I downloaded the Desktop ISO image, and burned the CD. I placed the CD into the drive and rebooted my computer. My plan was to overwrite all existing information on the machine, and not be concerned with migrating data.

On boot up, I was presented with a screen asking me for the preferred language. I selected english and was then asked how I wanted to proceed. The menu options were quite clear for the initial install: Try ubuntu without any change to your computer, Install Ubunu … I chose Install Ubuntu. For the next 1 minute 58 seconds, I watched an ubuntu splash screen boot into the install section.

Install

1. Welcome screen. Simple enough, select forward.
2. Where are you? Choosing a timezone, I am in Detroit. Click Forward (note: the map selection could be a little smoother or maybe zoom in as you click a region before starting the magnification mouse movement process).
3. Select a keyboard layout. This is easy, but maybe it should default to USA/USA (or localized based on language selection on the boot menu) and the provide an advanced option, to reduce any confusion for the less knowledgeable users.
4. Prepare disk space. Well, this would likely confuse a non technical user. My options were: Guided – Resise IDE2 master partition #3 (hdc3) and use freed space, Guided – use entire disk, Guides – use the largest continuous free space or manual. I know what I would choose, but thinking as an normal user, this should also be simplfied or the text should be more readable with terms like: Save my existing data, and install into free space. I chose guided use entire disk.
5. Who are you? Enter your name, and login details. This seems pretty straight forward, and most people are used to logins now a day.
6. Ready to install review. Click Install.

Well, 6 total steps is impressive. Just a few minor comments, but so far so good.

The installation finished, and the machine rebooted in 25 seconds before asking for the password, and was completely ready for use in under 1 minute! Thats nice and helps people think it to be OK to shutdown the computer. I often don’t shutdown my windows desktop, as I hate the boot up time when I just want to check something quickly (weather, directions, movie show times, email, .. ).

Next thing I wanted, was access to my network based printer, and HP Photosmart C6180 — Wow, setup was a breeze and just worked like you would expect.

Then I applied the updates that were waiting to be applied. A small window popped up alerting me that updates were available. I clicked installed, and waited while 256 updates were downloaded (5 minutes) and applied (20 minutes).

Then to top it off, I added my Linksys wireless card to the machine, and without an issue it was detected and up in running. This was a nice change, as I had to custom compile drivers in the past to get this working.

All in all, this has been my best Linux desktop installation and use experience to date.

The next part of this article will follow up with daily usage, after my wife notices I changed her desktop (she was a Fedora Core 6 user).

To start, I run a managed server company. We provide remote / onsite Linux support and implementations for small to enterprise customers. We have recently been approached by Ubuntu to join their partnership program. Being affiliated with Ubuntu is a good thing in my opinion, as it allows us to have a more diversified portfolio of services to offer. But for us to recommend a shop use Ubuntu vs. Red Hat seems like a risk today, and in some cases is not even an option (SAP implementations).

We must think of our customer first, and what is in the best interest of the business when architecting and implementing the technology infrastructure. So, is Ubuntu a safe bet for our customers? And, is it the right distribution? Why?

I know these questions must be scenario dependent, but Red Hat is a one size fits all for everyone of our customers as of today (Note, we are not providing desktop support to any of our customers as of now). Some of our customers are Novell shops, so they like to leverage the existing relationship, and deploy SuSE rather than Red Hat.

I am not trying to start a flame war here, but rather am looking for insightful reasons to start recommending Ubuntu vs. others or rather should we be implementing Ubuntu over other distributions for our customers because it actually is a better distribution.

What about support? Can anyone provide me with some reference to compare the support structure and abilities of the various distributions? A comparison (or customer satisfaction survey) between Red Hat/Ubuntu/Novell would be beneficial.  I have had great luck with Red Hat support, and a few mishaps with Novell (lack of communication), but overall when I have an issue both are on top of things, and Novell has even sent developers on site for debugging (kernel bug). Can we expect the same from Ubuntu?

I do see Ubuntu as an innovator, and having another company knocking on the doors of Red Hat and Novell will only benefit the Linux community.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – March 11, 2008) – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the speakers for its 2nd Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.

The Summit, heralded as the only place where Linux kernel developers, distribution and system vendors, ISVs, and end users meet face-to-face and collaborate, takes place April 8 – 10, 2008 at the UT Super Computing Center in Austin, TX.

The Collaboration Summit is designed to accelerate collaboration and problem solving in the Linux community by bringing key stakeholders together in a neutral setting. While there are a variety of industry and developer conferences, the LF Collaboration Summit is the only one to combine participation from developers, users, vendors, ISVs, attorneys and C-level executives to tackle the most pressing issues facing Linux.

To apply for registration, please visit: https://www.linux-foundation.org/events/collaboration.

Last year’s over-subscribed Summit took place June 13 – 15, 2007 at the Google Mountain View Campus and included more than 230 leaders from the Linux community.

Agenda highlights for the 2nd Annual LF Collaboration Summit include:

--  Fresh from his $1 billion acquisition by Sun, MySQL's CEO Marten
    Mickos will describe his plans for the future, including MySQL's commitment
    to the "L in the LAMP" stack.

--  Where is Linux growing? Al Gillen, research vice president at analyst
    firm IDC, will unveil important new data on Linux deployments worldwide.

--  Kernel Developer Panel. The Summit will be kicked off by a panel of
    key Kernel developers and maintainers including James Bottomley, Jonathan
    Corbet, Dave Jones, Christoph Lameter, Ted Ts'o, Chris Wright, and others.
    This is a unique opportunity to hear directly from these developers.

--  Mobile Landscape. The last twelve months have seen an explosion in
    Linux on mobile devices. Executive representatives from LiMO, Moblin.org,
    the new Open Handset Alliance and OpenMoko will address fragmentation and
    how they're working together to build the future's mobile computing
    platform.

--  In the last year, there has also been tremendous growth of Linux pre-
    installed on desktop and ultra-mobile devices.  This market is continuing
    to explode with dozens of design wins. Find out now what is behind this
    growing trend from senior representatives from Dell, Everex, gOS (maker of
    the CloudBook), HP, Lenovo, and VIA Technologies.

--  The titans of the Linux industry are growing products and service
    offerings on top of Linux. The 451 Group's Raven Zachary will moderate a
    panel of these influential industry leaders including: Wim Coekaerts, vice
    president of Linux engineering at Oracle; Dan Frye, vice president of open
    systems development at IBM; Christine Martino, HP's vice president of open
    source and Linux; and Christy Wyatt, vice president, ecosystem and market
    development for Motorola's Mobile Devices business. They will share what
    Linux means to their companies and where it's headed.

--  Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens will give a keynote address on the future of
    Linux from Red Hat's perspective.

“This year’s LF Collaboration Summit has attracted a veritable who’s who of Linux leaders,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “We’re looking forward to a packed house and a lively group. These people will be defining the agenda for the next stage of mass collaboration, and in order to fuel that collaboration we need to make participation in the Linux ecosystem as easy and efficient as possible.”

This unique, invitation-only event brings together the brightest minds in the Linux ecosystem to collaborate on the advancement of the Linux platform. In addition to plenary sessions, workgroup and breakout sessions include: Desktop Architects, the Virtualization Mini-Summit, Mobile and Embedded Linux, Power Management on Linux and Carrier Grade Linux. All of the key players necessary to make real and immediate contributions to the platform will be in attendance.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms. For more information, please visit www.linux-foundation.org.

Trademarks: The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Third party marks and brands are the property of their respective holders.

LinMin, a systems management software provider in stealth mode for the past several months, today announced the availability of its first product, LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning (LBMP™). LBMP can remotely provision (natively install and configure Linux and customer-specified applications) as well as image (snapshot and rollback entire systems for disaster recovery and clone systems for mass deployment) servers, blades, PCs, appliances and virtual machines. LBMP enables systems to be rapidly deployed, repurposed and recovered. LinMin delivered the successful Beta version of the product to customers several weeks ago.

In the past I have deployed Storix to accomplish similar tasks, with great success. An alternative open source recovery solution is Mondo Rescue.

More information about LinMin here.

What are you using for your bare metal recovery / provisioning?

Our system was configured with 6 array groups (RAID5). Each array group had 7 physical disks. 7 Luns (72GB) per array group were allocated to the system, for a total of 42 Luns ( x 72GB = 3TB !). This Disk array we used was the IBM DS6800.

The system used to test this configuration was an IBM HS40, with 4 – 2.7Ghz CPU’s and 16GB RAM. 4×2GB qla2340 fiber adapters, using SUSE Linux Enterprise server 9 SP2, and native multipathing (dmsetup, multipathd). Each Disk (Lun) had 4 paths configured using round robin. Hdparm –t shows the following per disk:

# hdparm -t /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Timing buffered disk reads: 360 MB in 3.01 seconds = 119.46 MB/sec
(~110-127 MB/sec was observed).

The tests were against all major linux filesystems, using default mkfs options. The mount options though, were noatime, and nodiratime. All tests were done against a large vg with all disks, and each filesystem was striped acrossed all 42 disks, using lvcreate –i 42. The only changing parameter here was lvcreate –I x (where x is 8, 128 and 512). This test was done using the the IO scheduler CFQ. This test was only a throughput test and to determine what the best stripe size should be. It was done using the directIO option as you can see in the data section.

Check out the pdf for images and the data.

Announced at CeBIT, the suite (also simply called Unison) combines IP telephony, e-mail and instant messaging with diary, address book and presence capabilities, all in a single Linux server. It is available free as a public beta.

“You can get all these elements separately on Linux, but this is the first time they have all been in one server,” said Rurik Bradbury, Unison’s chief marketing officer. Other unified communications (UC) schemes, such as Microsoft’s Office Communications Server (OCS) can require three or more servers to do the same thing, he added.

“If you’re reasonably familiar with Linux, you can deploy Unison in a couple of hours, and have a complete system running for a company of perhaps 50 or 60 people in half a day,” he said.

The server software works with a Unison client program for Windows PCs. This provides a genuine alternative to Microsoft’s combination of Exchange and Outlook, Bradbury claimed.

“We’re amazed no-one has done this before — build both a client and a server. Others have either one or the other,” he said. He added that a Linux version of the client will come later this year.

Unison is aimed at 20- to 300-seat organizations, but the US-based company plans to add server clustering in the future to support more. It is partly based on open source technology, such as Thunderbird for email and Jabber for instant messaging, and partly developed by Unison’s own programmers.

The software is initially offered as a free beta version but is already fit for use, Bradbury claimed.

“It is almost finished — it is relatively stable software,” he said, joking that he uses commercial software that’s less robust.

Once the beta program is complete there will be a free “community” version for up to 20 users, and per-user or perpetual licences will be sold for larger systems, although pricing for those is not yet fixed.

Bryan Betts, Techworld.com

The Release notes page in the wiki has the list of what’s changed, but it’s currently a couple thousand checkins out of date.

Grab the release from the download section and please at least try to read the docs before asking questions.The binary packages should hopefully be updated to 0.21 soon. See this links section for a list of linux distributions based around MythTV.

– I am partial to using LVM based devices for creating my virtual machines. Think lvm snapshots for backups.

A setup I am working on now consists of 4 systems with a dedicated LVM device, and an lvm based mount point for file based VMs.

# vgs
VG #PV #LV #SN Attr VSize VFree
xen1vg 1 6 0 wz–n- 1.96T 1.47T

# lvs
LV VG Attr LSize Origin Snap% Move Log Copy%
vm1rootlv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
vm2rootlv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
vm3rootlv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
vm4rootlv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
xen_master_img-lv xen1vg -wi-a- 80.00G
xenimages1lv xen1vg -wi-ao 100.00G

- If you decide to use a file based VM, but use a directory other than /var/lib/xen/images to store your image files, then selinux will get in the way. Use the following:
# semanage fcontext -a -t xen_image_t “/<new_directory>(/.*)?”
# restorecon -R /<new_directory>/

- If something is not working check /var/log/audit/audit.log and ‘dmesg’, disable selinux: ’setenforce 0′.

- If your system is installing or using a file based cdrom device, and you need to insert or change to another disk:
# xm block-list <vmname>
Vdev BE handle state evt-ch ring-ref BE-path
768 0 0 1 -1 -1 /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/14/768
5632 0 0 1 -1 -1 /local/domain/0/backend/vbd/14/5632

# xm block-detach <vmname> 5632 -f
# xm block-attach <vmname> file:/xen-images/nextdisk.iso hdc:cdrom r