dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/blog

As long as I can remember I had been using the Netscape web browser which evolved to Mozilla and now Firefox. I still use Firefox and have grown so comfortable with it that I don’t really desire to move onto anything else. Needless to say, Mozilla’s products are not perfect and there is always room for additional features and what I believe to be necessities in order to function in today’s world of computing.

For instance, I wish there was more of a concentrated effort to bring additional usability and manageability of these same Mozilla products (i.e. Firefox, Thunderbird, to even the SeaMonkey suite) where it can truly compete with Microsoft to even IBM’s Lotus in the professional world.

In this initial example I will choose to focus Lotus Notes and SameTime. This application was built around enterprise productivity. Everything is integrated in such a way where I do not only have the ability to work from my e-mail but through SameTime I can easily connect to the same directory of individuals for instant IM messaging. Google saw an advantage to such an approach and had it integrated into their GMAIL web client. So how difficult would it be to have Thunderbird do the same thing? Now, SeaMonkey may be a better candidate for this integration (as it resembles more of what Netscape used to be) but nobody really knows of its existence.

Another example is the way Microsoft integrates all of its products together to provide a complete solution. If I am using Internet Explorer and I click on something that requires Powerpoint, Excel or something else Microsoft developed, there are no problems in opening up those files and working with them in a new tab of my web browser. It could be beneficial for Mozilla to partner up with Oracle and provide similar transparent integration into their products with Star Office and OpenOffice.org. In fact, what is stopping Red Hat, Canonical, Novell or even Oracle from developing such integration modules in their workstation solutions? I always found it annoying that when I click on a PDF file to open it up in a new tab, it runs outside of the browser instead (unless I were to install a third party developed plug-in most of which are written for Microsoft Windows anyways).

Other things that I would like to see Mozilla work on is better management for corporate environments. Internet Explorer has a centralized managed infrastructure in that it can be controlled using Group Policies across an entire network emphasizing consistency. If you need to change the settings across all web browsers in your network, IE makes that easy and realistic. It is not realistic to e-mail co-worker HOWTOs (especially if they do not have the required permissions) nor is it realistic to visit or remote into every node to address those same changes. This form of management also includes patching/upgrading the browser/e-mail clients. Sometimes this needs to be controlled on a corporate basis as opposed to an individual user.

Mozilla has been doing an excellent job in conquering their fair percentage of market share. All without the billions of dollars dumped into marketing (as seen by their competitors). They are a known household name. A lot of end users know what Firefox is. To move on to the next best thing, I feel they need to start concentrating more on the corporate world.

Well, it has been 23 days or so since my last update. Things have been a bit hectic. For instance, I am spending all of my free time in a start-up company intended to cater to the data storage industry. My business partner and I have a few commitments with a couple of technology partners to deliver a data storage management suite. Other time is being spent in writing a book for No Starch Press on OpenSolaris. The book is outlined for 12 chapters and the first 3 have already been submitted to the publisher.

Some other exciting stuff taking up free time is that my wife is expecting our first born this January. Between now and then, our baby daughter can show up into this world, so we are on high alert. Although so far, all is looking well.

I have also spent some time playing around with Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala. It had been installed on my wife’s laptop and we have yet to see any problems or concerns. It was a brand new Sony Vaio laptop and all hardware was recognized without an issue. The operating system runs extremely quick and very smooth. Note that she is coming from the LTS Hardy Heron release, so there are some noticeable changes to her.

I must admit that Canonical is doing a great job with this distribution and I look forward to the next LTS release. I am even thinking of making a permanent switch from Fedora Linux to Ubuntu Linux. Please do not misunderstand me. I enjoy Fedora and have always been a fan. The thing with Fedora is that it is a bleeding edge technology distribution and things have a tendency to break every now and then. I have found myself with less time to go in and address those issues. Although it will not stop me from running a stable installation of RHAS on my Intel servers.

Going back to Ubuntu 9.10, while I find the integration of Plymouth a bit redundant in splash screens (one traditional and one in X; the second after an early initialization into X), one thing that I am really impressed and intrigued by is the integration of Upstart. Upstart reminds me so much of the Service Management Facility (SMF) found in Solaris/OpenSolaris as it shares some of the same basic functionality. It is Upstart that helps to speed up the boot process while also offering a nice and uniform service manager to replace the traditional init daemon. It is just amazing to see my wife’s laptop get to the desktop within 25 seconds from post. Some other positives I saw were in the addition of the Ubuntu Software Center and Ubuntu One cloud-based storage service.

Most of my recent computing hours have been spent in OpenSolaris anyways. Most of it is in development of the earlier mentioned application suite while also using it for the OpenSolaris book. The 2010.02 release is really looking good as I have been playing with build 128. It is currently installed on my Asus Eee 901 and also running on one of my 1U Sun Fire Intel servers. I even took the time to really tune the OS on the netbook and it is running fairly well. That includes, disabling unnecessary services, customizing the CPU configuration (modify the cpupm option to read the following in the /etc/power.conf file: cpupm enable poll-mode) file to utilize less power, enable ZFS compression and disabling ZFS atime updates. I even took the time to enable a RAM-based mounted file system for Firefox caching.

Nothing else new to really report but I am looking forward to the coming year and the future of some of these open source projects. Part of that is the excitement is Linux in the mobile computing industry. Linux had always had a good market share in the mobile industry. There just seems to be more excitement around Google’s Android and in turn Chrome OS.

Earlier today I came across this interesting article on tuning your SSD drive to achieve greater performance. It is worth noting that this article is intended for Linux and when it mentions setting your file systems mount options with noatime, this too is relevant for file systems that support such an option.

I would also take the time to read the comments. There are some distribution specific responses to the author’s notes.

Linked from linuxtoday.com, I found an interesting article posted on FlexTk regarding NAS Performance Comparisons between Linux, Windows and OpenSolaris. The results are very interesting. Under each category, comparisons are drawn between:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (64-bit)
• Ubuntu Server 9.04 (64-bit)
• OpenSolaris 2009.06 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2003 (64-bit)
• Windows Server 2008 (64-bit)
• Windows Storage Server 2008 (64-bit)

I assume that each operating system is utilizing the default file systems with default settings for that specific release. Red Hat and Ubuntu should be using Ext3-fs, Windows obviously uses NTFS while OpenSolaris is built on top of ZFS. The CIFS/NFS exported share(s) in turn are running on top of these defaulted file systems. Either way, with average overall performance, OpenSolaris seemed to really shine. It also did well in some of the other categories which made sense when knowing the design of the ZFS file system.

Yesterday afternoon I was really bored at work and had eventually navigated to a website dedicated to Easter Eggs that could be found on an operating system, software application and more. Naturally I went to the list of operating systems and started looking up the operating systems which were accessible to me. As I read through the Linux and UNIX related ones, I had already known some but there were a few that I was interested in trying.

Seeing how I was on an OpenSolaris laptop I decided to first look through the SunOS list. Unfortunately none of them seemed to work. It would appear that they were taken out. But I did remember one from many years ago that a friend (Marian Lakov) had shown me. Originally found on an installation of RHEL, it was in the man page for the xorg.conf file.

Listed under the VIDEOADAPTER SECTION you will read the following: Nobody wants to say how this works. Maybe nobody knows…

If you know of any hidden secret(s) that is not listed on the site posted earlier, please feel free to share.

Before I continue with my entry, I just wish to note that VirtualBox 2.2.4 has been released. You can review the Changelog here.

Anyways, whenever virtualizing a non-Windows operating system which utilizes the X Windowing system over VirtualBox, it may be beneficial to have some flexibility on supported resolutions for the GUI. For example, I was using OpenSolaris 2008.11 and VirtualBox seems to create a “virtual” monitor where the operating system (specifically X) is unable to read the monitor’s EDID information to obtain supported resolution information (among other things). As a result of this, by default X assigns 800×600@60 and 640×480@60 as supported display formats. When you are working on a wider screen that supports something larger, this makes for an uncomfortable computing experience; especially with limited graphical space on the virtual client.

In my case, my laptop’s wide screen has a native resolution of WXGA (1280×800). So I had plenty of extra room to work with. WhileVirtualBox allows you to fullscreen a virtual client, I like to multitask and this would limit my multitasking. I wanted to create a display configuration that would utilize most of the 1280×800 while allowing me to manage multiple other applications/windows on my host operating system. So I figured to write those entries manually in my xorg.conf file. This is located at /etc/X11/. So I began to play around with some standard display formats.

By default, OpenSolaris had the following under the “Screen” section:

Below that I added:

I then reloaded X by rebooting the virtual client and once the operating system came back up, all those options were available. No more default 800×600 and 640×480. In the image below you will notice that the OpenSolaris Virtual Client is displaying at a 1024×600.

Added Note 3Jun09: Please refer to Comments 1-3 for information on Guest Additions.

Two days ago I had written at linux.com that I was looking forward to the release of Fedora Linux 11 Leonidas, just to find out today that the release date had been pushed further back from June 6th to June 9th. Well, it just looks like I have to wait a little bit longer. ;-)

September 1-4 Red Hat is holding a Summit in Chicago, IL. Some of the features and highlights include:

• technical and business seminars
• hands-on-labs and demos
• customer case studies
• networking opportunities
• partner displays
• visionary keynotes
• direct collaboration with Red Hat engineers

While I had sumbitted a paper to present in the summit, yesterday I unfortunately received the news that this year I am unable to present my topic on the “Future of Linux Storage Management.” Maybe I will give it another try next year and it will give me some time to polish up the presentation.

For those of you interested in attending in Chicago, you can still register.