goliath in a Tron-like world (ok, maybe not that cheesey). Add to that the fact that today many mobiles run a Microsoft operating system, and the table appeared set for another Linux vs. Windows rumble in the data center jungle.

And while we don’t typically cover mobile Linux on SearchEnterpriseLinux.com or even here on the quirky Enterprise Linux Log, I couldn’t resist a quick link to a Slate article that discussed Google’s plan to take over the world. Here’s a free Pro Tip: Microsoft is but a small rival in the overall big picture. This isn’t so much a battle between technologies as it is a battle between ideologies.

Google’s truest and most formidable foes are much older and more powerful. Today we call them Verizon and AT&T, but their real name is the Bell system. Their ideology, which today governs the cell phone world, is called “Vailism,” and it can be traced back to 1907 and the origins of AT&T’s domination of American telephony. The Bells’ philosophy, as promulgated by AT&T’s greatest president, Theodore Vail, is based on closed systems, centralized power, and as much control as possible over every part of the network. Vailism is the antithesis, in short, of everything Google stands for. It is this—conquering the business culture of the telephone, as opposed to the computer—that is Google’s great challenge.

Do no evil? You tell me. I, for one, welcome openness not only in my software, but in my Internet and my wireless as well. But that iPhone sure is tempting…

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.