Patrick’s Blog(2)

An interesting article by Matt Asay with a rebuttal in the comment section by Simon Crosby, Xensource’s CTO.

Red Hat and some of the other distro’s should (continue to) fund the developers that work on (a forked version of) Xen. Or perhaps focus on KVM. It is obvious that Microsoft has no interest whatsoever in keeping the development of Xen on Linux going. Why fund the competition? Simon’s pitch about the religion thing is creative. This is not about religion and not about what customers want. It is about *how* customers *will get* what they want.

Applications are already (e.g. SugarCRM, Google) or soon will be happily running on cheap LAMP setups (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP or variations thereof). Nicely humming away in a virtualized setup. This is a threat to Microsoft. Suddenly it’s all about the applications and no longer about the underlying Operating System. Simply because it just requires a browser. No more, no less. Have you ever heard anyone say: “wow I was really glad that I ran Vista when I logged into Gmail to do my email.”?

On the Desktop side Microsoft’s business model is showing its age. And on the server side cracks are starting to show as well. Xen and KVM on Linux offer a great opportunity for businesses. If employees only need a browser to access business applications why would they buy Vista and the rest of the Microsoft menu for top dollar if the IT dept. can deploy thin clients and virtualized Linux servers offering those applications to the browser via a LAMP setup. Even if employees need a fatter client than the IT dept. can deploy a flexible cost-efficient desktop solution from Red Hat or any of the other vendors out there.

Now what about Groupware functionality (Outlook & Exchange)? There is no denying that this is a tough nut to crack. Scalix was bought by Xandros so only time will tell if Scalix will (is allowed to?) continue to Open Source its Exchange compatible Groupware solution. If not then there are several alternatives out there like Open-Xchange. If necessary I would assume that major players like Red Hat will step up and fund the development of an alternative. As a final resort one can always install 2003 with Exchange and OWA on top of a Linux/Xen/KVM setup until an alternative is available. Hey let’s be practical and not religious ok :)

So all this talk about the engine is irrelevant from a market point of view. It’s about how business will access their information. Obviously Microsoft wants the underlying technology to come from Redmond. Others prefer that not to be the case. Basic rules of competition make it very hard to accept that Microsoft through Citrix or Citrix itself will continue to fund Xen’s development on Linux while Xen and Citrix are betting on and siding with Microsoft. Time will tell.

Update: Matt Asay has written a mea culpa reaction to Simon Crosby’s comments titled Open-sourcing my error on XenSource.

At least a year ago when I needed to draw a diagram of a network and a server setup I was disappointed to learn that there is not a single Linux application including Dia and Kivio that is capable of using/importing Visio stencils. It’s not that Dia and Kivio have terrible stencils. It’s just that Visio has so much better or more beautiful stencils. Today I wanted to make a quick network diagram and did some googling to see if anything had changed for the better. The answer is no :-( I did find Ian Redfern’s efforts to reverse engineer Visio’s file format and Valek Filippov’s vsdump utility. Hopefully these guys can find the time and get assistance from the Community to help them succeed. That would save me from having to download a trial version of Visio for that one diagram per year.

Sun has finally committed to a 64 bit Java plugin in JDK version 1.7. About time. More info at Sun Bug ID 4802695

It took me quite a while to get my Acer Ferrari 4005WLMi with FC6 to properly suspend & resume. It worked like a charm with kernel 2.6.20-1.2962. Recently kernel update 2.6.22.2-42 was released for FC6 and resume is now completely b0rked on the Ferrari. My other laptop, an Acer TM6465WLMi running F7, completely fails on resume no matter which kernel you throw at it. The thing is, when it worked on the Ferrari (never on the TM6465), it worked really well. Better than WinXP which would do funky stuff after a while. I don’t understand why this regression was introduced going from kernel 2.6.21 to kernel 2.6.22 but it is obviously there. Searching Red Hat’s Bugzilla for suspend resume shows quite a few results. Hopefully the kernel devs will spend some time on fixing this regression.

Update: just found out that I can get the Acer TM6465 to resume when I boot with vga=0 into runlevel 1. The screen still remains dark but at least it’s a start.

Update2: I got the Acer TM6465 to properly suspend & resume. The trick is to *not* use any vga=… setting in your /boot/grub/grub.conf and you need to suspend with –quirk-vbe-post. You can only use the –quirk-vbe-post option with pm-suspend if you suspend manually. If you want an F7 system to have it pick up automagically you will need to edit /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/20-video-quirk-pm-acer.fdi and add the following lines:

<match key="system.hardware.product" string="TravelMate 6460">
  <merge key="power_management.quirk.vbe_post" type="bool">true</merge>
</match>

I have already submitted this info to the HAL project so it should be included in Fedora 8.

Having just updated WordPress to the latest and greatest it occurred to me that I used to use a nice blog client but I could not remember its name. A quick yum search blog gave the answer: Drivel. It is easy to install on Fedora 7 with # yum install drivel. I like the clean design and simplicity of the client. The only thing I miss is easy to click icons to for example add a link and the possibility to drag and drop a picture. Hope this will come in the near future.