The World of a Penguin

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 reading an article on the Swedish news site IDG about pro and cons between re-install and upgrading Ubuntu. The attached forum shows a clear doubt to upgrading. I meet the same opinion and lack of knowledge at work when talking about how easy it is to upgrade Ubuntu/Debian, in fact that it is as easy as do a security update. People do not believe me. Why? My guess is that MS Windows, commercial Unix such as Solaris, True64 and RPM-based Linux distribution have an upgrading scheme between releases that differs from security upgrades. You need to reboot the machine on a CD run a special upgrading program and hope that everything goes well. Most of the time you get a very crapy result whith lost configuration, broken application etc. Some OS (read MS Windows) are more or less impossible to upgrade to new releases, a new installation is the only option. It is time for a information campain about how easy it is to upgrade between Ubuntu releases. If it was not so easy it would be impo...

Christer Edwards asked in his blog today about the difference between starting a init-script through /etc/init.d and the command service that exist on at least Red Hat boxes. I left a comment on his blog, but thought it would be nice to write some more about it here. It is not the first time I got the question. What Christers blog was about was that you can get the service command on Ubuntu too: sudo aptitude install sysvconfig At boot of your Linux machine the scripts in the /etc/rcX.d are started. X corresponds to your run level. On clients is it normally 5 and servers 3, but all Debian and Ubuntu-boxes uses 2. Anyway, those scripts are actually links to /etc/init.d/. The software that has called these scripts has traditionally been init, now days it is upstart on Ubuntu. Init does not necessary have the same environment variables set as you will have when you log in as root. Therefore is the service command fix so that the environment variables are the same as when starting the se...

Red Hats Colby Hoke tells here that they introduced yum to solve the dependency hell. He continues: "Red Hat led the way [...] to solve a customer problem the dependency hell." He missed totally that they were more or last the last of the major Linux distributions to solve this problem. Or does he means that they were the first suits that talked about that they had solved a problem, other Linux users didn't have. To lead does not mean to just be in front of Solaris and Microsoft, it means to be in front of all. Does he knows that Y in yum stands for Yellow Dog, which is a Linux-distribution Macs. The dependency hell was one of the reason why I left Red Hat and Fedora in favor of first Debian and later Ubuntu.

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.

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?

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...

I have been using Linux since before 1.0 of the kernel. I have been using it at home, school and work. Actually, Linux is my main task at work to day. I am responsible for the Linux servers at the Swedish weather service, SMHI . At work we are mostly running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. But at home I am running Ubuntu since an early release candidate of Warty. Before that I ave been running Red Hat/Fedora , Slackware , Yggdrasil, Debian , Gentoo and Suse . Booth me and my wife are running Linux on our desktop. I have an extra lab-machine, that I easy can change between different versions due to network boot. The server is also running Ubuntu with an addition of Xen. So the server is hosting four other servers: One for internal file, printing, web etc. One authentication and authorization server running MIT Kerberos and OpenLdap. One DMZ server accessible from internet with web and mail. Finally a lab server that I am using to develop a music jukebox together with some friends. Okey, s...