Linux Solutions

Mozilla Firefox is on the eve of what could possibly be the most downloaded product in history. The second browser to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer has done well from itself from humble beginnings.

In March 1998 Mozilla was nothing more than a tiny open source project. Netscape Communications was on the receiving end of a battering from Microsoft, who feared they might lose out in the shift toward Web-based computing. In an effort to fight this, Microsoft began to give Internet Explorer out for free, integrating the browser with its Windows Operating system. Netscape was pretty much dead in the water.

While Microsoft got in to trouble with the justice department for the stranglehold they had on the market, Netscape – in a bid to out-innovate Microsoft – released the source code for their browser software, hoping to grab the attention of thousands of volunteer programmers, who would develop new features to Navigator.

The plan didn’t quite get off the ground right away. AOL bought over the shattered remnants of Netscape in 1999, later merging with Time Warner which caused the tiny project to be lost in the shuffle. To be honest, it didn’t matter much because the Netscape code was so flawed, the whole thing needed to be re-written.

It wasn’t until late 2004 that the company pulled themselves together and released Firefox 1. By that point AOL, seeing the browsers potential, had labelled the project as an independent, non-profit group. The newly created Mozilla Foundation garnered funding from AOL, IBM, Sun Microsystems and Lotus Development founder Mitch Kapor. In mid-2005, Mozilla created a for-profit subsidiary which caused the projects market share to grow at speed.

Over the past four years, Firefox has steadily chipped away at Microsoft’s share of the market. When Mozilla dropped Firefox 1 on us in 2004, Microsoft had a 95 percent share of the market. Now, just four years later, Mozilla command a worldwide market share of 18.4 percent, while internet explorer stands at 73.8 percent, with Apples Safari browser accounting for the rest.

“Our ongoing mission is to keep the Web open,” says John Lilly, who became Mozilla’s CEO in January, after three years with the company.

“We built the right product at the right time,” says Mitchell Baker, president of the Mozilla Foundation, who has been in charge of Mozilla in its various forms since its early days. “This was partly determination and partly good fortune,” she says. “We produced it when IE was terrible and people were happy to have an alternative.”

In March, Baker posted on Mozilla’s Web site a reflection on the projects accomplishments during its first decade. She also peered into the future: “In the next 10 years,” she wrote, “we’ll continue to be radical about building fundamental qualities such as openness, participation, opportunity, choice, and innovation into the basic infrastructure of the Internet itself.”

Tomorrow the world – along with Bill Gates – will be watching to see if Firefox 3 becomes the most popular download of all time.

The newest version of Firefox Web Browser is scheduled for release on Tuesday 17th and includes improvements in security, speed and design.

Quite a few of the enhancements in the Firefox 3 Browser involves bookmarks. The new version allows users to add keywords, or tags to arrange bookmarks by topic. The new ‘places’ feature lets users quickly access sites they recently bookmarked or tagged and pages they frequently visit but haven’t bookmarked.

The browser also features a new ‘star’ button to enable users to easily add sites to their bookmark list – something Internet Explorer 7 already uses.

Other useful features include a new password manager that doesn’t disrupt your log-in process and the ability to resume any downloads that may have been interrupted by loss of connection.

Firefox 3 has boosted security against ‘phishing’ – scans that trick users into giving out confidential information. Rather than just a warning – like in the current version - if a site looks suspicious then the browser will block the site. The new browser also adds protection from sites known to distribute viruses and other malicious software.

The list of ‘bad’ sites comes from Google and StopBadware.org, a project headed by Harvard and Oxford Universities.

Firefox has also made some visual changes; the back button, for example, is now larger than the forward button, because according to Mike Schroepfer, the project’s vice president of engineering, “people tend to return to a previous page more often.”

Firefox is now the No.2 web browser behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Designed by Mozilla, which is an open source community that has thousand’s of people, mostly volunteers, collectively develop free products.

Under development for almost three years, Firefox 3 has been publicly testing the browser since November for Windows, Mac and Linux Computers.

Supporters of Firefox are organising launch parties around the world in anticipation of the release. Mozilla hope to break the world record for most software downloads in a 24-hour period.

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Campsite is a free software project developed by the Media Development Loan Fund (MDLF) and is an open source content management system (CMS) designed for professional journalists.

The CMS’s latest release, 3.0, is designed to be simpler to install, maintain and is designed to fit into the existing publishing model: multiple authors and editors, issue-based publications, even subscriptions. The targeted users are media organizations; in particular those already working in print publications.

MDLF’s Douglas Arellanes describes the solution as “by journalists, for journalists. Campsite’s overall approach was intended to minimize the pain and shock journalists felt when using a CMS. So you don’t have the vocabulary of computer scientists, who talk about ‘nodes,’ ‘assets’ and ‘objects.’

“Instead you have concepts journalists can easily grasp - publications, sections, issues and articles, arranged in a way they can easily manage. Your journalists prefer ’story’ to ‘article’? No problem, go and change it in a few clicks in the built-in localizer tool.

“And you have out-of-the box support for things journalists find important, like workflow and subscriptions support (either free or paid). We think the function and culture of a newsroom, which has evolved over at least the last century and probably longer, is something that needs to be maintained, albeit online, and our entire aesthetic takes that into account.

He added: “Nothing against the other CMSes out there - they’re very good at what they do, and we recommend and implement them where appropriate…. We’ve even considered trying to adapt one or more of the other open source CMSes to meet these needs, but we’ve always found that the investment to make them do what our client organizations needed was too large to justify the effort.”

Campsite 3.0 runs on any platform that can support MySQL, PHP and Apache. The CMS features include a new web-based installer, a completely re-written template engine and plugin architecture. In previous versions of Campsite, a number of components were implemented in C++ but they are now PHP modules, which makes the entire system more portable, and reduces the number of package dependencies.

The active open source development community is another of Campsite’s strengths, says Arellanes. “The problem with turnkey systems is that media organizations rarely think past their 1.0 release - they spend all this time and effort reinventing the wheel with their turnkey system, and then six months down the road when there’s interest and demand on the part of their staff and readers for new features, the bosses say, ‘Yeah, but we already spent all this money to launch our site and we haven’t seen the return on that investment.’

“The worst situations occur when publishers get into terrible business arrangements with local solution providers who provide turnkey sites in return for either advertising trade-outs or joint ventures to manage the paper’s Web site. These are usually disastrous for all involved, and we try to make the case both to the papers and the providers that open source - and Campsite in particular - is a model that not only gives them a good base to build their news sites from, but it’s also a model that lets them spend their tight budgets on creating the features they really want.”

The UK UNIX USER Group (UKUUG) looks likely to drop their legal challenge to Microsoft’s controversial international document standard because it doesn’t have the money to see the court case out.

Britain’s High Court refused the UKUUGs application for a judicial review into the UK’s endorsement of Microsoft’s application for it OOXML document standard to receive international certification, last Thursday.

Chairman for the group Alain Williams was clearly disappointed to announce the group does not have enough money – they need about £50,000 ($98,000US) – to cover the costs of their action. The UKUUG was looking for the High Court to consider that the British Standards Institution (BSI) had no grounds to vote in support of Microsoft at the International Standards Organisation.

The group, according to Alain Williams does have the grounds to resubmit its application to the courts as he believes they were mistaken in rejecting it, but is realistic about he cash required, “We are casting about for a sugar daddy,” he said

Mr Justice Lloyd Jones rejected the UKUUG’s application, but gave them till dawn on Friday to raise enough money for an appeal – which looks unlikely.

“This application does not disclose any arguable breach of the procedures of BSI or of rules of procedural fairness,” said Justice Jones on Thursday.

“In any event, the application is academic in light of the adoption of the new standard by ISO,” he added.

The UKUUG completely disagree with the Judge. They believe OOXML had not been ratified as standard, but just accepted and put on the fast track to certification.
Since the UKUUG’s application, it has emerged that an unprecedented amount of national appeals against the ISO decision to back Microsoft. Brazil, India, Venezuela and South Africa have all appealed the ISO decision, pretty much stalling the ratification on OOXML as an international standard.

In an ISO statement on Thursday, it said: “The decision to publish or not ISO/IEC DIS 29500 [29500 refers to Microsoft’s standard] as an ISO/IEC International Standard cannot be taken until the outcome of the appeals is known.”

Williams has made it clear that he believes the UKUUG still as a case, on the grounds that there were “procedural irregularities” in the BSI’s decision to back OOXML. The BSI had given Microsoft the support for the standard after clearing a consensus vote in its favour among its members. However, the UKUUG pointed out that there had been no consensus because one member, IBM’s Ian Lamer, had abstained after a strongly opposing the OOXML ratification.

Etelos, the software-as-a-service provider announced a new addition to its offerings last weekend: hosted installations of some major open source projects.

What this means is that you can use the Etelos site and provision your own hosted copy of Wordpress, phpBB, Media Wiki or SugarCRM. The idea is that this is another way for open source developers to get their applications in front of potential users, and an easier way for businesses to set up this type of software with out in-house expertise.

The process has been made very straight forward by Etelos. You firstly, select an application from their catalogue then click ‘Add to Cart’. You then commit yourself to paying $4.95 per account per month, and they do all the technical stuff for you.

Essentially, with this model, Etelos is trying to remove one of the traditional problems for small businesses who are trying to move to open source, i.e. the difficulty of setting up and maintaining servers.

Out of the four applications, Wordpress is the most out of place. Consider the fact that Wordpress is free from the source itself, why you would want to go through Etelos – paying $60 a year for the privilege – when you could just do it yourself?

All in all, this is a pretty strange offering, Etelos will have to justify their unique services to attract any businesses, but with most other companies giving away Wordpress - and even Wiki - for free, it’s going to be a bumpy ride for them.

As opposed to Google, Wikia has a different take on how search engines should be used: They believe that we should get a say too.

Wikia Search – the open source search engine Wikia launched last January – got given a re-birth on Tuesday. The newly refurbished version allows users to edit, comment on and influence search results.

Typically, when a user performs a search they are presented with a static results page with the information derived from a complex algorithm. Wikia Search claims to add a human element to the process by along the customisation of search results. Users can delete or hide results, rank items and add new results.

Based on their relevance to the query, Wikia Search users will be able to rate certain results via a star based system, which will gradually alter the order of listings on the page.

Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikia Search said, “For the first time, we are allowing the true concept of the wiki to be utilised.”

The new Wikia Search allows users to compare the open source search engine to its proprietary competitors – Yahoo and Google – by offering one-click links to their results.

Over 20,000 members have signed up and created profiles since the launch in January, with nearly 66,000 edits made to Wikia articles, said Wales.

So far, Wikia Search has not generated huge amounts of traffic but Wales is optimistic about the new version of the site.

“Because the quality of our search engine has drastically improved, I expect the number of users to increase,” he said. “[Wikia Search is] still not as good as I’d like it to be, but we’re definitely heading in right direction.”

Wikia Search’s main goal is to pave the way for mid-sized companies to develop their own high-quality search engines,added Wales. “We are hoping to see midsize organizations such as The New York Times be able to build Google-quality search engines without spending millions of dollars.”

“Searching is important to the Internet community, and how a search is executed should not have to be controlled by search engines such as Google,” he concluded.

The Wikia Search project is built using an open source protocol, and all content is available under an open license.

Version 1.0 of the Phoronix Test Suite was released yesterday. Codenamed “Trondheim” test suite is an extensible open-source platform for conducting Linux-based benchmarking and performance profiling targeted at IHVs, ISVs and technology hobbyists.

The Phoronix Test Suite combines years of testing by the company with input from leading technology companies to offer the most comprehensive testing and benchmarking platform available for the Linux operating system. The platform also offers unprecedented capabilities for collaboration via the suite’s online component.

Michael Larabel, the founder of Phoronix Media and lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite said, “Over the past several years the Linux ecosystem has changed. For a large part it’s now rare to find Linux incompatible hardware, but it’s becoming a matter of having vendors optimize their drivers and ensuring a quality experience across a wide array of software. The Phoronix Test Suite looks to address this issue in part by providing a platform for conducting tests in an autonomous, reproducible, and standardized environment.”

“The impact of the Phoronix Test Suite isn’t limited to those interested in better optimizing their software or quality assurance teams ensuring device compatibility, but a by-product of this is greater vitality within the Linux ecosystem by fostering the growth of a standardized test specification,” he added.

Designed to be highly extensible, the software is provided under the GNU GPLv3 license to allow independent developers and companies to use this framework with the included tests, write test profiles for their own applications, or utilize third-party sources.

Andrew Schofield, a computational biologist and one of the contributing developers to the Phoronix Test Suite said, “The overall flexibility and usability of the Phoronix Test Suite makes it easy to create complex testing configurations and still have the results presented in a readable and understandable fashion.”

He continued, “Many of the software tools used in computational biology involve running tasks or analyses for extended periods of time due to the amount of computation required. Even a relatively simple molecular dynamics simulation can take a whole day of CPU time to only produce a couple nanoseconds of the simulation. The Phoronix Test Suite should be able to offer insight into what machine configurations perform the best at different tasks.”

An online component is provided for free for archiving, sharing and analysing results generated but the Phoronix Test Suite. PTS Global supports searching through all uploaded results, grouping of results, side-by-side results comparison, uploading results with user-supplied tags, and other features to effectively analyze test results.

“The Phoronix Test Suite is an impressive, fast-developing general-purpose testing suite for both software and hardware on Linux…Its range and flexibility set it apart from the current batch of benchmarking tools.

“It has an especially interesting and useful feature that I believe is unique: a public repository for sharing and comparing test results, and replicating tests performed by other users. This is a great tool for system tuning and understanding what your own test results really mean. I think this is going to become one of the most popular and useful Linux benchmarking suites,” said Carla Schroder, author of The Linux Cookbook and The Linux Networking Cookbook.

Analysts are predicting that Linux operating systems will be used in around a quarter of all smartphones by 2013, and with more and more companies adopting open-source software because of the lower development costs, reduced licensing hassles and greater flexibility – its not to hard to believe the statistics.

Analyst firm ABI Research have recently created a report about smartphones. Looking closely at Linux-based mobile platforms, they have reached a conclusion on what impact they will have on the industry. ABI sees the LiMo Foundation and the Open Handset Alliance as two of the most prominent framework providers and believes that their platforms will account for most of the Linux mobile adoption.

ABI Research vice president Stuart Carlaw said a statement about the report: “By 2013, we expect that Linux will take 23% of the smartphone market and will be the second most prevalent solution behind Symbian. And although LiMo and Android will take the lion’s share of the market for Linux solutions, there will be opportunities for solutions such as Maemo which will be facilitated by the encroachment of the MID (Mobile Internet Device) form factor into the mobile devices landscape.”

ABI has noted that despite some early teething problems, Google’s Android platform, which is backed by the Open Handset Alliance, is being used by a large amount of developers and say that this is an indication that Android has real staying power.

The other heavy hitter in the mobile Linux battle is the LiMo platform, which was taken under Verizon’s wing just last month. Unlike Google Android, LiMo has its own Java-based development framework and doesn’t support native applications. LiMo supports the existing GTK+ toolkit which means that popular desktop applications could theoretically be ported to the platform.

Linux is defiantly receiving a boost in interest and awareness because of all this and when phones with Android and LiMo actually get in to the hands of consumers it will only increase it further. The benefits open source provides to mobile hardware makers are almost endless, but the most significant benefit to end users it that it will lead to richer third-party software because application development will be more accessible to programmers.

In an effort to keep up-to-date with the growing popularity of low-cost, flash-drive equipped, wireless “netbook” computers, Ubuntu Linux have announced today that they have created a specially modified version of the Linux operating system designed to run on these type of machines.

Going by the name Ubuntu Linux Remix, the new OS will be aimed primarily at hardware manufacturers that are building netbooks or the consumer market, said Jerry Carr who is the marketing manager for Canonical Ltd. who are the commercial sponsors for Ubuntu around the world.

Ubuntu Linux Remix is built to be compatible with Intel’s new Atom processors – miniaturized, low-power CPUs that can be used in smaller netbook chassis.

Equipped with Intel Atom CPUs and Ubuntu Linux Remix, the netbooks are expected to be on sale within six months, priced at roughly $300 to $500.

Unlike other consumer desktop and enterprise versions of Ubuntu Linux, the new Remix OS will not be available as a free download and will only be offered to netbook vendors.

For those who are unaware, netbooks are typically very small and energy-efficient, offer wireless network capability and enables users to send/receive email and chat on instant messaging clients. The netbook as designed as a secondary computer to be used hen traveling or if you don’t want to heave around a heavy duty laptop.

A key difference with the Remix from the standard desktop Ubuntu Linux is the inclusion of a “launcher” that allows users to start the machines and get online quickly, Carr said. “There are also lots of tweaks for the Intel Atom chips, and optimization, too, for the flash drive [rather than disk-based spinning hard drives] and for other underlying technologies. Probably the major difference … is that this is very much a device-tied OS”

It’s expected that the arrival of the Linux Remix version of Ubuntu could start a wave of other offerings in the netbook arena. “If the market’s successful, I think there will be other players in it,” he said.