No, no, no…

This isn’t some “how-to” post. This isn’t about things I’ve learned about RPM’s, or yum or KVM…nothing like that. This is about things I have learned about what Fedora is about as a project, and what it’s mere existence means to the entire Linux landscape - in fact, I might stretch that even more… This is about why Fedora, along with other Linux distributions is so important to Linux, Computing, the Internet and beyond.

In this post, I will make some profound statements. Many “fanboys” will not agree with some of the things I am going to say, but if you will think outside of your boxes, you might be able to see the whole picture.

Many people say that Linux can never be a viable player on the desktop because there are too many distributions. I don’t think that is a problem, because the way I see it right now there are only three Linux distributions that are not only constantly innovating, but shape the entire face of Linux, and Open Source Software as we know it.

So, what are the three distributions?

• Ubuntu, which brings the Linux desktop to the masses.
• openSUSE, which brings interoperability to Linux.
• Fedora, which brings the best new technology and features of Open Source software to the enthusiast.

Ok, we’ll start with Ubuntu (since it’s probably the most obvious to most people):

Quick Note: I will go ahead and say that although Ubuntu is built upon Debian, it’s not one of the three. I think, personally, that Ubuntu could exist on it’s on without Debian at this point. Ubuntu is no longer a sanitized snapshot of Debian “Unstable” (Sid) as it was in it’s infancy - in fact, aside from sharing a package manager, there is little compatible between the two now…at least from the way I understand things…I could be wrong, however.

There is one very important area that Ubuntu has been very successful, and that is bringing Linux and Free, Open Source software to an entirely new audience. As important as that is, that doesn’t bring new features into the world of Linux. That doesn’t bring new areas of interoperability into the world of Linux, and that does not make Linux as a whole “better” (although it might make it more “popular”). Ubuntu has found it’s niche - it’s single, yet very important role in the entire Linux landscape - make Linux and FOSS popular with the general public, and not just something for us “geeks”. That doesn’t mean that Ubuntu never sends patches or new features “upstream”, because it does. However, most of what goes upstream from Ubuntu are more like refinements of features that were pioneered in the other two distributions I will discuss in this article.

In other words, Ubuntu is a popular Desktop Distribution, it’s releases are usually stable on a wide range of hardware, and make Linux consumable for even inexperienced users. However, in order to achieve this, it has to be somewhat conservative with what new features it includes and releases as part of it’s stable distribution. Ubuntu relies upon other distributions to pave the way, and bring in the major changes. Ubuntu brings new shutdown menus and a notification system. While those are great things to bring to the table, and add a lot to the distribution, it isn’t ground breaking stuff by any means.

Now, what does openSUSE bring to the table? Simple - Interoperability.

Many Linux fanboys got their panties all in a wad back in 2006 when Novell signed a patent agreement with Microsoft. I’m constantly amazed at how much of the Open Source community just puts on blinders and hates Microsoft for no apparent reason other than just hating them. I love OSS, and I love the model, but get real folks, it is SOFTWARE - not a religion. Don’t take things so personally. Microsoft creates and sells Closed Source software, and makes what is quite literally not only the most used desktop Operating System in the world, but the most used Office Suite as well (not to mention all of their many other products). I don’t hate Microsoft, In fact I use their products every day. I use Windows, I use Office - I couldn’t do my job without them (in fact, Windows is a large part of my job as a Network Administrator, since we have mostly Windows servers at work). In fact, I’m even typing this on a Microsoft Keyboard! They make good stuff. They are big, and they are powerful. By signing the patent agreement, Novell has had the ability to innovate in ways other Linux distributions can’t. Many great Open Source projects have come out of Novell: Mono and Moonlight are two very important examples, but also the Novell build of OpenOffice.org is by far the most widely used in all Linux distributions, and I always recommend the Go-oo build to Windows users wanting to try OpenOffice (the Mac-centric NeoOffice is also based on Go-oo as well). Also, just today, HP announced a new line of business laptops available with Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (or SLED). SLED is by far the closest thing to a true “drop-in” replacement for MS Windows in most business environments, and has excellent interoperability features with Active Directory and Exchange.  These are some examples of what Novell has done.

Now, for the final of the three: Fedora.

Fedora, as you probably know is a community project sponsored by Red Hat. Love it or hate it, Red Hat is the single largest Linux company in the world. I would also say that combined, Red Hat and it’s “child” Fedora, and the “step-child” (I say this because it’s not officially sponsored by Red Hat) CentOS together have the largest installed base out there, especially in the Server/Datacenter space. Many of the most popular sites on the Internet (can you say Facebook anyone) are built on top of a Red Hat based foundation. Even Oracle uses Red Hat as the foundation for it’s “Unbreakable Linux”, and then there is also Scientific Linux (another RHEL “rebuild”) that is popular in the Science and Education market, along with the Fermilab’s own FermiLinux.

Where does all of that start? With Fedora of course. I would venture to say, that no other Linux distribution out there brings more to the table in terms of new features than Fedora. Somehow, Fedora, approximately every 6 months manages to take the absolute most bleeding edge, innovative features that the Open Source world has to offer, and present it in a usable stable form for the enthusiast to use (and love).

Fedora has come a long way since it’s early days. Originally, Fedora was broken into two separate sections: Core and Extras. Fedora Core was the sole domain of Red Hat employee’s and community members were not able to commit to packages that were part of Core, while Extras was the community playground (if you will). Since the two areas have merged back with Fedora 7, the line between the two has become very transparent, and Fedora has blossomed into not only a great desktop system, but has continued to innovate in ways that no other Linux distro has. Fedora is like a showcase of things to come in other distributions. The Fedora project is committed to contributing as much as possible to upstream projects, and ensuring that everyone can benefit from what goes on inside of Fedora. Fedora is built upon a set of Foundations that state that it will remain dedicated to Free Software, Represent the Strength of the Community, while maintaining a Commitment to Excellence and to always staying Innovative. Fedora is a leader where others are followers and by means of the shared power and talent of the community always tries to create and improve free software and content, and is committed to contributing everything it does back to the Open Source community as a whole.

Just to give an example of how far ahead of other distributions Fedora is, compare the “just released” Ubuntu 9.04 with the now 5 month old Fedora 10, and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

So, who uses Fedora? Click the link to find out, and read the rest of the page for even more info about the Fedora project.

As important as each of these three distributions are, none would be complete without features, innovation and talent involved in creating the other two. As a result of the hard work of the developers and communities surrounding these three distributions, we are able to have and enjoy many different Linux distro’s, large and small, general and specified, free and non-free. We have a choice, and that choice, regardless of what distribution you choose is wonderful.

My choice from now on however, is Fedora.

(Thanks to everyone in the Fedora community that has made me feel welcome and taught me a few tricks in the process - you’ve all been great!)

While Microsoft preps their upcoming RC of Windows 7, and Apple continues work on Snow Leopard, the Ubuntu Linux team has already published the release candidate of their upcoming 9.04 version, dubbed “Jaunty Jackalope,” and is set to publish the final version of the code on Thursday, April 23.

Some of the major features of this release include:

• GNOME 2.26
• UPnP support for Totem
• MAPI support for the Evolution e-mail client
• Improved multi-monitor support
• X.org server 1.6, with Mesa 3D DRI, version 7.4
• Wacom tablet hotplugging
• New style for notifications and notification preferences
• Quicker boot performance (30% faster)
• Linux kernel 2.6.28
• Ext4 filesystem support (ext3 will remain the default)

In the release notes for 9.04, the team cites some problems with their Ext4 support that are present in the release candidate, but that they say should be fixed before the final release.

The 9.04 release will be an important one for Canonical and the Ubuntu team, as it should be the release that is out and in use when Windows 7, Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” and Fedora 11 are released. That is, unless Windows 7 slips into an RTM at a date past October of this year, in which case Canonical will get a second chance when they release 9.10, which is already dubbed “Karmic Koala.”

Download: Ubuntu 9.04 RC

To highlight the decreased boot time of Ubuntu 9.04, one user installed the beta onto their ThinkPad, equipped with a Intel X25-E solid state hard drive. The result was a boot time of only 17 seconds, from GRUB loader to starting Mozilla Firefox.

Posted in Reviews, Softwares Tagged: Linux, Ubuntu, Ubuntu 9.04 RC

As much as I like the 6 month release cycles of the open-source world giving us the latest and greatest bits to play with every 6 months, I’ve always dreaded that re-install every 6 months or so. I never have liked upgrading Operating Systems. As awesome as Ubuntu, Debian and other Debian derived Linux distributions can be at handling upgrades, I like to take the opportunity of a new release to kind of clean house and get rid of any crud I’ve collected over the past 6 months or so.

The flip-side to this, is I’ve always tweaked the ever living daylights out of my system, which made the 6 month re-install all the more painful. There are lots of “tricks” I’ve picked up around the web that are supposed to make your system faster and even make you toast in the mornings, and I’ve carried these rituals with me through the years, and seemingly built upon them with each re-install as I have found new “guides” on the web. This last time (and FINAL) time I decided to switch my main machine here at home back to Ubuntu as a Host OS, I kinda just installed Jaunty and let it fly. So far, I’ve only installed a few packages: ubuntu-restricted-extras (really a meta-package), banshee, nautilus-open-terminal and the stuff needed to make KVM do it’s thing. I’ve also only changed a few settings. I have: set up “nautilus-open-terminal” to open in my home directory when launched from the desktop, I un-ticked a couple of services and programs from “Services” and “Startup Programs”, added a System Monitor (with CPU, Mem, and Load graphs) to my top panel along with a few launchers, installed a few Firefox extensions, and that’s it!  I haven’t even changed the default wallpaper (I kinda like it this time - I never did like the “Coffee-stain Ibex from 8.10).

The next time I need to re-isntall (whenever 9.10 get’s in late Alpha or Beta stage), I’ll keep this philosophy and have much less work to do. In fact, since I haven’t loaded a bunch of crud I never use, or changed every setting known to man, perhaps I’ll just try and upgrade and see how it goes.

The funny thing is, it’s still fast, and I believe a vast number of the ritualistic “tweaks” I used to do were simply placebos - I doubt seriously they ever made much of an impact anyway.

The moral - just K.I.S.S and you’ll be just as happy

Now, now, don’t get excited, this isn’t a great, fantastic whiz-bang benchmark article. If you want that head over here to Phoronix where they did a great test comparing Ubuntu 8.04 running natively vs. Ubuntu 8.04 running virtualized on an Ubuntu 8.04 host running KVM. It’s a great read, and if you love all things virtual, as I do, be sure to check it out.

Now, on to my little “unscientific” test. I didn’t want to see how Ubuntu performed virtualized on Ubuntu - I will likely not be running that scenario quite frequently, other than testing Alpha and Beta builds of Ubuntu +1.

I will mostly be running Windows guest virtulized on KVM, so I wanted to get some indication of raw CPU bound performance, and with my quick ‘n’ dirty little test, I was quite pleased.

This test isn’t exactly apples to apples, but I think it’s as close as I could get, given the hardware at hand. The guest machine is a Windows XP x64 guest virtualized on KVM, with 1024MB of RAM allocated too it, and 2 Virtual CPU’s. The machine it’s being compared too is my old Core2Duo machine, which is downstairs running Windows XP x64 natively. This should actually be a pretty close match-up. The “native” machine is running on a Core2Duo E4600 2.4GHz dual-core CPU with 2MB L2 Cache. The “host” for the virtual is running a Core2Quad Q6600 2.4GHz quad-core CPU with 8MB L2 Cache. The differences, The E4600 sits on a 800MHz FSB and has 1MB L2 Cache per core. The Q6600 sits on a 1066MHz FSB and has 2MB L2 Cache per core, so really not apples to apples, but the same clock-speed, and I knew I would be able to interpret the results.

I was a little worried that Cinebench 9.5 wouldn’t run in KVM due to Video requirements but it fired up and worked just fine, so it’s my benchmark tool of choice tonight.

The results:

Native Machine xCPU test: 747

KVM Machine xCPU test: 753

Note: I ran the test twice, and took the second score from each machine…I tend to get more consistent results from Cinebench by testing in this manner.

Yup - that’s right, the virtualized machine won, and it actually won by about the same amount I would have expected “natively” given the slight advantange in L2 Cache and FSB speed.

I also want to note that I was very impressed at how Ubuntu handles processor scheduling with a multi-cpu virtual. When running the multi-threaded test in the guest machine, 2 of my CPU’s maxed out at 100% usage, rather than bouncing the threads around like Windows tends to do.

Although it’s still a little ways from release, I decided to give Ubuntu 9.04 a spin. Right now, development is “somewhere” between Beta and RC status, and things seem to be going quite well.

I decided to go ahead w/ Jaunty since it’s so near release, and if I was paving now, I’d rather go ahead and get my disks set up as ext4 to save the hassle of restoring from backups yet again down the road.

I haven’t run into any issues at all, but I wanted to make note of a few features I especially like:

First - I love the Notification UI - it’s very handy when dealing w/ multiple applications which use the Notification API.

Also, I like the new “shutdown menu” (not sure what else to call it). With this one applet, I can shut down, sleep/hibernate, and change my status in Pidgin - very nice.

I’d also like to mention boot speed - I’m not sure what has been done “under the hood” but 9.04 boots *very* quicky. Also, I’m very impressed so far w/ overall desktop speed and responsiveness.

I believe 9.04 will shape up to be a “killer release”, and should be well received by all Ubuntu users.

My main reason for paving over Vista was to check out KVM. I finally have a CPU now w/ Hardware Virtualziation, so I can finally use KVM. I find the technology to be very interesting, and I like the idea of having a virtualization solution that is fully integrated into the OS. So, expect some post as I explore and learn this new (too me) technology.

Cheers!

I just finished installing Ubuntu 9.04 from the latest daily image. I’ve taken a break from Linux for a while; a much needed break, but I’m glad to be back in the fold.

For a while I had gotten in over my head - I had gotten involved in too many Linux oriented things, and was stretching myself a little too thin, and as a result I simply got burnt out with the whole dang thing. I played around with Windows 7 some, but the settled into Vista comfortably for a long while. In the mean time, I built and sold a new computer, and then re-built a new “new” computer, and decided it was a good time to jump back on the Linux train again.

I decided to go ahead and load Jaunty since it’s about the time I would normally jump on the development version anyway (around Alpha 6). I noticed that the restricted drivers for Nvidia were working, so I was as good as gold. Ubuntu usually does a good job of just updating itself to final code anyway, so I shouldn’t have to re-install next month when the final bits are released unless something goes majorly wrong. Also, I wanted to go ahead and get my HDD’s and mount-points formatted in EXT4 for the future, which pretty much entailed installing 9.04 anyway.

Why did I come back? It’s simply - I just missed it. I missed the community, and I missed the software. I had my Vista install as “open source” as I could possibly get it; in other words, I was using the same software, just on a different OS. I initially thought I wanted Vista back on my machine for gaming compatibility, but I need to accept the fact that I’m simply not a gamer anymore. I guess I’ve just “grown up” so to speak, but I can honestly say in the entire time I was running Windows I could count the minutes spent “gaming” on fingers of my two hands. I simply don’t game anymore.

So, since I’ve taken a break and am just now coming back, what will I get involved in? Well, honestly not much. I don’t want to get burned out again. I’m going to stay away from distro level stuff as much as possible. I’m going to run Ubuntu because, well, it just works. Any involvement I have in Ubuntu will be restricted to helping out folk on the forums if I get really bored. I will however continue my involvement at the Desktop level and the GNOME project (specifically the GNOME Journal). I feel *anything* I do at that level is going to help far more people across many distro’s than anything I can do at the distro level.

It’s good to be back, and if you are one of my “Linux Buddies” I’ll be seeing you around more often again

Peace!