Core Dump

If you're working on documentation for modern, large-scale computer systems, the odds are very good that you'll be documenting a Linux-based system, probably running on a blade server. For example, in just over a decade, the Toronto Stock Exchange has moved from an IBM mainframe, to a HP-NonStop (formerly Tandem) mini-computer, to a RedHat Enterprise Linux-based system running on HP blade servers. It's also likely that you'll be working with a lot of shell scripts, small programs that execute a series of commands.

The Linux shell scripting language can be intimidating if you're not used to it. This tutorial, by Vivek Gite, gives a good overview of the bash shell, which is one of the most commonly used Linux shells.

Labels: Linux

The Globe and Mail's Lynn Grenier reviews the latest release of Ubuntu, 9.10, aka Karmic Koala. Nothing much new here in the release, but it looks like a good solid upgrade, and an alternative to Windows.

As Linux matures, it's becoming more and more of an OS accessible to the average user. KK is another step in that direction. There are still a few foreign concepts for a Windows convert to absorb, but on the whole Ubuntu 9.10, Karmic Koala, is a package that won't be a horrible stretch for the novice, yet contains enhancements for the Linux guru as well.

Labels: Linux, software

Tom's Hardware has put together a comprehensive guide for Windows power users who want to install Ubuntu 9.04 as a desktop system. It goes into quite a lot of detail about installating and configuring Ubuntu, something that many Windows users find challenging.

As a lifelong Windows user, system builder, ex-gamer, and performance freak, I'm not drinking anyone's Kool-Aid. I just want the most amount of control over my system as possible, and at this point in time, Ubuntu is the best follow-up to Windows XP. Don't take my word for it, give it a try for yourself. If, like me, you've tried it before with no luck, perhaps it's time to give it another shot. You could try it with the Live CD, but let's face it, that's little more than interactive screenshots. Without installing and running software natively, you really can't give it a fair shake.

This article will walk you, the Windows power user, through the Ubuntu installation process from downloading the CD image to finding help online. There are many guides available online, but most are written for total computer newbies or people already familiar with Linux. Most of the hang-ups that I experienced with Linux could have been easily overcome with simple Windows analogies.

Writing for power users, I assume that you have a good working knowledge of Windows and computers in general, but little or no experience with Linux. Therefore, this article will not tell you to compile anything from source code, and no sentence begins with “bring up the terminal” or any other UNIX techno-babble. Common Linux pitfalls like hard drive partitioning, installing software, and setup of essential plug-ins will be addressed entirely by using the graphical user interface (GUI).

Labels: Linux

Ubuntu 9.04, aka Jaunty Jackalope, was released today and Lifehacker has a first look at it. At first glance, it looks like an incremental upgrade without a lot of major new features.

Although the 9.04 release is a smaller step forward than most of us anticipated, it's still a solid Ubuntu release, and it's still light years ahead of any other desktop version of Linux. Put simply, Linux simply doesn't get any better than this right now for ordinary users, and Ubuntu is the only serious choice if you're tired of Windows or OS X. (If you do decide to make the leap to Ubuntu, consider getting my free-of-charge pocket guide book - see below for a special offer on the print edition.)

However, the Ubuntu guys are going to have to think long and hard about the direction they want to head in from the point onwards. Rather than playing catch-up with Windows and OS X, Ubuntu is now on a par with them. In fact, it's been on a par since 8.04, this time last year.

Labels: Linux, software

Here's an interesting variation on the standard Ubuntu Linux distribution - Portable Ubuntu, which runs as a standard Windows application is small enough to load from a flash drive (although at 438 MB, it's not really small).

Portable Ubuntu makes for a great place to test out your more cutting-edge stuff, without having to worry about messing up your working Windows system. The latest beta of Firefox 3.1/3.5? Even easier to run than the portable solution, and you can keep both your Windows and Portable-Ubuntu-launched Firefox browsers open at once.

When you're running Portable Ubuntu, Windows treats it like any other program. You can close down individual app windows from your taskbar, and pop it onto and off your desktop with little hassle.

If I can free up some space on my flash drive, I'll have to try it out, although I suppose I could just run it off my hard drive.

Labels: Linux, software

Linux isn't just for poor college students and techno-geeks any more - it's hit the business mainstream as evidenced by this article in about how Wall Street is embracing Linux.

Red Hat, which last month celebrated news that the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and its international subsidiaries were adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux and dumping Sun's Solaris, also has a Real-Time Linux version. Its Red Hat Enterprise MRG uses the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol developed by financial institutions JP Morgan Chase Bank and Credit Suisse with contributions from Cisco, Red Hat, Novell and other high-tech firms.

"This is about not just being fast but guaranteed-to-happen within a certain window," said Michael Tiemann, vice president of open source affairs at Red Hat.

But even as the Wall Street crowd increasingly puts its money on Linux — market watcher Tabb Group estimates that Linux adoption among the 14 biggest investment firms this year will reach more than 72% of the installed operating server base vs. 60% in 2006 — it's clear concerns linger about the licensing model. That model requires users return changes to the open source community under certain circumstances, a touchy subject for companies that are battling to accelerate their business processes.

I should note that at the TSX (oops, TMX onw), where I work, the new Quantum Trading Engine is built on blade servers running Linux.

Labels: Linux

Although Microsoft Virtual PC is only supposed to work with the various versions of Windows, apparently it is possible to run Ubuntu 8.04 as a guest operating system. If you want to mess around with it, the instructions are here and here.

When I find some time, I'm going to have to play with this. It looks a little neater than trying to set up Ubuntu as a dual boot system (which I have had trouble in the past). Although, I have to admit that running XP under Linux strikes me as the better solution.

Labels: Linux, Microsoft

The Ubuntu site has a good tour of some of the features in the new 8.04 release.

Labels: Linux

Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) was released a week ago and looks to be the best release of Ubuntu yet. I've looked at it a bit (booting from the CD) and I'm impressed - it fixes several of the issues I had with the last release (not seeing my hard drives, for example). I'll probably install it on my hard drive later in the month.

This article on HowToForge goes into detail on how to install and configure Ubuntu 8.04 for desktop use. I will use this as a guide when I install it - it's very detailed and easy to follow.

Labels: Linux

The New York Times has an article about how the New York Stock Exchange is moving to Linux for its trading systems.

The NYSE's shift toward Linux and x86-based hardware illustrates why consulting firm Gartner Inc. is predicting a slight decline in Unix server revenues over the next five years. In comparison, Gartner forecasts strong sales growth for both Windows and Linux servers.

Although Rubinow has the option of using HP-UX, HP's version of Unix, he said that he'd prefer not to. "We don't want to be closely aligned with proprietary Unix," he said. "No offense to HP-UX, but we feel the same way about [IBM's] AIX, and we feel the same way to some extent about Solaris."

As I noted here a few months ago, the same thing is happening at the TSX where I work. Quantum, the new trading engine, had a successful launch on Friday.

Labels: Linux, technology

Here's an article by a ZDnet columnist who's running both Windows Vista and Ubuntu 7.10. Guess which one he likes the most?

So here's the funny thing. I've used Windows since 1.0. I've lived through the bad times of Windows/386 and ME, and the good times of NT 3.51 and 2K. I know XP if not backwards, then with a degree of familiarity that only middle-aged co-dependents can afford each other. Along the way, I've dallied with many other operating systems on many other platforms - but never with Unix and only lately with Linux.

Then how come I'm so much more at home with Ubuntu than Vista? It boils down to one abiding impression: Ubuntu goes out of its way to get out of your way, even if it doesn't succeed all the time. Vista goes out of its way to be Vista and enforce the Vista way. You must conform regardless of the implications.

Call me curmudgeonly, call me prejudiced, call me atypical,

Labels: Linux, Vista

I installed Ubuntu 7.10 yesterday afternoon, setting it up as a dual-boot system. All went well initially, despite some slight confusion on my part about which partition to install on. (The installer picked the right one, but I had to go into the manual partiton window to verify that the cryptic name it was giving me was for the partition that I wanted). I verified that I could dual boot into Windows and went into Ubuntu to start setting it up.

But after that, I ran into a major problem. When I went back into Windows XP, I got a "missing or corrupt hal.dll" error message. I can get into Ubuntu, but it's insisting that my drives are SCSI (they're standard IDE drives), and I have to manually mount them.

So far, I've collected some information from the web and will start trying to figure this out when I'm more awake (getting about 4 hours sleep because of a sick daughter doesn't help). The worst case scenario is that I'll have to reinstall Windows XP - not a total disaster as I would still have all my data, but a major pain that I would like to avoid. And I would like to start transitioning from Windows XP to Ubuntu.

If anyone reading this can help, email me directly at keith@soltys.ca or post a comment.

Update: I'm back in Windows. AFter doing a fair bit of reading, I found out that Grub, the boot utility, for whatever reason, had probably installed the Linux partition in front of the Windows partition. I found my boot.ini file (in the root of my C: drive, despite the fact that my Windows in installed on E:, and incremented the partition number by one, saved the file, crossed my fingers, and rebooted. I selected windows which brought up the Windows boot menu (because I had Windows 98 on my system and have never bothered to remove the entry even though Win 98 is long gone), and booted into Windows. (And the first time I tried it, it failed because I needed to go into Windows (default) and not Windows XP Professional, why I have no idea. So now I have to go back into Ubuntu and set Grub to default to Windows and not Ubuntu, otherwise the rest of my family are going to have problems.

While Ubuntu itself is straightforward enough once you get it installed, this is the kind of issue that's going to keep it from being adopted more widely.

Labels: Linux

Ubuntu 7.10, otherwise known as Gutsy Gibbon, will be released today. Wired has a write-up on the new features in this release. I'm downloading it as I write this.

Ubuntu and the GNOME Desktop team have put considerable effort into improving the user experience for accessing many of Linux's under-the-hood options. A new graphical interface makes it much easier to make adjustments to monitor settings and set up a dual-monitor workstation -- both of which previously required using the command line.

Beyond these key enhancements, Gutsy Gibbon incorporates some of Mac OS X's most useful desktop traits to improve the user experience. New to this release is fast user-switching, a mimic of the same feature in OS X for switching between user accounts without logging out. Another nod to Apple is the improved Spotlight-like applet designed to search the hard drive and act as an application launcher. Printing has also been overhauled, and each print dialog now features a default virtual "PDF printer" which allows any application to output PDF files, something Mac OS X users will recognize.

Labels: Linux

John Dvorak has published a rant by his system administrator about the failings of open source software - most of which have to do with usability. He feels exactly the way I do about the vi editor:
.

What it comes down to as far as I can tell is the VI editor that comes with Unix causes brain damage. I’m totally serious about this. The VI editor absolutely sucks. It’s years behind editors I got with DOS 20 years ago and is an example of how to make an interface that totally sucks. I have refused to learn this editor because I find it offensive. I do most all my editing with a Windows editor, Textpad, and I run Samba on the Linux boxes so that I can mount them from Windows. That’s because there are no good editors in the Linux world. Other than that I use Pico which is a great little Unix editor for quick and dirty but still isn’t up to the kind of power I had in DOS or even CP/M (Wordstar) which is a better editor than any text mode editor in the Unix world.

Labels: Linux, software

You Can Move to Linux! from MaximumPC is yet another article providing advice on moving from Windows to Linux using the recent Ubuntu 7.04 Fiesty Fawn distro. It's a good article and covers some areas I haven't seen in other articles, such as manually partitioning your hard drive and moving your email over from a Windows-based program like Outlook.

Labels: Linux

Information Week has published a long comparision of Ubuntu 7.04 versus Windows Vista. Vista comes out ahead in many areas, often because the Windows interface is just more polished and easier to use. I found it interesting that documentation was one area where Ubuntu came up lacking:

Another area where Ubuntu still needs improvement is documentation -- not just the online help manuals, but Ubuntu's own prompts and dialogs. Some of the wording in the installation texts assumes knowledge of Linux that might not be in evidence, and some things are so skimpily documented they scarcely seem to be present at all. For example, the entire section on printing in Ubuntu's online documentation for version 6.10 is essentially a link to LinuxPrinting.org and the Ubuntu Wiki Printer page. The user-prompt problem has been improved a bit since 6.10, but it's still something that needs continual attention.

Ubuntu's user-contributed Wikis are often useful, but they're inconsistent in terms of what's covered and how, and they also often assume knowledge on the part of the reader which may simply not be there. By contrast, Vista's own plain-language documentation for many common system functions has been improved a great deal since XP, and they've implemented a system where contextual help can be supplemented with newer on-line material. (That and they've also made it easier to access the discussion groups used for peer-to-peer support.)

Labels: Linux, Vista

Today was a big day for open source software.

First off, we have the release of Thunderbird 2.0. I've been using Thunderbird as an email client for several years now, as is everyone else in our family, and I'll be upgrading as soon as I can find some spare time. And needless to say we all use Firefox as our default browser - that's another one I need to upgrade soon.

Ubuntu 7.04 aka Feisty Fawn, was also released today. I'll be downloading that once the crush on the servers dies down a bit. Once I can find some time, I plan to start migrating from Windows to Linux. I did try Xandros for a while, and liked it, but it's pretty clear that Ubuntu is now the leader in the desktop Linux market. There's more about it on Slashdot, including links to screen shots and reviews, as well as the usual /. nattering.

Labels: Linux, software

Linux for Beginners is an eWeek article offering an overview of some recent Linux distributions and instructions on how to get started using Linux, focusing on using Linux in a virtual machine.

The easiest way to test a Linux distribution is to do so with a virtualization product, such as VMware's Player, Workstation or Server; Microsoft's Virtual PC or Virtual Server; or Parallels' Workstation. All of these options run on Windows, and they are either freely available or available in time-limited evaluation versions. Parallels Workstation also runs on Mac OS X.

We think VMware Player is, at this point, the simplest of these solutions. Player is free, there are many Linux distributions ready for download in the Player format, and Player runs both on Windows and Linux. So, if you've fallen in love with Linux, you'll be able to switch from running Linux guests in a Windows host to running Windows guests in a Linux host.

Labels: Linux

Here's a very long and detailed article about switching from Windows to Ubuntu Linux. This is something I'll probably be trying to do soon - I have the Live DVD of Kubuntu, but I need to do some cleanup on my PC first. If you're thinking of migrating to Linux, this is one of the best articles on the subject I've seen yet.

I find that there are some things I just can't do in Linux – notably, gaming and Photoshop. For me, these are two very important tasks. I also find that there's much more that I can do in Linux that I can't in Windows. I'm mostly referring to the vast levels of consumer-oriented free software - software that I often didn't even know existed - whose equivalent often is price-prohibitive for most to obtain for Windows.

I have no reservations recommending Ubuntu i386 (32-bit) desktop edition for users to at least try out and see if they like it. Hey, it’s free. I would advise people to know what they're getting into before they take the full plunge, like I did, to Linux as a primary OS (perhaps by getting in touch with a local Linux User Group or talking in chatrooms on freenode), but all in all, I consider my experiences worth it.

Labels: Linux

Windows has gotten immensely more complex, and hence harder to secure, over the last decade. In comparision with Linux it's probably an order of magnitude more complex. The pictures shown in this blog post are of the system calls made by a web server serving a single HTML page with a single picture. Look for yourself.

Many millions of words have been written and said on this topic. I have a couple of pictures. The basic argument goes like this. In its long evolution, Windows has grown so complicated that it is harder to secure. Well these images make the point very well. Both images are a complete map of the system calls that occur when a web server serves up a single page of html with a single picture. The same page and picture. A system call is an opportunity to address memory. A hacker investigates each memory access to see if it is vulnerable to a buffer overflow attack. The developer must do QA on each of these entry points. The more system calls, the greater potential for vulnerability, the more effort needed to create secure applications.

Labels: Linux, Microsoft, security

The Learning Linux Project has published a series of online courses on Linux. They're a couple of years old, but they're still worthwhile because they're based on the fundamentals of how to use the underlying shell and not the flashier graphical interfaces that are helping to make current Linux distributions so popular. The courses include both HTML pages and PDF files that would make good references.

Labels: Linux