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

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.

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.

Recently many have noted a comment made by Mark Shuttleworth in response to Canonical’s support of WINE and Microsoft Windows compatability). The community response to Shuttleworth’s comments were of mixed results. I must admit, that I agree with Shuttleworth. He stated:

Many already know that Apple’s Mac OS X series of operating systems is not Microsoft Windows and will not run Windows applications, they also need to understand that GNU/Linux is not Windows and cannot natively run Windows applications. Apple has gotten this far without that need for emulation and people still purchase and utilize their products. The key behind their success is all marketing; from the eye candy to the advertising. The question is, when am I going to see real advertising for GNU/Linux? When will I be able to turn on the television and right after those stupid “I am a Mac/PC” commercials, observe a GNU/Linux one?

A PC user using GNU/Linux would need to understand that this is not a cheaper alternative to run their Windows applications. Shuttleworth is correct in stating that it needs to succeed on its own terms or it will fail. GNU/Linux needs to stand up on its own two feet and be recognized for its worth. I had made this exact point in a past post. But the only way for that to ever happen is when the average PC user understands that it exists and is also not a Windows clone.

If you didn’t notice yet, I enjoy doing a lot of “thinking about the past.” Last weekend I walked into a Target and while browsing through their electronics section, I noticed that they were selling a version of the ASUS Eee PC 900. Priced at approximately $250 and coming with a version of Xandros Linux. For well over a year I have been reading of these new sub-notebooks coming pre-installed with GNU/Linux but I had never seen one in person. This notebook is probably the smallest I had seen (8.9 inch). I immediately wanted one but did not get it…yet.

The event made me travel back in time to a remote and distant period when I used to work in retail; specifically at Best Buy, during the 90’s as a service technician. On the shelf, Best Buy used to carry and distribute other Operating Systems outside of Microsoft Windows. This was at a time when people saw that they had choices. You could have chosen from Red Hat Linux, SuSE Linux, Mandrake (now Mandriva) to even BeOS. Then, all of a sudden they all just disappeared. Retailers began selling nothing but Microsoft products and every now and then you may find Apple products. At least this was the case until recently (8 months ago or so) when I walked into a Best Buy I noticed that being sold, on the very bottom shelf and hidden to the side was Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux. I got excited but that excitement was very short lived when I realized that the average PC user will not know what it is, even if they do take notice of it. They have grown too accustomed to believing that there only exists Microsoft.

Now I do not know what tactics Canonical has to start gaining additional recognition beyond the GNU/Linux community but now is a better time than any for the company to start promoting itself more into the public’s eye. Modern day computing has literally gone through a face lift and almost everything has moved toward the cloud we refer to as the World Wide Web. Individuals are looking for something that is light weight and performs well; which is ideal for the up and coming sub-notebook industry.With some of these laptops offered preloaded with GNU/Linux, some people are starting to realize that there exists more beyond Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS X. But is that enough?

In the past I had posted on other blogs some tactics to which companies such as Canonical can use for additional recognition. You can find some of those posts here and here; but I will repeat them again in this post. For the time being I will continue to pick on Canonical seeing how they offer a great and easy-to-use desktop solution for the beginner to advanced PC users. And while the company has been providing a nice stable solution, it is my personal opinion that they have been spreading themselves too thin. What I mean is that they cover a little bit of everything in an attempt to provide an all-in-one solution. What I would like to see is more focus on specific aspects or industries, i.e. an Education, Business, etc. versions of Ubuntu. With regards to education,  I am not talking about Edubuntu. I am talking about something that a middle to high school student could be using at school for productivity and such and also something that a college student could be using. I am talking about an affordable solution that the schools could deploy on all of their systems. Here is an extract from my original post:

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As a good example, the foundation of the Microsoft Windows platform rests on three unstable pillars. If one were to fall, the rest will follow. These pillars are: (1) Education, (2) Productivity and (3) Multimedia related. The easiest and more influential to go after initially would be education. Not only would it be cheaper for a school to deploy and run the Linux Operating System but the students come out with familiarity in the platform. By the time they go into their respective careers, the seed would have been planted. It also would not stop a student from purchasing a Linux-based PC for their home computing seeing how they would be familiar with it at school.

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In my second comment I wrote:

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I understand that Canonical has a Ubuntu variant known as Edubuntu, but it is really not emphasized enough for the younger generation while the older middle-high school and college student will need more applications outside of the traditional productivity suites (i.e. Open Office, etc.).

For example, when I went to college I was studying in an Electronic Engineering course. Outside of Matlab, there was no known support of other electronic/engineering related applications for the Linux platform. There could be more applications to fill in this void.

Also, Microsoft pushed these “bundle software packages.” At that time it was Microsoft’s Windows 2000 with Office 2000, Visual Studio 6, Visio, etc. A student obtained this to be able to accomplish school tasks from home. The catch was that it was all added to your tuition! Why did I have to pay for this?!?!? Why can’t a company like Canonical devise a method of deployment? First market and influence the school(s) to start converting to a Linux Operating System and then provide their own bundle packages.

Not too long ago, I wrote to our Secretary of Education in the U.S. and offered some friendly advice and suggestions to better our education system; saving costs that can be placed into something else more needed. The suggestions focused on open source alternatives. In their reply, it has been claimed that the concept of open source had started to be adopted (more in the private institutions) but it was not the national governments role to facilitate such a change. In the end it was up to the State and more on the school district that was made in charge of these decisions. Should commercialized Linux Operating System distributors start there?

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Going along those same lines, would it be to Canonical’s advantage to start packaging specific versions of Ubuntu Linux? Such as Ubuntu Server (which already exists), Ubuntu Business, Ubuntu Education, Ubuntu Professional. Take a chapter from the competitor’s hand book; i.e. Microsoft. It seemed to have worked for them, the only difference is that Canonical will charge the same price for all: free.

To make a long story short, I just bought an ASUS Eee PC 901 from Amazon which I look forward to getting.

In continuation to my last post, I wish to pick up from where I left off. I had expressed some disappointment with my initial experience just after I installed the Intreprid Ibex (8.10) server edition of Ubuntu. I must admit that I was extremely pleased with the fact that the operating system did not install X. As an acting server, X is rarely needed and to those who are more than capable of working from the command line, it is pure heaven. That is my environment but is it a correct default environment? Let us say that the user is not as proficient on the command line, especially a UNIX/Linux command line running in your traditional bash shell. Would they know and be capable enough to run aptitude to install GNOME, KDE or any other graphical environment? With the default being the command shell, we are to assume that the user will be an intermediate to advanced one. If that is the case then why during the installation am I not prompted with the ability to set up my root password? An intermediate to advanced user is going to want to know what the root password is, even though it is taboo to log in as root; the preferable method being sudo. On the desktop version of Ubuntu, I can understand not setting up the root password. I just shouldn’t have to go into single user mode just to reset my root password into something I need it to be.

For example, Red Hat takes a lot of pride in being able to transition whole companies from Microsoft Windows Server to RHEL. They made it easy from setup to deployment. All tools and environments are there from the very beginning. Can you imagine a Windows administrator installing Ubuntu Server and getting a shell? A shell? That is unheard of, right? 

I know, there is plenty of documentation out there to address some of these issues, especially on Canonical’s website pertaining to Ubuntu Server; but what I have learned with real life experience is that a great percentage of individuals either do not have the time or patience to read this documentation. Frustrated I have told people to RTFM or man- the desired information until my face had turned blue. The point was never understood. I am sure that there are a lot of you who understand where I am coming from.

Going back to my initial problem and concern, my Qlogic Fibre Channel HBA was not being detected. Upon further research I noticed that it attempts to load a binary blob from /lib/firmware. It needs to load qla2300_fw.bin but fails to do so. Immediately after the failure, the system advises to go to a Qlogic ftp site to obtain the binary. Here is the best part, the binary DOES exist in in /lib/firmware and when I download the latest off of Qlogic’s ftp site, I get the same result. The best option, again, is to work from source and working with the physical modules stacked on top of the core module (i.e. qla2300 on top of qla2xxx).

I did find some other approaches to work around this here and here. Even in these approaches, I would still not be able to boot from SAN which is extremely common in enterprise computing. Qlogic is an extremely popular source for Fibre Channel and iSCSI HBAs and I find it extremely difficult to believe that out-of-box Ubuntu Server does not support it in full. I have yet to try my pile of Emulex and LSI Fibre Channel and SAS HBAs to see if I get the same results.

Some of you may be thinking, well that is just a piece of hardware and again, I will remind you that I am coming from a data storage background. This is not something insignificant when coming from that industry. Which brings me to my next point: High Availability. I was also surprised that I had to go through aptitude, after the installation, to install multipath-tools. Although, I do have to note that in RHEL and SLES, you do have to specifically add this package during installation. It is a shame that Ubuntu Server never gave me an option to review and install packages. It only asked for the types of services that this server was going to run. That is: DNS, LAMP, Mail, OpenSSH, PostgreSQL, Print, Samba, Tomcat Java servers or as a Virtual Machine host. No more details on packages are accessible beyond that point. I can only imagine how frustrating this can be when configuring 100 blades or more in a data center; even when setting up a Kickstart file.

Again, please do not misunderstand, I would love to see nothing more than Canonical succeed in everything that they do. I just feel that they are bringing too much of the Desktop mentality into the enterprise. I agree, that you do not have to install everything into a server and limiting the amount of packages installed can make for a quick and light weight installation; at least with the bare necessities. But if I have to install device drivers from source, then I am also going to need GCC along with the kernel source. If I am not familiar with GNU/Linux and the command line, I am going to need a GUI. As a more advanced user, if I am looking for a complete solution where I have control over what I am doing and that includes which packages to install, Ubuntu Server would not be my first choice. In choosing Ubuntu Server I would require some additional time to work and hunt down packages to get it to where I need it to be. In a lot of other situations, if you wanted to set up any of the services listed above where the storage is local to the host and not external in a SAN (but instead connected to a NAS solution) this may be ideal for you. I guess I cannot ask for too much when the installer is one CD.