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.

Original URL: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081009-wikipedia-adopts-ubuntu-for-its-server-infrastructure.html

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.

Original URL: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13580_3-10057452-39.html

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?

Today’s discussion was about Android the concept. We won’t really know what Google has developed as far as Android the product until at least next week, when the company releases a software developer’s kit.

Much of the iPhone’s initial success can be traced to the user interface and we have no idea what Google has cooked up in that sense, although Andy Rubin (the brains behind the project) said it would be cool. “We hope Android will be the foundation for many new phones and will create an entirely new mobile experience for users, with new applications and new capabilities we can’t imagine today,” he wrote on the Official Google Blog Monday morning. Fair enough, for now.

Apple is extremely unlikely to directly compete with Google in one sense: OS X is probably not going to be sold on a licensing basis anytime soon. In that sense, Google is really butting heads with Symbian and Microsoft, fighting for design wins at companies beyond Motorola and HTC, who pledged support for Android on Monday. Apple will continue to compete against hardware makers like Nokia, Motorola, and Research in Motion, although software is certainly a selling point for the iPhone.

It also sounds like Google and its partners are focused more on mainstream phones than the high end of the smartphone market where the iPhone plays. Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said his company hopes to develop chipsets for Android phones that bring the cost below $200, although that might take some time. And Rubin said Android can run on 200MHz processors based on the ARM9 core, which ARM’s Rob Coombs, director of mobile solutions said was very much a mainstream processor by today’s standards. The iPhone uses a 620MHz ARM chip made Samsung that’s based on the current leading-edge ARM11 core.

But I can’t ignore the obvious: If you’re shopping for a smartphone late next year, and you search pages for information on what you should buy, you’ll probably see Android phones from HTC or Motorola compared to phones running Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm (maybe), and, of course, the iPhone.

In a way, Android could be good for Apple. One of Intel’s public relations representatives, besieged with requests to comment on AMD’s advantage over Intel’s lackluster server processors in 2004 and 2005, used to always declare that “competition is good for the soul.” Right now, the smartphone industry is trying to come up with an answer to the iPhone, and we’ll all benefit if the bar is continually raised by Apple, Google, Symbian, or any other number of companies.

Also, the more people that embrace the notion of smartphones and sophisticated mobile computers, the better life will be for companies in that industry. A rising tide does lift all boats to a certain extent, and Apple could attempt to position itself as the thought leader in mobile computing and let other companies have the less-profitable segments of the market.

The interesting thing here, however, is that no one from Microsoft, Symbian, Palm, Nokia, Motorola, or Verizon sits on Apple’s board of directors. Google’s Schmidt does. As director, Schmidt is privy to Apple’s future strategic priorities, if not actual details of its product plans. Might Apple now wonder if that’s a good idea?

Apple declined to comment on the notion, other than to note that Google remains an important partner to the company. During the conference call, Schmidt sort of addressed the question of competition with Apple, noting for the record that he’s “a very happy iPhone user, but it’s also important to state that there are going to be very different mobile device experiences.”

It’s not like this is the first time in history that companies have been both partners and competitors; just look back to when IBM was making chips for Apple, but selling Windows PCs. And it’s very common in the software industry, where companies like Oracle and SAP compete fiercely but also have to make sure that their products can work together.

But Larry Ellison isn’t attending board meetings in Germany. There will be many compelling stories that come out of Android and the iPhone during the next year, and the makeup of Apple’s board of directors could be one.

Original URL: http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9811421-37.html

The Everex TC2502 Green gPC is one of the first Linux-based desktop machines to be offered for sale by a major retailer. As such, it could become a barometer of open source software’s potential for success in the consumer market.

The gPC comes preloaded with the gOS operating system — a Linux variant — and a 1.5-GHz processor manufactured by Intel clone maker Via Technologies. The rest of the specs include an 80-Gbyte hard drive and 512 Mbytes of DDR 2 memory.

There’s no monitor included, but buyers get stereo speakers and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

As for software, the gPC comes with the free OpenOffice.org 2.2 productivity suite. The suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, recently won backing from IBM.

Everex is a Taiwanese-based PC maker that’s looking to carve a niche for itself in the computer industry’s economy section. A version of Everex’s gPC that runs the basic edition of Microsoft’s Windows Vista is on sale at Wal-Mart for $298.

The retailer is making the gPC available at selected stores and through its Web site.

The price difference between the Linux and Windows version of the computer reflects what some in the tech industry derisively call “the Microsoft tax” — a Windows licensing fee that PC makers must pay to the Redmond, Wash., software maker for each computer sold.

It’s unlikely that Linux-based PCs will displace Windows-powered computers anytime soon. For one thing, there’s only a limited number of applications that will run on Linux.

Linux advocates argue, however, that until they become more mainstream, open source systems could fill some important niches — such as the market for cheap PCs aimed at students in low-income areas.

Original URL: http://www.informationweek.com/hardware/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=202801241

Yes, I know I’ve said before that in my purview Linux doesn’t need mainstream success to be “succesful”, but this is one of those canards that gets waved under my nose often enough that it needs to be addressed at least once.

Why Photoshop? For one, apart from Microsoft Office, it’s one of the most broadly used programs in the whole of the computer world, both Mac and PC. Everyone either wants Photoshop or “a program like Photoshop.” And in many cases, they don’t have the luxury of choosing: they’re in a graphic-arts or design job where Photoshop is mandatory, not optional. By far the most overriding reason is support for CMYK colorspaces (you can’t do proper graphics work for print without CMYK support). Lack of proper CMYK support is one of the biggest reasons why GIMP, the open-source Photoshop-like app for Linux, hasn’t been able to displace Photoshop in a professional context.

And why no Linux-specific version of Photoshop? First, and most likely, Adobe probably believes there just isn’t a market for Photoshop on Linux — yet — especially since the perceived size of that market isn’t even a fraction of its total sales, whether for Mac or Windows.

There’s also the question of commercial application support on Linux, a topic which deserves its own post but which can be summed up this way: Closed-source apps generally only get supported on a couple of distributions at a time — Red Hat and SuSE are two of the biggest, although Ubuntu is turning up more and more — since the effort involved for more than a couple of distros is more than many software companies want to take on.

(This is where I agree at least in part with Alex Wolfe about there being too many distros — too many for the software makers, but that still means a plurality of choices for the users.)

What’s ironic is that a while back, Adobe had an IRIX version of Photoshop available for a number of Silicon Graphics computers. I played with an SGI O2 workstation that had it running, and it operated exactly like its Windows counterpart. Surely it wouldn’t be difficult to take the work done for the IRIX version and apply that to a Linux edition? Probably not — programming for IRIX, Linux, and the Mac OS are almost certainly as unalike as it gets in many ways.

Finally, there’s the problem of third-party add-ons. Photoshop has a giant library of plug-ins, and many Photoshop users are married to their plug-in collections. Said plug-ins would not work on Linux, unless a) they were rewritten from the ground up (not terribly likely) or b) the Linux edition of PS had, say, some kind of back-end into Wine that allowed the plug-in to run correctly. There’s always the possibility of running the Windows edition of Photoshop in an emulated Windows session or in Wine, but that sort of defeats the point.

So if Adobe ever bothers to offer Photoshop for Linux, I suspect it’s going to be for very specific breeds of Linux, and not Linux generically. I’m dead certain Adobe is not about to make Photoshop into an open-source product; they’re going to be as stalwart about this as Microsoft is about Office. But again, it’s a question of how much Adobe feels it’s likely to get back for that effort — which, at this point, is probably not a lot at all.

Original URL: http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/10/photoshop_for_l.html

This is the first case filed in the United States against a company for allegedly not complying with the terms of the General Public License (GPL) version 2, according to the SFLC, which provides legal representation for free software projects. The GPL is used by Linux and countless other free and open-source software programs.

The suit was filed on behalf of the creators of BusyBox, a set of Unix utilities used in embedded systems and licensed under the GPL version 2 (see complaint).

Under the terms of the GPL version 2, people can use GPL software within their own products. But when they redistribute that software, they must make the source code available.

A request to see the source code used by Monsoon Multimedia came up in a discussion forum, but a request sent by the SFLC to the firm was not answered, according to an SFLC representative.

Representatives from Monsoon Multimedia, which makes digital consumer devices for viewing video on the PC or TV, did not comment on the suit on Thursday.

The plaintiffs in the case are Erik Andersen and Rob Landley, who hold the copyright to the BusyBox software. They are seeking damages and an injunction.

The Free Software Foundation has made many efforts over the years to enforce the license, but typically has taken a much lower-key approach. A programmer in Germany, Harald Welte, has been more aggressive, though, in a case that was settled.

Linux is widely used inside consumer electronics devices, such as the digital video recorder TiVo and those that Monsoon Multimedia makes.

Original URL: http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9782211-7.html

The new WindowsServer/Compare Web site provides information about how Windows Server stacks up in total cost of ownership, reliability, security, manageability and interoperability with Linux, Unix and IBM Corp.’s mainframe architecture.

Microsoft has posted customer information, feedback from industry experts, white papers and resources about the capabilities of Windows Server on the site. It also offers information for developers building applications on Windows Server.

Microsoft said the new site is an evolution of its Get the Facts campaign, launched in mid-2003 and seen by many as a direct slam against Linux and open source.

The campaign compared Windows Server favorably against Linux and other technologies in terms of some of the same factors handled on the Compare site. Get the Facts was panned by Linux proponents. Their ire in part may have been due to the outspoken swagger of then Microsoft rising star Martin Taylor who led the campaign. After 13 years at Microsoft, Taylor abruptly left the company in June 2006 and no explanation was given for his departure.

Since Taylor’s departure, Microsoft has appeared on one hand to be more friendly toward Linux and open source while on the other continuing to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt about those technologies, according to the open-source camp. Linux proponents gained fuel for their side when Microsoft executives earlier this year made bold claims that Linux and other open-source software violate more than 230 of Microsoft’s patents.

At the same time, Microsoft has put former IBM Linux executive Bill Hilf front and center stage as its open-source advocate. The vendor also recently launched a new open-source Web page that explains how the company views its relationship with the open-source community.

Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20070825/tc_pcworld/136404

The company said such criticisms were wide off the mark, since the affected servers were running old, unpatched versions of Ubuntu as well as a number of insecure web applications.

The compromises affected five of the eight Local Community (LoCo) hosting servers, which are sponsored by Canonical for the use of local-area Ubuntu developer communities but hosted outside the company.

Canonical was at pains to point out that the servers did not host downloadable software, but mainly news pages, blogs and localized documentation.

The problem came down to the fact that responsibility for the security of the machines didn’t clearly belong to either Canonical or the communities using the servers. The systems were all located outside Canonical’s own data center.

The problem first came to light on Monday evening, when Canonical received reports that one of the LoCo servers had been compromised, and an investigation found four more of the servers had been hacked.

“Since it was reported that they were actively attacking other machines… the decision was taken to shut the machines down,” said James Troup, head of Canonical’s system administration team, in a report on the breaches which was published on Ubuntu newslists.

The systems could have been breached in several ways, Troup said, since they were being accessed using FTP without SSL and were running more than a dozen web software packages, all of which were out-of-date and missing security patches.

What’s more, the systems were running a version of Ubuntu Linux that is no longer receiving security updates from Canonical, meaning there was no way of fixing more recent security issues.

That’s because more recent versions of the operating system failed to work with the servers’ network hardware, Troup said.

“This probably allowed the attacker to gain root,” Troup said.

The communities affected will have the choice — of moving their servers into the Canonical data center, where they’ll be kept up-to-date but will have stricter limits on how they’re used, or sticking with outsourced servers but taking on the full responsibility for administration.

Original URL: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,136084-pg,1/article.html

The Foundation created the forecast site by teaming up with Jonathan Corbet, a Linux kernel developer and writer, who’s also executive editor of the LWN.net Linux and free software news site.

The forecast, which will be officially announced on Wednesday, is already live and tracks work in the Linux developer community likely to be included in the operating system’s kernel and in major distributions of the open-source software, or both.

The Linux Foundation was formed earlier this year through the merger of the two leading evangelizers of the operating system, the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group consortiums. The organization has two main tasks, according to Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, to build on Linux’s existing strengths and to buttress its weaknesses. “Now that everyone gets that open source works and it’s a mainstream technology, how do we up our game?,” he said.

As Linux looks to compete more and more on equal terms with proprietary operating systems like Microsoft Corp.’s Windows, the open-source software has to have equally rich support mechanisms in place. Already, the Foundation offers the Linux Developer Network, a resource site for programmers, similar in thinking to the Microsoft Developer Network.

The creation of the Linux Weather Forecast is a way to improve on one of the operating system’s key strengths — its open-source development model, which allows many people to both contribute to and refine Linux, leading to rapid development, Zemlin said. He estimates that every day developers add 2,300 lines of code to the Linux kernel. On average, a new version of the Linux kernel appears every three months, while fresh desktop distributions of the operating system debut every six months and enterprise distributions become available every 18 months.

The downside of all that rapid development is that it’s been no easy task for Linux users, vendors and developers to get a handle on what’s going on, Zemlin said. Previously, trying to get status updates on the plethora of kernel development projects involved pouring over many mailing lists. “A lot of developer support for Linux is Google,” he added, as people cut and paste lines of code into the search engine in the hopes of finding answers to their software problems.

The aim of the Linux Weather Forecast is to provide a central repository of accurate information presented in an easily understandable format. Over time, the foundation may look to incorporate graphics as a way of making the data more simpler to process and digest, Zemlin said. A typical user of the forecast would be the technical lead at an embedded systems company, he added.

The forecast provides summaries on work in areas including core Linux kernel development, virtualization and containers, file systems, security, networking and support for hardware.

In keeping with the analogy of a weather report, each summary is split up into current conditions reflecting the technology that’s available now as well as short- and long-range forecasts for the release of upcoming development work. Looking further out, the summary has a climatological timeframe segment to examine what developments may appear beyond 2007 as well as a list of “weather events that may never occur,” indicating previously announced technologies that might not see the light of day.

The forecast also includes a discussion page for suggestions on existing information and additional development tracks to keep tabs on.

Original URL: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135953-pg,1/article.html

In late May, the computer manufacturer started selling three models pre-loaded with the Ubuntu Linux distribution, but only in the US.

The decision to sell PCs with pre-loaded Linux came as a result of pressure from visitors to the IdeaStorm website, Dell’s user forum. IdeaStorm is now playing host to several motions calling for the company to offer such products outside the US.

One motion, entitled “Sell Linux PCs Wordwide [sic] — not only the United States”, had attracted over 23,000 votes at the time of writing. A separate motion, “Dell Ubuntu for Europe”, calls for the same thing and has garnered over 10,000 votes.

Dell’s EMEA director of client marketing, Eric Greffier, said in May that Dell would offer the rest of the world Linux PCs some way behind the US due to driver certification issues and the logistical difficulties posed by translating support documentation.

But Dell refused to confirm when it would release Linux PCs in the UK. Dell said it was “still working out details of its global programme and will share details when it has definitive plans — there is nothing further to add to this position”.

Original URL: http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39287605,00.htm