Free Software Linux

From the article: Three years ago come August, O’Reilly’s Nat Torkington, interviewing Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz, pressed the CEO on the issues of patents generally and DTrace patents specifically. Torkington’s question? “So if the Linux kernel were to implement DTrace, Sun wouldn’t employ the patents against them?” Schwartz’ answer? “Knock yourself out.” That was 2005. Fast forward to 2008. As one of the DTrace engineers has noted, Paul Fox is taking Schwartz up on that challenge.

In many organizations, the first round of virtualization choice has been made.  But as the technology progresses and improves with time (and what a difference 12 months makes), viable alternatives to that initial choice begin to become more apparent. Should you stay the course or make a change?  Hedge your bets and choose two? I won’t debate that here, but just know there are choices… VMware has the marketshare and name recognition…  Xen has the performance and power of freedom… Hyper-V is for the Microsoft faithful…  What’s your cup of virtualization-tea??

Where can I find…. As usually happens, I get an IM or email with a request for a piece of information and either I have that info in a bookmarked or easily referencable location, or it’s time to put on the derby and become Network Jones and the Lost Files of Wendy.  (If you get that reference, you’re as old as I am and love that cartoonist too…) All nostalgia aside, someone recently asked me a question that before a month ago I would have faked a network connection problem or a heart attack to avoid having to be involved in:  What Oracle products are certified and supported on SLES, all versions. A Brighter Day

From the “Not Linux or Open Source, but good to know” department comes this little screed on trying to meet with people for important meetings in multiple timezones, organizations and calendaring programs. —————————— Scenario:  Try to schedule users for a meeting who are in a) Provo b) Waltham c) Nurenberg d) France.  Mix includes 3 companies, 4 operating system choices and 3 calendaring programs/standards.  Wackiness ensues, as they say in the sitcom biz. Enter meeting organizers such as  When is Good, Doodle and TimeBridge.  The basic premise is that you go to the scheduling software site and create a meeting and paint or select your available times, and then the site sends you the meeting URL so you can have all the other people select from the times you propose.

Excellent video from Novell about the Notes 8 Client OCCS architecture and programs running on SLED 10. Link

Many of us who pay attention to the Linux community recognize that moving from a proprietary hardware and OS (such as Solaris on SPARC hardware) to an open source OS (such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) and commodity hardware can save a lot of IT budget.  But the question is… how much will it save and how long before I recoup my migration costs? Novell recently posted a Solaris-to-Linux TCO Calculator which calculates the total cost of ownership over a 3 or 5 year period.  It gives you nice charts like these and you can customize just about every parameter.  Using mostly default selections, I threw in some basic figures (1000 users, 10 Sun servers, running a database), and the calculator showed a savings of well over $5M in direct costs over 5 years!

From the article:

This article shows how you can use an iPod on a Linux desktop with the Rhythmbox audio player. It covers how you can upload MP3 files from your desktop to your iPod and delete files on the iPod. Normally, Apple’s iTunes software is needed to manage an iPod, but iTunes is not available for Linux. Fortunately, there are Linux alternatives such as Rhythmbox that can handle the task.

Read More.

Linux is a “unix-like” operating system while Mac OS X is based on BSD Unix, and as such they are basically cousins

There are a number of tools that ship with your Mac by default, and others that are included on the installation media that can be used to remotely administer SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Machines from your Mac.

From the article: The topic of a bootable external USB Linux hard drive (without dual-boot) is an area that is not well documented. A simple Google search shows many articles, blogs and forum posts written on this topic, all of them discuss setting up dual-boot strategies. While I did not specifically test a USB Thumb Drive and did not intend to address this device in this article, I see no reason why this would not work for Thumb Drives as well. This article was written with the goal of defining an alternative to the traditional dual boot concept and keeping each operating system isolated from each other. Read More.

Hey, they wrote the headline, not me.  From the article: It is time to get serious about this multi-core thing. For years, I have dreaded the day when the computing world hits the parallel wall. As I have said many times in the past, multi-core is parallel computing and parallel programming is hard, expensive, and in some cases non-portable. It adds another dimension of complexity to writing software. There is no quick fix and no solution on the horizon that addresses this issue. The computer industry is now facing a huge challenge — how to transition software to multi-core platforms. No amount of marketing or wishful thinking will help. Trust me on this one. I have been neck deep in parallel computing for 20 years. The parallel software issue is real and it is standing in front of us. Read More.

If you plain just struggle with VIM or you are looking to get better at it then tune into Zonker’s slide deck here He talks about tabbing, gvim,  Abbreviations, Mappings, Viewports, Marks, Jumps, Folding, VIM scripts,  easy mode :),  and hacking your .vimrc Become the VIM expert you always wanted to be. Enjoy!

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!

From the article: The Linux kernel is a restless beast, and must continally evolve and change. Especially in ways that mystify us poor end lusers. A recent wrinkle, as of kernel version 2.6.20, is changing the /dev names for ATA devices, so that all ATA and SCSI devices are named /dev/sd*. This is a result of using the shiny new libata subsystem. In the olden days PATA (also called IDE) hard drives and ATAPI devices (CD/DVD, tape drives) were /dev/hd*, and SCSI and SATA devices were /dev/sd*. Read More.

From the article: The Linux kernel is a restless beast, and must continally evolve and change. Especially in ways that mystify us poor end lusers. A recent wrinkle, as of kernel version 2.6.20, is changing the /dev names for ATA devices, so that all ATA and SCSI devices are named /dev/sd*. This is a result of using the shiny new libata subsystem. In the olden days PATA (also called IDE) hard drives and ATAPI devices (CD/DVD, tape drives) were /dev/hd*, and SCSI and SATA devices were /dev/sd*. Read More.

Seminar: Come Get Virtualized - Be The Hero. Move Up to Linux. (Stamford, CT)