Linux Solutions

The OpenSuse Project has released the eleventh version of its operating system and will be available for free download this week.

Powered by Novell, OpenSuse 11.0 is built on the original open source system developed in 2005. The update includes loads of new features designed to improve installation and performance.

One of the areas that‘s had a big over-haul is the installation utility, which has been designed to be far more accessible for beginners to use. Other new features include three-dimensional desktop effects courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.7.4, a new management system, and a faster package management build. There are around 200 news features in the release.

Version 11.0 boasts a user-selectable desktop environment, including options for Gnome 2.22 or KDE 4. Users can also download a full DVD image of both the software and the accompanying tools, which means it’s entirely possible to run everything from disc without having to tinker with computer settings.

Amanda McPherson, vice-president of marketing and developer programs for the Linux Foundation, said: “I’m really impressed with the new version of OpenSuse. The OpenSuse community has obviously done a lot of work to create a unique and compelling desktop experience. I think the installer improvements are key as well as the multimedia ones.”

OpenSuse 11.0 also includes the latest version of the OpenOffice word processing suite as well as Banshee 1.0, which provides digital music and video managing capabilities.

OpenSuse’s developers say that options are a key part of Linux appeal. They hope that their latest offering will help expand the platforms reach. The long time goal of the developers is to not only impress existing Linux users, but to also convince Windows users tp take a leap in to the unknown.

“If you look at all of the major Linux community distributions, it’s really an embarrassment of riches,” McPherson pointed out. “Customers have a lot to choose from, and choice is really what drives Linux adoption.”

The OpenSuse project serves as a foundation for other Novell developments. The company is plans to use the open source system to create Linux products in the future.

Suse Linux Enterprise 11 - which will be completely based on OpenSuse 11.0 — is scheduled to be released sometime next year.

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.”

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.

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.

Although other reports have claimed otherwise, Google has announced that the new Google Android platform will be 100 percent open source.

Everything that makes Android what it is, including all the core platform components and libraries need to port Android to new devices, will be open sourced and commonly used, industry standard licences, say Google.

At the recent Google I/O conference in San Francisco Employees of the search engine giant said even the multimedia codec’s will be open and that, except where noted, everything will use the Apache software license (ASL v2). This is the same open source license as used by Tomcat, Harmony, Apache HTTP server and other large projects in the open source community.

There are however two exceptions to the Apache license rule. The first exception is software that is already covered by a free/open source license will continue to use that license. This includes Google’s enhancements to the Linux Kernel. Linux uses the GNU Public License (GPL v2) so enhancements to the kernel will use the same license.

The second exception to the Apache license rule is, any software that touches Eclipse, for example the Eclipse Android Development Tools plug-in (ADT) will be licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL), because that’s what Eclipse uses.

Google chose the Apache license because it gives carriers, OEMs and application developers the freedom to use whatever license they want for their own software. Although it is not a requirement of the license, Google encourages everyone to make their own code open if possible.

Google does plan, however, to make a few of their applications closed-source, such as their GMail application. These programs do not form part of the Android system, although they will likely be included on Android phones.

Dick Wall, who is on the Android team said, “We’re not holding it back for any nefarious purpose, We’re simply not ready to publish the API that talks to the back end server.”

Wall’s comments make sense as Google do not want to be stuck with a poorly thought out API that they will be unable to support forever. This doesn’t mean that the company won’t open us those apps in the future.

Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, has said that his company’s new operating system of the future will centre on the internet, and will be distinct from the current Palm OS that’s available at the moment.

In a recent interview, Colligan described the Nova OS (or Web 2.0 – possibly) as a “next-generation operating system with much more capabilities, driven around the Internet and Web-based applications.” Scheduled for release next year, Nova will be based on a Linux core.

Talk of new capabilities sounds good but with Apple’s dominance amongst others, how will Palm compete in an already crowded market?

“Palm’s got maybe 15 million customers and 50 million devices around the world, it’s brand that’s globally recognised. We sold a million Centros in the first five months of it going on sale with one carrier in the US, so to say were not an active player in the market is not really accurate.”

“There will be 1.2 billion new handsets sold this year, there’s billions of users around the world, so there’s a huge opportunity. And it seems to me that when there’s a billion of anything sold per year – well, we don’t have to have Apple, RIM or Nokia be unsuccessful for us to be enormously successful,” said Colligan.

Palm are focused on executing their own system, “mostly because we really believe that to create the most compelling solution it should be an integrated package much like we started with the Palm OS and doing the original Palm Pilots: we did the operating system, we did the hardware and we did the whole synching architecture and the desktop tie-in, which is equivalent to the Web these days.”

Colligan claimed one of the things Palm wanted to do is to make sure that they had an “end-to-end solution we really controlled and could deliver the end-user experience we want to deliver. We think it’s going to be stunning and breakthrough in its execution, and we’re working on some very exciting new devices to go with it”.

That ‘next generation’ Palm OS will slot in between the Centro and Treo lines under a new ‘prosumer’ brand that’s yet to be decided, Colligan explains. “We’re going to continue to look at those three line areas – consumer, prosumer and enterprise. Treo is today more of our mainstream prosumer product which is extended into the enterprise, but over time you’ll see some branding work done on the top two to make sure they’re really well delineated.”

Yesterday, Google Inc unveiled it pricing details for the Google App Engine. The announcement comes on the eve of the company’s first-ever developer conference.

First announced in April, Google’s App Engine provides hosted dynamic web servicing, persistent storage, automatic scaling, a local development environment and authentication and load balancing aimed at making it easier for developers to build web applications.

Google has touted the App to developers as a way to take advantage of the most visited site on the internet’s own infrastructure, and to build, test and run their own applications.

The waiting list for the Google App Engine has 150,000 developers since it was announced, and as of today it is available to any developer without waiting.

The pricing of the App Engine has been a mystery but now Google have provided us with answers. The product is free to get started, and in the current preview release applications will continue to be restricted to the free quota of up to 500MB storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for about 5 million page views per month, Google said.

Once the preview period ends – later this year – developers will pay:

$0.10 - $0.12 per CPU core-hour
$0.15 - $0.18 per GB-month of storage
$0.11 - $0.13 per GB outgoing bandwidth
$0.09 - $0.11 per GB incoming bandwidth

Other announcements for the App Engine in the coming weeks include new developer APIs; a new image-manipulation API will allow developers to scale, rotate and crop images on the server, and a new memcache API is aimed at making page rendering faster for developers through a high performance caching layer.

This new announcement is part of Google’s continued effort to get cosy with developers. With the Google I/O developer conference taking part today in San Francisco, the company is expecting around 2,900 developers to attend.

With regard to the conference, Tom Stocky, Google’s director of product management for developer products noted, “The Web is really the de facto platform for application developers. We think this in many ways represents an inflection point for Web developers. The Web has brought a new level of interoperability for apps. Developers can choose between APIs and bring a new level of utility to end users.”

In related news, Google Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 will be released at the end of the week, and will include Java 5 language support to help developers build AJAX applications without having to worry about common barriers like browser capability.

Google added that this next release includes a compiler for producing faster code and a growing set of libraries for building AJAX applications.