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2006, Selva himself became an advocate of open source after finding Saint Stephens’ computer hardware and software out of date and too expensive to replace.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

At the MySQL conference in Santa Clara, Calif., Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green, Sun’s senior vice president of software, dropped in unexpectedly in an informal dinner organized by the open source community and spent several hours chatting up the crowd.

Beyond the photo op and blogging opportunity, the visit was encouraging to the group, according to Zack Urlocker, Sun’s vice president of MySQL products. “It was a very nice touch, showing that they are actively listening to the community and understand its importance in the open source world,” he said.

Don’t read Red Hat’s latest blog on its desktop policy unless you’ve just chugged a few bottles of Red Bull. In a blog update on its desktop product direction, it says, ” We have no plans to create a traditional desktop product for the consumer market in the foreseeable future.” I’ll bet I’m not the only caffeine-deprived reader who skipped — or might skip — right over that word, consumer. Then I scan down to the bold print which reads: ” our desktop product plans for 2008 and 2009 include …” and thinking, “Huh?” OK, so this is a reader error. Still …

Red Hat then lists three initiatives, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, which, contrary to its name, is a niche product for specialzed uses in manufacturing and other verticals. Not what the term “enterprise” brings to mind at all. The other two are Fedora, the free, community-based desktop version, and, finally, we’re getting to the news here, the Red Hat Global Desktop (RHGD), a desktop project currently in development targeted to countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America that are severely undersupplied with computers.

Announced last June and stalled by marketing and assorted other issues, this project, which is still not a done deal. Companies often fall behind in their projects so that’s hardly a crime. But couldn’t Red Hat have simply blogged about the news: it’s late with the Global Desktop project, and be done with it instead of making readers embark on a verbal treasure hunt? And, by the way, mum’s the word on when this initiative is going to happen. It would be nice to know, after all that time wasted.

SearchEnterpriseLinux.com expert Sander van Vugt blogs from Novell BrainShare in this post.

At the annual Novell BrainShare user conference that started in Salt Lake City today, Novell unveiled its roadmap and loaded the car with new friends. The roadmap includes a new strategy focused on agility, called Fossa, and a new release of SUSE: SUSE Linux Enterprise 11. Joining Novell for the trip will be new partners bearing products such as SAP, PlateSpin and Atos Origin.

Focussing on SLE 11, Novell’s CTO Jeff Jaffe talked about product features, but mostly about development plans. Novell wants to leverage the OpenSUSE network, communicating better with the open source comunity, an area where Novell hasn’t been particularly successful lately.

Another new development is the joint solutions that Novell is going to develop with PlateSpin. These solutions will add important features that are currently lacking, such as P2V and V2P in the Xen stack that is offered by SUSE Linux.

Also very important for Novell is that it has extended its partnership with ERP vendor SAP. According to SAP’s Pat Hume, SAP has chosen to work with Novell because it is the fastest growing enterprise-level Linux vendor.

With these developments, Novell is bolstering its position as the vendor in charge where open source software meets enterprise needs. I’ll be here all week reporting on developments.

BrainShare is being talked about elsewhere in the blogosphere. The VAR guy notes that the Microsoft-Novell partnership is a rancorous marriage, as Novell is still pursuing its anti-monopoly suit against Microsoft. Reporting from BrainShare on Sunday, March 16, blogger Richard Bliss saw some clamor around a CRM product, at least as much clamor as a small crowd could muster.

This post was written by Megan Santosus, SearchEnterpriseLinux.com feature writer.

Linux has outpaced Windows and Unix in corporate adoption rates, according to research firm IDC’s 2007 server market numbers. The pace of Linux’s future adoption could partly depend upon whether certain people choose early retirement, another researcher says.

According to IDC, Windows is still the dominant player, responsible for 36.6% of server revenues for the fourth quarter of 2007. (Quarterly Windows revenues totaled $5.7 billion—a new quarterly record.) Unix servers took in 33.3% of quarterly revenues. And Linux servers—which reached a milestone of $2 billion for a single quarter—made up 12.7% of revenues for the quarter.

While Linux still lags its rivals, it’s growing at the fastest clip. IDC pegged Linux year-over-year revenue growth from 2006 to 2007 at 11.6%. By comparison, Windows revenues grew 6.9%, and Unix a paltry 1.5%.

Richard Jones, vice president and service director for Data Center Strategies at IT research and advisory firm The Burton Group, sees a shift in sentiment among CIOs he talks to that mirrors what’s going on in the market. “CIOs that haven’t moved to Linux yet are planning to do so soon,” Jones said.

Certainly, Linux is gaining a track record for reliability, Jones said, and costs—at least for initial software licenses and maintenance—are lowest for Linux compared to Unix and Windows. And Jones cited Oracle Corp.’s decision to release its 11g database first on Linux as further evidence that the market is shifting irretrievably.

With all the momentum behind Linux, an interesting question emerges: Why isn’t every shop that is able from a workload standpoint to migrate to Linux doing so?

Jones however sees a good reason for the hesitancy: skills. Unix shops in particular remain set in their server ways. Most have veteran Unix experts running their IT systems. “Many shops today have Unix engineers and administrators,” he said. “Once those people start to retire in droves, that’s when many CIOs will make the move to Linux.”

It sounds downright bizarre to buck the trend toward running apps on commodity servers, especially considering that enterprise applications like Oracle and SAP run on commodity-based x86 boxes running Linux.

In this case, it’s not the technology after all. It’s the people.

CentOS released version 5.1 of its increasingly popular distribution, which is celebrating its fourth birthday this month. Version 5.1 includes 70 new packages native to the distribution including 17 in the series of the Yellow dog Updater, Modified (yum) package updater tools, 11 in the Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability (sblim) management tools and an assortment of various other packages. Updates in the distribution include Apache, php, kernel-2.6.18, Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice.org, Firefox-1.5 and PostgreSQL. The full release notes of the build of the distribution are available at CentOS.org.

CentOS 5.1 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It remains completely free and offers the compatibility and reliability of RHEL without the costs of build certification and support contracts. This makes CentOS a wonderful test bed or quality system that does not require the full resources (hardware, software costs, support costs) of the enterprise production builds.

For what it’s worth, a test by Redmonk analyst Stephen O’Grady of Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) on Fedora 8 was “not so much success as much as total failure.”

After overcoming some preliminary hurdles (i.e., a lack of Live CDs for x86- and 64-class machines, the inability to run Fedora off a memory stick, and the need to manually add the virtualization packages), O’Grady got things stable enough to try run an Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon virtual machine (VM). But alas, it was not meant to be:

Opening Fedora’s Virtual Machine Manager, which is a very nice piece of software despite my lack of success with it, I first attempted to virtualize Ubuntu Gutsy. Start with what you know, I figured. Curiously, however, I had to manually start the libvirt daemon as it hadn’t been initiated despite the install and subsequent start of the Virtual Machine Manager. Once that was figured out, I created a Gutsy image and began the install. Everything went smoothly until it failed, complaining of “corrupt packages” and an inability to connect to the network. Given that I later used to [sic] the same disk to create an instance of Gutsy on VMWare, I think the media is fine. And the network connection worked beautifully during the initial part of the installation. So I did the easiest thing I could think of, and gave up on Gutsy.

He experienced the same sad story with Windows Server 2008:

Instead, I’d try to virtualize Windows Server 2008, as I knew Senor Dolan had successfully done just this. Forgoing his instructions, which were command line based, I thought I’d try to use the GUI just as an experiment. That failed, as it was rumored it might, due to ACPI [Advanced Configuration and Power Interface] errors. At which point I turned to Michael’s CLI method, which also failed because Fedora returned a “command not found” to kvm. Turns out that kvm is instead qemu-kvm on Fedora: my bad. After I figured that bit out, the install of Windows Server 2008 promptly bluescreened.

Ditto for Vista:

Next, I tried to virtualize Vista. Blue screen numero dos. Complicating my efforts with all of the above were the slight differences between Fedora and Ubuntu; you can’t modprobe on Fedora, apparently, even as root. Nor can you sudo, by default - su is your only option.

At that point, our intrepid analyst “cut bait” and decided to retreat back to VMware running on Ubuntu.

What’s remarkable about all this, though, is O’Grady’s tenacity and continued open-mindedness in the face of adversity. For all its flaws, Fedora Virtual Machine Manager also has its share of virtues, despite the fact that they’re well hidden:

The Virtual Machine Manager, as mentioned, comes with a nice, simple GUI that’s very usable once you get the hang of it (connect to the localhost before you try creating VMs). More importantly, the virtualization technologies under the hood in KVM and Xen are more capable than many realize. Xen, as an example, is the underlying technology behind Amazon’s EC2, and KVM is hugely popular with the distros due in part to its light weight. Both are eminently capable of virtualizating the very operating systems I failed to, and my lack of success is at least as attributable to me as it is to the packages themselves.

O’Grady remains undeterred and promises to check in with Fedora VMM again in a couple of months.

For the complete text, click here.

For a month that saw a GNU GPL lawsuit and nearly 20% growth in GPLv3 project conversions, September has quickly become yet another month set to go out like a lamb (I’m looking at you, March).

At the beginning of the month, I cited a Palamida report that had tracked the number of GPLv3 adoptions among open source projects at a 15-20% increase month-over-month. Today? The numbers have cooled slightly, although the GPL’s younger brother the LGPL has taken up some of the slack.

Again, Palamida provides some of the licensing numbers they’ve been tracking for the period of September 10 through the 21rst:

Wow for the LGPL v3 (Relatively)
The last two weeks have seen a 17% increase over last in the number of projects that have adopted GPLv3. As of 3pm PDT, September 21, 2007, our research indicates that 683 projects have officially adopted GPLv3, as compared to 585 projects on September 7th. A whopping 31 new projects have adopted LGPLv3 bringing the total LGPLv3 projects to 76.

Palamida is also pretty good at keeping people up to date on some of the specific projects being converted to the GPLv3 (they aren’t just about statistics, people!).

Some of the latest conversions:

• mySerialz: A Web application that allows users to keep track of their serial keys.
• gPodder: A Podcast receiver/catcher written in Python and pyGTK. It manages podcast feeds for you, and automatically downloads all podcasts from as many feeds as you like. If you are interested in Podcast feeds, simply put the feed URLs into gPodder and it will download all episodes for you automatically. If there is a new episode, it will get it for you. It supports download resume, if the server supports it.
• Version Control Control (VC”): A tool that integrates with off-the-shelf version control systems and monitors file system access in order to enhance awareness among users. The tool warns about actions made by other users and suggests conflict avoiding actions.
• GNU Emacs: Emacs is the extensible, customizable, self-documenting real-time display editor. Emacs is a text editor and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp (“elisp'’, for short), a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.
• yWiCo: SyWiCo is a tool for managing concurrent modifications of shared files between unconnected computers. It can be used as a synchronization tool relying on email.
• Portaneo Open Source Homepage (POSH): Posh is a open source personalizable portal (Netvibes, iGoogle, ̷ developed with PHP/MySQL/Ajax.

I assume the last one has no relation to Becks.

Bonus link: More on the FSF lawsuit against Monsoon Multimedia.

UPDATE: Hate to kick you while you’re down, buddy, but InformationWorld is reporting that developers are shunning GPLv3.

Today BMW AG and Siemens Corp. today became the latest customers to hop on board the Microsoft-Novell bandwagon. For those of you keeping score at home, good for you, because I’m not.

According to a joint release fired off from Redmond and Waltham, Mass. simultaneously , Under two separate agreements Microsoft will deliver to BMW and Siemens each certificates for three-year priority support subscriptions to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.

BMW and Siemens join a small but growing group of European companies, including Credit Suisse and HSBC, which have already signed on to Novell and Microsoft’s agreement to jointly build and support applications to improve interoperability, virtualization capabilities, and provide intellectual property assistance to customers (that last point is up for debate).

For Siemens, the agreement will support the Siemens operating company through the work of the ISEC subsidiary of Siemens Enterprise Communications, which is responsible for customer software application development and management worldwide. Due to the large quantity of current and legacy Linux applications in customer environments, Siemens has a need for Windows and Linux platform compatibility.

The agreement will enable BMW’s dual-vendor data center strategy, supporting worldwide corporate computing services and many human resources, marketing and financial applications.

Don’t you just love the smell of a press release in the morning? Regardless, this is yet another customer (two, actually) that believes the Microsoft-Novell approach to interoperability is the right one.

Last week we told you all about Novell’s big customer win in Germany, so it seems only fair that this week we follow up with some news from that other big time commercial Linux vendor out there, Red Hat.

Today, Red Hat announced two customer wins: The French Ministry of Education (an educational institution adopts Linux? Really?!) and the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry–because even Swedish penguins need to stay healthy.

Noe, for those of you keeping score at home, you’re out of luck, because I don’t keep track of every Red Hat and Novell customer out there. I am, however, interested in Linux migrations, of which we now have two more to add to the ol’ quiver.

The first, in France, involved the migration of 2,500 servers across 30 local education authorities to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. “Avoidance of vendor lock-in” was one of the main reasons given in the press release. “”In 2004, over 95%of the servers ran on Linux. Today we are close to 100%, since we withdrew the last AIX servers at the end of 2006,” said Michel Affre, the ministry’s IT systems manager.

In the land of Swedes Red Hat managed to get FASS.se, the main medicines portal run by the Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry, LIF, to migrate its servers from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Ian Murdock will not be too happy about that coup.

In a canned PR quote, Per Manuell, chief technology officer said the move was in part due to a desire to make operations run more smoothly. During evaluations, he said it was noted that RHEL was just that, and it was an “easy decision” to leave Solaris for RHEL.