Linux
Microsoft Free – One year later – The radio interview
I recently wrote a post called Microsoft Free – One year later that spoke about my experience using all open source products in a corporate environment with mainly Microsoft products. The guys at Gustygeeks.com invited me to be their guest on their weekly show. I recorded a portion of the show which you can hear by clicking play on the media player below. Enjoy!
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KXAM Radio Interview about Linux
Here is a recording of my radio interview on KXAM in Arizona. The interview was in response to a popular post I wrote called Microsoft Free – One year later.
Get your own playlist at snapdrive.net!
Radio interview with Gutsy Geeks
This Wednesday, June 11, I will be live on the air with the good folks at gutsygeek.com. Apparently they liked my Microsoft Free – One year later article and want to hear more. This was by far my most popular blog of all times which had over 60K hits from Slashdot, over 10k from Stumbledupon, and over 103K hits overall!
You can catch the show live at 7pm MST, 9pm EST on 1310 KXAM in Arizona.
Microsoft Free – One year later
In May of 2007 I wrote a post called Open Source and Microsoft Free. Little did I know that this post would show up on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, and several other popular web sites and become a platform for both the Linux and Microsoft camps to wage yet another flame war.
This whole “Microsoft free” experiment started when a colleague of mine challenged me to eat my own dog food after reading many of my posts about my dabbling with open source technologies. The next day, after a few blue screens of death and various issues with Outlook, I grabbed a Ubuntu CD and installed it on my laptop….at work! From that day forward, I have not used a single Microsoft product at work. It has been one year now and I have survived with Thunderbird and Evolution, Open Office, Firefox, and many other open source replacements for Microsoft products.
I put “Microsoft free” in quotes because there are a few exceptions. First, I did install IE 6.0 under wine for that rare occasion that I stumble across a website that only works on IE. Second, there is no answer for Visio. Most of the Visio diagrams that I needed to read were embedded in design documents in Word which I can read with Open Office Writer. But for those that I needed Visio for, I opened them at home on my XP box (I have 1 XP, 1 Vista, and 5 Linux boxes at home). I also used Visio at home when I had to create Visio diagrams. The issue is Visio’s proprietary format is not available for developers to write a translation utility for.
With those two issues aside, which represents about 1% of my overall usage on my laptop, my Open Source experience was nearly flawless. Open Office worked remarkably well both receiving Microsoft Office files and creating files in Office format. I exchanged literally thousands of documents between Microsoft Office and Open Office. I never encountered a single issue with Word and Excel and occasionally encountered minor formatting issues with Power Point files. The formatting issues where nothing more then some minor placement issues which probably occurred less then 5% of the time.
Over the course of the year I experimented with Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Freespire, Mepis, and PCLinuxOS. I settled on Kubuntu and recently upgraded with ease to the latest version, Hardy Heron. Here is my analysis of the different Linux distros from last fall. With this “Microsoft free” laptop I have coexisted with 1000+ employees who use XP and various verions of Office including 2007 (the 2007 compatibility add-on works fine). I also delivered presentations at conferences using Open Office Impress and traveled across the country and internationally with no issues with wireless connectivity.
I am not in any camps. I use XP and Linux at home and like both. I gave Outlook the boot years ago at home and do just fine with Thunderbird. It has every feature I need. I do however have problems with Vista. But my message here is not about recommending what tools that my readers should use. My message is that I performed at a high level at work while using Linux, Open Office, and other open source products. These tools did not hinder my ability to do my job and did not impact anyone else at my job. I was able to productively coexist with no Microsoft tools in a Microsoft shop. That is all I am trying to say.
I am not going to recommend to anybody that they change their company standards away from Microsoft. What I will tell you is that open source is a viable alternative that can be used in a production environment. So when you see flame wars where the two camps argue back and forth about their favorite technology, you can point to this post when people claim that Linux and Open Office just won’t work in the work place. I have validated that they do work for over 365 days now. Whether we should use these tools at work is a whole different story that really depends on factors like corporate culture, skill sets, budgets, user base, executive support, and many others.
All I can say is that for the last year, I have been using Open Source exclusively and I am loving it!
Open Source – Debunking Myths – Part 2
In part 1, I highlighted four myths (FUD) that I felt needed to be addressed:
- OSS is bad for the economy and defies the values of capitalism
- OSS support is bad, slow, and/or non-existent
- OSS products are second rate (”created in the garage” mentality)
- OSS can’t be good because it is free
In this post I will discuss the myths about open source support. I have heard every quote from “You can’t get support for open source” to “Where are you going to get support, in a chat room?” It is obvious that people who make these statements have not done their homework or just choose to dislike OSS because of their long history of snuggling up with their favorite vendor(s).
There are many options for getting OSS support. I will list six that I am aware of.
Single Vendor Support
Many well established open source projects offer support for a fee. Typically these support fees are minimal when compared to proprietary software where they charge 18-21% of the purchase price. Some projects offer a totally free version of their software with a subset of features but offer an enterprise license with full support that has the complete bundle of features. In either case, this model is similar to the normal proprietary model where you pay for the support of your product. Also, many major software vendors like IBM, Sun, and Oracle are leveraging open source products within their software offerings. In cases like this, these vendors provide support for the OSS products. The only downside to this is they are often not certified on the most recent version of the OSS products.
Stack Vendor Support
In this model, a single company provides support services for a suite of products. Companies like SpikeSource & SourceLabs provide support for a suite of products while Redhat provides support for its own “appstack” which includes jBoss, Red Hat Linux, Apache, MySQL, PostgreSQL, and languages like Perl and PHP. The following diagram is from SpikeSource’s web site that shows a few different stacks that are supported.
Community
All OSS products have community support. Many people not familiar with OSS believe that this is nothing more then interacting with some hacker in his garage. This might be true if you are betting your business on a product with a development team of three (which is not highly recommended). But most serious OSS contenders have a huge community following which provides 24×7x365 support from people all around the world. This is where I see an advantage of community support over proprietary software support. In the OSS world, it doesn’t matter if you are a billion dollar company or a startup, your issues are equally important and addressed. In the proprietary world, top customers typically get priority over others because huge contracts carry a lot of clout. Many critical fixes and security issues are fixed and patched literally overnight. In fact, if you know how to fix the issue, you can make the changes and submit it to the project team to be reviewed and possibly patched. That beats waiting for the next service patch!
Do It Yourself
You also have the option to not pay any support and fully support the OSS yourself. This makes sense for most non-mission critical products like blogging software (WordPress) and wikis (Mediawiki), but is not recommended for mission critical products like server based Linux and ESB’s like Mule.
Use consultants
Another option is to use consultants. This can be individuals who are experts with certain OSS products or companies that specialize in installation and/or support services for various products. You can see a huge list of consulting companies on Sourceforge.net who specialize in certain areas. Some companies use consultants for installations and upgrades, but chose the “Do it yourself” method for everything else. Sourceforge also offers support services for several products.
Mix and Match
The sixth model is to mix and match a combination of the five support models above. Many OSS products rely on a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. A company may already have a stack support vendor it deals with and may choose one of the other models to support the specific product. I’ll use my Mediawiki example again. Mediawiki may not be a mission critical application at your company, but a few other applications might rely heavily on LAMP, including the wiki. The LAMP stack may already be covered by a stack vendor so you may chose the community or “Do it yourself” models for the wiki.
So the next time somebody tells you that you can’t get support for OSS, forward them this link. This myth is pure FUD. I am not saying the all OSS products have good support, but then again, that is true for proprietary vendors also. Part of the vendor selection process for OSS should include your support requirements. If support is critical, make sure you pick a product that has strong support options in one or more of these models.
Open Source – Debunking Myths – Part 1
On the ITToolbox community, we have some very passionate bloggers both for and against open source software (OSS). I am a proponent of both OSS and proprietary software. As an architect, I view both of these as tools in my toolbox. The trick is to know when to use the right tool for the right job. It is unfortunate that some people think there is no place for OSS. Here are a few of the myths (FUD) that I continue to hear from people who insist on depriving their company from leveraging OSS tools even when it may be the best solution for a given problem.
- OSS is bad for the economy and defies the values of capitalism
- OSS support is bad, slow, and/or non-existent
- OSS products are second rate (”created in the garage” mentality)
- OSS can’t be good because it is free
Myth #1 – OSS is bad for the economy
This could not be further from the truth. Here is a real life scenario from my trip to France last week.
One of our business partners is in the software development business. They are a small company with small IT budgets whose customers are primarily in the retail industry, mainly grocery chains. The retail grocery industry is a very low margin business and one where companies are in real danger of being crushed by the likes of Walmart and Carrefour. These companies are extremely frugal and the big boys have a major say in the price of goods and services. One of our partner’s core strategies is to leverage open source technologies to keep both their costs down and to keep the cost of their solutions down. Due to privacy concerns, some of these retailers are demanding that solutions providers shift from the current ASP or SAAS models to a shrink-wrapped model (buying the software and running it locally). This is currently not feasible for companies heavily invested in proprietary software due to the licensing costs of vendor software that is involved. The retailer would have to pay for the operating system, the database, the application server, the BPM tools, the middleware, etc. This would add up to a hefty bill. Using OSS like the LAMP suite (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PhP) and Intalio for BPM, this solution becomes affordable and a competitive advantage to sell to the hundreds of retailers in this space.
Please read this article from Wired called Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business so you will understand my next point. Here is an excerpt from the article.
Technology is giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, allowing them more freedom to give away products or services to one set of customers while selling to another set.
Let’s look at this blog for starters. I use free tools to publish my lessons learned and ideas on both Blogspot and ITToolbox. In both cases, a software product and a service was offered to me for free. In return, Google and ITToolbox get value by increasing traffic which increases advertising revenue. I paid nothing for the software or the services. I dedicate a lot of my personal time and expertise to my blogs because I get recognition, increase my network, and I learn from others. So in this case, “Free” is actually a revenue generator and is good for the economy. In the example above, free software allows my company and our business partner to compete by controlling our costs. These OSS products allow us to generate revenue and allows the retailers to improve their products and services by leveraging our loyalty marketing solutions. Once again, “Free” is generating revenue.
The anti-OSS folks argue that OSS is taking food off the plates of developers and giants like Microsoft. Yes this is not good news for Microsoft but there is more to the world’s economy then the market share of software giants. Without OSS, this new surge in Social Networking would not be what it is today. Look at all of these new startup companies that have emerged over the last few years. Starting a Internet company from the ground up has never been more affordable. Look at tools like Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, MediWiki, Joomla and others. These tools are changing the way the world communicates and they are all free. The more collaborative the world is, the stronger the global economy gets. These are all good for the economy.
I believe if people would stop thinking of OSS as Linux versus Windows, we could look past our “religious” beliefs about our favorite operating system and start focusing on things like controlling costs, share holder value, flexibility, negotiating power against vendors, and more. In part two I will discuss the myth about support for OSS. Until then, I look forward to the debate that follows. I ask that we keep it professional!
Kubuntu, Laptops, and Wireless Networks
I have been experimenting with various flavors of Linux over the last several months. The last time I wrote about it I mentioned that on my newer 64 bit laptops, only Mepis could connect to my wireless network out of the box. On the desktops and older hardware, all of the distros that I installed successfully had no compatibility issues with any hardware components. They also could see my network.
This weekend I finally found some time to look into the wireless issues on both the Ubuntu and Kubuntu distributions. After much experimentation and little success, I finally found a thread that solved my problems. In an effort to help others, I felt that I should post my fix here.
This thread is specifically targeted for Dell laptop users running (K)Ubuntu. There are a lot of steps but if you follow them all you will have your laptop connected to your wireless network in no time. Before you start, make sure the wireless switch on the front left hand side of your laptop is in the on position. One note, I did have to make a few minor adjustments to the script that was posted. First of all, I had several commands fail due to permissions. I had to do a few chmod commands to allow write access to various directories and files. Second, there were two wget commands that are issued to retrieve a file from Dell and the ndiswrapper file. I had to precede the commands with the command “sudo” to get the appropriate privileges.
wget http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R151517.EXEwget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper-1.51.tar.gz should change to sudo wget http://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R151517.EXEsudo wget http://superb-east.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ndiswrapper/ndiswrapper-1.51.tar.gz
Once I finished running all of the necessary commands and rebooted, my wireless light indicator finally shined blue. Then I had to install the Wifi-radar using adept_installer. Once I did that my laptop was able to connect to my network and I became a happy man.
I also had an issue with my sound card. A quick search on the Ubuntu Forum and I found this simple one liner.
sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-generic and then reboot.
I cut and pasted the commands, ran it, rebooted, and presto….Sound! If it still does not work for you, make sure your volume controls are not set to low or mute.
So hopefully some people will find this post and quickly resolve their issues on the newer Dell laptops. Once these issues are put to bed, you can sit back and enjoy the experience of a fast, secure, and a free operating system for those like me who dumped Vista.
My top 10 open source posts for 2007
I was looking back at my first year of blogging to see what my best posts were. For those of you who have read several of my posts you know that I have two favorite topics: open source and SOA. I started blogging in March of this year and have written 120 posts. The top 10 were all dominated by open source articles. The reason is simple, Windows vs. Linux is a hot topic on sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Reddit. There are a lot of flame wars out there and not a lot of facts. Most of my posts were related to real work experience with open source and a few were dedicated to an experiment I did at home with several Linux distributions. So for 2007, here are my top 10 posts:
- Open Source and Microsoft Free (54,000 hits)
- Comparing Linux Distributions – Final Results
- Dumping Vista – a Divorce with a Happy Ending
- Open Source and Loving it!
- Linux Mint is….Mint!
- Eating my own Dog Food
- Another easy Linux Install, Kubuntu Style
- Review of Linux Distributions – Part 2
- 10 Reasons why you need an Open Source Strategy
- Review of Linux Distributions – Part 1
The top post was a hot ticket on Digg, Slashdot, Craigslist, Stumble, Del.icio.ous, and every Linux website known to mankind. Even though I wrote it several months ago, it continues to get a lot of traffic. Obviously, I am a big advocate of Linux. I have been using Kubuntu at work at a Microsoft shop for most of the year now and have been very productive without a single piece of Microsoft software on my laptop. Linux is ready for primetime. People aren’t ready for Linux.
Linux – not just a Windows killer
One of the most popular discussions in the blogosphere is the topic of how Linux is posed to start taking market share from Microsoft in the battle of the desktops. What I don’t see being discussed too much anymore is how dominating Linux is becoming in the middle tier and backend server space. Not only has Linux been killing Windows in this area but it is also killing mainframes, Unix, and is a favorite choice for grid computing.
Grid computing is an area where Linux makes the most sense to me. Companies like Google and Paypal are clustering thousands of cheap nodes or blades without having to pay a few hundred bucks per node or processor in operating system licensing fees. These companies are also taking advantage of the available source code and making tweaks to customize performance and security to meet their needs. Check out this article about how Paypal leveraged 4000 Linux nodes running RedHat and eliminated the need for an expensive mainframe. Here is a key quote from this article…
In a mainframe environment, the cost to increase capacity a planned 15% or 20% “is enormous. It could be in the tens of millions to do a step increase. In [PayPal's] world, we add hundreds of servers in the course of a couple of nights and the cost is in the thousands, not millions.
I can personally speak to a real life business case for Linux. About eight years ago I worked on a project that had incredible data processing requirements. At that time, the only database technology that existed in the market place that even had the potential to meet our performance requirements was Teradata. They gave us a quote of $34M for the solution which was comprised of proprietary hardware and software. Back then, our entire IT budget was less then $34M. So we built our own solution which ran on a cluster of servers running Red Hat Linux for $100K. Throw in our labor and other fees and we spent close to $1M. What is more amazing is that we did not add a single employee to the staff to run the system since the system is self monitoring and self healing. With the Taradata solution we would have had to add DBA resources. This system is still running today and provides services for a product that generates over $100M a year.
I also stumbled across another article where IT shops are moving off of Unix to Linux for cost savings. A key take away from this article is this quote…
Linux is the best-engineered, most interoperable platform for enterprise computing and is becoming the clear choice for organisations.
So we can debate all day whether Linux is the real deal on the desktop, but in the server world, Linux is king. The irony to me is eight years ago when I was proposing Linux servers (before Linux was cool!), I was getting the same push back and resentment that Linux on the desktop is receiving today. I am sure that three or four years from now I can dig out this post and joke about how people used to fight Linux on the desktop.
Even YiaYia loves Linux
Many people are still in denial that Linux is a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop. I have written numerous posts of my experiments with several Linux distributions and my dumping of Vista. In yet another post, I talked about my plans to switch my parents over to Linux.
The next experiment will be my parents. I still have to reset the clock on their VCR every time I go to their house. All they do is read email, surf a few web sites, and play Spades and Mahjong.
Well, that day has come. YiaYia is Greek for grandmother, and YiaYia loves Linux. My parents have an old Dell 4300 with 256MB of RAM. They boot this box and basically leave the room for 15-20 minutes as it struggles to come to life. Even when it does come up it is sluggish and choppy when viewing rich media content. Every time I go to their house I run various tuning and spyware applications with limited impact. My folks where getting ready to buy a brand new PC which would have been a total waste of money for the limited resources that their usage requires. So I convinced them to give Linux a try before they spent their retirement money on a box with enough horsepower to run Vista.
Enter PCLinuxOS. I installed PCLOS in between commercials of the Giants-Lions game on Sunday. My parents are long time AOL users and were still living on the nasty AOL thick client software. I showed them that they can have all of the same functionality on aol.com using Firefox which includes their email. They were able to boot their old clunker PC with PCLOS and get to their AOL mail account in about 3 minutes. The box is humming now and they are extremely happy.
I brought my external hard drive and loaded their PC up with Greek Music and a Live Yanni concert (hey, we’re Greek!). Without installing a single additional package, they were able to simply double click on the Yanni video and the video started playing on MPlayer. Then I brought up the music player (I can’t remember exactly which tool this was) and it built a music catalog from the files I copied to the disk drive. I set it up to run in random and started the player. PCLOS did a great job of recognizing all of the drivers on this machine out of the box! At that point I think my parents mentioned something about all of those college tuition bills paying off.
I had to leave after the football game and didn’t get a chance to finish. Over Thanksgiving I will get my Dad’s Hoyle Games and my Mom’s Mahjong running under Wine and they will be good to go. My folks are extremely challenged with computers. They don’t understand most computer concepts and can only do simple things that require clicking a mouse. They are able to do everything on Linux that they could do on Windows. Without spending a dime, their old PC is now as good as new. The only complaint I heard was my Dad’s concern for his Microsoft stock. And to make a good day better, my Giants won.
