Linux may have started out small, but it’s grown by leaps and bounds. Today, Linux can be found on everything from a home wireless router to the gigantic mainframe in the data center. Although the spirit of openness surrounds Linux, thanks in part to the GPL, distinct communities have sprung up to support the different environments, each with a slightly different take on what it means to be in the Linux community.
Desktop The most famous form of Linux, the type that used to get the press, has got to be Linux on the desktop. Supporters of the Linux desktop range from those who value the open source license above all else (the same type of Linux user who posts words like FREEDOM in ALL CAPS in online flame wars), to technically inclined people, to the simply curious. I’ve personally been following the Linux desktop “movement” since 1999, back when Linux Magazine was “Chronicling the Revolution”, a reference to Linux’s impending superiority over Windows as the operating system of choice for personal computers. Year after year, Linux has gotten better, but dominance on the desktop remains elusive. For many users, this is not a problem. They have their customized Debian desktop just the way they like it, thank you very much, and don’t need anyone’s approval for it. For others though, recent developments in the next category of Linux users has people asking, “Does Linux Need the Desktop?”
Mobile Mobile Linux has exploded in the past year, thanks to Google and their Android operating system. With Android, Linux is finally able to reach the casual user audience that was so difficult to reach on the desktop. Android is the top competitor to Apple’s iPhone, and possibly soon to be with the iPad as well. Android has done the one thing that was seemingly impossible on the desktop, surpass Microsoft on a consumer device. However, the freewheeling development of the desktop doesn’t perfectly equate to mobile devices. Carriers retain a lot of control over what you can and can not do to your phone, and even approved apps still need to play by Google’s (admittedly lax) rules.
We had a visit from a vendor the other day, one who sells high end Unix hardware. The meeting was informative, and overall went well. While I was walking the vendor out of the building, he turned to me and told me how learning his version of Unix would really help me as I matured in my profession. He continued to say how any company who needed a Linux admin could just grab a kid right out of college, because, according to him, it was no big deal. I understand his position as a vendor, and wanting to push his proprietary software. I also understand that he’s right that learning new things is good for any career, but he’s completely wrong on his perception of Linux.
Linux is a complicated operating system, but one that has grown exceptionally fast. After dealing with Linux for over a decade, you come to the understanding that Linux, like ogres and onions, has layers. As soon as you think you have a good solid understanding of something, you can peel it back and look at the layers underneath, and realize that much to learn, still you have. An understanding of the deeper complexities of a load-balanced Linux cluster is not something you just pick up over night. It takes knowledge of networking, the TCP/IP stack, arp caching, reverse arp, scripting, system utilization and fault isolation. It is true that a novice administrator can follow an instruction book to install the necessary software and get a cluster up and running, but it takes a senior sysadmin to fix it when it breaks. I’ve questioned before the future validity of systems administrators, but I’m confident now that choosing to be a Linux sysadmin is a great career path, if you dedicate yourself to continually growing.
The best place to turn for information concerning the field of systems administration is SAGE, the Systems Administrators Guild. SAGE is a special interest group of USENIX, the Advanced Computing Systems Association. SAGE publishes professional pamphlets and articles, and has defined a set of criteria for advancing from novice to senior sysadmin roles. SAGE also publishes a code of ethics encouraging members to maintain high standards of personal integrity, especially when dealing with sticky issues like privacy, social responsibility and law. One of the best benefits of a SAGE membership is access to the mailing list, which gives you a group of peers to bounce questions off and discuss relevant matters in open source. Joining SAGE is a great step in furthering your career as a sysadmin, and one that shows you take your field seriously.
Google Wave is kind of like the Snuggie. You either immediately see its genius or can’t figure out why anyone would bother. When Google announced plans last month to shut down development of Wave and open source its code for anyone who wants it, some users were crushed while others just yawned. If you fall into the “I love Wave” camp, then you’ll be glad to know the Google Wave team has new plans for the now defunct project.
Software Engineer Alex North announced Wave in a Box, an application that will allow users to run their waves on their own servers and hardware. While the app will work out of the box, so to speak, its usefulness and future features will depend on what developers and enterprising hobbyists want to build out from it.
When Wave in a Box rolls out, it will include:
The other day, we considered the question “How much does Linux need the desktop?” It’s widely known that on the desktop Linux has held steady at only about one percent market share for many years, and that has caused many pundits to proclaim that it will never be a truly meaningful player on the desktop—especially on business desktops. Now, more and more stories are appearing about inroads for Linux on computing devices other than standard desktop and laptop computers. If you don’t believe that Linux has enormous opportunities outside of the straight desktop computing straitjacket, look no further than Apple’s iPhone operating system.
As Computerworld reports: “Apple’s iOS mobile operating system is now the third-most popular platform on the Internet, with a share nearly six times larger than Android’s, [Net Applications] said Wednesday.” And, as noted here, the iPhone OS also surpassed Linux as the third most popular browsing platform, behind Windows and the Mac OS. Specifically:
“According to Net Applications, the milestone came in July, when the release of the iPhone 4 apparently created a surge for iOS past 1% market share while Linux dropped below 1%. The trend continued in August, with iOS taking a 1.13% share compared to Linux’s 0.85% share.”
“It’s something to take note of when a mobile operating system passes something that’s been around forever,” said Vince Vizzaccaro, a Net Applications vice president, discussing iOS overtaking Linux. “Mobile’s growth curve is strong, and mobile is becoming quite a phenomenon on the Internet.”
We’ve written before about the fact that both Mozilla and Google have been offering cash bounties for people who find bugs in their browsers, and it’s also worth noting that the concept of bounties is spreading out across the whole FOSS landscape. For example, Funambol has had good success with a bounty program focused on developers. Now there is new data out about actual cash being paid by Google for its Chrome-focused bug bounty effort, and it’s clear that the program makes a lot of sense for Google.
ThreatPost reports, in discussing the new release of version 6 of the Chrome browser:
“Google Chrome 6 includes patches for 14 total security vulnerabilities, including six high-priority flaws, and the company paid out a total of $4,337 in bug bounties to researchers who reported the vulnerabilities. A number of the flaws that didn’t qualify for bug bounties were discovered by members of Google’s internal security team.”
So Google spent less than $5,000 to uncover a substantial number of significant bugs with the help of outside researchers. That’s money well spent given that Google and Mozilla are leading the way in browser innovation, and Chrome is picking up market share while Firefox is currently sitting pretty stagnant.
Nagios sent me a reminder yesterday, which I finally got around to reading today, to update to the latest version of Nagios Core, 3.2.2. We were running 3.2.0, so we were a couple versions behind, so after browsing through the list of fixed bugs I thought it would be good to go ahead and upgrade. I had a meeting in fifteen minutes, and Nagios was actively monitoring servers in production. I considered for a moment waiting till after the meeting. After all, what if something went wrong during the upgrade, what if there was some unforeseen problem that caused disastrous results and caused me to miss the meeting? And then I remembered, this is Nagios. I did the upgrade, and made the meeting in time to get a cup of coffee on the way. This is how upgrades should work for everything.
After considering the source of my hesitation for a while, it came to me that I’ve been dealing with a lot of proprietary software lately. Gigantic, proprietary systems with names that form acronyms that start with a “T”, one of our providers we deal with ships what must be some of the most complicated software in existence. For example, there is one system that I’ve been dealing with that runs several daemons between servers. One of the daemons restarts on a schedule every night, and for some reason when it restarts it writes to a database and changes the configuration of another daemon that defines what port this other daemon should listen on. Why the configuration is kept in a relational database to begin with is beyond me, and further, why one daemon should be changing the configuration of another daemon is simply mind boggling. It is exactly this type of problem that adherence to original Unix philosophy, and open source, would prevent. If the system were open source, many more eyes would be on the problem, and someone somewhere would see this problem and be able to fix it, submit the patch upstream, and everyone would benefit. Any dealings we have with this system described are handled with care, and caution. Once the system is up and running, I’m very hesitant to patch it. If it goes down, will it come back up again? What new bugs will the patch introduce?
Going back to the Nagios example, upgrading was a snap. I first made a copy of the existing /usr/local/nagios directory, because I’m a sysadmin and having two backups just might not be enough. Then I unzipped the download, ran configure, make all, make install, reviewed the helpful documentation that came with the download, and that was it. I restarted Nagios, using the new binaries, and watched it update all of my host and service checks. It was fast and easy. Nagios is certainly an enterprise class system, so why is it that so many other software packages for large businesses feel that they need to be so complicated?
The organizers behind the 9th annual (SCALE) announced a call for papers today ahead of the event to be held February 25-27, 2011 in Los Angeles, CA. There are a total of five speaker tracks this year and the selection committee is looking for presenters to speak on a wide variety of topics of interest to the FOSS community, from beginners to expert-level and enterprise users. Organizers also welcome lab sessions for speakers who want to take a hands-on approach with their audience.
Last year, SCALE Publicity Chair Orv Beach gave OStatic readers an overview of what the SCALE chairs will be looking for when selecting papers. “There aren’t hard and fast rules, but there are some things we look for. If a proposal even faintly smells of being commercial, it is rejected. That’s not our focus and we provide enough other opportunities for commercial sponsors to meet our attendees. We screen the proposals strictly, but once in a while one does sneak through (the proposal misrepresents what the speaker is actually going to talk about). When it does we hear about very clearly from the audience afterwards. I’m not saying that SCALE has a speaker blacklist, but we do have long memories; speakers who violate that guideline generally won’t have their submittals considered thereafter.”
To ensure presentations appeal to the widest possible audience, SCALE organizers are looking for content in several areas, including:
We cover the open source collaboration software provider Open-Xchange a lot here on OStatic because it’s a great alternative to Microsoft Exchange. If you’ve considered making the switch but haven’t taken the plunge yet because you think moving your data is going to be a hassle, then take a look at a free migration tool designed to make moving to Open-Xchange Server a whole lot easier.
The Open-Xchange Microsoft Outlook Uploader (OXUploader) packs all your existing data into PST files so they can easily be moved to a the Open-Xchange server. From there, it’s a snap to secure, manage, and backup data in a central location.
Features include:
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In this tutorial we are going to learn how to create a vector turtle character based on a vinyl toy named “Skuttle” from the “Little Trickers” series.
We’re going to be using Adobe Illustrator CS3 for this tutorial, but the majority of old versions and the newer version will work perfectly fine. If you don’t want to create a turtle, why not take a photo of one of your favorite vinyl toys or collectibles, or sketch your own and scan it in?
The first step is to open up Illustrator and place your photograph or sketch in. Set up a basic RGB document, I’m going to use a 800
If you’re in any way interested in graphics, you’re probably already familiar with GIMP, one of the very best of all open source applications and certainly one of the best graphics applications.Users new to GIMP, though, are often unhappy with the level of documentation and the tutorials that are immediately available for it. The good news is that the open source community has offered up many alternative resources for GIMP learning–and they’re free. Here is our updated collection of some of the best of them.
GIMP, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a long-standing and hugely respected open source graphics program, and many readers probably already use it. Originally created at U.C. Berkeley its interface and feature set run neck-and-neck with expensive proprietary alternatives such as Photoshop, and it has a thriving community of developers and plug-in creators.
There are many good books on GIMP, but you may very well find everything you need in the way of instruction in Grokking the GIMP. The book is available in a free HTML tarball in addition to a printed copy that you can buy. I highly recommend looking at the links in the contents. This free, online book takes you through layers, filters, resizing tips, masks, blending colors, case studies and way more than that. The screenshots and instructions are from an older version of GIMP, but many of the tutorials will still give you what you need to perform advanced tasks. (For many more free books on open source software titles, check this post.)
Among GIMP tutorials, some of my very favorite specialized examples come from Scott Photographics. For example, here is a very slick tutorial on how to create see-through text effects with GIMP. You should also check out this tutorial on creating cosmic wallpaper with GIMP. Search the Scott Photographics site for many more GIMP tutorial gems.
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