In “Return of the Mac,” Paul Graham writes: “All the best hackers I know are gradually switching to Macs.”
At the LinuxWorld show in Boston last month, Apple had a small understated booth, with a couple of company reps out front, and a plain table with a Mac Mini, an XServe and an XServe RAID up and running. They were low-key and glad to answer questions. I spoke with one of them and said “The Mac is my favorite unix workstation,” and he replied “I’m glad someone knows why we are here.”
OSNews reports “Microsoft funding of security report decried. Two researchers surprised the audience at a computer-security convention last month with their finding that a version of Microsoft Windows was more secure than a competing Linux operating system. This week, the researchers released their finished report, and it included another surprise: Microsoft was funding the project all along.”
I heard about the report and I was really pleased that Microsoft may have finally started catching on with Windows Server 2003 in shipping a product that’s reasonably secure out of the box. To say it is about time is a vast understatement. To claim that redeems Microsoft, or has any effect on the 500 million insecure Windows installations out there is wrong. From my limited experience with W2K3, it’s a lot more difficult to work with, since lots of features are disabled by default, and turning them on is far from intuitive. It’s pretty much too late for me. I’ve taken my business elsewhere.
Novell/SuSE is running their BrainShare conference this week, and it looks like they have loaded up on announcments:
OSNews notes “A Bunch of Novell News. Why Novell’s internal migration to Linux desktops is a landmark story. Novell preps Linux Desktop 10: Desktop search, note taking features will surpass Windows, execs say. Novell buys N.H.’s Tally Systems to benefit ZenWorks.”
InfoWorld: Application development reports “Novell preps Linux Desktop 10. SALT LAKE CITY, Utah — Linux is ready for the corporate desktop, and the forthcoming version of Novell’s Linux Desktop offering will go head-to-head against Windows, Novell executives said here this week at the company’s annual BrainShare gathering.”
Slashdot also picks up on Novells internal migration storry, with “Brainshare Reports: NLD 10, Novell’s Linux Switch. An anonymous reader submits “Computer World has an article about Novell Linux Desktop 10, which was just announced at Brainshare, that it plans to compete directly with Windows. One of the biggest things about NLD 10 is that it will have the desktop search engine Beagle as a feature.” Also from Brainshare, Joe Barr writes on NewsForge about the significance of Novell’s ongoing (multi-year) transition to Linux for all of its 6,000 desktops. Consultants and software sellers of all stripes won’t soon run out of TCO arguments for the products they want to push, but Novell claims to have saved $900,000 last year in Microsoft license fees alone.”
Ed Leafe posts “Just in time for PyCon DC 2005, we’d like to announce the release of Dabo 0.3.2. A summary of what’s changed since the last release can be found at http://dabodev.com/announcements/changeLog-0.3.2. Source code is available for download at http://dabodev.com/download.”
dabo is an application framework for developing rich-client data-centric applications, released under the OSI-apprived MIT license. It runs (and is in use at customer sites) in Linux, Windows and OS X, and probably in other platforms supporting Python. While the primary focus has been compatibility with MySQL, support for PostgreSQL and Firebird are included in this version. Check out the links above for a wiki full of development information and to download source code and demos to play with.
— Ted Roche, dabo commercial licensee #1
OSNews points to EDS: Linux is insecure, unscalable. Large enterprises should not use Linux because it is not secure enough, has scalability problems and could fork into many different flavours, according to the Agility Alliance, which includes IT heavyweights EDS, Fuji Xerox, Cisco, Microsoft, Sun, Dell and EMC.”
And what exactly is the purpose of this “alliance?” According to the article, to compete with IBM and HP. What a surprise. And what software do they favor? Theirs, of course. What nonsense!
All OSes likely have an appropriate place in a well planned enterprise.
OSNews echoes ZDNet’s lead paragraph: Fedora takes off as Red Hat declines. “Latest statistics for the Web server market show that Fedora, Red Hat’s free Linux operating system, is growing in popularity. But the picture isn’t quite so rosy for its enterprise offering.”
But Read the Fine Article (RTFA) and you find out that 400,000 web sites are now running Fedora, placing it at number 5. And 20,000 less sites are running RedHat, which still leaves it in the top spot with 1.61 million deployments. That represents a 122% increase in the hobbyist/experimental distribution of Fedora, and a 1.2%, yes, One-Point-Two percent decrease in RedHat.
The survey cites only 4 million web sites in this survey, so this is not the same study as the March Netcraft study I pointed to earlier with sixty million sites surveyed. So what’s the subset here? The article is unclear.
Fedora had a new major release in the last year, and it is attracting attention, while RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 has just been released, after the date of the survey. RedHat is facing stiff competition with Novell/SuSE and other commercially supported versions of Linux, but still seems to be holding its own or slipping ever so slightly, though not increasing its market share. Competition is Good.
While the analysis isn’t a gross misrepresentation, if I were RedHat, with 1.6 million customers @ $349 a year (or more) each, I would see the picture as more rosy. That’s likely not the case. The original Netcraft article isn’t clear what “RedHat” is it talking about: my suspicion is that that number is a summary of RedHat 7, 8, 9 and two versions of Enterprise Linux. It would be interesting to see what the uptake of RHEL is, and whether it is RH 7.0 and 8.0 boxes that are being sent out to pasture.
Recently, the USB ports on my ThinkPad stopped working. My suspicion is that I probably zapped them with static electricity, as we’d had some dry and bitterly cold weather, and I’m usually running around in a couple layers of fleece this time of year.
At Best Buy, I picked up a Dynex 2-port USB 2.0 card so that I could plug in mice, keyboards, and the essential USB data drives. Imagine my surprise when I unpacked the box and found a funny little power cord, with a T-connector of male and female USB connectors on one end, and a small round power plug on the other. I guess that the PCMCIA bus doesn’t supply enough power for USB peripherals, as they would not work without the cord plugged in. Much to my relief, it appears that the dead USB connectors in my laptop can still supply power, even though USB devices aren’t recognized. Just a warning , though: if you need to add USB ports to your notebook, you’ll need to already have USB ports on your notebook to power the new ones. Go figure.
Despite the fact that the card is listed as supporting only Windows operating systems (the blister pack also listed Max OS X 10.1 or later), the card came right up and was detected properly in Linux Fedora Core 3, too.
I’ve attended a couple of professional get-togethers lately (like BOFs Birds-Of-a-Feather at LinuxWorld) and running these meetings is tough. Typically, you’ve got a lot of smart people with a lot of interesting things to say, and a lot of smart people who might drag the discussion off-focus. Halley describes a classic problem here, but notes the next day that things are improving.
I’m hoping to make a few visits this year to what Dave Winer calls UnConferences, and hope the benevolent dictators in charge of these events take note. Imagine – a conference where people actually confer!
The Fedora Core 3 Linux distribution includes a very powerful new security feature called SELinux. In my (very) limited understanding, SELinux overlays another set of policies and permissions over the basic UNIX-style security to produce a far more secure product. However, it can also trip up the unsuspecting. At last night’s LAMP class, we got caught. Installing Virtual Hosts as we had with Fedora Core 2 threw permission errors, despite everything we could think of. As it was a beginner class, we just settled for placing the virtual hosts under the standard DocumentRoot at /var/www/html and continuing on with our exercise, with a promise that we’d investigate and explain to the students what went wrong at the next class.
The Fedora web site provides guidance at “Understanding and Customizing the Apache HTTP SELinux Policy.” I was also pleased to see that a WebMin module is under development to simplify SElinux management at http://www.selinux.hitachi-sk.co.jp/en/tool/selpe/selpe-top.html
UPDATED: Indeed, it was the SELinux that was causing the problem. Turning that off (requiring one of the very rare reboots in the Linux world) and fixing a problem with rights (the parent home directory needs x permissions for searching, as pointed out in the Apache FAQ) solved the problem. We’ll be able to present the solution to the class, along with a little side-talk on how to figure these things out, at the next class.
NewsForge features an article called “My Workstation OS: Mac OS X” Apparently, it’s part of a series that “So far, we’ve heard from fans of FreeBSD, Mepis Linux, Debian, Xandros, Slackware, Windows XP, Lycoris, SUSE Professional, NetBSD, Ubuntu, FreeDOS, Libranet, Mandrakelinux, and Arch Linux. Coming soon: Linspire, Knoppix, Gentoo, Fedora Core 3, and more.” It’s always interesting to read how other developers use their machines.