Free Software Linux

You’ve seen the stats… 70-85% of all IT shops have Linux in use.  More and more of them are using Linux and open source for “mission critical workloads”…  Bill Snyder from InfoWorld posted a blog entry that highlights a report that indicates what he calls “the open source jobs boom”. Looking for a good job in IT? Sharpen your knowledge of open source development frameworks, languages, and programming. A just-published study of available IT jobs found that 5 percent to 15 percent of the positions now on the market call for open source software skills.

If virtualization is in your vocabulary these days, and who in IT doesn’t finish the day without saying it at least a dozen times… (at least that’s what it feels like) — you should understand including SUSE Linux Enterprise is not about “either/or” but rather “and”. What the heck am I talking about?? While Xen is included in our distribution, our solutions go way beyond the inclusion of a hypervisor. SUSE Linux Enterprise will actually work with whatever major virtualization technology you want to use, and we can probably even help you manage them all. We’ve posted several articles on the topic and discussed it many times, but I wanted to share a couple of additional examples with you…

   Customers, Partners Run Top Supercomputers on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for High Performance Computing Press Release World’s three most powerful supercomputers run SUSE Linux Enterprise from Novell WALTHAM, Mass.— 11 Jun 2008— Supercomputers around the world are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell®. According to TOP500, a project that tracks and detects trends in high-performance computing, SUSE Linux Enterprise is the Linux* of choice on the world’s largest HPC supercomputers today. Of the top 50 supercomputers worldwide, 40 percent are running on SUSE Linux Enterprise, including the top three – IBM* eServer Blue Gene at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, IBM eServer BlueGene/P (JUGENE) at the Juelich Research Center and SGI* Altix 8200 at the New Mexico Computing Applications Center.

Thanks to InfoWorld, I heard about this volunteer census being taken to identify open source software that is being used by individuals and enterprises alike.  They are aiming to count more than just Linux, but all open source software (Firefox, OpenOffice, etc.).  It’s an ambitious goal for sure…  Check it out at www.osscensus.org

Requested by popularity I have finally gotten around to updating this document here to add steps for the md5sum’s of the RPM’s and the gpg signing of the YaST repository in Appendix A. Please have a look at this document if you are running SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 and are using ZLM as your patch management solution. This document can help you greatly diminish the time it takes to setting up this environment and be well on your way to patching your SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 environment. The PDF version refered to in Appendix C will be uploaded in due time, so please look back if you prefer that version. Enjoy!

“VMware is expensive, but it can save a lot too.” I hear people say that, but I have to wonder if you could be saving more though… Let’s dive in a little deeper to see if indeed there’s more money to be saved by using a virtualization alternative - namely Xen on SLES.  Let me begin by saying:  I’m not a VMware pricing expert — so if any of you who read this can correct me, please do. However, today I happened across an article at Forbes.com which caught my attention and described the wonderful benefits of virtualization. The article was really mostly about VMware which is the most common virtualization technology in use today, but towards the end of the article they started talking about how pricey VMware is.