Microsoft coming back to ARM

ARM, the processor manufacturer that powers 90% of the mobile phones, digital media and music players, hand-held game consoles, calculators and computer peripherals such as hard drives and routers is a super-power these days and Microsoft realizes this more than ever. That’s the reason why there is talk that Microsoft is going back to release a OS for the ARM processors.

Back in the old days of Windows NT 4.0, Microsoft has a release of Windows that ran on the ARM architecture, but due to pressure from Intel and the growing market of IBM-compatible PCs Microsoft stopped release OS running on ARM. Thus, Microsoft only released Windows for x86 architecture (…and sometimes for Itanium). Microsoft has had WindowsCE running on ARM, but it is not the Windows that is popularized. The latest buzz means that Windows 8, the next version of Windows will be able to run on ARM processors

The reason why this news is interesting is because Windows Mobile 7 was just released and is a different architecture than the desktop Windows. If this means anything, then it shows Microsoft’s idea that a common platform can be moved across different sizes of devices, similar to what Apple has been doing with the iPhoneOS, iPadOS, iPod Touch and OSX. The idea is that the OS can be stripped off services and run on smaller devices. Today as more and more devices became part of our lives, we want to have similar experiences on all these devices… probably through different interfaces, but want the way data is looked at through a common way. Especially as developers, it is frustrating that the same applications cannot be ported easily across processors and platforms. The web is definitely the future of data, but rich client applications are important for the experience and the browser is still not everything that the devices/PCs can do.

Hoping that we can move towards converging platforms… especially easy ways to port client applications across platforms

Installing Windows 7 from USB

I wouldn’t believe it is so simple… Just download the Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool from Microsoft. Have the Windows 7 ISO file on your computer and a USB Pen drive with more than 3.5GB.

The tool will format the USB stick and then just cope over all the required files from the iso. Then you insert the USB stick, boot from it and go through the installation screens… Installs in 30min and you are done!! Didn’t expect it to be this smooth…

Fixing Wireless in OpenSuSE 11.3 and Dell Studio Laptops

The new and shiny OpenSuSE 11.3 was released on 15th July, 2010 and I was eagerly waiting because it promised to give a preview of the GNOME 3.0 and LXDE desktops on the DVD. As with my forgetful self, I forgot about the release, until now when I had to create an openSuse based appliance (but this one is long story for another day)… Nevertheless, I downloaded the DVD image yesterday and was ready to install it.

After the installation like I always do with the Dell Laptops (which have the Broadcom wifi chipset), go and download the Broadcom proprietary ‘wl’ drivers from packman repo. But this time, the 1-click install button didn’t work and gave some error message. Nevermind, I got the rpm and installed it. Rebooted the machine, but couldn’t find the wireless on… Odd I wondered and went to YAST and checked what was the issue… I discovered that starting from OpenSuSE 11.3, the ssb module is bundled with the kernel to deal with the Broadcom chipsets, but then Broadcom changed the hardware address and hence the driver doesn’t work correctly. Also because there are two options (wl and ssb), I couldn’t get the wireless automatically working after installing the ‘wl’ like it otherwise does.

Thus, I realized that ssb and its dependencies need to be blacklisted and only then wl will be the only one available in the kernel and things will work well… Thus, the following steps need to be followed:

1.) create a file 50-Broadcom-wl-blacklist.conf, if it does not exist with the following content:

blacklist bcm43xx
blacklist ssb
blacklist b43
blacklist ndiswrapper

2.) install the Broadcom-wl, if you haven’t already installed. Download it from the above linked packman repo. If you had already installed it, then do the following:

rmmod bcm43xx
rmmod b43
rmmod ssb
insmod wl

3.) reboot

This should only load wl into the kernel and should show the wireless in the network manager or ifup, whichever you may want to use.

Headphone in Linux on Dell laptop

The newer alsa sound in Linux kernel has an issue with the headphone jack... Most distributions have issues with the newer Dell, Asus and other laptops which have the Intel 5 series or H55, P55 etc chipsets. These use the IDT codecs and work well on the normal laptop speakers.

I got a Dell 1749 recently and had issues with alsa configuration which resulted in no sound from the headphone. The same problem with other dell studio and XPS laptops that are using that chipset. Adding model=dell-m6 in the /etc/modprobe.d/sound (or /etc/modprobe.d/50-sound.conf in opensuse 11.2) will solve the issue.

Windows Vista SP2 to be Delayed by a Month

As everyone including Ubuntu’s king Mark Shuttleworth are eagerly waiting for Windows 7,   comes news that Microsoft has delayed the released of Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista by a month. Microsoft now states that Vista SP2 will be available only in the second-half of 2009.

Microsoft was supposed to deliver its first release candidate to beta testers in February, but now has plans to release it in March. This Release Candidate (RC) is now being referred to as “escrow build” (also means frozen and only bug fixes will be done). Showstopper bugs are supposed to be only fixed and regression is to be avoided. Microsoft has in the past indicated that SP2 is very much an optional install to the OEMs and it wants OEMs to instead move to Windows 7 directly, when its released.

Windows 7 is running pretty much on schedule and we expect it release by early next-year. The RTM for Windows 7 may be out from the Microsoft stable even by the end of this year.

By the way for those wondering what changes SP2 will be bringing to Windows Vista, following are some of the known changes in SP2:

• Windows Search 4.0 for faster and improved search
• Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, the latest Bluetooth spec
• Blu-Ray support to write discs directly for explorer
• Windows Connect Now (WCN) for simpler WiFi configuration
• Content Protection in Windows Media Center

Also on the blocks with Vista SP2 is Windows Server 2008 SP2 which was released with the label SP1. Hoping to see another Windows 7 beta before the Vista SP2 then!!??

Linus Thinks “OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys”

If you’ve had some pain fixing a Windows issue, I’m sure you’ve heard of the word “Linux” from one of the other “geeks” that visit around forums, helping people out. Linus Trovalds was the person who started the Linux operating system project and owns the copyright to the name, “Linux”. Recently when discussing a security issue in the Linux kernel, Linus did some disrespectful “name-calling” in a public readable mailing list.

The following is an excerpt from the mail:

Security people are often the black-and-white kind of people that I can't stand. I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.

Linus is known to be a little outspoken and as a person who can be little rude at times, but when you treat other competitive developers with so much disrespect, it obviously means there is something wrong with him or his team. Linus invented the Linux OS, but today there are lots of other developers who are working hard towards improving Linux. The other developers do all the hardwork these days and Linus just supervises and controls which patches are to be applied to the kernel and what direction the Linux kernel should follow.

Look at the backdrop of events happening at Linux and OpenBSD, you’ll realize why Linus is a little upset with OpenBSD/BSD in general. The last release of FreeBSD v7.0, which is based on OpenBSD’s trunk4 and is a spectacular release with performance better than Linux on most grounds. Also, a lot of other Linux developers are in constant debate with Linus on what direction Linux should take. Someday its about the schedular or one day its about the security. There is some unrest in the Linux community, which feels the desktop neglect in terms of efforts in the kernel.

You can read his insane reply here and the whole discussion here.

But whatever the problem, such harsh words are completely unacceptable from the leader of such a big community of developers and users. Linus definitely needs some spiritual counselling to heal his internal turmoil.

Solaris & Xeon Break Million Messages Per Second

Sun Microsystems today announced that it has collaborated with Intel to not only provide the best throughput performance to date by breaking the million-messages-per second barrier, but also the lowest available network latency on a 1Gb Ethernet. This performance output was generated on a new financial services benchmark known as Reuters Market Data System 6.0.3 (RMDS).

The Intel-based Sun Fire™ X4150 with Solaris 10 provided the top-notch results for the benchmark and it indeed is superlative performance to reach million-messages per second. And more importantly its done on standard network topology instead of stacked topology, which can improve scalability but comes at a cost. Doing it with standard 1Gb Ethernet is surely an achievement. The performance by the system is highly dependent on the hardware which Intel has engineered and Sun has built. But Solaris also has contributed to the improved performance. Solaris has the least latency in message passing and network performance on it is excellent.

Sun Microsystems CEO, Jonathan Schwartz applauded the new benchmark results and attributed much of it to Solaris. And he sure must be happy!! Sun Microsystems is very focused on Solaris/OpenSolaris these days with a lot of development work towards OpenSolaris. There is also a big PR machine running for openSolaris these days and some ol’ Netbeans guys have been moved to talk and explore the world on openSolaris. Sun Microsystems has got this target to make openSolaris big on the desktop with a distro-plan similar to Linux distros.

Congratulations to Sun on the new benchmark record!! It is definitely one of the strong forte for Sun to perform on the network, but the desktop move is a totally different ball-game. And why didn’t we have one of those largest hardware/microprocessor team from Sun make the system from UltraSPARC to perform that good instead of the Intel hardware ??

Microsoft's Seven Deadly Sins in Windows

I've seen a lot of Deadly Sins post from around the blogosphere and I've also seen the rants on Windows Vista. Both the stories somehow clicked and formed a connection in my head. There are a lot of other software/company that commits the sins, but we already have the eternal bash toy called Windows/Microsoft. So I take my cue at Windows and convey my anger on the BSOD, I just saw on my desktop!!

Introduction

For those who don't know much about "sin", its an act/feeling which is understood to degrade the human soul and distances oneself for serenity. Every culture/religion has a few norms and refer to these sins slightly differently. Thus, every developer/user may realize my views either as sin or as virtue. The following sins do not follow any specific order:

Lust (Latin: Luxuria; Hindu: Kaam)

Lust is when we work a lot to improve superficiality of software and that's good enough to lure a lot of people. Irrespective of how much hardware that lust requires, we are drawn towards good looks. Microsoft did just that and Windows Vista had DirectX 9 hardware as a requirement to view Aero. It got a lot of criticism for increased hardware requirement and more usage of RAM. In fact, Microsoft has to fight "Windows Vista Capable" and "Windows Vista Premium Ready" at the courts and even within its own walls!! All due to lust!!

Envy (Latin: Invadia; Hindu: Matsar ==> Jealousy)

If you know how Microsoft came up with the GUI, then probably you'll know something about it being related to Apple. When Bill Gates and friends, they saw the Mac's GUI, they got envious and jealous that the Mac looked better than Windows. It had better usability, better window management, better shortcuts... It was so good, MS copied and even named the damn things Windows 2.0... Windows 1.0 sucked at doing windowing and Microsoft only learned the game, when they really worked out their own ideas in Windows 3.0. They gave away the envy and got back to work!!

Wrath (Latin: Ira Hindu: Krodh)

Microsoft got very angry when it saw another company taking over the web. The other company was called Netscape and its browser was becoming more popular than Internet Explorer (IE). Netscape regularly criticized IE for its issues and Microsoft couldn't bear that it was being bullied by the underdog. Microsoft showered its wrath on the browsers, and bundled IE with Windows 95 OSR. The browser got stuck so much with Windows that Microsoft had a few legal lawsuits and Netscape dies with time. Even if someone thinks Microsoft wasn't to be blamed for Netscape's death, a sticker of a monopolist got stuck on Microsoft only because it got angry in the browsers war!! Now its always at a risk of trying to bundle something into the system

Greed (Latin: Avaritia Hindu: Lobh)

Microsoft could have easily sold Windows 2000 with some simple basic changes for home users. But it got greedy and continued to milk the 9x core. And they released something known as Windows Me. It was called by many other ugly names, but probably you can associated many other cardinal sins to this release.Primary it was a marketing reason why this version of Windows was released and its been a black spot in Microsoft's reputation forever. Greed never pays off!!

Sloth (Latin: Acedia Hindu: Moh ==> Attachment)

Microsoft's sloth with Windows XP was so much that it believed it has done the best it could and didn't want to do anymore than what is required. Thus, Microsoft was completely lost about what to do in next release. Even if they thought, they were thinking too many things. Even sending someone to the moon would have been cheaper than building Windows Vista that came after 5 yrs of XP. Sloth brought the downfall and people are so much attached to XP that Vista doesn't mean much to consumers.

Pride (Latin: Superbia)

With Windows XP's success of selling lots of copies quickly, Microsoft got proud of its success. Celebrating for too long and basking in the proud glory of Windows XP proved costly to the development of Vista.

Gluttony (Latin: gula)

Microsoft is currently working on Windows Seven (also Windows 7 or se7en). Gluttony is one sin I believe Microsoft could be doing with this version. Gluttony is the act of over-indulgence. Microsoft already released too many versions of Windows Vista. Windows 7 could just show the gluttony with Microsoft releasing even more versions. The "componentized" architecture could just be for selling different components of the OS at different prices. Although Microsoft promises Windows 7 to be leaner and consume less resources, it could very well be the basic version. Microsoft could be gluttonous by selling different versions at different times as well... Still there is time before Windows 7 will have a feature freeze and then we will really come to know what's inside Windows 7.

Conclusion

With this post I wanted to highlight some of the mistakes Microsoft has made with earlier versions of Windows. Hopefully none of these cardinal sins are repeated in Windows 7 or else the other alternative OS are really catching up and Windows may not have enough time to get back!!

I believe that its stupid to fanatically claim something to be the truth... So I may have completely misunderstood these sins or versions of Windows. But I just now remembered that the opposite of sin is faith, not virtue!!

Microsoft's Next-Gen OS Research is Open-Source Now

Microsoft has been researching on operating systems for sometime now and manufacturers the most popular operating system in the form of Windows. But most of the research that goes into Windows is unknown to the rest of the world. Most people bash Microsoft of being very secretive and people from the open-source world often criticize Microsoft for this. But today Microsoft has done what many people believe is impossible. Microsoft has released their operating system research to be used in future as an open-source project. And the project is called Singularity.

The name Singularity does sound like some path-breaking theory in physics. In the world of operating systems, Microsoft's Singularity is sort of path-breaking. Microsoft announced Singularity about 2 years back and had started thinking about it 3 years before the announcement. After 5 years of research, today Microsoft released Singularity with source-code to codeplex, which is Microsoft's open-source community repository.

Singularity in theory looks to be very promising. It uses a microkernel architecture, which means the kernel is really very small and contains only very few services/managers. There was much long debate between Minix Vs Linux on microkernel Vs monolithic kernel without result. I side with Minix and this with PCs getting faster we need more stability than performance. But I guess that is part of a different discussion altogether. The following image shows the architecture of Singularity OS.

 

I have just finished downloading the Singularity RDK (Research Development Kit) from here, and will be installing it on Virtual PC.

Microsoft launches Visual Studio 2008, Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 in Mumbai

Microsoft has been running a campaign called "Heroes happen here" as part of the launch of 3 major products from the 27th February all over the world. The launch of Visual Studio 2008, Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 is supposed to be the largest software product launch from Microsoft ever and covers  the most important tools which Microsoft sells to developers and businesses. The campaign reached Indian shores yesterday at Bangalore and today the launch party reached Mumbai. The Mumbai launch about which I had blogged earlier was held today at Regal Theatre from 10am.

Microsoft's odd selection of a movie theatre for the launch of its product was explained VJ Gaurav Kapoor, who played the host to today's Microsoft party. Microsoft explains that developers who use Microsoft products create technology that can help change lives and play heroes in today's world of technology. "Like film heroes, this party is to celebrate their success story and what better place than a movie theatre to showcase heroes", said Gaurav Kapoor.

Microsoft has also created a song for the event, which was quite peppy I may add and definitely better than the "Vista Wow Song"!! A group of young dancers came up to the stage and performed on the song...

S.Somasegar, Senior VP at Microsoft started the keynote and mentioned all the new things that Microsoft brings with these new products. He talked about the upcoming Dynamic IT (read here) and how these products launched today are going to help reach that goal. He also talked about Virtualization being one of the primary goals and future technology in the IT world. A small demo on virtualization was also shown. I would have loved to ask why Hyper-V is still in beta (won't be out-of-the-box feature) and why understanding that the market needed virtualization took so much time for Microsoft. Alas! they didn't have a Q&A session.

 

Then there was a presentation on new features of SQL Server 2008. With SQL Server 2008, Microsoft brings a lot features that it lacked in previous versions. New Large User DataTypes, Data/Time Datatype, Spatial Data are some new things for SQL Server 2008, but have existed in other database systems like Oracle for sometime now. SQL Server 2008 didn't seem to me as a revolutionary product compared to the competition, but adds much needed features to this product line. A few SQL Server 2008 benchmarks do tell us that performance has improved considerably. SQL Server 2008 is actually not going to be released now. Microsoft is still testing it and adding last few touches. It will RC sometime in Q2 '08 and will be released in Q3 '08

Visual Studio 2008 was the next product that Microsoft talked about. Microsoft has done some hard work with Visual Studio 2008 and from the audience reaction at the product demo and technical presentations, it seems they have a winner. A lot of new features from ASP.NET were shown and out-of-the-box AJAX controls were shown. Time was running out and everyone was waiting for lunch... but I added to everyone's pain by requesting Harish (the speaker) to demo how to create an app with Silverlight. He obliged by explaining to the audience about Silverlight and its CLR and demo'd a small button animation. The audience loved it and everyone clapped. Silverlight seems to be an interesting proposition and Expression Blend 2 is turning out to be a good product so early in the game. Flash tools still are better, but Silverlight v2.0 with C# is more powerful compared to ActionScript or Flex.

Windows Server 2008 was the last to be introduced. It has a host of new features and IIS 7.0 was the main part which Microsoft highlighted. A few other things like WMS, failsafe clustering, Sharepoint services were also mentioned. Large part of the demo featured on how easy it was to manage the different services and talked about the small "core" of services that were enabled by default. Improved Security was also discussed to some extent and Microsoft said it was one of the main priorities in Windows Server 2008.

After lunch Microsoft showed the movie, "Transformers" to the audience and everyone attending the event left smiling with some goodies in a bag. The goodie bag contained lots of PR material and partner information. A 90-day evaluation DVD for Visual Studio Team System 2008 and Windows Server 2008 RC were part of the goodies. Having already played with Windows Server 2008 during the beta testing, these weren't exactly goodies for me. But all in all the event was fun, but I didn't wait to watch the movie!!

FreeBSD 7.0 Released. 15% better than Linux

The world knows quite a lot about Linux, but before Linux there was a branch from AT&T Unix called the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). After a lot of changes to the code, we have something which is completely free and its called the FreeBSD. Unlike Unix which is proprietary FreeBSD is free in terms of money as well as source-code.

Today, the FreeBSD team announced the availability of version 7.0. It is the stable build of the kernel and contains a host of improvements in performance, security and has a lot of bug fixes. According to the release notes, the performance in multiprocessor systems has increased dramatically and when compared to Linux performs about 15% better. This means that compared to previous versions of FreeBSD, the performance is even greater since Linux performed better than FreeBSD previously.

Scheduler, Filesystem and Networking have all been improved in this release. You can download from FTP here or through Bittorrent here.

 

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list, available at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.0R/relnotes.html
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/7.0R/errata.html

Windows Vista SP1 RTM'd

Finally after a lot of days, the Vista development team has announced on its blog that it is finished with the development of SP1 (Service Pack 1) and will be shortly giving it to partners and friends. The whole world will be able to get it through Windows Update and Microsoft Download Center in mid-March. So hold you horses for another month is what Microsoft means by this announcement.

If you have been following the leak, then you probably have already realize that it won't take another month to get it into your hands. The advantages that the Vista SP1 is supposed to bring is more under-the-hood in the form of stability, compatibility and performance improvements. You can read a well explained piece on what's changed with Vista SP1 on Paul Thurrot's website.

Vista SP1 is also an important update for Microsoft because quite a lot of people were holding their upgrade to Windows Vista from Windows XP until SP1 will be released. May be those people were expecting some more goodies and features like Microsoft has earlier provided with Windows XP SP2. But Unlike XP SP2, Windows Vista hasn't added new features to SP1. Even people who were expecting some Ultimate Extras to be shipping with SP1 will be in for some disappointment. Earlier Microsoft has hinted that people who bought Vista Ultimate would be provided regular Extras, but not much has been released after DreamScene, which is a animation/video desktop background.

Lets hope Microsoft will start working on some Ultimate Extras, now that they have stopped working on SP1.

Sun Virtualization With xVM Server

Update: Sun xVM Server gets a discussion from Jonathan Schwartz

A friend attending Oracle Open World told me about xVM, Sun's Virtualization platform. I have to say, I hadn't heard of it before, so I went on to look for some resources and this post is what I've found about xVM Server.

Sun has a new virtualization server based on Xen hypervisor. It currently supports virtualization of operating systems like Linux, Windows and Solaris. I have been using Xen with openSuSE which is bundled on the DVD of openSuSE 10.3 and I think its one of the better virtualization software available. So I asked what was different about Sun xVM and is it just plain packaging that Sun will be doing. Going to their website, I found that xVM server has a few scoring points to it.

1.) It brings Sun's very efficient and cool ZFS filesystem with the xVM Server.

2.) Sun will provide xVM for free but would provide support (at some cost) for the xVM server.

3.) DTrace and Self Healing (FMA) will be available with xVM

4.) Another Sun open-source, Crossbow for network virtualization will also be bundled with xVM

SunxVM server is opensource and is working through a few different communities. All of those can be found at http://www.openxvm.org . VmWare which is the market leader for virtualization products only has 9% of the market share. This just goes to show how much the virtualization market is scattered and everyone wants a pie of the market. Sun's product is openSource and is bundled with some nice tools and good administration GUI as well.

Prof. Ian Pratt of Cambridge who originally developed the Xen hypervisor, must be quite happy with the development that Xen has gone through. The success of xVM Server largely depends on how much the market believes in the value proposition that Sun has bundled with Xen!!

Free Virtualization: VmWare Server 2.0 Beta

Guest Blogger: Steven Parker
13th Nov, New York

I have been a big fan of virtualization. Microsoft just yesterday announced that their Hyper-V server would be sold at $28 as an add-on to Windows Server 2008. This came as a surprise to me. Microsoft is entering into this market pretty late and with free alternatives from major players already existing, giving it free would have been the best strategy for widespread adoption. But may be Microsoft wouldn't be Microsoft if it started giving anything for free!!

VmWare which sells its flagship ESX-Server, also gives away free a smaller brother of ESX. They called it GSX and now its called VmWare Server. VmWare released just few hours ago, the VmWare Server 2.0 beta on their servers. This is downloadable for free and has lots of new features built into it.

What's New

New features and enhancements in the VMware Server Beta 1 release:

• Web-based management interface: A new Web-based user interface provides a simple, flexible, intuitive and productive way for you to manage your virtual machines.
• Expanded operating system support: VMware Server now supports Windows Vista Business Edition and Ultimate Edition (guest only), Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server Beta 3), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Ubuntu 7.1, among others.
• Greater scalability: Take full advantage of high-end hardware with support for up to 8GB of RAM per virtual machine, up to two virtual SMP (vSMP) processors and up to 64 virtual machines per host.
• 64-bit guest operating system support: Run high-performance operating systems in virtual machines with support for Intel EM64T VT-enabled processors and AMD64 processors with segmentation support.
• Support for VIX API 1.2: This feature provides a programming interface for automating virtual machine and guest operations.
• Support for Virtual Machine Interface (VMI): This feature enables transparent paravirtualization, in which a single binary version of the operating system can run either on native hardware or in paravirtualized mode.
• Support for USB 2.0 devices: Transfer data at faster data rates from USB 2.0 devices.

 

I have just downloaded and installed Ubuntu on it. Doesn't seem like its running on a VM and is pretty stable being in beta. I have yet to play and tweak a few things, but the first impression is pretty neat!! I'm going to install Vista and try quick switching between them... If you want to play with it as well, then you can download it from here. Leave comments about your experience ==>

Why Did RedHat Choose OpenJDK ?

RedHat just got itself into the openJDK community and this is apparently big news. Even Jonathan Schwartz, thinks its a momentum for Java!! I'm sure most of you remember the open letters that were written to Sun to make Java open source... OpenJDK was Sun's response to those letters. But all this is history... RedHat's promise has just taken its first step to contribute openly to Java...

But just integrating openJDK with its distribution is not going to help Java... not that Linux never had JRE (Java Runtime Environment). Every DVD distribution with had non-OSS software included jre or anyone could download it from Sun's website.

So what's RedHat going to do with an openJDK?? Firstly, it will be able to test compatibility with Sun's JDK 6 and make sure Java remains "Write Once Run Anywhere"... Only time will tell if it remains this way with the other JDKs

Secondly openJDK does not have classes that are Sun proprietary. RedHat will contribute open-source variants of these classes... I'm wondering how much time will it take to reinvent the wheel ;-)

Thirdly, it had to do it since it was one of those that pressurized Sun to open source Java. I'm wondering why it took RedHat so much time to join the openJDK community if it had it in mind since long!!

All those explanations do not make much sense to me... Sun was already doing very good with all the work in keeping Java version-compatible and language changes didn't have steep learning curves. Any answers from you guys why RedHat's joined openJDK??

Run Windows Programs Without Booting Windows

Just found at Wired.com, about this new virtualization tool called "HyperSpace". Its a new hypervisor much like VmWare's ESX Server which is a layer just above the BIOS and can boot multiple OS. HyperSpace is something similar but not entirely an independent virtual machine. Instead it currently allows only Windows applications to run above it.

HyperSpace is developed by Pheonix Technologies, which is famous for developing BIOS for a host of motherboards. Pheonix Technologies says that this product has been developed considering that the boot times for Windows has increased so much that people need 5mins just to login to their computers to check emails. Also, Pheonix provides an argument that Windows has become bloated and people who want to use only simple applications, don't want to load that bloat...

Although all of the above arguments from Pheonix may be true, it doesn't make much sense to me. With quick sleep and hibernate available in Windows today, it really takes 4-5 secs to start using windows after you wake up from sleep. Even with hibernate, it takes less than a minute and in that time you just stretch your arms to start typing!!

I think virtualization should be directed at multiple testing environments and servers with different applications. Virtualization should ideally allow you to switch between operating systems by the click of a button. To me, this approach of virtualization is not very useful and does not have a large market. May be some people will use it, but Quick Sleep and Hibernate are for the general masses!!

Windows Programs Sometimes Run Faster On Linux Than XP

A popular myth among old linux users is that they need to dual-boot because their fav windows program does not work in Linux. I tell them, there's wine and cadega and they tell me the performance of these are slower than Windows... and this post is to break this myth!!

Recently, after my openSuSE 10.3 review, I asked a friend to start using Linux instead of Windows. And the old debate again came up. I opened a rar file using WinRar using Wine and even to my surprise, the file opened 5 secs faster in Linux than Windows XP (a 700Mb file ==> Windows XP took 46secs and Wine on openSuSE took 41secs)... I didnt really expect that much of a difference, but it actually did and I was pleasantly surprised. I tried another 1Gb file and there was a 6sec difference... Your results may vary, but it does say something... Doesn't it??

Not that every windows program works faster in Linux using Wine, but atleast some do. People who dont play games, can really be happy with the performance that Wine gives on Windows programs.

I found these benchmark on Wine's site. I haven't tried all those programs, but then there may be some truth to it. I'll also try the comparison on Vista and analyze the results. Don't believe me or the wine's benchmarks blindly, you'll be pleasantly amazed...

Ubuntu's 3rd Birthday & 7 Reasons To Fame

Ubuntu 7.10 was released 2 days back. I have used Ubuntu since the first version and have always loved working on it. According to most online surveys on Linux, Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution. I don't completely rely on distrowatch's popularity list, but then it's a good indication of what Linux people are using when they visit distrowatch.

3 Happy Ubuntu Years

Ubuntu's first release was on 20th October 2004. Tomorrow will be Ubuntu's 3rd Birthday. Anyone who has heard Linux, knows the popularity that Ubuntu gained in a very short period of just 3 years. When it started, I remember Ubuntu to be just a fork from the Debian Team. The first released really didn't make me believe it'll be as big as it's today. But after the 2nd released and the publicity effort that was put into it, I knew it'll be the big distro in the coming years. Read about "The Ubuntu Story" for more.

We analyze a few reasons to the success of Ubuntu and think about what lies in the future for Ubuntu and open-source!!

7 Reasons For Ubuntu's Sucess

1.) Publicity: I attribute the biggest reasons for the success of Ubuntu to be it's marketing and well publicized effort. Not that Ubuntu is a good product. But even good quality stuff requires marketing, so that it atleast reaches the consumer's eye. Ubuntu's developer team as well as Mark Shuttleworth have done considerable amount of work to tell everyone about Ubuntu. Mark's money and effort has to be acknowledged in all this fame for Ubuntu.

2.) Philosophy: Ubuntu as a name is as much a philosophy as is open-source and freedom. Read here, about the interpretation of Ubuntu. The philosophy of helping the other person and the community is another very important reason for the sucess of Ubuntu. Ubuntu's philosophy is summarized in the 3 points from their own site:

1. Every computer user should have the freedom to download, run, copy, distribute, study, share, change and improve their software for any purpose, without paying licensing fees.


2. Every computer user should be able to use their software in the language of their choice.


3. Every computer user should be given every opportunity to use software, even if they work under a disability.
   

3.) Free of cost: Another lame, but true explanation for the success of Ubuntu is it's free... and free here means you don't pay money!! You can easily think of all Linux's being free, but then we have had distros which require you to pay money. Some charge for support, some for software installation, some for the packaging. Ubuntu also has commercial support, but a strong community means you have a lot of people who want to help you solve the issues for free!!

4.) Ship It: Another important reason for the success of Ubuntu is that they ship CDs to you free of cost, anywhere around the world. Yeah, most people download it, but for the branding and logo stamped on the CD, a lot of people want it shipped. These CDs not only are good show-offs, but also are another form of publicity for Ubuntu. People who don't know the Linux world or Ubuntu, get curious when they find a CD with the nice Ubuntu logo and some nice guys/gals in a round formation... ;-)

5.) Synaptic (Apt): For people who thought Linux was tough and software installation was a pain, please use apt-get!! Installing software off the net was never so simple and apt-get is synonymous with installing anything on Ubuntu. It does all the dependency scanning and gets the packages installed on your computer. Fedora has yum, openSuSE has yast+online repositories, but there's something about apt that it requires lesser steps to install a package.

6.) Debian based: Not the most important reason, as there are host of other debain-based distros, but then being debian-based has its advantage for Ubuntu. Lot of packages are already available for debian and debain developers quite an experienced bunch of geeks.

7.) User community: The user community for Ubuntu is the strongest and it has been the case from the very beginning of the project. Somehow every Ubuntu user has spread the word of mouth and helped make Ubuntu popular. No other community of a Linux distro is as tightly-knit as Ubuntu and believe me I have seen a lot of community-driven projects over the years.

Future of Ubuntu & Open-Source Software (OSS)

For success, some luck and external factors do play an important role. Ubuntu's success is also somewhat dependent on these. Novell sponsors openSuSE while RedHat sponsors Fedora. Both have their tie-ups with proprietary software makers. Some OSS evangelist's do not approve of such relationships and thus love Ubuntu more than others.

Normally, the Ubuntu distro is released twice every year. In 2006, Ubuntu also started something called Long Term Support (LTS), which is released every 18 months. These versions are considered to be more suitable for large corporations that do not upgrade very often and require long-term support for an OS. The next LTS will be 8.04 released in April 2008.

Ubuntu is special example of OSS, because it's got popular quickly. Along with Firefox, it is probably the best success story of desktop OSS. For the future success of OSS, its important that projects like these become a success. There is quite a lot of work to be done, but Ubuntu's just started the engine... and there is a long road to success...

New Linux Kernel v2.6.23 Released

I got an email just now from a colleague that, the new Linux kernel v2.6.23 was released today. This released was greatly delayed due to a lot of bugfixing and some noise regarding the process schedular.

For those who haven't followed the story read here, about the CFS Vs SD. Linus finally chose to integrate CFS and this is the first major release of the kernel with the CFS process schedular.

The ChangeLog at linux.org, will be able to give you complete details of a lot of improvements in this kernel. If the changeLog seems a little complex, the summary can be read here at Kernelnewbies. We expect this kernel to be rolled into major distros in the coming months!!


This is a group photo from the Kernel Summit 2007 at Cambridge U.K. (courtesy: LWN.net) Was trying to lookup for a friend there, couldn't find him!!

Update: The guys at Phoronix.com have done some preliminary benchmarks on the new kernel and it doesn't show as much performance. Its truly preliminary, so take it with a pinch of salt!!