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Even though my goto operating system for servers is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, lately I have been working with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 10.04 and I will admit that it has so far been a great experience. Just like what is expected of a server operating system, it is not intended for the general user base and focused more toward an experience Linux user; especially when by default there exists no GUI. That is one of the best parts in my personal opinions. Another great thing about the OS relates to its simplified installation process and how everything is automatically installed and to an extent configured should you choose to configure the server as a LAMP, DNS, etc.  A couple of years ago, I had reviewed an older 8.10 release here and here and wasn’t impressed. Now, I can see things have changed for the better. Unfortunately I will not be discussing this. But before I get any deeper into this article, I wish to share my experiences with 10.04.

I am currently using Ubuntu Server 10.04 in two ways:

1. Development platform in VirtualBox - The simplified installer allows me to get a base system up and running in a VM guest. I usually decline to install any additional packages but the base and when I am up and running, I will invoke apt-get to grab anything else I was too lazy to customize from the installer. The advantages are that I have a very light weight system. No GUI, just CLI and all the standard packages I need to test my developed device drivers and applications.
2. To host my much needed services - I had an older Dell PC collecting dust in my office. So I decided to revive it and install Ubuntu Server 10.04 on it. It is currently configured to run and host Apache (Bugzilla), MySQL, a git repository, FTP and a bit more. After spending some time to secure MySQL, Bugzilla, ssh and my iptables firewall rules, the PC has been up since and I am able to function more productively; especially since I enabled the node to be accessible outside of my local network.

In both scenarios, the operating system has been a pleasure to work with. Although I do have one complaint and that is when you get to the point of package selection during the installation process, the interface kind of sucks. I am sure that I am not the only one who feels that way but it is what it is.

Now that I finished sharing my personal experiences with the operating system I will continue on to the main topic of this article and that relates to Canonical’s release cycles for their server catered OS. I for one know from experience that the IT industry doesn’t like change. That includes operating systems. The mentality is always that “if it ain’t broke, why fix it.” With that in mind I can see why Red Hat takes many years to release a new official stable release of their flagship OS while continuing to support the current with almost service pack like updates (via a new release such as 5.x or through yum). Truth be told, when a facility deploys and manages an operating system, they usually get comfortable with the release and do not want to stray far off it until one of three conditions are met:

1. It is not supported anymore and they are forced to move on.
2. A new release comes out and it introduces [a] much needed feature(s).
3. Or new hardware is acquired.

So…why do I mention this? I understand the concept of 6 month release cycles and an LTS release every two years. Ideally, you would want to attract potential customers at every LTS release; but those inbetween releases seem like a waste of time and effort ONLY for the server series. Let me explain.

A lot of the general public are still somewhat confused by the whole Long Term Support (LTS) concept and what that truly means. For both desktop and server operating systems, with Canonical, everything inbetween is considered a concept or feature testing release in preparation for the next LTS OS. While this may not be an official explanation coming from Canonical, it has always been general perception. In a non-LTS release you saw the introduction of the Software Center, Upstart, Plymouth, etc. (as is evident with 8.10, 9.04 and 9.10) and now btrfs support is planned for 10.10 (also a non-LTS release) among other features.

For the desktop OS, this is all fine but when we get to the server side of things, why is it still necessary to maintain the same release cycle? Nobody wants to deploy a non-LTS release in a production environment. Especially when the support for that release is not as long as an LTS one. And if something needs to be tested, it can always be tested in the desktop non-LTS releases. This is where I feel that companies such as Red Hat, Novell, Sun/Oracle to even Microsoft got it right. The server editions of their operating system are not meant to see dramatic changes and or additions so often. This is why it is easy for a system administrator to transition from Microsoft Server 2000 to Server 2003 and again 2008. Don’t misunderstand me, I know from experience that a Microsoft Service Pack or upgrade can cause some damage but generally the operating system are focused on stability and standardizing the environment until the next major release.

If I were to suggest a recommendation for Canonical, it would be: “Maintain the 6 month release cycle for the desktop (and netbook) releases with an LTS appearing every two years but as for the server OS, drop the 6 month cycle and adopt an every two year LTS release.“

In recent Linux related news I have been reading about the Ubuntu Control Center (UCC) and the Ubuntu Application Menu (Global Menu). The projects looked extremely interesting so I decided to install them and give them a try. Note that directions for download and installation are provided in the links above.

Ubuntu Control Center (UCC)

In the GNOME desktop environment, most of us have become familiar with the gnome-control-center. The gnome-control-center provided a centralized interface to access various components and elements of your GNOME desktop environment to your general computing experience. This included shortcuts to network configuration tools, disk management tools, display and screensaver related tools, power management and more.

UCC is not that much different. The way in which it stands out is that it is a little more visually appealing to the eye and continues to maintain the new style and themes presented by Canonical for Ubuntu. It is also simplified in presentation and organization. I can see it to be less intimidating to a lesser experienced Ubuntu Linux user. It is my opinion that this is a great step into the right direction. It is these little things that help one distribution stand out over the others. In the open source world we call this differentiation (a topic I will write about in my next post). Although I don’t see myself using it that much, as I usually know which commands to invoke from the command line or which files to modify instead, I can see someone like my wife utilizing this interface and actually be somewhat comfortable with it.

Also note that when it is installed, the application can be launched from Applications > System Tools > UCC.

Global Menu

While this is not an Ubuntu original project, it is one that Canonical desires to use in their distributions intended for smaller devices (i.e. netbooks). At least for now, it is planned to have this feature implemented in the future release of Ubuntu Network Edition (UNE).

The interface reminds one of the similar feature in the Mac OS series of operating systems. Instead of wasting LCD  space for every open application by dropping a File, Edit, etc. menu system, Global Menu will integrate it into the top GNOME panel. This is very desirable for the netbook devices with smaller screens (i.e. 1024×600).

I actually like this. Truth be told, I grew up on Macs, so I am very familiar with this setup and while it is going to take a little bit of getting used to, I have decided to keep it installed with my 10.04 installation on my everyday notebook. Here you can see it in action when a terminal is open:

There are a few drawbacks to this though. It would seem that this feature is only fully functional for GTK+ developed applications. Or at least something to that extent. Certain applications such as Firefox, OpenOffice.org to even VirtualBox will only result in the name of the application to show up in the global menu with options to show the desktop or maximize/minimize the current application. Instead you will find that the generic menu interface will still be presented in the application’s window. Despite this, I still do look forward to seeing what this project grows into.

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.

So, I finally did it. Two days ago I installed Canonical’s latest release Ubuntu 10.04 LTS on my main computing laptop. Just to give you a brief history, since 2001 I have been a Red Hat Linux user. And even when they decided to go enterprise, I decided to stick with the community driven solution, Fedora. Up until two days ago, I had always been running Fedora on my laptop. Although I had been using Ubuntu since their Hardy Heron release (8.04 LTS). In fact, that is what I had the wife work on when it was released and my exposure to Ubuntu was with her using 8.04, 8.10 and 9.10. I was also using 9.04 on my netbook for a short while, at least until I over wrote it with OpenSolaris (currently running b134 of the 2010.03 release candidate) and have also been running it in VirtualBox and one or two servers for development and testing purposes. The reason why I am mentioning this is because I had noticed a lot of great changes with each release. The integration of Upstart, Plymouth, etc. has made a user friendly and beautiful looking computing environment. Wanting to give the latest LTS release a whirl, I decided to do away with my Fedora installation.

First things first, the installation was beyond simple. Answer a couple of questions and just sit back while the installer handles everything else. Once my OS was installed, the PC rebooted and in 10 seconds (possibly less), I was at the log in screen. Note that I am running on a 2 year old Lenovo R61i Thinkpad with 3GB of RAM, 1.8 GHz Intel Dual Core processor and a standard SATA 2.5″ hard drive. Nothing out of the ordinary. It is amazing what can be achieved when you get rid of the traditional init daemon and replace it with Upstart.

So I log in and start to disable the login sounds. I couldn’t stand it in Microsoft Windows, so I would not tolerate it in Ubuntu. After that I began to install all of my software. I had a huge list that I had to go through; software and packages that were in my previous Fedora installation. For the most part I was in the command line invoking aptitude unless I came a across a package that I couldn’t find (not knowing the string name of the package). So I would then navigate to Applications > Ubuntu Software Center and start searching through there. It is an extremely user friendly and amazing way to install, manage and uninstall your applications.

I then set up my e-mail accounts, configured conky, customized the Avant-Window-Navigator and even tuned Firefox to run its cache entirely out of RAM through a local tmpfs  mount. Overall, a pleasant experience.

The only downside was attempting to figure out why network manager was not enabling my wireless card. I have an Atheros wireless card:

Its driver was also installed and fully functional:

But after some playing around with iwconfig, I was able to get it working and tuned to how I wish to enable/disable it with local hotkeys and alias commands pointing to customized scripts.

The reason for this problem is…who cares. I read many blogs complaining how Linux is not ready for desktop use. Blah blah blah. Neither is Microsoft Windows, if you choose to complain for the same reasons. Often the complaint is about wireless cards. How many fresh Windows installations will have a wireless driver (or graphics and anything else) to your device(s)? Not many if at all. Fortunately enough OEM distributors provide the user with a driver resource CD or you may have to dig up the device driver from the collection of CDs or somehow get on the Internet and obtain it from the manufacturer’s website. I never saw this as a problem. As long as Canonical does an excellent job in working with OEM providers, then this should never be seen. 95% of Windows users never have to install Windows from a CD. And if a Ubuntu imaged PC is bought from Dell or <insert other OEM distributor here>, chances are they would never have to install Ubuntu from a CD and all their devices would be working out-of-box.

All in all, this has so far been a very pleasant experience. I even took the time to upgrade my wife’s 9.10 installation to the latest. The upgrade, while taking 1.5 hours, went smoothly. No problems seen. Great job Canonical!

UPDATE 27Jun10: I ended up finding out of a great fix for the wireless driver problem I had been seeing during and after installation. Note that I was able to get it functional but it was not operating as fast as I would have liked it. So I found this blog posting with a great fix for the AR5212 Atheros card and it seemed to have resolved those issues.

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.

I came across this blog entry and it got me thinking about another blog entry which I cannot find at the moment. The latter briefly covered a topic which made a lot of sense. One reason for Linux not gaining wider market share is that it was not available as a pre-installed operating system.

Face it, no matter how user friendly, stable and well performing the operating system becomes, the majority of basic PC users will never get a chance to touch it because they will never install it. Think about it. An individual whose only objective and limited knowledge of personal computing is to turn on the PC, wait for the OS to finish loading and open up a web browser or an office productivity application. The most they know is what already comes pre-installed. So if they walk into a Best Buy or order from Dell’s website, they trust that whatever comes with the PC will work for them. They do not know the difference.

So when I read entries like the one I linked to above on where to obtain copies of Linux, does it really matter? Are you going to tell your neighbor’s mom or your co-worker’s grandfather that he/she should go to the download sites of Ubuntu, Fedora or <enter other distro here>. And even if you do, what are the chances that they will really understand the installation process enough to be able to feel comfortable in doing it. Yes, Ubuntu is easy to install, but if a user has never done it before they may be reluctant in doing it for the first time and scrap the idea altogether.

What we need to find is more of a combined effort in getting some of the major distributions pre-installed on more desktop/laptop solutions. I have seen articles and advertisements (and the link above mentions it also) for Ubuntu on Dell and ZaReason PCs. I am not talking about netbooks here but instead regular PCs. On the UNIX front, I know I have seen an article about OpenSolaris pre-installed on certain models of Toshiba laptops. I do not think we will see any changes until we see more offerings of a reliable solution: a GNU/Linux solution.

I first reviewed the ASUS Eee PC 901 when I was getting frustrated with the Xandros Linux customized installation that it came preinstalled with. Within a couple of days, I immediately installed Easy Peasy over it and had a significantly better experience. And while Canonical was pushing their Ubuntu Netbook Remix (UNR), I recently decided to install the desktop release and have my netbook run the standard 9.04 release of the Ubuntu distribution. Below are the results to my experience.

Now before I get into the details, I know that this is an appliance and should be used as such. My problem is, that I am used to multitasking and being efficient. Some of the netbook based operating systems restrict the user’s ability to multitask. It does not mean that it is not possible. It just means that it becomes increasingly difficult when every application you open full screens and cannot be adjusted. This is why I wanted to try out the desktop version. This multitasking becomes much easier when I connect the VGA output to my 47″ 1080P HD TV. There is a lot of desktop space to work with. Note that I am familiar with UNR’s desktop switcher. I still wanted to try the desktop version.

I downloaded the ISO from the Ubuntu website and then used unetbootin to convert the ISO image to my USB flash drive. I plugged in the flash drive and powered on the netbook. Before anything, I verified the device boot order in the BIOS. The installer loaded from the USB flash drive and the installation began. The installation was simple and I experienced no problems. After the installation, I removed the USB flash drive and rebooted the PC. All loaded without any problems. This included device drivers. The only thing additional that I had to install was Cheese as my webcam application. Seeing how this was not Easy Peasy or the Ubuntu Netbook Remix, it would not have been configured to install by default.

With regards to performance, this operating system seems to run smoothly. During my customization of the installation, I went ahead and enabled the enhanced 3-D rendering while also installing gDeskCal, Avant Window Navigator, GNOME-Do and Conky. I also modified my startup applications to load all at login.

Two weeks I have been playing with this and have experience nothing but positive results. Visually there are differences between 9.04 and previous releases as you start seeing fancier looking transparent windows informing you that the wireless device has connected to a broadcasting signal. I do not remember how the previous releases handled audio configurations but it seems somewhat intuitive in 9.04. Normally I would go back to my wife’s PC to check this out as she used to run on 8.04 but that too has recently been upgraded.

The most noticeable change is boot time. It is super quick! After grub loaded the kernel image, it takes 20-25 seconds for me to be logged in and working on my desktop. Another few seconds go by and I get a message that my wireless is connected. Wow! Fedora 11 Leonidas (just released 2 days ago) has also sped up boot times to about 20 seconds. This is probably in response to all those instant-on PC setups such as the Splashtop, etc. The focus being: get me to my desktop and working in as little time possible. I wonder how Microsoft will compete with that on Windows. Even when I tried the Release Candidate of 7 for the 2 days I virtualized it through VirtualBox, it still took some time to load the OS and get me to my desktop.

I believe Canonical is doing an excellent job with this distribution. I just wish I could see more laptops sold with a customized version of Ubuntu pre-installed.  As Mark Shuttleworth had pointed out in the past, Canonical’s first focus is to go up against Apple. Apple is well known for its visually appealing hardware and software. The only way for Ubuntu to get its chance is to have its distribution pre-installed on capable hardware where it can then be pre-customized with whatever 3-D rendering and applications are required.