The World of a Penguin

Ubuntu 8.10 is released and I have already installed it on my desktop. My server have to wait since I plan to upgrade the hardware so it becomes a 64-bit system and give it SATA-disks. The upgrading went smoothly.

Each time we get close to a new Ubuntu release I notice an increasing number of articles in non Open Source media. This time I found an interview with Mark on BBC . Mark mention deployment of 50 000 Ubuntu desktops at the French police and 500 000 Ubuntu desktops in the Spanish education system.

What does this mean? Are Red Hat giving up and saying that they have lost the battle of the Linux desktop to Ubuntu and Novell/Suse? Relative to the state of the art Linux desktop at the given time I think that Red Hat 7 was a better desktop than latest Fedora is.

I am currently attending the Swedish conference Open Source Forum 2007 in Stockholm. The conference have prior years given a good view about what happens in the aspect of use of Open Source in Sweden with some minor part from other countries. So far the national property board have presented what Open Source they use, which is a lot. The most interesting is that they use Samba and open ldap instead of AD. One talk as about GPL v3 in a Swedish perspective. The last seminar was about about Peugot and Citroëns client use of Linux (Noviell) clients. They will have 20000 in the end of next year. Their users demands that they want Linux, which is a very good response. The lunch is ending.

I know this is a tool/functionality that many old *nix-guys hate, but I think it has some good potential. The function I miss so far is the ability to store default and mandatory values in an LDAP-directory or in a SQL-database. I have heard that it is designed to handle other backends, but it had never been implemented. Today I stumbled up on this good article about GConf, its worth reading if you want to know more about tweaking your gnome.

It is official that Dell will ship Ubuntu on some of their desktops and laptops. I can imagine that CEO:s at Novell and Red Hat are dragging their hair until they get bald as Steve Ballmer. They will wounder why they have not been able to write such an agreement with any of the major suppliers of client-machines. The answer is pretty simple; Ubuntu is a great desktop system that can be used by most people. It is cheap, or to be correct free. There are a community that are willing to answer questions from anyone in a lot of different languages. Who is up for the next deal? HP, Lenovo ... and with whom? Ubuntu again or will any of Red Hat and Novell take it? Congratulation Mark , Cannonical , and of course all in the Community. This is a big day for Ubuntu and for Linux.

I installed Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) yesterday evening. I have tried it out a bit more today and continuously new nice features. One of the features I like most is that suspend works out of the box on my laptop (MSI S271). Another feature that I feel is very important is the suggestion feature where the desktop suggest what software you should install to be able to open a file. I will not repeat what every body else on the web are writing at the moment. The reception from boot the community and the press has been enormous. I have loved each new Ubuntu release more than the previous and 7.04 is not an exception. I already look forward for the next release, Gutsy Gibbon. I will also try to provide a more complete packaging of AppArmor for Ubuntu.

There are two days left until Ubuntu 7.04 has its release. My objective view is that the non open source computer press writes more about Ubuntu's upcoming release than they wrote about Red Hat Enterprise 5 when it was released. The big question is; when are management in enterprise businesses ready to accept Ubuntu in the server rooms and on the desktops. I think, unfortunately, that they require a large business partner to rely on, even if they have enough competence inhouse.What may give a big push forward if some big consulting corporation, like CSC, starts to support Ubuntu. If this happends, how is the community affected?

I had today my first real use for the great remote desktop functionality in Ubuntu. My mother in law have used Ubuntu for a while, but she is now also connected to Internet using broad band. Today I gave support using remote desktop to help her configure Gaim, or Pidgin as it just was renamed to. The scary thing with remote desktop is if she forget to inactivate it. Things to do is backing up her hard drive over the Internet and start using dyndns.

Except from having a terrible cold this week I have been at two seminaries. The first one was Red Hat and JBoss Value² Tour. Red Hat clearly show that they have entered into the offices of managers, CEOs, CIOs, VPs etc. They also show that they want to lock you in as any other vendor, but they can defend themself that at least the source is open. From a commercial and organizational perspective I think they do one important thing wrong. They are still not shipping proprietary drivers such as wireless, graphic cards, codecs etc. This means that as a system manager one must still handle these things to give the users a pleasant drive on the desktop. Here is an area where other providers such as Suse and also Ubuntu have done a tremendous job. On the other hand Suse trie to lock us in with Yast, even if it is open source, which makes it harder to manage from central point. Ubuntu on the other hand lack of kerberos/ldap/AD integration in main, which is a demand in many organizations. Red H...

A few days ago I gave some support to people running a desktop pilot project. They are testing three different desktops; Novell/Suse Desktop 10, Fedora, Red Hat Workstation. The task was to integrate Suse Desktop with an existing AD. Okay, lets start with using the configuration GUI that they are famous for. There is a selection for running AD. Nice! Click for SSL, the current AD is no configured for TLS. Fill in Group and User OU. This seems promising. But here are we entering the halt. MS recommends that you configure your AD to use a proxy-users before authentication. But the Suse GUI does not have support for a proxy-user, so we change direction and start editing the /etc/ldap.conf-file. Add the proxy-user. But things is not working. A normal ldapsearch works but not doing id username . Looking in the logs it shows that it tries to use ldap and not ldaps. Some searching using google gives that on Suse the parameter ssl on in the config file is not working, you instead have to poin...