Linux In Novell’s East Region

One of my running themes for presentations and customer visits is always the topic of Virtualization, ie: taking the resources of one system and running multiple instances of various operating systems in virtual machines on that system.  I am constantly looking for success stories and documentation that will help techies convince the bosses, bosses convince the board and for our team to keep up with advances on the topic in all areas, not just the customers we have here in the East Region.

I found a great IBM site that has the greatest concentration of System Z success stories I’ve seen so far, broken out into the industry areas and vertical markets.  If you can’t find the numbers you need to make a point on this site, contact us or leave a comment and we’ll be happy to help you evaluate and plan where you can use Virtualization on any platform.

Chalk up another positive review for SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10.  (Are you noticing a trend yet??  😉  This time, CRN pits 4 of the top Linux desktop contenders against each other in a Bake-off.  You can check out the SLED 10 review here or read the entire article from the beginning here.

Here were the final standings…

1. SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10
2. Xandros 4 Professional
3. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5.0
4. Linspire Five-O

We blogged a few weeks ago (here, here and here) that Dell was taking input from the community and that the number 1 request was support for Linux on their PCs.  Well it appears that we’re getting closer to some kind of annoucement or news from the Dell camp about what that might be exactly…

Check out this blog entry that Dell is going to expand Linux Factory Installed Options, and a more detailed Dell techie blog entry.

In the meantime, I’ll be keeping my virtual eyes peeled…

The Linux Foundation was created by combining the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG) in early 2007.  The Foundation employs Linus Torvalds (creator of the Linux kernel) and is supported by numerous organizations interested in open source adoption.  This article in InfoWorld tells who the new board members are, including Markus Rex of Novell.

You can also read this Tech World News article which describes each of the board members, or you can simply check out the posting on the Linux Foundation’s website.

If you weren’t at BrainShare, and you’re a fan of those infamous Mac commercials, you’ve got to check out the three Novell takes on those: http://www.novell.com/linux/meetlinux/

In order for your machines to PXE boot into the KIWI Build System you need to create a specially made initrd and Linux kernel. To create these files we will utilize Kiwi in similar fashion to the way we build Kiwi images.

Make sure that you have kiwi-desc-netboot-1.20-21.1.i586.rpm installed. This package can be downloaded from here:

http://software.opensuse.org/download/openSUSE:/Tools/SUSE_Linux_10.1/i586/

Enter:

kiwi -p /usr/share/kiwi/image/netboot-suse-SLE10

(‘-p’ tells kiwi to prepare a directory. By default all prepared directories will put in /tmp. Prepared directories will be named kiwi.<random> where <random> is some random string. This is the physical extend.)

Now we need to create a binary from the directory we just prepared. We will also use KIWI to do this. Enter:

kiwi -c /tmp/kiwi.<random> -d /tmp

(where kiwi.<random> is the name of the directory you just prepared. The -c option tells kiwi to create the logical extend. -d tells kiwi where to put the binary(s) you’re about to create.)

This will create 3 files in /tmp that look something like this:

initrd-netboot.i686.gz

initrd-netboot.i686.kernel.2.6-default

initrd-netboot.i686.md5

The one ending in .gz is your initrd. move it to /tftboot and rename it to initrd.

The one with kernel in the name is your kernel. Move it to /tftboot and rename it to linux.

Get pxelinux.0 from /usr/share/syslinux/pxelinux.0 on a running system and put it in /tftboot.

For a number of years Microsoft has been working hard to put Novell’s Groupwise and IBM’s Lotus Domino systems on the back burner, with a certain amount of success.  Now it seems that the main threat to Microsoft’s dominance might be Open Source-based email systems, ie: those that are completely open code and enhanceable by anyone.

Yankee Group has a report coming up in April, “2007 Global Server Hardware and Server OS Survey” which queries nearly 1,000 CXO and IT Manager types shows a coming storm for the Big M.  Over 23% of those surveyed indicated they are going to be migrating from MS Exchange to Open Source and Linux-based solutions.  This will be taking place over the next 12-18 months, and apparently the main reason is that Linux and Open Source packages are less expensive and easier to manage.

Some other interesting numbers stand out from this survey, such as 65% of those surveyed are currently MS Exchange customers, with the other third being fairly evenly split amongst Lotus Domino, Novell Groupwise with a number of smaller players bringing up the rear.  Only 19% of the current MS Exchange customers indicated they would be upgrading to the next version of Exchange within the first 12 months of Exchange 2007’s release.  Apparently it’s becoming clear that Linux and Open Source email solutions have grown up enough to cause those who find Exchange too expensive in cost, management and complexity to look elsewhere.

Anyone among our readership who is considering the switch?  If so, post a comment and start a conversation!

Here’s a short little article which is reporting that the Beryl and Compiz communities appear to be uniting to achieve the common goal of giving Linux added “bling”.

As a user of Compiz who’s given lots of demos of SLED 10, I have to say that people do love the “bling”.  You can check out some cool demos and videos of the “bling” in action here.

Several resources are available on this wiki page dedicated to tuning performance on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)… including a whitepaper which compares several Linux file systems.

In this article from ZDNet, Dell is reported to have plans to bring Dell virtualization-oriented servers to the market.  While details are pretty thin at this point, it appears that these servers will have two processor sockets and be able to work with the latest multi-core processors.

I applaud Dell for recognizing the need to help bring virtualization technologies to the market.  It’s definitely coming, and about to change the way that enterprises manage their data centers.  I really believe that – it’s just a matter of time.

Perhaps they already have the plans underway, but I think where virtualization will really begin to show it’s true colors is when we start to see BIG virtualization servers arrive.  What’s big?  When 8 and 16 socket servers are the norm and not the exception, each socket with a multi-core processor — THAT’S BIG!

Intel showed a technology preview of an 768-core processor recently… amazing!

Article about Syncing a Palm Device with Linux, as per a request at one of our Birds of a Feather Session.

This morning at Brainshare, Novell officially announced our support for thin client devices. The backend for creating these thin images is Kiwi.

Click here for more information about the announcment:

http://www.novell.com/products/thinclient/

This article very concisely lays out the differences between Free Software, which the Free Software Foundation espouses, and Open Source, which is defined by the Open Source Initiative, a more business-friendly distillation and set of criteria than the FSF GPL (GNU Public License).

I thought long and hard about posting on this topic, and here goes.  Robert Scoble, a former Microsoft employee who was given unprecedented freedom to comment on his employer’s inner workings has struck out at Microsoft with his criticisms ranging from philosophy, security and strategy.  He particularly criticized comments on Google recently made by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO.

Bob Scoble’s Scobleizer blog is one of the most-read technology blogs, his presence and communications with the media/public while at Microsoft is widely viewed as helping the software behemoth to be a better member of the online community.

Article Link

Here’s a nice little success story…  “The company wanted to realize the cost and reliability benefits of Linux, but it didn’t want to abandon certain Novell products that were working well.”  Solution – they migrated their Windows and NetWare servers to SUSE Linux Enterprise.

Download lots of logos and SUSE Linux Enterprise wallpaper from the bottom of this page…

http://www.novell.com/company/logo/index.html

A reviewer of VPC 2007 from Microsoft (Competitor to VMWare and Parallels on the Desktop side) recently said:  “Microsoft released its Virtual PC (VPC) 2007 virtualization software as freeware recently, and you definitely get what you pay for. “

You might remember that in previous versions it was possible to get Linux running as a guest OS in a virtual machine; not so in this version, or so it would appear.  Guess you shouldn’t complain, it’s free after all, so they only support the versions of Windows, that’s all Microsoft needs to support, right?  Hmm.

Article Link 

Suddenly there are many layers to copy protection and anti-piracy, not only does Microsoft have to try and stamp out piracy from people installing Windows versions on real hardware, now they have to try and make an OS be able to detect if it’s been virtualized.

Of course, all this is a moot point if you use Linux and particularly SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux 10, where a single subscription covers the physical machine, and allows as many virtualized instances of SLE 10 as you can fit on the box, for the same subscription and cost.

Morale of the story, rather than spend massive development cycles treating your customers like potential theives, spend that instead making the OS inexpensive, easy to register and easy to manage.

WOW! 😉 I’m starting to see some more momentum building in the Federal space… We posted a blog entry about this before where the FAA and DOT had banned Vista for the time being – together, they represent about 60,000 desktops which won’t be getting Vista any time soon. This article from ZDnet adds the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) to that list — another 2900 desktops banning Vista.

Who’s going to be next?

One very intriguing part of this article is the reference made to the agency memo citing the reasons why Vista is temporarily banned… compatibility and cost are among the reasons.

“There appears to be no compelling technical or business case for upgrading to these new Microsoft software products,” according to the memo. The department plans to issue an update next month to clarify its strategy for 2008 and beyond, the representative said.

We could not agree more. You have a choice in the marketplace. Feel free to exercise it! I think you know where I’m going with this… 🙂 (if not, click here)

Due to the Novell/Microsft agreement OpenOffice.org is becoming even more compatible with Microsoft Office. Novell has released an opensource plugin to OpenOffice.org to convert from ODF to Microsoft’s OpenXML. Microsoft has released an opensource add-in to Microsoft Word (XP, 2003, & 2007) to allow opening and saving OpenDocument format (ODF) files. Translators for Excel and PowerPoint will be coming soon.

Many customers are realizing significant cost savings by upgrading to OpenOffice.org running on Windows or Linux. A subscription to SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop entitles customers to OpenOffice.org on Windows. Running OpenOffice.org on Windows is a great way to transition to a Linux desktop.

OpenOffice OpenXML Translator

OpenOffice 2.0.4, Novell Edition (for Windows)

OpenXML Translator (ODF Add-in for Word)