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2006, Selva himself became an advocate of open source after finding Saint Stephens’ computer hardware and software out of date and too expensive to replace.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!

When Sam Lamonica first joined Rudolph and Sletten as CIO in 2003, one of his first orders of business was to stabilize the IT infrastructure at the construction firm. “There were all sorts of IS problems affecting the network and the applications,” Lamonica recalled. And with no uniform systems management tools in place, the IT group was essentially flying blind. “We knew we had a problem when one of two things happened,” Lamonica said. “We’d get calls from end users telling us an application was down, or we’d look at the servers and see that the lights were not blinking.”

A 600-employee commercial construction firm with four offices in California, Rudolph and Sletten relies heavily on its IT infrastructure to conduct business. At any given time, the company operates 50 or 60 construction projects at job sites that last anywhere from one to five years; each job site essentially operates as a temporary regional office that requires all the connectivity and applications as a permanent office. So keeping tabs on applications and the network from the company’s data center in Redwood City, Calif., is critical to keeping remote operations running smoothly.

In a previous job, Lamonica got to know Bob Fanini and Dave Lilly, the two entrepreneurs who went on to start GroundWork Open Source Inc., a provider of open source IT and network monitoring software. “The previous company I worked for – Phoenix Technologies – was actually GroundWork’s first customer,” Lamonica said.

In addition to GroundWork, Lamonica was also familiar with HP OpenView, another monitoring and systems management tool. “We really needed something we could implement quickly, so we went with GroundWork,” Lamonica says.

Within six weeks, Rudolph and Sletten had its first set of diagnostics and assessments, courtesy of the GroundWork Monitor Professional tool. Today Lamonica uses the tool to monitor the entire infrastructure, from enterprise business applications and email to servers and network devices. Reliability and stability have improved markedly, from about 80% when Lamonica arrived to 99.99%.

Gone are the days when IT was the last to know when a problem occurred. “We set thresholds, so that we know well before issues arise,” Lamonica said.

Lamonica said that GroundWork has changed some minds regarding the use of open source at the primarily Windows-based Rudolph and Sletten. “We don’t really care if something is open source anymore,” he said. “We just want a solution that fits our needs.”

This blog post was written by Pam Derringer, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s news writer.

Red Hat Inc.’s enviable earnings boost for 2007 is a clear reflection of the market’s growing confidence in open source software, according to Stephen Elliot, a research director at IDC.

Rather than a signal of one player’s increasing dominance, Red Hat’s $523 million in revenue last year – a hefty 31% increase – shows that open source “is a trend that continues to move forward.

“There seems to be enough of a market to go around,” Elliot said. “Each company has its own strategy,” he said, citing Novell Inc.’s recent acquisition of PlateSpin Ltd., developer of innovative virtualization and management tools. “The trend [toward open source] continues to go forward.”

“Red Hat’s revenue growth shouldn’t be surprising.” he continued. “The current economy creates almost a perfect storm in terms of timing because midsized companies are looking at lower-cost options now.”

But it’s not just a tougher economy that has boosted open source companies. A key factor in the growth of companies such as Red Hat and Novell is their single-minded focus on product development and customer support, Elliot said. Another critical growth component is the ability to spot new technologies such as virtualization or enterprise management and incorporate them quickly into their own offerings, he said.

An ongoing challenge for open source companies is continued improvement in interoperability, not only with Windows products but also among their own offerings, Elliot said.

The growing adoption of open source “will continue to move the needle forward … and continue to chip away at [proprietary software adoption] with some success,” he predicted. “Open source isn’t right for everything but [its increasing acceptance] will drive additional discussions where open source wasn’t previously thought of as a viable alternative.

This blog post was written by Pam Derringer, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com’s news writer.

You’ve got to hand it to Vyatta Inc. The Belmont, Calif-based startup daring to take on Cisco Systems Inc. with free, downloadable open source router software is a hands-down winner when it comes to chutzpah.

As those in the news biz are painfully aware, the standard company description at the end of every press release (known as “boilerplate,” and rightly so) is typically jammed with as much meaningless jargon as a commuter-packed, rush-hour subway. But not Vyatta’s.

Vyatta starts by saying its “networking solutions (An empty word that should be exiled) provide an alternative to over-priced, inflexible products from proprietary vendors.” Zap No. 1. But that’s just the warmup.

Then it continues: “Our customers are smarter, better looking, and drive much nicer cars than purchasers of big-name products.” Zap. No. 2. Wow. This is getting personal. Way personal.

Finally, it compliments its customers as “thought leaders.” Attitude can go a long way in helping a David challenge a Goliath.

(A disclaimer: The boilerplate from Cisco, the market share networking leader, is brief and to the point. Much better than most. But it’s a lot less entertaining.)

As a closing note, I’m a native New Englander, so I didn’t have to read Vyatta’s company backgrounder to know that the startup was based in California. No kidding. Its boilerplate has California hip written all over it. Back to my long, impatient wait through gray skies and snowy driveways for our all-too-short New England summers.

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.

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.

The up-and-coming LiMo Foundation recently announced that, in March of 2008, a Linux-based platform for mobile computing platform will be available.

A development application programming interface (API)  specification available now for third-party developers to make packages for the platform. Basic characteristics of the platform include embracing open-source code and being modular and portable. More information on the platform release can be found at the LiMo website.

Have you found Instant Messaging (IM) running on just about every box in your enterprise? Want to secure IM? Meet Jabber. Jabber is a streaming XML based open source instant messenger server.  You can provision a Linux server to host the Jabber server quite easily and more securely on your own network.

Building a Jabber Server

A jabber server builds from the jabberd2.x release, which is licensed under the GPL. Once running, a jabber server will provide support for your internal IM clients. Should you need to have external IM contacts that cannot connect to your internal IM server, some of the jabber clients can connect contacts from other Internet IM services.

The enterprise IM server can also take a big load off of your email server from a storage and message traffic perspective. Too many times, long threads of email traffic with one-line replies waste resources on your expensive email system. A (free) IM service on your network would be a better solution for messaging that is not important to store per long-term email retention policies for storage.

IM in the enterprise

The Jabber client offers more options for Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems, but IM over the Internet for business matters is not a good practice. Security rules can be violated in practice by sending passwords, sensitive files and personnel data because users may find it quicker and easier than correct mechanisms.