Call it a non-issue, bad journalism, or a hasty backtrack, but for 24 hours, this was a big deal.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that RedHat would not be supporting competing companies products on its OpenStack cloud software :
In its quest to sell OpenStack, Red Hat has chosen not to provide support to its commercial Linux customers if they use rival versions of OpenStack, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The company's support, which includes providing bug fixes and helping customers if they run into technical problems, is a key reason people use Red Hat rather than free versions of Linux.
Well, queue up the angry competitors with torches and pitchforks. The CEO of Mirantis, whom RedHat seems to have deemed a competitor, was just one of the many outspoken critics.
MegaOm took advantage of the furor to ask, "Is RedHat the new Oracle?" And then, suddenly it was over, as RedHat clarified
its cloud offerings would remain open and available for customers to run whatever software they preferred .
Hasty turn-around? A chagrined CEO back-pedaling as a result of sharply more negative press than he'd anticipated? Or just a Wall Street Journalist getting the story wrong. And anyway,
is RedHat the next Oracle?
Every day tech news is rife with stories about the latest and greatest, but some people don't
want the latest and greatest; they want their old faves. The blogosphere is buzzing this week with the
revelation that
George R.R. Martin , the much-admired author of the
A Game of Thrones and more, actually does his writing on a DOS machine running the old, 1970s word processor,
WordStar .
Should that matter?
I don't think so . Not one bit. In fact, WordStar and DOS have a couple of advantages over more modern hardware and software: probably no Internet connection, no icons, nothing buzzing or beeping or flashing at you. In sum, the perfect environment for focusing on your writing. Judging by the success of GRRM's books, it's working!
What old software do you use? Which old technologies do you hang onto even as the rest of the world chases the newest update?
Here's some good news for everyone except Microsoft:
nine out of ten of the most reliable hosting providers in April 2014 use Linux or FreeBSD as their hosting platform. Microsoft only got one of the ten slots, thanks to Netcetera, a provider specializing in WinServer 2012 hosting. Of the nine top sites, five use Linux and four use FreeBSD. The performance measurements are made at fifteen minute intervals from separate points around the internet, and averages are calculated over the immediately preceding 24 hour period. More detail on the measurement process and stats is available at
Netcraft .
Typically, the install process doesn't stop with the installation of the base OS. You've still got to install and configure a lot of programs and drivers, for example: VirtualBox, Flash, LibreOffice, Java, and NVIDIA drivers, to name but a few. That takes time and energy.
Recently I needed a hard drive upgrade, and after trying out Xubuntu 14.04, I decided to stick with
Crunchbang 11 . With a fresh installation, I needed to quickly get the applications that weren't an apt-get away. Enter
smxi , a handy collection of scripts
created to solve the frequent, repetitive support questions that often appear on IRC channels. Here's a
guide showing how to set up smxi in Crunchbang.
How do you complete your config and install? What other tools and scripts are out there to ease the pain, particularly for multiple machines?
oSC 14 , held April 24-28 in the lovely Mediterranean port town of
Dubrovnik, Croatia , has
come and gone . If you like
openSUSE , expect more of the same. Don't expect any radical changes upcoming for this steady-and-predictable distro!
The conference
focused on high level questions of packaging, approach, distro lifecycle management, and marketing. There were some interesting presentations on specific topics of interest as well, including [the following are all video links]:
The rest of the presentations are available
here [youtube], and conference photos are
here .
SUSE has been my go-to distro since 2001. I'm raising a glass to the openSUSE team and hoping for more green!
Ubuntu keeps working on
optimizations of its controversial UI, and they haven't all been equally liked. This one, too, is sure to cause some controversy:
They've removed the ability to choose whether the buttons go on the left or right side of a window .
That's not necessarily an option that everyone cares about, but those who do, care
strongly about the now-removed feature. From the AskUbuntu forum:
It seems that Canonical went the totalitarian way and ordered that users should not be allowed to change the buttons position (you can find more technical details of this change on the bottom of this post).
As for now the only way to have windows buttons on the right side in 14.04 is to switch from Unity to the Gnome Flashback session (what I personally recommend). More details on how to do that are presented below.
That is, the days of being able to make this personalization to your config, once easily handled either via the
gconf-editor command line tool, or the equally comfortable command:
gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.wm.preferences button-layout ":minimize,maximize,close" have drawn to a close. Hope you like Ubuntu's choices, everyone: they're the only choices you get!
The Debian project has adopted a
code of conduct for participants to its mailing lists, IRC channels, and other modes of communication within the project. The main points of the code are:
- Be respectful
- Assume good faith
- Be collaborative
- Try to be concise
- Be open
Tails , a Debian-based live operating system known for its strong privacy features and pre-configured for anonymous web browsing, has
released version 1.0 after nearly five years of development. The version 1.0 release, in addition to being an
important milestone in the development of the project, addresses a number of
security updates over the previous version. This also marks Tails' 36th stable release since its initial public release in June of 2009.
For more on Tails 1.0, a brief history of the OS and a complete
changelog , read the official
release announcement on the Tails
home site . Distrowatch has information regarding
current and previous releases of Tails. Downloads, both direct and torrent, and installation instructions are available
here .
Ubuntu released version 14.04 LTS (codename "Trusty Tahr") today. This is a long-term support distribution, meaning Ubuntu will support it with security and bug fixes for 5 years as it slowly replaces Ubuntu 12.04 LTS that preceded it.
Recent notable changes, such as the move to systemd or the Mir display server, are absent in this release. However, this release adds arm64 and ppc64el architectures. OpenStack and other "cloud" tools also received many updates.
Although critics often disparage the animal codename, the uniqueness of the word does aide Internet searches. For example, if you search for "Ubuntu Bluetooth" you may get outdated information from previous versions that is no longer relevant. However, adding "Precise Pangolin" or "Trusty Tahr" really helps narrow down the results.