Archive for February, 2009

Ubuntu 9.10 Server to Focus on Cloud Computing

Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu foundation, announced today the plans for Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala”. The server version will focus on developments both in the Amazon EC2 cloud as well as allowing users to build their own elastic computing clouds utilizing the Eucalyptus platform.

Ubuntu started offering official AMI’s to run on EC2 just a short time ago and is planning on building out its list of images to allow users to deploy pre-installed packages of the OS and applications to run on EC2 and other clouds as well as building on the ubuntu-vmbuilder software as well. Ubuntu-vmbuilder is an application that lets users automate the creation of virtual machines for testing and development purposes as well as deployment of applications which is right on track with the elastic computing idea. Shuttleworth promises to make an easier way to interact with clouds: “Wouldn’t it be apt for Ubuntu to make the Amazon jungle as easy to navigate as, say, APT?”

The other thing they will be focusing on with the new release is integrating the Eucalyptus platform into the OS. Eucalyptus is an open source suite to build an elastic computing cloud similar to Amazon’s EC2 using your own hardware. It uses the Xen hypervisor just like EC2 and it meant to be able to interface with EC2′s web services as well as query interfaces. Plans for Ubuntu server are to allow the “cloud” resource pool to grow and shrink with the resource requirements of the cluster. In theory, all servers would run during peak hours and as resources are no longer required, the physical hosts would be suspended or shutdown all together to conserve energy.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 21st, 2009

World’s Largest Linux Desktop Deployment

Userful and ThinNetworks announced on Tuesday that they have been selected by the Brazilian Ministry of Education to to deploy 365,800 desktops to Brazilian schools. The deployment will be the largest virtual desktop deployment in the world as well as the largest Linux desktop deployment in the world. The Userful platform allowed the schools to utilize each PC as 10 desktops rather than a 1 to 1 ratio. This allowed schools to keep costs low and Userful is bragging that the cost was less than $50 per seat (without keyboard, mouse, and monitor). You can download a 2-seat version of their software for free from their website for personal use to try it out. You just need a PC with two video cards, two monitors, and enough USB slots for two keyboards and mice. Another multi-station solution, NComputing, deployed a 180,000 workstation deployment in Macedonia last year. They are claiming up to 30 “stations” per PC (example they gave was of a sub-$1000 PC from Dell).

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 20th, 2009

Microsoft Wins a Major Victory in ‘Vista Capable’ Case

The judge for the Microsoft ‘Vista Capable’ class action lawsuit has dismissed the class action lawsuit and told the individuals in the case they can pursue the case further on their own if they so choose. The judge stated that the plaintiffs failed to “adequately shown that the Vista Capable program caused widespread, artificial inflation in PC prices”. The judge did not, however, dismiss the case completely. She simply split the case up saying that the problem wasn’t a widespread problem, but there could be just cause for each of the individuals to pursue the cases individually.

In the case, a number of consumers went after Microsoft claiming that the “Vista Capable” stickers sold on PCs just before Vista was released were misleading since the PCs weren’t actually capable of running all of the features of Vista. The PCs ran the base OS fairly sluggishly and did not run Windows’ new Aero graphics effects.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 19th, 2009

Zimbra Adds Reminder Zimlets

Zimbra has been gaining popularity as an open source alternative to Microsoft Exchange for some time, but its real power is in its ZImlet extension functionality. Last week they added a killer Zimlet to their arsenal as well as a new Zimlet this week that will be very handy and both revolve around helping us not forget things, a problem any busy person faces. :) Last week’s Zimlet was an email reminder Zimlet. The extension allows you to set a reminder to respond to an email so it’s not forgotten. This is a great replacement to my error-prone system of marking items as unread that I need to remember to respond to. For instance, let’s say I get an email that a subscription or license to something will be expiring in a few months. Rather than placing an event in my calendar and possibly missing the reminder after the date goes by, I can set a reminder that I need to do something about that email later on. For me, this is a killer feature as I often forget to respond to emails that don’t necessarily need to be responded to right away. The second reminder Zimlet is a birthday reminder. It allows you to remind you of a birthday of one of your contacts and set multiple reminders before the birthday so you don’t have to worry about forgetting a birthday and get yourself into trouble :) Both of these new Zimlets require ZCS 5.0.12 or greater for the server-side or you can install them into Zimbra Desktop as well.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 19th, 2009

HP Now Supporting Ubuntu on Its Servers

HP has announced that it will be partnering with Canonical, the commercial backers of Ubuntu, to provide certification and support for Ubuntu on its servers. HP already offers Red Hat and SUSE Enterprise Linux on their servers, but will now be offering support for Ubuntu as well. Ubuntu has been very popular on the desktop but is also making a charge in the datacenter as well. The LTS releases of Ubuntu offer customers a long-term supported Linux operating system without the costs of Red Hat or SUSE. Of course, customers can purchase support from Canonical if they so choose, but they are free to use Ubuntu for, well, free. It has been gaining popularity both in small companies and in large companies with the likes of Wikipedia running Ubuntu exclusively. HP will be offering the OS on its ProLiant product lines which includes the cheap pedestal servers to blade center systems.

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Filed under News : Comments (0) : Feb 17th, 2009

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