Linux In Novell’s East Region

Paul Murphy posted a ZDnet blog entry entitled “Leveraging Linux to sell yourself” which describes his plan and ideas around using Linux to help climb the corporate ladder from low-level tech to a higher level engineering job.  It was an interesting read, although I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says. I did note that he suggested using Linux as the differentiator for you to get noticed at work.  He could have said Vista or some other hot technology in our world, but he specifically called out Linux… and Linux on the desktop at that.  Why do you think that was?

Linux is clearly one of the hot topics in the IT industry these days, and is being adopted by organizations of every size and varying levels of experience. So while it may be challenging to change your Windows environment to an all-Linux environment over-night, introducing Linux “gently” certainly couldn’t hurt. When getting started, you don’t need to focus on replacing established servers with Linux, start with “new workloads” instead. If needed, get some training/self-study, and consider these low-risk ways to give Linux a try:

• Set up a departmental file server with Samba, maybe just for the IT group
• Set up a small LAMP server for a company intranet (don’t forget AppArmor)
• Set up a utility server using Linux (e.g., backup, monitoring tool, gateway, etc.)
• Set up a new (incoming) application on Linux
• Give Linux on the desktop a try
• (Any other ideas?  Post a comment below.)

I often check in on the ExpressComputerOnline site, one of the sites that covers India’s business and IT community, where I found Kushal Shah’s well done interview with Maarten Koster, Novell’s President of Asia Pacific.

Excerpts from the interview:

Where is Novell positioned in the market?

“… We are playing in the business segment, be it medium or large. As part of our go-to-market strategy, we have tied up with one of the major universities in China wherein we load Linux on all laptops.”

Can you tell us about the trends that are shaping the Linux market?

“Linux started off in the middle segment of the market whereas we started at the top end and have already captured about 90 percent of the IBM mainframe segment which runs SUSE Linux. Our competitors were focused on the middle end. As the distribution network is expanding we are moving to the middle layer and the data centre space and our competitors are going towards the top end.”

Is Server Consolidation and Virtualization picking up?

“… All the CIOs I have spoken to have virtualisation on their radar screens. These two things, security and virtualisation, are on the radars of all the companies.”

Read more of the interview here.

RossB

I recently completed presenting a round of “Southeast” Linux Day seminars in Atlanta GA, Nashville TN and Orlando FL. We had a simply fantastic turnout for Nashville and Orlando – hundreds of folks registered to attend and rooms were filled in both cities. We had a good showing in Atlanta too, although the room was way too big… In light of the typical summer vacation season, our expectations were far exceeded overall. In all three cities we had tons of engaging questions, and I really enjoyed meeting many of you face-to-face. It’s clear that interest in Linux, and in particular SUSE Linux Enterprise is not just alive and kicking, but very strong!

So, thank you to all cities for giving us a warm reception, and thank you to the attendees for your participation and involvement! Also, a big thanks to our partner Mainline Information Systems who helped sponsor the Orlando and Atlanta events!

Based on the success we’ve been having, we’ll definitely be back soon! Stay tuned for more upcoming events (or just sign up for our newsletter). And look out Charlotte NC, we’re coming next week (7/31)!

As I mentioned at each event, if you want a copy of the slides – shoot me an email, visit our post-event website or simply keep an eye out for the post-event email message.

It’s certainly one of the hot topics of discussion in OSS circles… should video drivers be open source or proprietary? Ideally two of top three major video chipset manufacturers (namely ATI and Nvidia) could be convinced that they should fully open source their video drivers for the benefit of all. ATI info is here and here.  Nvidia info is here.  Intel already releases open source drivers for at least some of their chipsets, if not all. The general reply to those requests has always been that they won’t because it would expose their secret sauce to their competitors and they would lose their performance edge. I don’t know enough about the techie details to comment on the validity of those claims, but one thing is certain – end users don’t really care. Typical end users just want their video cards to work. That’s why you’ll find SLED 10 offering support for both proprietary and open source drivers out of the box.

Will the proprietary and open source drivers offer the same features and performance? In a word – No. An interesting review (a bit dated now, but still interesting) from Phoronix directly compared the open source driver to the proprietary driver for an ATI video card. Check out the results here to see what they found out.

Clearly, pressure is mounting as Dell and Google have been ramping up the requests/pressure on ATI to get more open drivers for these chipsets. Hey, the more the merrier! This will be an interesting space to watch as things develop…

From the press release:

SUNNYVALE, Calif., July 23 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — SGI and NASA today announced that the agency has selected a record-setting SGI(R) Altix(R) supercomputer in its evaluation of next-generation technology to meet future high-performance computing (HPC) requirements. The system was acquired as part of NAS Technology Refresh (NTR), a four-phase procurement process that eventually will replace the Columbia supercomputer system, powered by SGI Altix.

NASA’s new SGI Altix system is expected to be installed in August at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. The new system will be the first supercomputer to operate 2,048 processor cores and 4TB of memory under a single copy of Linux(R) — creating the largest Linux single system image (SSI) in the world. A larger SSI can accelerate scientific research by making all of the system’s processors and memory available to solve a single problem, or several problems at once.

Driven by 1,024 Dual-Core Intel(R) Itanium(R) 2 processors, the new system will generate 13.1 TFLOPs of compute power. The system’s dual-core processors allow more computing power per square foot, enabling NASA to pack more computing power into its supercomputing center. NASA also acquired an ultra-dense 240TB SGI(R) InfiniteStorage 10000 system to efficiently handle the massive data storage requirements.

Read more. 

Now that’s a lot of processors in one spot, guess they’ll be putting in a couple of new Carrier AC units to keep that one cool!

RossB

Wow, sometimes you think you’re really tied into a product and who’s using it and where, but even I was surprised at the amount of people and institutions deploying, using and enhancing OpenOffice.org. The vast majority are kind enough to take the time to document their experiences so others can take advantage of those findings.

I can’t tell you how many discussions, presentations and other encounters I have had lately where people have been so kind as to share their objections and misgivings about OpenOffice vs Microsoft Office, and partly I wanted to make this roundup into a set of references that could easily and quickly be investigated by those who are OO-curious and want to go and see who is doing what and how with this great office suite.

Blogs and Articles

A very interesting blog posting recently by one Nate Grondin on the subject of OO in Schools started off this research project, and as I write this, there are over 50 Firefox tabs with relevant info waiting to be included somehow, this is an incredibly rich area of progress on the Open Source front.

Another interesting site and resource is the OpenOffice Training, Tips and Ideas blog, with a lot of good articles, links to free and commercial training and books etc, subscribe to the RSS feed and keep an eye on this one.

Projects and Coordination Sites

The Education Project, hosted on the OpenOffice.org site is a great starting place for those who want to help educators and students, either in classes or individually to help develop OO.o. The goal of the project is: “to help teachers as well as students or anybody involved in education to enter the OpenOffice.org project and find a place where to contribute or to find informations.” With it’s tools and development categories, it’s user and development lists and other documentation, this is a great resource for the Education community.

The openSUSE.org site has a great education page, run by our friend James Tremblay from Newmarket NH. The goals of the project are to:

• Catalog and collect all educational software built or converted to run on Linux
• Separate all cataloged software into server and desktop categories
• subdivide all collected software into it’s curricula discipline and age groups
• build the “Edu-cd” (which is an add-on CD/DVD specifically for education tools/programs)

Additionally, on this page you can find links to the Education News, how to make an account and get involved, the IRC channel info, links to the Education Application Index including the currently collected lists of Desktop and Server Education Programs, HowTo’s and a Wishlist. This is an excellent project to get involved in, it’s very easy to contribute and you’ll get a lot out of it.

Another resource on the OpenOffice.org website is the Major OpenOffice.org Deployments Wiki, where a complete world-wide overview of deployments of OpenOffice.org are listed by categories including Governments, Schools and Universities, Private Sector and other areas. There are 14+ major deployments listed in North America in the Schools and Education category, there must be more, get your deployment listed and join in.

Other major resources you’ll find as part of the OpenOffice.org site are the OpenOffice Marketing Project, the Why OpenOffice Wiki and the very comprehensive Case for Switching (to OpenOffice.org) Wiki pages.

The most authoritative location for documentation of OO.o is the official OpenOffice Documentation Project site. With it’s plethora of information, links and resources, and broken up into Users and Developers sections, this is the main location for OO.o documentation and it’s creation. If you want to contribute to the project, go here and get started.

The OSDI project is one that wants to distribute OO.o CD’s to people in dis-advantaged environments, they’re raising money and almost have the amount they need to do the first big push, give ‘em a few bucks and help get OO.o into people’s hands and their computers and free ‘em from the Microsoft Tax.

Focusing on the K-12 market is a great site called K12OS whose goal is to provide news, links, resources and discussion about the use of Open Source in the K-12 market. With it’s discussion forums, listserv’s and loads of links, this should be on every educator’s daily rotation.

Training and Tutorials

Linked off the official OpenOffice Documentation Project siteand the OpenOffice.org Wiki, but not obvious, is an incredible resource called the OOo Help Outline, with it’s long list of FAQ’s, HowTo’s and per-application help documentation it’s a must for everyone.

Then visit the somewhat simplistic but very useful Tutorials for OpenOffice howto site. Check out the various categories, organized by the application in OO.o, and contribute if you feel so moved.

Next up, is the ByteBot site with it’s OpenOffice.org training materials. You can download the materials and use them, just please do ask them if you use the materials commercially. They also have a rudimentary Linux training course you can get the same way. ByteBot also has an archive of the mysteriously missing OpenOffice Unofficial FAQ, which should be located at OOAuthors, but seems to not be linked properly.

A very nicely done site and great resource is the iTrainOnline site, it offers Open Source documentation and courseware, including OO.o Write and Impress mini-courses.

Statistics, Other Roundups and Misc.

The OpenOffice.org Market Share Analysis site is excellent for those who want to see how OO.o is making inroads in their market, or to show others that a grassroots change is happening, or just to keep an eye on the numbers and see what is happening in each area for OO.o deployments.

Last, and surely winning an award for the most links in a single HTML page is the Why Open Source in Schools article. I have yet to fully investigate the articles, lists and other resources listed there, but I’ll add the most useful ones to the Education page for our blog.

Hopefully this roundup is helpful for everyone, we’re very serious about helping Open Source get implemented in the Education environment. If you have resources or think we missed something, or might have a cool project you want to get some free publicity for (subject to review and approval) leave a comment or email me.

RossB

On the lighter side of Virtualization (some would say PLEASE!) is a fun article from the RoudyBob blog, wherein the author likens the board game of RISK to the worldwide Virtualization Market.

A very entertaining and spot-on posting from a blog that I will be adding to my must-read list.

Enjoy,

RossB

I just finished reading Jim Klein’s thought-provoking piece “Is XEN Ready for the Data Center? Is That the Right Question?” on the Server Virtualization Blog, and in my opinion, he’s got it right in several areas, such as:

• People focus too much on the GUI interfaces, data center tools and virtualization in particular aren’t desktop macros or spreadsheet chart wizards, you can expect to use a command line interface now and then and often a well-written and implemented script can be the most useful item in your system management quiver

• Virtualization-awareness is a growing trend, where the actual OS knows it’s being virtualized and compensates for that fact, by being more flexible in requesting resources, how it accesses memory and hardware and in how it performs under load

• Why XEN seems to be winning the marathon, but not every footrace. Typically, when talking about VMWare or other legacy or historical virtualization schemes, people discuss how “refined” or “mature” they are, which is probably what was said about the dinosaurs, and has certainly been said about many things that are currently established. I mean, buggy whip manufacturers responded poorly to the advent of cars, if they had blogs back then there would have been all sorts of opining about how cars are an “unproven technology” and “unfit for the roadways” etc.

• Should you begin to use virtualization? What version or type should you use? I recommend reading everything you can on the topic, and engage with one of us about it, there are a lot of reasons to use any of the available methods, it’s best to do some discovery before just plunking down and hacking away at it

I recommend reading Jim’s article, and make your way through both the Server Virtualization Blog and our own Virtualization and DataCenter categories. Time well spent.

Enjoy,

RossB

Are you using Faronics Deep Freeze product to prevent users from adding to your IT helpdesk calls?  The product “freezes” the OS such that any changes (good or bad) being made to that computer (from say curious users or viruses) can easily be wiped out, and a clean OS state can be easily restored.  Used in places such as classrooms, labs, kiosks, or any other location with “at risk” devices.  Learn more about Deep Freeze here and here.

Formerly only available on Windows, the company announced that its Deep Freeze Linux product is now available.  It is currently only supported on SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop.  Read the press release here (pdf).

You certainly are aware that Novell participates in the open source Linux distro, SUSE Linux – but did you know that there are MANY other contributions to the open source community that Novell makes??  While even this CNet blog entry doesn’t cover all of them, it does hit on several of the points that frequently get over-looked. Well worth reading!
Thanks and kudos to Matt Asay for providing the outlet, and kudos to Justin Steinman for putting together the overview.

The manager of the Open Addict forums (a very popular site for Open Source and Free Software advocates and users) has implemented a block on all Internet Explorer users for compliance and maintenance reasons.

In his words:

“Well, believe it or not, most people coming to our site are using Windows and IE. This could hurt out traffic potentially, but I’m just fed up with IE rendering issues. So if you’re an IE user, I hope you’re not offended by any of this – it’s nothing against you as a user. Just please install and use Firefox or Opera if you use Windows. Better yet, use Linux and all of your dreams will come true.”

Wow, the shoe is definitely on the other foot now, maybe this will inspire other sites to “Just Say NO” to IE in all it’s forms. Get FireFox now, and join the revolution.

In a surprise move, and one that is probably timed for the beginning of back-to-school shopping, Walmart is about to begin selling a sub-$300 PC with a Via Processor, 1G of RAM, 80GB Hard Drive and a DVD Burner.  Oh, and OpenOffice.org 2.2 instead of something in a lovely shade of Microsoft Office.

This system doesn’t show on their site yet, it’s the Everex Impact GC3502 from the Everex Computer company, running Windows Vista Home and containing a surprising lack of trialware, according to Ars Technica contributor Eric Bangeman’s article.

Some would argue to that to be complete trialware/spyware and buggy-software free it should ship with a certain Gecko’s favorite version of Desktop Linux, and NOT Windows, but that’s another story and another time.  One bunch of proprietary spaghetti code at a time…

RossB

Novell recently held an internal event in which developers were encouraged to work on projects of interest and passion, rather than the ones they are normally working on. This great article from ARS Technica interviewed some of the developers involved and gives a glimpse of some of the projects they have been working on. Be sure to hit the subtle “Next Page” link at the bottom of that website’s page so you can see the details on some of the cool projects.

Of the ones listed in the article, my favorite has to be Joe Shaw’s web interface for Banshee music player. Think of it as a “sling box for Banshee”. Very cool! You can even check out his live demo site – (but please be nice to his test server).

Another very interesting project actually was awarded the best-overall-project honors…

Stephan Kulow and Richard Guenther, who extended the SUSE Build Service platform so that it can automatically recompile Debian source packages and turn them into RPMs with dependencies properly mapped to other SUSE packages.

You can check out the dozens of other projects that were being experimented with during the week at the openSUSE Idea Pool

(Updated 8/30/07) Nice related audio podcast discussion and review of their favorites from Erin and friends at Novell Open Audio

Check out this cool little PC with an embedded Linux OS, all the basic functionality that a home user might need — especially if they’re just into web browsing and email.  No moving parts means it should be pretty durable, and it’s small enough for a frog to sit on.  They even market the device as being “Green” based on its ability to reduce power consumption.

It’ll be nice to see how this fares with home users… Check out their website for details and even a video demo of their OS.  Zonbu PC

 The public beta for the Novell Client for Linux version 2.0 is available for download at:

http://www.novell.com/beta/auth/beta.jsp?id=2208&type=1

This version of the Client supports x86, AMD64 and Intel EM64T CPUs in 64–bit mode (x86-64) on SLED 10 SP1.

The Novell® Client™ for Linux* 2.0 workstation software extends the capabilities of Linux desktops by providing access to NetWare® and Open Enterprise Server (OES). When it is installed on workstations, the Client enables users to enjoy the full range of Novell services such as authentication via Novell’s eDirectory™, network browsing and service resolution, and secure and reliable file system access. The Client supports Novell’s traditional NCP™ protocol.

Version 2.0 of the client also offers integrated one click single sign-on so that you don’t have to do any scripting.

The final version will ship with OES 2.

From SearchEnterpriseLinux.com, here’s a nice collection of three stories — a city government, a school, and a corporation — each has made the transition from MS Office to OpenOffice.org, and they have some interesting thoughts and advice around what they might have done differently.

One of the stories even comments that while they got some initial advice from Novell, they opted not to follow the voice of experience (Novell has done this migration several times mind you, including our own internal migration from MS Office to OpenOffice.org).  “[the interviewee] wishes more of their advice had been followed early on, however.” 

I guess you can add that one to the “Oops file”.

Verizon has recently released their VZAccess utility for Linux.  VZAccess is the client side utility that manages connections for wireless broadband cards.

Since SLED 10 SP1 we have had support for cards like the Merlin v620 card, thanks to Greg KH, but now Verizon has gone one step further and given us nice easy to use graphical interface that allows you to connect to the network, activate new cards and shows you your signal strength.

Kudos to Verizon for listening to their customers!

The combination of Unisys’s ES7000 16-way, 64-bit Servers and Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Server make a formidable platform for enterprise-class tasks, providing unparalleled throughput, expandability and handling of massive CPU-intensive loads.

Such a task is the providing of near-realtime or realtime data for the purpose of apprehending criminals at the borders or entry points to countries, essentially the ability to have someone’s fingerprints, passport or face be recognized in real-time is the key to apprehension.

Gary Simpson, Chief Operating Officer of Intelitrac, explained it this way,

“Real-time response means the difference between catching a criminal at the point of access and knowing he was there after he’s gone.”

Intelitrac is the premier provider of large in-memory databases (very quick, very large, special hardware and software needs) did the research and picked Unisys’s ES7000 line and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to host their biometric security solution. Initially deployed for real-time security at a very large South American Airport, the system has the following characteristics:

• Stability: Intel® Itanium® 2 processor-based ES7000 and Linux platform enables real-time backups at the rate of one terabyte per hour.
• Speed: Complex biometric searches are performed in less than 1.5 seconds, significantly faster than initial estimates.
• Growth: Scalable and flexible high-performance platform can adapt to new market requirements.

Critical in determining the flexibility and expandability of the systems were the benchmarks conducted early on in the evaluation. Tests that included database information retrieval and memory response time dramatically surpassed expectations, driving the response time for recognition down to around 1.5 seconds, a nearly 250X performance increase compared to previous platforms.

Other key items that drove the buying decision were:

• Reliability and failover
• Support for Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise
• Total cost of ownership (TCO)
• The ability to grow the solution

You can read more about Unisys’s product lines on their site, and get additional details (including a video synopsis) in this case study.

Enjoy,

RossB

Got an hour? If you’re interested in getting a good overview of virtualization and the SUSE Linux Enterprise offering, you might want to check out a webcast we hosted for a select group of customers on July 10.

(Correction in webcast: List of officially supported virtualized OS’s can be found here)

Click here to see the recording.

Also, during the session several questions were entered into the chat window. Here are the answers to those questions…

say that again please… about the subscription fees, please…
ANSWER: If you have a subscription for the SLES virtualization host server already, you don’t need to purchase additional subscriptions for the virtual SLES servers on that box. For example, if you want to run 5 virtual SLES servers on that physical box, you will only need 1 SLES subscription for that situation. Saves you $$!!

how about per socket or per core costs?
ANSWER: SLES subscriptions do not count processor cores. We do count sockets. Up to 32 sockets are included in the normal SLES subscription.

OES 1 isn’t supported?
ANSWER: OES v1 is not supported on Xen in SLES 10. However, OES v2 will be supported.

can you do concurrent para and full servers? i.e. one suse and one windows at the same time?
ANSWER: Yes. As long as your server supports the Intel VT or AMD Virtualization instruction sets, you can run both paravirtualization and full virtualization on the same physical server. For example, you can run a SLES server paravirtualized on the same box as a Windows fully virtualized server.

list price of virtual machine driver pack?
ANSWER: Retail pricing can be found on the website here. Contact your reseller or Novell rep for a specific price quote for you.

Can VM be run on a HA Cluster?
ANSWER: Yes, virtual machines can be run on a high availability cluster. In fact, they can be nodes in a cluster as well.

Is there USB hardware support for the guest?
ANSWER: No USB support at this time. It is on the list of feature requests however.

Is Orchestrator part of SES 10 or XEN?
ANSWER: ZENworks Orchestrator is a completely separate product from SLES and Xen. More info about Orchestrator can be found here.

Is the PCI Frontend and Backend now compiled in XEN kernel?
ANSWER: Researching… stay tuned.

Do you back up all virtual machines from single backup device?
ANSWER: You can use your “normal” backup process to back up individual virtual machines.

A technical white paper is now available from Novell that explains some of the details of what’s supported (officially) in terms of virtualization technology related to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1.