Early this morning Linus Torvalds announced that the next release of the Linux kernel will be given the version number 3.0.

I decided to just bite the bullet, and call the next version 3.0. It
will get released close enough to the 20-year mark, which is excuse
enough for me, although honestly, the real reason is just that I can
no longe rcomfortably count as high as 40.

He strongly points out that this lift of version number is not due to any major changes in the kernel, but more based on time since this year it’s 20 years since the first Linux kernel was released.

So what are the big changes? NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. Sure, we have the usual two thirds driver changes, and a lot of random fixes, but the point is that 3.0 is *just* about renumbering, we are very much *not* doing a KDE-4 or a Gnome-3 here. No breakage, no special scary new features, nothing at all like that. We’ve been doing time-based releases for many years now, this is in no way about features. If you want an excuse for the renumbering, you really should look at the time-based one (“20 years”) instead.

Personally I’m a bit disappointed since I was hoping for the 3.0 release to contain something awesome that I could really look forward to. Despite what Linus Torvalds says, it’s probably just me remembering the anticipation for the first stable 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 releases, which all of them was a great step forward for the Linux kernel. However, the 2.x release of the kernel has been around for quite a while now and on the other hand it’s reasonable to bump the version number around this time. To be honest, if there’s no super fancy new features in the pipe line for the next year or so, why not celebrate the 20 year mark with a Linux kernel version 3.0.

I wish the kernel development team the best of luck with Linux 3.0 and in the meantime we can keep a close watch at http://www.kernel.org for the actual release candidate to be published.

Source: http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/1147415

I’ve recently upgraded my Fedora installation to Fedora 15 with Gnome 3. I used Gnome Shell a while back but abandoned it when they changed the meny layout. The meny layout is now the one that made me abandon Gnome Shell before, but I think I could get used to it this time. Gnome 3 looks great and a part from the extremly reduced configuration options I belive it’s a huge step in the right direction for Linux on desktops.

Gnome 3 settings dialog.

My first impression of Fedora 15 was that mostly Gnome 3 was the big news, and that is the truth. Still they’ve managed to put in a very nifty little feature that toke me by surprise when I encountered it. Look at this wonderful thing, it’s not a very complex thing to create, but a really nice touch to the former user unfriendly Linux. I was trying to run a traceroute with the command mtr and look what happend.


[amelia@forth ~]$ mtr ping.sunet.se
bash: mtr: command not found...
Install package 'mtr' to provide command 'mtr'? [N/y]
* Running..
* Resolving dependencies..
* Waiting for authentication..
* Running..
* Resolving dependencies..
* Downloading packages..


After this, the mtr window appeared running a traceroute against ping.sunet.se. I’m amazed at this brilliant idea for a desktop Linux distribution, but at the same time I pray that they’ll never ever implement a feature like this in any of the enterprise server distributions out there.

Check out the rest of my Fedora 15 and Gnome 3 screenshots at: http://www.linuxchick.se/gallery/fedora-15-with-gnome-3/

Lately concepts like SOA, consolidation, green computing and cloud computing has been the buzzwords in every CIO’s dream and every technicians nightmares, except mine. In my dreams I see datacenters filled with mainframes and I’m pretty sure that’s not what the CIO’s are dreaming about, then it would be called a nightmare. Before we continue on this subject I have to state that I’m a Linux/UNIX consultant, female and not 60+ years old, just to avoid future confusion…

In the dark, behind the headlines of death sentence after death sentence for the mainframe, companies like IBM, HP and Unisys has been working on bringing the mainframe back on the market. We all know that mainframes are huge, power hungry, complex and most of all OLD, but that’s not true. Mainframes are 1500 virtual servers in the same space where you can fit three racks with 126 1U servers, unless you get heat problems. Reduced heat means less cooling for the same amount of servers in the datacenter and together with a focus on power saving mainframes becomes the ultimate choice when it comes to green computing.

Some of the features IBM has been focusing on is new technologies for partitioning, virtualization and smart solutions for load balancing inside the mainframe. Most companies that are already using mainframe invest in more mainframes and are consolidating their Linux systems inside the mainframe. IBM mainframes seems to get their way back to the market with a growth of mainframes world wide with 30.7%, and the latest model IBM System Z10, released in the beginning of this year, has led to a growth of mainframes in Europe with  58%.

With all due respect, mainframes are stable and just as made for cloud computing, but who’s going to operate them? The amount of System Administrators that are familiar with mainframes and applications running on them is barely enough for what’s needed at this point. Same story goes for System Developers that are familiar with languages like Cobol and RPG. My hope is that this lack of competence won’t impede use of mainframes and that more people will see their possibilities for virtualization and cloud computing.

Open Source Forum 2008 toke place in Stockholm on October 7th – 8th. During the first day one of my favorite speakers on this kind of event was having two presentations. First up in the morning Arnoud Engelfriet from ICTRecht in Holland talked about the legal aspects of using and develope open source software and how your company lawyers and engineers could work together with open source. In the afternoon he finished the subject with talking about everything from embedded open source software, distribution of open source software and how GPLv3 could affect your business.

This first day offered a few other interesting presentations such as Alexander Schanz from DFS Deutsche Flugsicherung GmbH who talked about their open source radar data processing system PHOENIX runing on SUSE Linux and Lennart Hagberg from TetraPak who showed us and talked about the open source software behind their communications plattform for videos and documentation, an internal “YouTube”-service together with a wiki for documentation built on LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and WordPress.

On day two of Open Source Forum 2008 there were two tracks, one track with presentations like the day before and one track with live demonstrations of products and services. I begun day two at the live demonstrations track listening to Urban Anjar from Ubuntu Sverige talk about Ubuntu Linux and show KVM virtualization on Ubuntu. After the coffee break I ended up talking about Nagios and Op5′s Nagios-based network monitoring system with Jonas Björk and a representative from Op5.

Next up before lunch was Erik Lönroth from Scania Infomate who talked about how the use Linux in their cluster for calculations and simulations. With open standards and open source software they reduced many performance problems, but when they got here they found a new problem, no one had solved the problems they encountered before. To my surprise it would be until this point of this conferense when someone finaly said that you can get far with open source, but when you’re there it’s time to solve the problems never solved before and share them with others. At this moment I found myself thinking that with people like Erik Lönroth out there on the IT departments of the companies there’s hope for open source to survive the step into the world of business.

A presentation that surprised me during this conference was Anders Wallenquist from Vertel/Dataföreningen who talked about the CMS Drupal. I was surprised because I’ve never understood how competent Drupal acctually is and on top of this Dagens Industri, a financial newspaper, will move their webpage to Drupal instead of Escenic and Polopoly like most other newspapers in Sweden uses. To read more about di.se and Drupal IDG wrote about it at http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.182311.

Back to Open Source Forum 2008, during day two there were two tracks which means a lot of presentations that you don’t have to time to see. I’ve been writing about those presentations that impressed or surprised me during these two days. For the full agenda of this conferense see http://www.opensourceforum.se/Program.htm.

So, what’s my summary of this conferense? Well, it was terribly expencive, only ~50 visitors and I had some very interesting conversations about various subjects with other visitors which would mean that since I’m not paying for it, it was totaly worth it. :)

Does your company have an old IBM iSeries or zSeries with the POWER processor architecture that’s not in use anymore? I’m looking for an IBM iSeries or zSeries to have at home to learn about how to virtualize Linux or IBM hardware. If you have one you don’t need anymore or if you know someone who does, would you consider giving it away to someone who wants to learn about it’s hardware and systems? .

I already have one IBM AS/400 with the 48-bits CISC-processor from 1993 running OS/400 V3R5 that was given to me in 2004 from a company where my dad was working at the time, my most grateful thanks to them. Now I look forward to combine the knowledge I’ve gathered from working with both Linux and IBM hardware to take the next step and learn how to virtualize Linux on IBM midrange and/or mainframe with the POWER processor architecture.

For years we’ve been trying to educate the world about the benefits and the ideology behind free software. We’ve been working hard to enlighten as many people and companies as possible, but somewhere along the way I believe we forgot our goal. Our goal was to get Linux, free software and open source into peoples homes, offices and even the data centers and believe it or not, WE ARE HERE!!!

Open source has gone into a new phase and whether we like it or not the rules have changed. Of course this didn’t happen over night, this is the result of a series of decisions a couple of companies made. Red Hat decided to release an enterprise version of their Linux distribution and begun to compete with Microsoft, Sun, HP and others about the space in the data centers and not too long ago Red Hat also bough the popular open source application server JBoss. Novell bought SUSE and pretty much replaced NetWare with SUSE Linux and joined the party in the data centers.

A company that definitely made a difference in leading open source into the next phase is Sun Microsystems. In the past few years Sun has been changing the licensing of Java to open source and also released OpenSolaris an open source version of Solaris. As another step in Sun’s open source strategy they bought two very significant open source projects, MySQL and VirtualBox. Sun isn’t the only company to buy open source projects at the moment and not to long ago Nokia bought Trolltech and Citrix bough Xen Source.

At this new playground there’s a new set of rules to live up to that the open source-community never faced before. At this playground of companies, business agreements, economics and profitability there’s no room for decisions based on ideology. We need to help these companies find ways to make their decisions so that they do not interfere with the ideology behind open source and so that these companies can benefit from their decisions.

It’s no longer the open source-community’ believe in their ideology that brings open source further, open source has silently taken the step into the commercial world and whatever you all think about that it was all of us that brought it there. We got what we asked for and now it’s time to learn to play by the new rules.

The last ten years speculations about however this is the year for Linux or not has been literally attacking us when surfing the net. This year these speculation has been hard to find despite the fact that the number of people speaking for open source has been growing strong last year thanks to Ubuntu and others. The only one I can remember to speculate about if this is THE year is IBM who said that they never said it before, but 2008 is the year Linux take over our desktops.

Instead all the discussions are about that Lenovo released two of their laptop models from the IBM ThinkPad-series with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop pre-installed on the Swedish market and that HP and other computer manufactures are planning on releasing some of their models with Linux pre-installed. Two months into 2008 two huge companies bought three important and significant open source projects. Of course am I thinking about that Sun bought MySQL and VirtualBox, and that Nokia bought Trolltech including the copyright for QT.

The fact that huge companies has begun to buy open source projects is absolutely positive in my point of view and I’m not worried that these projects will be closed source or difficult to access in other ways like many others do. The companies are not going to close the source of further releases since the open source community is the worlds greatest test department free of charges. To release a product as open source for people and small businesses to download and use free of charge results in that they report bugs and literally test your product for you. When this product is considered stable the manufacturer package the product together with administration tools, security updates and patches, documentation and support to an enterprise product for companies that need these kinds of guarantees.

The benefits of big IT companies buying and developing open source software is that the development becomes more stable and organized since a company has to deliver a product to survive. These big IT companies also guarantees that the product is working together with different hardware and software that a non-profit open source project got a hard time to provide to the customer. The fact that big IT companies is buying open source projects makes them competitive on the market for software which will contribute to more companies taking the step to open source solutions.

Open source is also a great marketing strategy, to give your customer access to the product before it’s all done gives the customers the possibility to have all the internal testing done when the finished enterprise version of the product hits the market and the implementation can be done instantly. For all technicians that work with these products open source gives them the opportunity to run exactly the same software at home without expensive licensing models and the fact that they’re able to influence the development of the product they use.

The companies has finally accepted the challenge of open source! 2008 will certainly be an interesting year in open source history.

Novell together with IBM has developed a special edition of SUSE Linux named SUSE Linux Enterprise Server Starter System for IBM System z. As the name tells it’s SUSE Linux for IBM’s most powerful servers IBM System z, and with the package you get SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP1 together with administration tools for SUSE-based virtual servers. Novell says that with this new product it will be as easy to install Linux on a mainframe as it is on a regular PC. This opens for a lot of new opportunities for the use of mainframe computers.

For all of IBM’s customers that already invested millions of dollars into mainframe computers this is good news since they can reuse their hardware when building a more standardized server environment. For new customers this opens new possibilities to virtualize Linux servers and all the benefits that comes with using stable and redundant mainframe computers for virtualization. The different models of IBM System z can run from eight to 1500 virtual Linux servers which means there is a size of IBM System z for everyone. Other benefits from virtualize Linux servers on your company IBM System z is that you can use all of the administration tools your staff is used to.

IBM is working together with RedHat on developing an edition for IBM System z since before.

Source: http://www.idg.se/2.1085/1.143428 (swedish)