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More purchases and conglomeration on the way this year.
The buzz at VMworld Europe, before it has even started, is that Novell is to purchase Canadian data center management software company Platespin. Novell has now posted the news on their site, and many are scrambling to figure out where this will lead them as the software is very popular in the VM market. (UPDATE: Platespin have posted their announcement regarding the Novell acquisition as well)
Novell is starting to grow again: it now owns SuSE Linux, Ximian (original makers of Gnome), and just recently purchased open colaboration vendor SiteScape.
If you’d like more info about the acquisition, feel free to register for the Novell-Platespin webinar.
From the Platespin announcement:
On February 25, 2008, Novell announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire PlateSpin Ltd. The combination of Novell’s platform and automation management with PlateSpin’s leading solutions for workload relocation, protection and provisioning will give customers the agility to cross physical and virtual boundaries so IT can work together. Both organizations are focused on helping customers maximize the strategic value of the heterogeneous data center. Novell and PlateSpin will deliver products for complete workload lifecycle management and optimization for Linux, UNIX, and Windows operating systems in the physical and virtual data center. Below you will find details about the acquisition and what it means to current and future PlateSpin customers and partners.
From the Novell announcement:
The acquisition of PlateSpin will allow Novell to offer customers a full solution stack with a powerful virtualization platform and a best-in-class heterogeneous management solution. Together, Novell and PlateSpin will solve many of the data center challenges that customers face today, including:
- Relocation: PlateSpin provides a completely integrated product suite that automates the assessment and migration phases of data center initiatives, like server consolidation, data center relocation and hardware upgrades, to help customers reduce costs, power consumption and space in the data center.
- Protection: PlateSpin’s disaster recovery solutions offer affordable workload protection that leverages virtualization technology to protect both physical and virtual servers in the data center, for improved security and business continuity.
- Provisioning: Using PlateSpin’s technologies, customers will have a single approach to imaging and configuring physical and virtual workloads regardless of platform. This eliminates the manual install process and dramatically reduces the time to provision new server workloads. It will also enable customers to address changing resource requirements at peak demand times as well as in test lab scenarios.
- Optimization and Management: Novell and PlateSpin optimize the balance between physical and virtual infrastructure by automatically monitoring and making infrastructure adjustments based on server availability and workload demand. By automating the process and increasing the visibility into how workloads use physical and virtual resources over time, customers will be able to increase server utilization and optimize their data centers by better addressing common workload movement challenges.
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I’ve been reading the IndieHIG (Independent Human Interface Guidelines) a lot lately, being a fan of Apple’s original HIG, and (to a lesser extent) the Sun Java HIG as well.
While it’s great that they are taking on the Macintosh apps that are not aligning to standards, they don’t really apply anywhere else at all, and that’s a real shame. What the venerable Apple HIG really had going for it was that it could be applied anywhere, and that’s why it was so popular.
I really think the new HIGs to be watching are those from Gnome HIG and KDE HIG as more developpers are involved and the rules can be applied to all types of applications, and in many environments.
But hey, keep up the good work IndieHIG - just change your name to something more suitable like Indie Apple HIG.
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SSH is one powerful tool. You can do just about everything under the sun using an SSH login to a remote computer. SSH works very well in low-bandwidth situations like dialup, or satlinks.
But wakeup, we’re no longer in the 80s - people want GUIs, let’s give them fancy-pants graphics, bouncing cursors and silly linux wizards. Remotely.
Enter Xming, what I would name as top of my favorite applications. Xming is just like X over SSH, for dummies (or people who would rather spend more time working).
Xming allows you to connect to remote or local Linux workstations and servers and run full graphical applications on those remote machines on your local Windows computer.
Here’s how it works: all of the applications are run remotely, but when it comes to the graphics, the information that would invoke the graphics is sent to your local computer, not a bitmap or a sequence of bitmaps like VNC. Xming uses a local X server on your Windows computer in order to display your remote applications. This local X server is 2D accelerated, and it’s sometimes difficult to even notice that you are working remotely.
Since Xming can run in windowed or full-screen modes, you can establish thin client connections in this fashion, or you can publish applications Citrix-style.
Xming is completely free to install and setup. It is a great way to manage virtual machines, and in fact is often faster than Microsoft’s Virtual Server ActiveX control (surprised?), VMWare’s Virtual Machine view (even with VMWare tools!), and even Parallels speedy virtual machine view.
To set the whole thing up, you’ll need a computer running Microsoft Windows, one Linux box, a network connection between the two, but you won’t need much effort.
First install the Windows Xming server on your Windows computer. We’ll use Windows XP SP2 in this example, but it could easily be other varieties. Xming can be found on Sourceforge quite easily, download it, run the install (use defaults), and start XLauncher.
On the Linux computer this are slighlty more complicated, but not by much. For Gnome or KDE on Ubuntu Edgy, go to the System>Administration menu in your menu bar. In Administration, we’ll select login preferences as we’ll be setting up a new logon method (we’re using XDMCP). Select the Remote tab, and enable remote logon (same as local) to your Edgy Eft machine.
Now on your Windows machine, set up XLaunch to logon to your Linux machine using it’s IP address. Save the setting if you want, and connect. You will be presented with a logon screen to your Linux desktop!
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I’m pretty excited because this weekend Ubuntu announced that Edgy is now in Beta!
From the Ubuntu site:
“The full release notes can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EdgyEft/Beta
Highlights include:
- On the Desktop
- GNOME 2.16
- OpenOffice.org 2.0.4 RC 2
- X.org 7.1
On the Server
- Task selection for easier installation of mail servers, web servers, etc.
- A pre-release of the upcoming LTSP 5.0 with support for local devices, printers on thin clients as well as language and session selection from the LTSP login manager, network swapping, etherboot support out of the box and many more additions and improvements like network swap support that reduce the minimal requirements for thin clients to 32MB memory.
“Under the hood”
- GCC 4.1.1
- glibc 2.4
- Linux 2.6.17
- New init system.
As always, Ubuntu includes the very best of the 100% Free / Libre application software world, and each new release incorporates countless newfeatures and bug fixes from the global development community.”
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More and more people are turning to virtualization these days. One of the main reasons is in order to test pre-release, beta, or alpha software. When it comes to Linux, the operating systems are in a state of constant flux so there’s always something new to test. People routinely want to test beta versions of KDE and Gnome and other desktops before comitting, or simply want to see what features are in development.
We’d previously written an article about installing Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft Knot 2 (it IS a long name) on a Mac Mini, so to do the same would be batty. Instead, this guide covers testing the newest Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft Knot 3 on Windows XP using free (as in beer) virtualization. This guide would also apply to anyone testing on various flavours as well, as long as they can run our free virtualization software: VMWare Server 1.01.
Setting up the Ubuntu virtual machine in VMWare server is very easy (click the pictures for larger versions):
Connect to your local VMWare Server installation if you run it locally, or connect to your remote VMWare Server.
We’ll select “typical” for this virtual machine as VMWare Server includes a configuration for Ubuntu already.
And, speaking of which, here it is! Make sure to select the plain “Ubuntu” option, unless you are running a 64bit host, and downloaded the 64bit version of Edgy Eft knot 3.
Name your virtual machine and select the location. The defaults should be fine here but feel free to tinker.
I typically use bridged networking, but for added obfuscation you can use NAT (which creates a virtual network based on your host’s network connection). You could also select host-only if you only want to be able to contact the host operating system. In fact, if you really wanted to make sure the machine is isolated from the wiki wikid web, don it with a nice tinfoil hat and disable networking completely. Ubuntu won’t be happy, but it looks pretty nice in a tinfoil hat.
8 GB of diskspace is fine for testing.You’re not going to be leeching full seasons of Lost… at least we hope so.
Since we opted to allocate diskspace now, VMWare Server will start creating the 8GB file. This can take some time depending on your computer’s hardware. In my case this took a few minutes - I use SATA2 NCQ hard drives and have 2GB of RAM. Your mileage may vary.
You now have a default virtual machine set up, but it will need some slight tweaking in order to install Edgy Eft Knot 3 as fast as possible. Click on “edit virtual machine settings” and remove the floppy drive - we don’t need it. Set the memory to at least 512MB, but it really depends on your total amount. Since I have 2GB total RAM on my host I select 1GB normally. Edit the CDROM settings and point it at your Ubuntu Edgy Eft Knot 3 CD image. Click “OK” - we’re set for lift off.
Press start and drool over the new llivecd boot screen. Note the reflection on the logo. How original.
Now we’re at another original boot screen - the progress loader. Note the gradient progressbar, and the Crystal-esque Ubuntu logo. Reminds us of 3 years ago, doesn’t it precious? Yes, yes it does.
We’ve landed at the desktop. You may stop here if all you wanted was a secure browsing solution with no cookies and passwords to worry about. Should we wish to continue, our mission involves double-clicking that obvious “install” icon. Let’s go for it.
This is an easy 6 step process. Step 1 - select your language.
Step 2 - Select your location or timezone.
Step 3 - Select your keyboard layout. I normally recommend you test the layout just in case. We’ve typed in “blandname” here for demonstration purposes. You may wish to try typing “Ubuntu”, but nothing else lest ye be stricken down.
Step 4 - Identify yourself. This information will be used later in life to incriminate you. Be choosy with naming and passwords. Harry MacDonald that means you! Try typing in something other than your real name here - it works, I promise.
Step 5 - We’ve pre-allocated our diskpace, so no need to worry about this one. Just click the “forward” button.
Step 6 - There really isn’t a step 6. The Ubuntu team has decided to waste our time by confirming the already tedious and easy task. Onward, ho!
Installing - took me 30 minutes. It may take you an eternity, but with hardware prices where thet are, I seriously doubt it will take you long to be rolling with a virtual Edgy Eft install.
The eternity has passed, and we’re going to reboot. Don’t forget to disable or otherwise change the CDROM settings so you don’t end up installing again - that would be embarassing, right?
There you have it - the pretty login screen. Note those options. XDMCP looks very intriguing doesn’t it? We’ll get to that later…
And presto! What have we got here? Firefox 2.0b1 - Bon Echo Beta 1! Try it out and see what you think, I’m impressed so far to be honest.
So that’s it, you now have a working Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy Eft Knot 3 test virtual machine (edit: let’s make the name longer). And it weren’t hard neither! When Knot 4 comes out you’ll be able to do it in your sleep. If not, well we’ll see you searching for it again.
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Oh no! My poor lil Mac Mini is unable to test the new Edgy Eft version because the Mac BT keyboard is not working in the livecd. I sent the error report to Ubuntu using the device driver wizard (pretty cool!) however was obviously unable to comment about what happened as I could not type anything in the box.
Otherwise, this version is quite swank. I was able to mouse around the web, play with FSpot and poke at Gnome a bit as well.
I’ll see if I can’t grab a USB keyboard and boot into OpenFirmware in order to load the CD (holding C typically does not work with other non-Apple keyboards, by the way).
UPDATE:
I was able to install with no problems (have a look at the new blandname Ubuntu Edgy Eft Knot 2 article here )
Still not able to get the Bluetooth running, but I have been in contact with the helpful Ubuntu team and will keep you all posted!
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