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Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the user-driven Wikipedia project, is in the process of migrating its servers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wikimedia’s move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration of the organization’s 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.

Ubuntu has achieved an unprecedented level of success in the desktop Linux market, but the distribution has been slow to gain acceptance on servers. Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu could help increase the distribution’s visibility in the Linux server market and demonstrate its viability in large-scale deployments.

Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that is primarily funded by donations, the organization’s technical requirements are significant. Wikimedia CTO Brion Vibber published some statistics in the slides (PDF) from his presentation at the Wikimania conference which took place in July at the new Library of Alexandria.

Wikimedia’s entire collection of web sites—which includes Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others—serves up roughly 10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers.

In an interview with Computerworld, Vibber provided some insight into some of Wikimedia’s technical challenges and discussed the benefit of migrating the entire set of servers to a single distribution.

He says that the original Wikipedia site grew from 15 servers to 200 servers within the first 18 months. Replacing their previous mix of distributions with a consistent and uniform Ubuntu solution has simplified administration considerably for the organization. “We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing,” Vibber told Computerworld. “Everything is a million times easier.”

Canonical initially announced the availability of Ubuntu for servers in 2005 and has taken several major steps since then to boost its popularity, including a partnership with Sun and several certification initiatives for major enterprise software packages. At the Ubuntu Live conference last year, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said that the company will increasingly fund server improvements and also announced Landscape, a server management tool.

Despite these efforts to push Ubuntu in the server market, Canonical has had difficulty competing with Red Hat and Novell for enterprise server marketshare. Some changing trends could, however, soon give Ubuntu an advantage. Organizations are increasingly turning toward free, community-driven Linux distributions as in-house Linux expertise becomes more accessible. During a presentation at the LinuxWorld conference earlier this year, 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman said that Ubuntu and CentOS will both gain enterprise acceptance as a result of this trend.

Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu is a reflection of the distribution’s growing strength and popularity as a server solution, but it doesn’t appear that it will translate into revenue for Canonical because Wikimedia will be maintaining its systems largely without commercial support. Now that Ubuntu is gaining traction with large-scale free deployments, the next challenge for Canonical will be getting some mindshare with enterprise adopters who are willing to sign up for support contracts.

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Posted in Hardware, Internet, Linux | No Comments »

Google’s Picasa for Linux catches up to Windows

Google has brought to Linux the beta version of its new Picasa 3 software for image editing, cataloging, and uploading.

The new release catches the open-source operating system up with Windows, which got the Picasa 3 beta one month earlier. There’s still no word about a Mac OS X version, although Mike Horowitz, Google’s Picasa product manager, told me earlier that “Macs are important to us…We’re always looking for new ways of making sure our users are happy, so it’s something we’re looking at.”

The new version adds a retouching tool, automatic synchronization of photos on the PC with those stored at Google’s Picasa Web site, and a collage mode that lets people combine numerous snapshots into a poster-size collection, Google programmer Lei Zhang said in a blog post announcing the new version. The new version also is faster, he added.

However, it does lack the Windows version’s movie maker feature that can turn photos into a slideshow with a soundtrack that can then be uploaded to YouTube.

The software runs using Wine and an open-source software layer that translates a program’s Windows instructions into commands for Linux instead. Google has contributed about 850 patches to the Wine project so far this year, Google said. Better video support in Wine is still a work in progress, though, which is why the movie maker feature is disabled.

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Google’s Android not an iPhone

The only real thing that the iPhone and the Gphone have in common at the moment are five letters.

Google’s plans for the mobile phone market have caused quite the stir Monday, even though the company’s press conference Monday morning didn’t add much to what we already knew about Android, a collection of software that could be a catalyst for Linux on mobile phones over the next few years. Still, when any company the size of Google makes noise about steering its ship in a certain direction, people take notice.

One nice development is that we can stop calling the damn thing the Gphone, which stopped being cute awhile ago in the fine tradition of J-Lo, A-Rod, and K-Fed. But while both Apple and Google will be selling mobile phone software in late 2008, the companies seem determined to walk a fine line in their new dual relationship as trusted partner and wary competitor.

Android is a nice idea; take the promise of Linux as a mobile operating system and finally give it a backer with some legs. This could set Google up nicely for the future if mobile phones continue to turn into little computers, since companies like Symbian and Microsoft are far from entrenched in this market.

Apple is also eying that future. Much of what Google said about Android during its press conference–such as the desire for a better Internet experience on mobile phones–was uttered by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in January during the presentation of the iPhone. And it’s already sold 1.4 million iPhones in three months.

So this time next year, are we going to be talking about the looming showdown between Google and Apple in mobile computing, or the surprising resignation of Google’s Eric Schmidt from Apple’s board of directors?

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Posted in Apple, Google, Hardware, Ideas, Linux | 1 Comment »