By Ryan Faas
Computerworld (US)
August 13, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Apple Inc.’s iPhone has always had something of an image problem in the workplace, which isn’t surprising given that Apple has always marketed its smartphone more to consumers than to the business world.

In fact, when the iPhone debuted in 2007, there was no way to put third-party apps on one without jailbreaking the device, it didn’t support 3G data networks, it didn’t integrate with Microsoft’s Exchange, and you had to use iTunes to activate it initially and back up or sync data later on. Plus, there were security concerns, since there was no way to require a passcode, encrypt business data or remotely wipe an iPhone if it was lost or stolen.

A lot has changed for the iPhone, its operating system and the smartphone industry as a whole in three years. For people who want to use the iPhone at work and the IT departments that support them, the changes have been good. In fact, some of the major updates in each new iteration of the iPhone operating system (now called iOS) were the ones that made it easier to manage and secure Apple’s mobile platform.

With each passing summer, Apple has polished the business and enterprise features of iOS. It has added Exchange support, support for remote wipe, security and configuration policies (either through Exchange or with configuration profiles that can be loaded onto each device), VPN options and encryption — both whole-device encryption on the iPhone 3GS and targeted app data encryption in iOS 4.

While each of the changes was an improvement, it wasn’t until this year’s arrival of iOS 4 — and the iPhone 4 itself — in June that Apple included a new mobile device management (MDM) service that companies could use. As a result, businesses finally got something sorely needed for enterprise iPhone adoption to make sense: the ability to more easily deploy, manage and monitor iPhones used by employees — a capability that has long made Research In Motion’s BlackBerry one of the most trusted mobile platforms.

Note: Although iOS 4 has been rolled out for the iPhone, the iPad won’t get the operating system upgrade until this fall.

THIRD-PARTY VENDORS ARE PART OF THE EQUATION

One surprising thing about how Apple rolled out MDM is that the company largely left implementing it via a server up to other companies. Considering Apple’s penchant for secrecy about upcoming products and its tight control over the App Store, this move seemed out of character. Most people, myself included, figured Apple would offer a robust over-the-air device management solution. And we expected Apple to take a page from RIM’s BlackBerry Enterprise Server and ship something as part of its own Mac OS X Server platform. (That could still happen in the next major OS X Server release.)

Whether or not Apple comes out with its own management server, there are advantages for companies looking to support iOS devices in a secure and managed way. The most obvious one is competition. With seven different options either already on the market or slated to be available by year’s end, companies can choose the one that works best for them. Although many of the core management features of iOS 4 and the MDM service offered by each vendor are essentially the same, there’s still plenty of differentiation among them.

In some cases, the main difference may simply be the management interface. Or it can mean different levels of integration with other technologies such as Active Directory. Other variables run the gamut from the type and format of reports about mobile device use to system requirements (one option is completely Mac-based), cost, existing relationships with providers and the number of non-iOS platforms each can manage.

STANDARDIZING ON A MOBILE PLATFORM IS TOUGH

Having a standard computing platform is a relatively simple task for most businesses, partly because there’s a limited set of choices: some variation of Windows or Mac OS X. (Yes, Linux and Unix are options, but they typically aren’t chosen for people outside of IT.)

Getting hardware is also easy, since most purchases are made in bulk and typically from a single vendor. If you’re a Mac shop, you’re buying Apple hardware; if you opt for Windows, hardware choices are plentiful.

That kind of standardization doesn’t work as well for smartphones and tablets. Even if your company pays for a smartphone for each employee, IT shops are still apt to encounter problems. Being tied to a single carrier may not be a good choice for all workplaces; different phone models may sport different features (and potentially different management capabilities); phones might only run certain versions of operating systems or offer different sets of bundled or available apps; and there may be varying levels of integration with other systems like VPN, mail servers and intranets.

When workers bring their personal devices to work — as more of us are doing these days — there’s even more potential for problems. IT shops may not even know what devices employees are using, or for what purpose — to say nothing about how secure they are.

A few years ago, companies could afford to buy mobile hardware for their employees. That’s no longer true, and many organizations are embracing the concept of bring-your-own-hardware-to-work. That saves a lot of money, since there’s no hardware to buy and no monthly cell phone bill (for the company). But then you have to manage and secure those devices — or try to dictate what your workers use. (Good luck with that one.)

The most important advantage to Apple’s approach to MDM is that all but one of the third-party companies that have announced or released management servers offer support for platforms beyond iOS. Two of them, Absolute Manage and AirWatch, offer management capabilities for devices other than smartphones or tablets.

Apple would be hard-pressed to develop its own such multiplatform system, as would any smartphone manufacturer. Of course, the specific mix of supported platforms varies with each product, as does the extent of supported features. But that’s the advantage of competition: You should be able to get the one that best meets corporate needs.

UNDERSTANDING CONFIGURATION PROFILES IN IOS

A central component to managing mobile devices involves what Apple calls configuration profiles. These are XML lists of different configuration features and optional restrictions that automatically configure an iOS device.

A single configuration file can contain all of the available settings for an iPhone — complete with user credentials for various network resources — or it may contain just a single value that’s not user-specific, such as the details for accessing your mail server, VPN or wireless network. If you put in a server or network-related configuration without specific user credentials, the user will be asked to authenticate the first time they access the resource.

You can assign as many separate granular profiles as you like to any or all phones and they’ll all be enforced. This is helpful if you need to assign configuration data based on job function or department.

The most important features you can set using configuration profiles involve security: requiring a passcode, setting passcode restrictions and forcing employees to use long and complex passcodes. You can also specify how quickly a device locks when not in use and how many failed attempts to unlock it with a passcode are allowed before the device automatically wipes data.

Another security-related option allows you to disable an iPhone’s built-in camera(s). Since it is common for employers to ban camera-enabled devices to avoid sensitive information from leaking, this is an important option in many organizations.

Beyond the security options, there are a number of ways to customize an iOS device for use with your company’s network and resources. You can preconfigure access to Wi-Fi networks, VPN and e-mail servers. You can also pre-populate bookmarks for the mobile Safari browser to ensure that users can easily access internal (or external) Web-based resources. You can even specify Web pages or Web apps to appear as icons on a devices home screen for easier access.

In short, you can do a lot with configuration files to lock down an iPhone.

For more details about configuration profiles, check out Apple’s documentation of the iPhone Configuration Utility. This is the free tool (available for Mac and Windows) that Apple developed for creating and testing configuration profiles. Apple also offers information about various management and deployment scenarios as well as overviews for iOS 4 business integration.

In addition to setting configurations through profiles, the MDM service allows you to query any managed device for more than 20 different pieces of data (including device- and carrier-specific details, as well as usage and verification that security policies are being enforced).

Beyond setting configuration profiles and querying devices, the MDM service allows you to take certain actions on managed devices. You can, for instance, force the device to lock and/or wipe all data. And you can temporarily remove a passcode (in case a remote user has forgotten it). If a passcode is required, the user will be required to create a new one.

You can also install or update configuration profiles as well as installed apps and enterprise application provisioning profiles and in-house apps. All this can be done in the background without user intervention, allowing you to make sure that software, configuration and security policies are in place.

(See below for a full list of the available management and monitoring capabilities of iOS 4.)
Enrolling iOS devices for management

Apple made the process of setting up device management pretty simple using SCEP. A user is instructed to visit a secure Web site and authenticate with his or her user account (typically an Active Directory account or some other LDAP-based directory service). This allows the iPhone to generate a certificate enrollment request and then an identity certificate for the device.

Using that identity certificate and the user’s credentials to establish a secure connection, the device then processes the list of assigned configurations and presents them to the user. When the user agrees to the configurations, the device will download and install the related profiles and can be fully managed.
Management server options

Now that we’ve covered the what and the how of enterprise management, here’s the list of vendors and the expected ship dates for their products:

* Absolute Manage: Expected availability in the third quarter of this year.

* Afaria by Sybase: iOS 4 beta program now in progress, with availability also expected in the third quarter.

* AirWatch: Availability listed as summer 2010.

* Good for Enterprise: Now available.

* MobileIron: Now available, and offering discounts to existing Good customers.

* Tangoe Mobile Device Manager: Now available.

* Tarmac by Equinux: Now available.

Note: Equinux is known for media and networking tools for Mac OS X and iOS. Tarmac is its first step into the realm of device management and is an iOS-specific solution. It lists a Mac as part of its system requirements, and overall it might be better for small and midsize organizations — particularly those that have a strong Apple presence.
Management and monitoring options for iOS devices

When building configurations, you can specify details about the following: Exchange or POP/IMAP mail servers; VPN configurations; Wi-Fi networks (including hidden networks and networks requiring a passcode or radius authentication); LDAP directories for contacts, access to a CalDAV and/or CardDAV server, public or private calendars that support iCal (.ics) subscriptions; carrier (APN) settings; digital certificates; and Web clips.

You can also mandate a variety of security policies, such as requiring an unlock passcode; allowing a simple passcode or requiring an alphanumeric passcode with a special characters; setting how long a passcode can be used; specifying the length of time before automatic screen locking takes place; setting the number of failed passcode attempts allowed before the device is wiped automatically; requiring that the backup created when syncing to iTunes be encrypted; and indicating whether users can remove configuration profiles.

When it comes to locking down an iOS device, you can restrict access to the following: app installation, the camera, screen captures, automatic mail sync while roaming, voice dialing while the device is locked, in-app purchases, items tagged by iTunes as explicit and access to the security settings for the mobile Safari browser. You can also keep users from launching Safari, YouTube, the iTunes Store and the App Store.

The goal is simple: You want to set as many parameters as needed to ensure that the device is as locked down as your company needs.

In addition to device management, MDM is a service that relies on Apple’s push notification system to receive queries and instructions from a management server to interact with any iOS 4 device in the background. That it runs as an always-on background process is the reason third-party vendors couldn’t create such a solution on their own.

You can build queries for a single device or multiple devices that encompass the following areas: unique device identifier (a value unique to each iOS device); the device name; iOS version; model name and hardware version; serial number; total storage capacity and available free space; IMEI number; the modem firmware version; SIM card ICCID; MAC addresses for both the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth receivers; current carrier (home carrier or roaming); the carrier identified by the installed SIM card as the primary carrier; the version of the carrier settings (APN) data; phone number; whether data roaming is allowed; the installed profiles; installed security certificates and their expiration dates; enforced restrictions; hardware encryption capability; whether a passcode is set; installed applications (including app identifier, name, version, and size); and any application provisioning profiles and their expiration dates — something that’s required for internal corporate iPhone apps distributed outside of the App Store.

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s still unclear whether iOS 4 will truly end the belief that the iPhone (and iPad) platform is more about personal entertainment than workplace functionality. It’s also hard to know for now which smartphone and tablet platforms will have the staying power to dominate the market — though I wouldn’t bet against Apple. For now, it seems clear that workers and businesses will have a wide variety of choices over the next few years, with Apple being just one of many players trying to get their feet in the enterprise door.

Being able to effectively support and manage multiple platforms is crucial for any organization that wants an effective mobile strategy. For iOS 4 devices, and others, these tools offer ways to make the coming diversification easier to manage and secure. And while they certainly don’t ensure that Apple’s devices will be welcomed by IT shops, they do make them increasingly viable options for companies in the years ahead.

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By Jaikumar Vijayan
Computerworld (US)
August 13, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - The Open Compliance Program announced by the Linux Foundation on Tuesday is a response to the surging growth in the use of open source technologies within enterprises, and by makers of consumer electronic and mobile devices, analysts say.

Much of the program appears to be directed at addressing what many analysts said is a continuing confusion among makers of embedded devices about open source licensing requirements. But enterprises can benefit from the program as well, they added.

The Linux Foundation, a non-profit group that is focused on fostering Linux growth, announced a set of open source tools, training materials and a self-assessment checklist , designed to help companies comply with open source license requirements.

The program is supported by several large vendors, including Google , Novell, IBM , HP and Intel . Also supporting the effort are organizations such as the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), which provides free legal representation for developers of open source software, and gpl-violations.org which is focused on raising awareness of open source license violations.

The impetus for the initiative comes from the skyrocketing use of Linux as an embedded operating system in mobile, consumer electronic and numerous other products, said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the foundation.

The goal is to help companies fulfill their license obligations in as straightforward and low-cost a manner as possible, Zemlin said in a conversation with Computerworld today.

“Market adoption of open source software has reached a scale that is unprecedented,” Zemlin said. Companies ranging from embedded systems manufactures, to those with large super-computer clusters are all using open source software these days because of the cost and technology benefits, Zemlin said.

Many though appear not to understand or be fully-informed about their obligations to share their source code with the broad community as they are required to, he said.

“The Linux kernel alone has a $10 billion value, and that value comes from the fact that people are sharing it,” he said. The compliance program will ensure that all of the technical and cost benefits that companies are deriving from open source software “is matched by their ability to comply with the legal requirements of open source licenses,” Zemlin said.

Eben Moglen, founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and a law professor at Columbia Law School said the new effort is being driven largely by what’s happening in the embedded world.

Most of the violations that the SFLC has observed and pursued have occurred among manufactures of embedded devices, Moglen said. In most cases, the violations stemmed from a lack of experience in open source use. Enterprise use of open source software for the most part appears to be more mature and in line with open source license practices, he said.

What the Linux Foundation is doing is “to provide operations advice that should make it easier for device manufactures and distributors to comply with Free and Open Source Software license at minimum cost,” Moglen said.

But enterprises that are using open source technologies will also benefit from the Linux Foundation’s newly released tools for identifying and reporting source code components, and for ensuring that the code is safe and ready for public consumption.

“Companies wanting to use or contribute to the open source world are complex mixes of developers, business management, and operational management such as the internal legal team,” said Stephen Walli, technical director of CodePlex Foundation, a non-profit that facilitates exchange of code among software companies and open source communities.

The Open Compliance Program will increase corporate contribution and participation in the open source world, and alleviate some of the FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) that surrounds open source licensing, he said.

“I think the Open Compliance Program is an important next step in the industry as more and more companies use and contribute to the open source software ecosystem,” Walli said.

“There’s a growing maturity and understanding in the software industry around intellectual property practices over the past two decades, but that understanding isn’t uniformly present across all participants,” he said. “The OCP fills that gap providing tools and education for all to use.”

The Open Compliance Program comes at a time when there are indications that adoption of open source software may have reached a turning point. A survey by Accenture of 300 IT managers in the U.S., U.K. and Ireland showed 69% expected investments in open source tools to increase this year, while about 40% said they planned on migrating mission-critical software to open source in a year.

More than 75% of the survey respondents cited quality as a primary driver of open source adoption.

The Linux Foundation’s move highlights problems being raised by the continued broadening of Linux and open source use, said Jay Lyman, an analyst with The 451 Group.

While it has extended to new markets and devices, open source software and its licensing model … are still very new to many organizations and verticals, so this type of compliance and facilitation,” is needed for continued growth, Lyman said.

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By Rick Broida
PC World (US)
August 6, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - I know a handful of people who suffer from netbook-buyer’s remorse: they bought one of the inexpensive little machines, then stuck it in a closet when they discovered how sluggishly it ran Windows.

If you’re in the same boat, you might be able to give that system a new lease on life. Jolicloud is a free, Linux-powered operating system designed specifically for netbooks. It’s fast (way faster than Windows), easy to use, and better optimized for cloud computing.

The OS offers just the basics, without the clutter. It comes with about a dozen apps already installed (Facebook, Dropbox, Gmail, Google Docs, etc.), but you can browse a library of hundreds more–all of which are free to download. I think it’s safe to say that virtually everything you can do with Windows, you can do with Jolicloud.

The OS comes in two flavors. The first installs alongside Windows, creating a dual-boot configuration. That’s great because it leaves your existing Windows installation alone, allowing you to return to it as needed (and uninstall Jolicloud as easily as uninstalling any piece of software).

You can also load Jolicloud on a CD or flash drive, then boot from either one (keeping in mind that netbooks don’t have CD drives). Unless you’re a tech-savvy user, I recommend going with the Windows installer.

Either way, Jolicloud is currently available only via Bittorrent. That might prove a hassle if you’re not already familiar with it (in which case I recommend this beginner’s guide).
I installed it on an aging Acer Aspire One. After a few confusing moments with setting up a Jolicloud account and activating the computer, I found myself navigating a speedy, stylish, mostly intuitive interface that never once left me longing for Windows. Admittedly, there’s a learning curve, but I think most users will figure out the basics fast enough.

Speaking of fast, I can’t say Jolicloud booted significantly faster than Windows on my Aspire, but overall operation was definitely zippier.

I’m not 100% decided I’ll stick with Jolicloud, only because it still seems a bit buggy, but I like what I see so far. It’s a lovely, simple operating system, one that can breathe new life into old or unloved netbooks. If you own one, this is definitely worth a look.

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By Ian Paul
PC World (US)
July 28, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Once you’ve seen some amazing pictures of seemingly transparent LCD screens, you may want to create your own optical illusion. After researching the topic, I wanted to give it a try, too. So I’m going to show you the simplest way I’ve found to create the effect. All you’ll need is a digital camera, photo-editing software, and about an hour to produce the image.

In this step-by-step guide, I use Gimp, the free photo-editing software for Windows, Mac, and Linux; but any standard photo editor that can produce layers and perform basic editing will work as well.

TAKE YOUR PHOTOS

Before you get started, you need to determine (and write it down for later reference) your screen’s resolution. Microsoft has two online tutorials–one for Windows 7 users and one for Windows Vista users–that show how to obtain this spec.

Next, you need to take a photo with your computer screen in the frame, and another without your screen in the frame. If you’re using a laptop, the only adjustment you have to make is to fold the clamshell down before taking the second shot. Desktop users must remove their monitor from the desk entirely to achieve the right effect. You should also mark the location where your monitor sits on your desk with tape or pencil. This will make it easier to restore the screen to the right spot later on.

When taking your photo, make sure that you have enough light in your environment, but avoid having a strong light source–like the sun or a bright light–directly behind you, as it could cause screen glare in your final picture, decreasing the illusion of transparency.

The other key is to be sure to take two shots at an identical angle.The best approach is to mount your camera on a tripod. If you don’t have a tripod, you can create a makeshift one. To take my shots I just used my nightstand, with a few boxes piled on top of it. You should also turn off your display or give your desktop a solid color background. This will simplify the task of editing the screen in your photo-editing software later on.

When it comes time to take your final shot, you may want to use your camera flash or to be in a room with a lot of natural light. This is because both light sources help create the transparency effect in your final shot. But if you use a flash, take care to use an angle that doesn’t let the flash slip onto the screen. In the experimental shot above, the shot is pretty good overall, but the flash ruins it.

Tip: Have at least two items that run beside and behind the screen. Doing so will make it easier to line up your final shot later, and it will add to the transparency effect.

After you’ve captured two shots that you like you can upload them to your computer. Here’s how my two photos looked initially:

Tip: If you’re using a laptop, try not to move the base of your computer at all from start to finish of this project. That way, the only adjustment you’ll have to make will be to the screen angle when lining up your final shot.

LAYER YOUR PHOTOS

The first thing to do after you’ve uploaded your photos is to layer them. The shot with the screen should be on top, and the photo without the monitor should be on the bottom. The reason will become clear in a moment. Once you’ve layered the two photos, you need to align them. To do this in Gimp, select the image with the monitor in it, and then click Select, All from the menu bar. Then choose Edit, Copy to copy the entire picture. Now, go to the second photo, and click Edit, Paste As, New Layer.

At this point, you need to align the two photos by selecting Image, Align Visible Layers. Be sure to uncheck Ignore the bottom layer even if visible, and instead check Use the (invisible) bottom layer as the base.

FRAME YOUR SCREEN

Next, you want to use Gimp’s Free Select Tool (in Photoshop it’s called the “polygonal lasso”) to frame your screen. This type of lasso is easy to use since you have to create a closed shape to complete your cut. Don’t use a magic wand or any other tool to do this, as you aren’t going to cut out the contents of the top image; rather, the photo of your monitor is merely serving as a guide.

MOVE TO LAYER TWO

Now that your cut is ready, it’s time to get rid of the first layer so you can cut out the contents of the second layer. Open your layers dialog box, and in Gimp select Windows, Dockable Dialogs, Layers.

Click the eye icon next to the top layer (the image with the screen visible). You should see the image without the screen, with the selection frame that you created in the previous step over the top. To copy the selected area and create a new file, click Edit, Copy Visible, and then select File, Create, From Clipboard.

SIZE YOUR TRANSPARENCY

All you have to do now is create your background desktop image. The best way to edit this part is to go into full-screen view. You should see that your new selection doesn’t quite match up with the edges of the image canvas. To fix this, use the transform tool, but make sure you that have turned off the ‘constrain proportions’ setting. In Gimp that means making sure the link icon is broken in the transform tool dialog box.

Now, use the transform tool to push the edges of your photo until they just barely fill the entire canvas. Once you’ve done that, save your work (make sure you know the location of the saved image) and examine the final product to confirm that the canvas is filled.

At this point, you need to match your photo’s dimensions to your computer screen’s resolution. Click Image, Scale Image, again make sure that the ‘constrain proportions’ setting is turned off, and adjust your photo size to match your screen resolution numbers. My laptop’s screen, for example, has a resolution of 1200 by 800 pixels.

SET YOUR BACKGROUND

The moment of truth has arrived. Set your resized image as your desktop background, grab your camera and tripod and get ready to snap your first transparent photo. In person, your transparent desktop background may not look like much, depending on the resolution of your camera. But bear in mind that the finished product is your final photo–not the actual desktop image.

Take a look through your camera, and confirm that everything lines up. If you followed my earlier recommendation, several items will be running off your desktop screen–for example, a cord extending from the back of the monitor onto your desk, or a book that is partially blocked by your monitor. These items greatly enhance the transparency effect, and serve as guides for your monitor’s angles. Remember to take your time, be patient, and get the best shot you can.

As you can see, my final shot didn’t turn out too badly. I made a few lighting mistakes–but overall not a bad effort for a novice.

WHAT NOW?

After you’ve captured your final image, what you do is up to you. You can put it back into Photoshop and adjust its colors, lighting, and white balance; or if you feel that the image is good enough as is, you can simply declare victory.

Now that you’ve created your first transparent screen, consider posting your image on your favorite photo-sharing site or adding your work to Flickr’s Transparent Screens Pool.

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
July 22, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Canonical is offering enterprises a chance to try cloud computing via a virtual appliance that bundles Ubuntu Linux with the IBM DB2 Express-C database running on the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) public cloud platform.

The free appliance, which features Ubuntu Server Edition 10.04, also can be deployed in private cloud configurations.

[ See InfoWorld's report on Novell working with VMware on Linux-based software appliances. ]

DB2 Express-C enables developers to test applications to see if they can be used in a cloud, said Neil Levine, Canonical vice president of commercial services. Applications such as data analysis and Web frameworks can be tested, he said.

“This is a very easy way for the enterprise to try out [cloud computing],” Levine said.

IBM endorsed Canonical’s cloud effort.

“Customers are quickly adopting DB2 software on Linux for both on-premise and cloud computing deployments,” said Robert Sutor, vice president for open source and Linux in the IBM Software Group, in a statement released by Canonical. “The combination of Ubuntu and DB2 provides users with a highly integrated and tested virtual cloud appliance.”

Canonical is making the announcement at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland.

Canonical is talking with IBM about possibly bundling Ubuntu Linux with an enterprise level version of DB2, Levine said.

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By Kenneth van Wyk
Computerworld (US)
June 28, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - ON JUNE 1, THE FINANCIAL TIMES REPORTED THAT GOOGLE PLANNED TO DROP WINDOWS AS ITS PRIMARY DESKTOP OPERATING SYSTEM AND SWITCH TO APPLE ‘S MAC OS X AND LINUX , BECAUSE THE LATTER TWO ARE MORE SECURE THAN WINDOWS. THAT’S A PRETTY BOLD LEAP BY ANY MEASURE. SHOULD YOUR ORGANIZATION FOLLOW SUIT? NOT SO FAST.

No doubt about it, switching desktop operating systems across an enterprise the size of Google is a massive undertaking. There’s just so much to take care of. It’s a move that’s far more complicated and disruptive than simply uninstalling one operating system and installing another. And the direct product costs are a mere drop in the bucket compared to the overall costs when you consider things like tech support, user training and so on.

I can only assume that Google was well aware of all this and made an informed business decision. If that is the case, should the rest of us consider it a warning sign that we should heed?

Let’s take a rational look at some of the factors involved here. And I’ll point out that I have absolutely no direct contact with Google on this, so I’m merely making some guesses from an outsider’s perspective.

For starters, Google seems to be reacting at least in part to the recently publicized attacks it experienced. From those reports, it appears that the attackers were able to exploit old browser configurations (Internet Explorer 6) at Google to gain their initial access to the company. Of course, it sure shouldn’t surprise anyone reading this column that running a vulnerable browser can lead to significant problems.

Aside from that, wouldn’t it be cheaper to simply upgrade these vulnerable browsers, or even switch to a different browser, than replace the entire operating system? It’s got to be cheaper to switch browsers than it is to replace desktop operating systems across an entire company.

Next, does anyone really believe that OS X or Linux are inherently more secure than Windows? Seriously? I believe I’m safer on OS X than I would be on Windows, but let’s not confuse secure with safe.

Consider doing something that is inherently risky — say, walking around with a wad of cash stuffed in your pocket that’s so large it’s obvious, and without anything to protect yourself. That’s just crazy, right?

Now, if you’re carrying that cash while walking down a quiet country lane, you’re far safer than if you were walking through crowded city streets in a foreign land where you glaringly stood out. Safer, but not more secure.

That’s the difference between secure and safe, but how does it apply to switching operating systems? You may feel that an operating system other than Windows is more secure because there have been fewer published successful attacks and malware for that other operating system. That could well be a legitimate concern. But I’d argue that neither Linux nor OS X is inherently any more secure than Windows. They tend to be safer because there are far fewer attacks and malware aimed at them, at least today.

So, what makes one operating system safer than another? Published 0days? Successful attacks? All of these things and much more factor into the equation, for sure, but it doesn’t end there. At some level, we’re kind of at the whim of the attackers. What operating systems are they attacking most today?

If we think of attacking systems as a business, then the folks writing the attacks face similar issues as the ones faced by any software developer. What platform do you write your code for? Market share, likelihood of success, cost to market and many other things are likely to factor into that decision. Well then, by all accounts, these things tend to be dynamic. Right now, they tend to favor Windows, but that may well not always be the case.

What is safe today may well not be the safest choice tomorrow. From where I sit, it’s a pretty safe bet that we’ll start to see more malware and attacks aimed at Apple’s systems in the future, just because of their market success in the past couple of years. See where this is going?

My point is this: Today we have far more attack code that works on Windows systems than on OS X or Linux. That probably won’t always be the case, and underneath it all, there are security weaknesses in all three of these operating systems. So, switching operating systems across an entire enterprise and bearing the resulting expenses might not be adequately forward-looking to be a sound business decision.

A far more compelling business justification will be found by looking at the business applications you need. Which platform best supports your business processes? What applications are available for those business processes? How about usability? How about ease of integration with other business infrastructure? Those are the sorts of things that should factor most in the decision process.

While I have my own preferences for what desktop operating system I want to be using personally, that’s hardly a basis for a sound business decision for the entire enterprise.

So, if you’re looking at Google’s actions and trying to decide whether your enterprise should consider switching operating systems, security and safety should certainly be factors, but don’t fool yourself. Be sure to see the big picture before you make that hugely important leap.

With more than 20 years in the information security field, Kenneth van Wyk has worked at Carnegie Mellon University’s CERT/CC, the U.S. Deptartment of Defense, Para-Protect and others. He has published two books on information security and is working on a third. He is the president and principal consultant at KRvW Associates LLC in Alexandria, Va.

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By John Mark V. Tuazon
Computerworld Philippines
June 11 , 2010

The cloud poses no threat to open-source enterprise Linux vendors–who use the same subscription model as the cloud–because many providers actually rely on open-source platform for their services, a visiting Red Hat executive revealed Wednesday.

Josep Garcia, director of channel sales/inside sales for Asia Pacific/Japan, Red Hat, cited the cases of NTT Japan, IBM, and Amazon’s EC2–all current or potential public cloud players–who use Red Hat’s hypervisor offering to virtualize their servers.

Salesforce.com, a popular cloud CRM vendor, likewise migrated their databases from Sun Spark to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, thereby doubling their overall performance, according to Garcia.

Garcia said more and more businesses–users and providers alike–are seeing and reaping the benefits of migrating to open-source platforms, due mainly to cost.

“Open-source software eliminates the need for license fees, because we use a subscription model,” Garcia clarified, adding that support, upgrades and fixes are already included with every subscription. “By moving to open-source, [firms] reduce spending on capex.”

Community resource pool
But more than cost, Garcia claimed that companies are becoming dependent on open-source platforms because “software developed with open-source are more robust.”

This is because of the community of thousands of developers inherent within these platforms, Garcia said. “The [opportunity for] peer review makes the quality better and innovation much, much faster on open-source,” he added.

Patrick Reidenbach, general manager, UR Solutions, one of three advanced Red Hat partners in the Philippines, observed that even proprietary software vendors are going with the spirit of open-source. “Companies are seeing the value of consulting users. With open-source, it’s the people who decide which features they want included,” he related, adding that the development process is more democratic with open-source.

Specialized skills
One of the gripes about open-source software, however, is the fact that it needs highly specialized skills to maintain, a fact admitted by Garcia, but said that “skills in Linux are now highly pervasive in the country, and we are continually ramping up new administrators for open-source.”

Garcia said Red Hat is fully committed to the Philippine market, which has seen increased adoption of their offerings in the large enterprise and SMB sectors. “We have two of the major telcos using our products, as well as some government offices,” he divulged.

While prospects are good, Garcia said the market is not yet big enough for them to hold office in the country, but the possibilities are rife. “We’ll look into it, although there are no short-term plans as of late,” he added.

Red Hat will continue to sell through its partners, where at least 80% of their revenue from the Asia Pacific region is from. In the Philippines, UR Solutions is one of the handful of Linux distributors around, with at least four Red Hat-certified engineers and eight Red Hat-certified sales people.

Reidenbach said they started out selling their solutions to NGOs and SMBs, but later on realized that open-source has become pervasive in large enterprises. “We saw that there are a lot of companies using Enterprise Linux, so we shifted gears,” he added.

UR Solutions has been a Red Hat Advanced Partner since 2008, a distinction which entails a certain level of commitment from both parties, but earns them additional help and support in terms of promotion and development from the open-source software company.

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
June 10, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - VMware will distribute and support Novell’s Suse Linux Enterprise Server OS and also bundle the Linux variant with software appliances, under an arrangement between virtualization provider VMware and Novell being announced on Wednesday.

Users who want to deploy VMware vSphere virtual machines with Suse Linux can get a free subscription to the Linux OS that includes patches and updates. VMware and solution provider partners will offer customers an option to purchase technical support for Suse Linux to be delivered directly by VMware.

[ Desktop virtualization could save desktop Linux, InfoWorld Editor in Chief Eric Knorr writes. ]

“VMware customers will be getting the updates or patches not only for vSphere but also for Suse Linux Enterprise Server,” said Bogomil Balkansky, VMware vice president of product marketing. Users can get a “seamless, unified maintenance and support experience” from a single vendor, he said.

Also, VMware will standardize its virtual appliances, which package an OS and an application with a pre-configured virtual machine into a self-contained unit, on Suse Linux as well. VMware has offered appliances such as vCenter AppSpeed, for managing the performance of virtualized multi-tier applications.

The VMware-Novell arrangement reduces complexity for customers and increases value, said Joe Wagner, Novell senior vice president and general manager for global alliances.

“We’re delighted that VMware is endorsing our strategy to be the most portable OS for physical, virtual, and cloud environments,” Wagner said.

The deal is a natural fit, said analyst Drue Reeves, of Burton Group.

“I wouldn’t say it’s earth-shattering, [but] it makes a lot of sense specifically from a Novell perspective in that a lot of customers are migrating off mainframes and midrange platforms,” onto Linux, Reeves said They can opt for a virtualized Linux platform, he said.

Novell and VMware, however, must make sure they do not upset partners like IBM, which sells mainframes and Unix, and rival Linux vendors Red Hat and Canonical, who also do business with VMware, Reeves said.

The agreement with Novell, however, is not exclusive, Balkansky said. Although there are no plans now for similar arrangements with other vendors, the proposition is “definitely something that’s not out of the question,” he said. VMware will support customers who use the company’s virtualization technology with other Linux platforms, such as Red Hat or Canonical Ubuntu.

Reeves said he expects VMware will forge similar arrangements with Red Hat and Ubuntu.

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By Lincoln Spector
PC World (US)
June 9, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - The IT Department where Daniel Toth works won’t let him use open source software because they believe it’s a security risk. Is it?

No. If anything, open-source software has the potential to be safer. Not that it always is, of course.

An open-source program is one whose source code is open to anyone who wishes to study it–or improve upon it. Open-source software is usually free and often public domain. Popular open-source programs include Linux, OpenOffice, and a program you’re quite likely using to read this blog post: Mozilla Firefox.

I might also add that two of my favorite security programs, Password Safe and TrueCrypt, are open source. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

At first glance, this seems counter-intuitive. If any hacker can read your code, why can’t they use that knowledge against you? Think of what the Rebel Alliance did with the Death Star plans in the original Star Wars.

Reality and Star Wars don’t always coincide. When everyone has access to the source code, a great many experts are able to examine that code thoroughly and determine if it really is secure. That’s prohibitively expensive if the only people with access to the code are on the payroll.

And it’s not as if closed-source programs are especially secure. People find exploits in Windows all the time.
Back in 1999, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote that “Public security is always more secure than proprietary security…For us, open source isn’t just a business model; it’s smart engineering practice.” (I checked with Schneier while researching this piece; he still stands by those words.)

But don’t be too hard on your IT department. They have to approve every program put on company computers, and checking out new programs is time-consuming. Open-source or not, they don’t want programs on their PCs that they haven’t vetted, and they don’t have time to research or test everything. Besides, they may have to answer to executives who think that k is an effective password.

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By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)
June 3, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - If a report is accurate and Google is urging its workers to dump Windows because of security concerns, the company’s rationale is bogus and disingenuous, analysts said today.

The experts were reacting to a story published Monday on the Financial Times’ Web site that cited several unnamed Google employees who said the company is phasing out the use of Microsoft’s Windows operating system because of security concerns.

Instead of Windows, Google is reportedly offering workers the choice between Macs running Apple’s Mac OS X and PCs running Linux .

Several analysts scoffed at the security excuse.

“There must be other motives besides security for such a move,” said John Pescatore, an analyst at Gartner who specializes in security issues. “As an academic exercise, yes, the ’security-by-obscurity’ model works,” he said, referring to the concept that users are safer running Mac OS X and Linux because they have much smaller market shares than Windows, and so offer hackers a less attractive target.

That’s why most malware is written for Windows machines, Pescatore added.

“But for Google — or for that matter a company like Oracle or Cisco — it doesn’t, because [attackers] target them specifically,” he continued. “If [hackers] know that Google uses Macs, then they’ll just target the company with Mac malware. And Mac malware exists.”

Windows and its supporting ecosystem do have more zero-day vulnerabilities — flaws that are exploited before a patch is available from the vendor — Pescatore acknowledged. “But if you look at the total cost of ownership of, say, Macs in the enterprise, you’re not going to find yourself spending any less on security than if you were running Windows.”

Google’s corporate network was hacked late last year when attackers exploited an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 , security researchers said in January.

“The idea that security is behind this is a little bogus,” added Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with the Altimeter Group. “Windows seems pretty good for Fortune 500 companies.”

Like Pescatore, Gartenberg sees Google’s move, if true, driven by other factors than security. “It’s an interesting excuse, but to me, it underscores the tension between Google and Microsoft,” Gartenberg said.

The two companies are locked in simultaneous battles over everything from search, where Google is the dominant player, to business productivity software, where Microsoft rules.

Last month, Google and Microsoft engaged in a public spat over Microsoft’s Office suite , with Google claiming that its online Google Docs was a less expensive alternative for companies considering upgrading to the about-to-be-released-to-retail Office 2010; Microsoft countered that Docs can’t cut it.

“Google has its own browser, its own [application] software and its own OS,” said Gartenberg, talking about Chrome OS, the unreleased operating system Google announced 11 months ago but won’t release until later this year. “So I can’t say this [talk of ditching Windows] comes as a total shock. But it seems a little disingenuous.”

If Google does drop Windows internally, the company has options, including Mac OS X, Linux and if it’s at the point where it runs reliably, Chrome OS. But some of those choices may be just as vulnerable as Windows.

“Chrome OS is too early in its development for them to use [on production PCs],” said Gartenberg. “So there’s Linux or Mac OS. But given the tension between Google and Apple, how long can Mac last there?”

Google and Apple have rubbed each other the wrong way over mobile devices, especially smartphones, where Google’s Android operating system is challenging Apple’s iPhone .

“I’m willing to bet that it’s not Apple that ends up on Google’s desktops,” echoed Ezra Gottheil, an analyst who follows both companies for Technology Business Research.

Gottheil saw a different spin on the report that Google is edging away from Windows. “I think it all has to do with Docs rather than the operating system,” he said. “The big thing you lose when you lose Windows [in an enterprise] is Excel.” In his scenario, Google is less interested in weaning workers from Windows than it is in getting everyone on Docs, which includes an online spreadsheet.

“This reminds me of when Scott McNealy ran Sun [Microsystems],” said Pescatore. “He said that he wouldn’t let employees use Office because it had security problems. But Sun was pushing OpenOffice.”

In 1996, McNealy, then the CEO of Sun, said he had banned PowerPoint , Office’s presentation manager, from the company. “I just edicted [sic] it,” McNealy said then. “I just said ‘out.’”

Microsoft declined to comment on the report, while Google issued a short, general statement. “We’re always working to improve the efficiency of our business, but we don’t comment on specific operational matters,” a Google spokesman said.

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By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)
May 27, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Google today shifted the Mac version of Chrome out of beta and into what it calls a “stable” channel, meaning that it considers the browser solid enough for day-in-day-out use.

The company also did the same for both the Linux and Windows versions.

“We believe that [Chrome] provides not only the stability, performance and polish that every Mac user expects, but also a seamless native Mac application experience that Mac users will feel instantly at home with,” said Mike Smith, a Chrome product manager, in an entry on Google’s Mac-oriented blog .

Google debuted a beta of Chrome on the Mac in December 2009, running through several updates before today.

“Anything that Google can do to indicate that Chrome is production ready is significant,” said Sheri McLeish, an analyst who covers browsers for Forrester Research. “Historically, Google has had long beta cycles, sometimes without a clear end point, so this provides some assurances, especially to enterprises, that they’re driving the browser. It should give IT more confidence in Chrome.”

According to Web metrics company NetApplications, Chrome across its three platforms accounted for 6.7% of all browsers used worldwide in April. McLeish said that the latest survey she had conducted put Chrome in the 8% range of enterprise browser share.

Chrome is the second-fastest browser in JavaScript rendering, lagging only behind the Norwegian browser Opera. Earlier this month, Computerworld pegged Chrome 5 as about 17% faster than Chrome 4.

Google also updated Chrome for Windows — which has been in the stable channel since December 2008 — to the same version number, marking the first time that all three supported platforms carry the same designation. Google maintains three separate “channels” of Chrome: a finished, stable build; a beta build; and a developer preview.

Not included in today’s updates is Google’s planned integration with Adobe’s Flash Player. Currently, the automatic background updating that Google has been testing in beta builds is disabled by default in the stable edition. In a separate blog post , Brian Rakowski, another Chrome product manager, said that Google would switch on the feature with the final release of Flash Player 10.1.

Adobe delivered a release candidate of Flash 10.1 — usually the last step before calling software finished — for Windows, Mac and Linux earlier this month.

Today’s stable editions of Chrome include support for several HTML5 features, such as geo-location and drag-and-drop; synchronization of browser settings to effectively “clone” Chrome on multiple machines; and the ability to use extensions when working in Chrome’s “Incognito” private browsing mode.

Google also patched six security vulnerabilities in Chrome with today’s stable releases. Two of the six were tagged as “high” threats, while the other four rated “medium” on Google’s four-step scale. Access to information on all six vulnerabilities has been blocked by Google, which regularly locks down details until it decides that a majority of Chrome users have upgraded to the patched version.

Chrome 5 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from Google’s Web site. Users already running the browser will be updated automatically.

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By Chris Kanaracus
IDG News Service (Boston Bureau)
April 27, 2010

BOSTON - Lawson Software announced a number of services and products Monday for running its software in a private cloud environment, following up on its recent move to support its ERP software on Amazon’s public Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

The ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor has developed grid-computing technology for distributing application workloads over clusters of servers; the first two in a series of virtual software appliances; and a drag-and-drop Cloud Console tool for managing the appliances.

While Lawson built the grid technology, the appliances are VMware images that use a Linux OS and IBM’s WebSphere application server.

The first two appliance products are for Lawson’s Smart Office and Enterprise Search applications. Lawson began with this pair because they are considered add-ons to its core ERP systems, said Lee Kilmer, global director for technology product management.

“For customers who want to get started with it, these lend themselves very well to that,” he said.

Lawson is considering support for other virtualization technologies, such as Microsoft’s Hyper-V, but is not ready to make any public announcements, Kilmer said.

The appliances will be available worldwide in May. Kilmer declined to discuss pricing information.

Lawson’s announcement is more a telling indication of cloud computing’s growing ubiquity, rather than a major technological breakthrough.

But the new cloud console is significant because its ease of use should help customers reduce staffing costs, said analyst Ray Wang, partner with Altimeter Group.

Overall the announcement reflects the fact that much of Lawson’s base wants private rather than public clouds, he said.

“These are state governments, health care organizations, people dealing with a lot of HR data. Granted it’s fairly secure in the [cloud] environment but they still have to answer to their constituents,” he said. “It’s probably not the cheapest thing in the long run, but it’s the right thing for their company.”

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By Lincoln Spector
PC World (US)
February 24, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO - Rwiringa asked the Answer Line forum how to save an entire Web page, including images, for off-line viewing.

You’ve got a number of options here.

The first is to do just that: Save the page and its image files. And the current versions of most browsers make this very simple.

In either Firefox or Chrome, press CTRL-s to bring up the Save As dialog box. In the ‘Save as type’ field, select Web Page Complete, and save the file to your desired location.

If you’re using Internet Explorer, select Page (near the upper-right corner), then Save As. In IE, the ‘Save as type,’ menu offers two “Webpage complete” options. You want Webpage complete (*.htm; *.html).

When they save the page, all three of these browsers create an .htm file, plus a folder containing all the necessary images. The code in the .htm file has been altered to look for image files in that folder.

The result isn’t always perfect, and heavily coded pages may not render properly. I tried several pages from pcworld.com, and found various images missing, although the ones you’d most want–those that are part of the editorial content–were there.

Another problem with this method: If the .htm file and the folder get separated, or if you change the folder’s name, the page won’t find its images.

Internet Explorer offers a one-file solution that gets around this problem: Web Archives. To create one, select Page, then Save As. For ‘Save as type,’ select Web Archive, single file (*mht). Now you know why IE offers two Web Archive options.

These archives aren’t perfect, either. You can only view them in Internet Explorer (a serious problem if a Linux user must look at them), and they still drop a lot of images.

The final solution is to save the page as a .pdf file. These files are compact, don’t have to travel with a folder of images, can be read with a free reader that almost everybody has, and include all of the images on the page.

But how do you convert a web page to a .pdf? There are plenty of programs available that can do it for you. Many of them install as print drivers, so that anything you can print can be converted. I’m currently using the free Bullzip PDF Printer, and see no reason to change.
But there’s an even easier way to convert a Web page into a .pdf file. Copy the URL to the clipboard, go to pdfmyurl.com, paste the URL into the appropriate field, press ENTER, and save the file. My thanks to forum regular Oldschooljohnny for introducing me to pdfmyurl.com.

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By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)
January 4, 2010

FRAMINGHAM - Microsoft’s Windows resumed its usual losing form last month as the operating system’s usage share dropped by about a third of a point even as the new Windows 7 posted a second straight month of impressive gains, Web metrics firm Net Applications said Friday.

Although rival desktop operating systems — Mac and Linux — essentially remained flat, mobile OSes, including Google ’s Android and Apple ’s iPhone OS, took up the slack created by Windows’ dip. Mobile operating systems, said Net Applications, now power 1.3% of all the hardware that surfs the Internet.

Windows finished the year with a 92.2% share, down 0.3 of a percentage point. It was the eighth month in 2009 during which Windows lost share.

As it did in 2008, Windows’ decline again accelerated in the second half of the year, when it lost 1.2 points of share. That compared to a drop of just 0.5 of a percentage point in the first six months of 2009. In 2008, Windows also lost more than twice as much share between July and December as it did in the preceding six months.

But the slip doesn’t mean Windows is in any danger of losing its grip on the operating system market anytime soon: At the pace of the last 24 months, Windows would retain a majority share for another 27 years.

As in November , both Windows XP and Windows Vista lost share in December, while Windows 7 gained ground. Unlike in November, however, Windows 7 was unable to make up for the decline in Microsoft ’s older operating systems.

Windows XP slid 1.3 percentage points in December, its second-largest one-month decline ever. (The record remains November, when XP lost 1.4 points.) Vista, meanwhile, lost 0.7 of a percentage point, a single-month record, to end at 17.9%. December was the second month in a row that Vista lost share, and the third in the last four months, a trend that points to a permanent decline as users abandon it for Windows 7.

Still, the bulk of Microsoft’s losses since the Windows 7 launch on Oct. 22 have been from Windows XP; the eight-year-old OS has lost 2.7 points in the last two months, while Vista has lost only 1 point.

Microsoft’s newest OS, on the other hand, boosted its share by 1.7 percentage points to end December with 5.7%, meaning that approximately 1 out of every 18 machines on the Web ran Windows 7 last month. If it can keep up the pace of the last 60 days, Windows 7 will crack 7% this month, beating Vista to that number by six months.

Windows 7 also reached a milestone on Jan. 1, 2010, when it posted an 8% share for the day. The previous one-day record of 7.6% had been set on Dec. 27, 2009.

Apple’s Mac OS X dipped for the second month in a row, finishing December with 5.1% after a decline of a statistically insignificant 0.01 of a percentage point. Most months, however, Mac OS X posts gains, not losses: December was only the fifth month of 2009 in which Apple’s operating system lost share.

The winner, according to Net Applications: mobile operating systems, which accounted for 1.3% of all OSes powering devices that browsed the Internet in December. Although their shares remained small — the largest was Java Platform, Micro Edition, with just 0.53%, followed by the iPhone OS with 0.44% — month-over-month increases were dramatic in some cases. Google’s Android operating system, for example, increased its share by nearly 56% between November and December, while RIM and the iPhone boosted their shares by 22% and 20%, respectively.

Net Applications measures operating system usage by tracking the machines that surf to the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients, which results in a pool of about 160 million unique visitors each month. It then weights share by the estimated size of each country’s Internet population.

December’s operating system data can be found on Net Applications’ site.

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By Jeremy Kirk
IDG News Service (London Bureau)
December 2, 2009

LONDON - A team of researchers has developed a squeezable mouse-like input device that gives three-dimensional control to its users.

The device is called Suma, short for satsuma or the mandarin fruit, said Duncan Smith, head of consumer product development for Cambridge Consultants, which licenses its innovations to manufacturers.

Cambridge Consultants is developing several versions of Suma that will be shown in January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The company can’t reveal too much as it is in the process of filing for a patent for Suma, but it is releasing some details.

Inside Suma’s pliant foam are light actuators surrounding a sensor core. As Suma is squeezed, those actuators detect pressure and movement changes. Those signals are processed with software inside Suma and then sent to the software program that can accommodate the device.

The difference between Suma and a controller for Nintendo’s Wii, for example, is that the motion-based controllers allow users to move objects but not manipulate the shape, which has the potential for a new range of applications, Smith said.

The Suma is “very much a whole picture of the inside of your hand,” Smith said.

It’s possible, for example, to manipulate the viewpoint of both the user and the object the user is looking at simultaneously, which is not possible with controllers now, Smith said.

Smith said developers have also put an accelerometer inside Suma, which allows for more movement control. Although Smith stressed that the software for Suma would come from elsewhere, his team has developed what he described as an “addictive” ball game that runs on a Linux OS and shows what Suma can do.

The ball game will be part of a demonstration at CES, where Cambridge Consultants hopes to pique the interest of peripheral makers and software developers.

One Suma model has a cord and runs off of USB (Universal Serial Bus) power. In order to use Suma, devices such as gaming systems or PCs would need a new driver, but it not difficult for Suma to be recognized as a standard peripheral, Smith said. Inside Suma’s core, there is some software that translates the actuators’ signals into a more standardized form.

Cambridge Consultants has developed a low-end version of Suma that is less sensitive to pressure but also cheaper to produce. With more expensive components, Suma can be made into a more sensitive, precise device.

Gaming and 3-D applications are obvious for Suma, but Smith said his team believes it could have medical-related uses such as for the disabled.

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By Computerworld Philippines Staff
November 9, 2009
 
Open source solutions firm Red Hat, Inc. announced the general availability of the Red Hat enterprise virtualization for servers, designed to enable pervasive adoption of virtualization, with end-to-end solution combining a standalone hypervisor and virtualization management.

The virtualization platform is the newest product set in the Red Hat enterprise virtualization portfolio built on its leading Red Hat enterprise Linux operating system platform, which offers the proven security, performance, scalability and cost advantages of open source virtualization technology.

Red Hat said the enterprise virtualization for servers entered a worldwide beta in June 2009, collaborating with large enterprise beta customers, such as Comviva, Host Europe, NTT Communications, Qualcomm and Swisscom. This resulted in enhanced product capabilities designed to meet enterprise requirements for deploying and managing heterogeneous virtualization and cloud environments.

“As a participant in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization beta program, we recognized expanded performance, security and scalability benefits for our systems,” said Amarendra Kumar Singh, vice president, CAG, DPM, ISS and IT at Comviva.

Sing said they look forward to continuing their technology collaboration with Red Hat and plans to deploy new virtualized workloads on Red Hat enterprise virtualization going forward.

Yet Patrick Pulvermuller, managing director at Host Europe, said they recognized expanded performance and scalability benefits for their thousands of virtualized systems.

“After comparing the industry’s leading virtualization solutions, we are planning to use Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as the foundation for our cloud servers to leverage the powerful combination of Red Hat’s next-generation KVM virtualization technology and Red Hat’s new server virtualization management tools. We look forward to continuing our long-time technology collaboration with Red Hat through joint work on our cloud and virtualization deployments,” Pulvermuller said.

Similarly, Masato Minamisawa, executive manager of IP technology department, business network services division at NTT Communications, claimed they have experienced the impressive agility, scalability and performance benefits of Red Hat’s virtualization solutions.

However, Red Hat said its enterprise virtualization for desktops remains in private beta today and is expected to be made generally available in early 2010. – Tom S. Noda

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By Gregg Keizer
Computerworld (US)
November 9, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - Just a week after it last updated Firefox, Mozilla has rushed out a new version of its browser to fix a crash bug that programmers inadvertently introduced.

Firefox 3.5.5, which Mozilla posted for download late Thursday, fixes a small number of what the company called “stability issues” in the release notes that accompanied the update. Unlike almost all interim updates that Mozilla issues about once every six weeks, version 3.5.5 did not patch any security vulnerabilities.

The main bug quashed Thursday was one that was causing a high number of crashes in the Windows version of Firefox 3.5.4, the update that Mozilla launched Oct. 27 to patch 16 flaws.

“We’re seeing lots of crashes in the GIF decoder,” noted Mozilla developer Joe Drew in the message that kicked off the discussion on Bugzilla, the company’s bug and change tracking system. Only the Windows edition of Firefox 3.5.4 was crashing, others reported on Bugzilla. The GIF decoder is the component that parses .gif image files embedded in Web pages.

“This bug was actually caused by bug 514776 which removed the check for null mImageFrame,” said another Firefox programmer, Jeff Mulzelaar, on Bugzilla. “I don’t know why that check was removed.” Information about the bug Mulzelaar mentioned is password-protected and not available to the general public.

Firefox 3.5.5 also fixes a stability bug in the Mac version, and another crash problem in the Windows and Mac editions.

Mozilla’s older browser, Firefox 3.0, was not affected by the bugs. The most up-to-date version of that edition is Firefox 3.0.15, which was also released Oct. 27.

Firefox accounts for an estimated 24% of all browsers worldwide, according to data from U.S. Web metrics company Net Applications.

Firefox 3.5.5 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from the Mozilla site; current Firefox users can call up the browser’s update tool or wait for automatic update notifications to appear.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
October 21, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - IBM is trying to hit Microsoft where it hurts, with a new offering designed to lure customers away from Windows 7.

The top 7 roadkill victims on the journey to Windows 7

IBM Tuesday said it is teaming up with Canonical to provide cloud- and Linux-based desktop packages in the United States at half the cost of upgrading to Windows 7. It’s called the IBM Client for Smart Work package, which was initially launched last month in Africa, as it was designed for emerging markets.

But IBM sees an opportunity to extend the product to the United States “to help companies avoid the higher licensing, hardware upgrades and migration costs associated with Microsoft Windows 7,” as IBM said in an announcement.

Despite announcing the product Tuesday, IBM and Canonical say it won’t be widely available from its full lineup of partners until 2010. That gives the industry’s dominant operating system vendor a significant head start, with Microsoft’s Windows 7 set for general availability on Thursday.

But IBM says the Client for Smart Work package, which is based on IBM’s productivity and collaboration software, will give customers a less expensive alternative to Windows by taking advantage of existing PCs or low-cost netbooks and thin clients.
“Independent market estimates range up to $2,000 for the cost of migrating to the Windows 7 operating system for many PC users,” IBM argues. “New PC hardware requirements account for a significant portion of the added expense.”

IBM claims its package will help businesses save as much as 50% vs. Windows on software costs. IBM says Client for Smart Work will consist of the following components, some of which are already available: “Word processing, spreadsheets and presentations from IBM Lotus Symphony, which is a free-of-charge download on the Web; Email from IBM Lotus Notes or the cloud-based LotusLive iNotes launched earlier this month, which starts at $3 per user, per month; Cloud-based, social networking and collaboration tools from LotusLive.com from $10 per user, per month; and Ubuntu, an open platform for netbooks, laptops, desktops, and servers.”

“Since the IBM Client for Smart Work is based on Eclipse, Linux and open Web standards, it can integrate with any third-party software,” IBM says. “This gives companies the freedom to use technologies of their choice, extend their functions and preserve existing investments.”

IBM Client for Smart Work is already being sold as a hosted virtual desktop by partners such as Web hosting provider Midas Networks and desktop virtualization vendor Virtual Bridges.

IBM and Canonical say there will be hundreds of partners offering IBM Client for Smart Work in the United States, but not until 2010. Partners will include systems integrators, virtual desktop providers and others.

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By Patrick Thibodeau
Computerworld (US)
October 19, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - IBM disclosed the plans at a time when server sales among all vendors have taken a bruising during the economic downturn, and IBM is no exception. In a third quarter earnings call yesterday, said Mark Loughridge, IBM’s chief financial officer, said that the company’s third quarter mainframe revenue declined by 26% from the year-earlier period.

Nonetheless, Loughridge said IBM is optimistic about the hardware business in the near future in a climate of what he called a return to “general stability.”

The new Power7 chip will offer up to eight cores and increase support for virtualized environments, executives said. IBM has slowly be releasing specs for Power7, which it says will support 1,000 virtualized machines, almost four times the 254 supported by the dual core Power6 chip that was released in 2007. IBM’s Power chips support AIX, Linux and the older System I computers.

IBM released its last mainframe, the z10 , in February, 2008, and typically releases a new mainframe every three years. If it keeps with that schedule, the new mainframe probably won’t be shipping until late next year.

Gordon Haff, an analyst at Illuminata Inc. in Nashua, N.H., said IBM’s next mainframes may help users cut costs by allowing them to move some of the mainframe processing to IBM x86 systems. In a hybrid system, the mainframe may handle the service management and data storage with the x86 systems performing some of computational work, said Haff.

IBM has tried to cut user costs in the current mainframe line by using specialty processing engines, such the Linux IFL processor.

The ability to offload mainframe work to the x86 systems of multiple vendors is one of the reasons cited by the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA) trade group in its effort to trigger a new antitrust inquiry into IBM practices by the Department of Justice. The trade group claims that IBM is blocks third party vendors from offering such an offloading capability.

Rich Partridge, an analyst at Ideas International Inc. in Rye Brook, N.Y., said that with increases in throughput and processing power in the next mainframe, IBM will probably encourage users to replace servers with mainframes to cut back on data center sprawl. The argument for “more centralized computing infrastructure will play to the mainframe,” he said.

IBM’s planned hardware improvements come as Oracle Corp. outlines more of its plan to integrate Sun Microsystems Inc. once its deal to buy the struggling computer maker closes. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison went into overdrive about IBM at company’s annual conference OpenWorld, vowing to vanquish IBM.

IBM CTO Alan Ganek was sanguine about IBM’s prospects in any head-to-head performance metric match up.

“Oracle is a competitor and will always be a partner,” said Ganek, of Ellison’s attack, “but I don’t see any change here I’m worried about.”

Meanwhile, Loughridge noted that IBM’s software’s sales improved in the third quarter. He cited In particular a 2% increase in sales of the company’s major middleware products, such as the WebSphere, Tivoli, Lotus and Rational product lines.

Ganek said in an interview that improvements in the WebSphere and other middleware lines generally are the result of automating businesses processes, so that a user’s data can flow through the process end-to-end.

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By Patrick Lim
General Manager, Red Hat ASEAN

Not too long ago, a Singapore schoolboy wrote a drawing program for the iPhone to help his younger sisters draw on the touch screen using their fingers. Called Doodle Kids, it was downloaded nearly half a million times in three months from Apple’s App Store. The 9 year old boy ‘got’ IT.

Technology isn’t about building and maintaining infrastructure, it’s about using IT to solve problems. Yet, nearly seven in 10 enterprise IT dollars are spent on maintenance and, in a distributed computing environment as much as 85 per cent of IT capacity can remain idle.

This is not to diminish the importance of maintaining infrastructure, but the true value of IT lies in providing users with information they need to make critical business decisions.

Today’s mobile, interconnected workforce places new demands and greater pressures on business application delivery. To meet these challenges, enterprises typically over-provide computing capacity and network resources, leading to the idling of excess capacity. This needs changing.

The combination of the Internet, broadband networks, virtualization technology and increasingly powerful commodity computing resources creates the conditions for the next development in IT — cloud computing. The idea behind cloud computing is to harness pools of computing resources to give enterprises access to IT infrastructure without incurring large capital investment.

Cloud computing removes the need to over engineer infrastructure. With it, enterprises can acquire resources as needed and when usage peters off, these resources can be turned off, offering great flexibility. When you only pay for what you use, the economics of providing IT resources changes dramatically. Available on a metered basis, IT expenditure shifts from capex to opex.

If enterprises view IT as a utility, then continued investment in infrastructure when options exist, would be like operating your own power station just to get electricity. IT is an information utility. Growing adoption of virtualization technology will advance cloud computing and its promise of self service, on-demand usage and portability.

Research firm Gartner Inc anticipates that by 2011 enterprises will purchase as much as 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service. And that by 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license.

The move to cloud computing won’t happen dramatically. Rather, it will be evolutionary as enterprises get used to freeing applications from being tied to specific infrastructure. A recent market study by Merrill Lynch predicts the global market for cloud computing to reach US$95 billion in the next five years or about 12 per cent of software deployed in the world. Recessionary economic conditions will likely add pressure for a faster adoption of commodity infrastructure and services.

Cloud computing is, of course, no panacea for all economic ills. But it does offer businesses a new way to provision infrastructure and computing services as well as a compelling financial argument by freeing up capital otherwise locked in physical equipment.

Here in Singapore, pay-per-use computing services is already a reality for a number of government and commercial organizations through the National Grid initiative. According to one computing resource provider participating in the initiative, critical mass is within reach in three years’ time.

The more compelling vision is the creation of a Grid Market Hub in Singapore by 2013 that will offer businesses anywhere in the world infocomm resources on an on-demand, pay-as-you-use basis. In short, cloud computing will move to the forefront in Singapore and IT organizations will not be able to ignore it.

The open source, collaborative model of developing and consuming software will be pivotal in cloud computing, In fact, open source and cloud computing are a natural fit, not least because of the inherent cost advantages. As cloud providers grow, given their scale, the costs of acquiring proprietary software will loom large in the business calculations.

More importantly, community-driven open source software ensures cloud computing is open, standards-based, interoperable and free from technology lock-in. Openness delivers choice. It makes it possible for enterprises to switch cloud computing providers or architectures as their own conditions change as, for example, when acquisitions occur or new business requirements arise.

In the US where the cloud computing wave is gathering momentum, nearly all major cloud providers like Amazon, for example, use open source software. Demand for open standards and development transparency will push the adoption of open source in cloud computing and in so doing, redefine the way software is developed and consumed.

The on-demand cloud computing model will transform the way in which enterprises will use IT. Freed from the time and cost constraints of implementing and maintaining underlying IT infrastructure, enterprises return the focus to creating business solutions they need to operate successfully. In their continuous search for business advantage, enterprises need to re-emphasize the information in IT.

Red Hat is represented in the Philippines by MSI-ECS, its exclusive country distributor. To help CIOs and CXOs understand the value of open source and virtualization, Red Hat will be hosting a free seminar exclusively for CIOs and CXOs on October 2, 2009. For registration, please visit www.msi-ecs.com.ph/redhat.

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By Nancy Gohring
IDG News Service (Seattle Bureau)
September 23, 2009

SEATTLE - Leaders in the Linux community seemed resigned to the fact that Linux still hasn’t made headway in the desktop market, but they made it clear on Monday that their success in other markets, such as mobile, is at least as important.

At the Linuxcon event in Portland, Oregon, panelists on one session that included Linux’s founder, Linus Torvalds, seemed ambivalent when asked whether next year is finally the year for Linux on desktops.

“I don’t know that it’s important that everyone or some large percentage of the user population is using Linux as a desktop,” said Ted Ts’o, chief technology officer for the Linux Foundation.

Bob Sutor, vice president for open source and Linux in IBM’s software group, outlined what he sees as possible scenarios for desktop Linux in the years to come. One is that it just dies. “Or, we stop using desktops, so who cares,” he said.

Apple and Microsoft each could end up with about a third of the market, with Linux getting the rest, plus or minus 32.9 percent, he joked.
“If the Linux desktop gets into the double digits across a broad range of people, it’s probably time to claim victory,” he said.

Rather than dwelling on the lack of success for Linux in desktops, though, leaders focused on other successes.

“Linux has incredible market share on the client, just not on the desktop,” said Dirk Hohndel, chief technology officer of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center. Routers, wireless access points and TiVo boxes all use Linux, he said.

“Linux is used every day by every person in the modern world,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. That’s because popular Web sites such as Google and Facebook employ Linux, as do commonly used devices such as cable TV set-top boxes.

The leaders were particularly excited about progress in the mobile-phone market. Google’s Android and Palm’s Pre operating systems are built on Linux, and the LiMo Foundation supports a set of Linux technologies for mobile phones. Nokia uses Maemo, a platform based on Linux, for its mobile Internet devices.

In addition, the Linux community has high hopes for regaining lost ground in the netbook segment. Zemlin hinted at an announcement planned for later this week about new netbooks based on Moblin, a Linux-based operating-system project spearheaded by Intel.

That potential may be behind the satisfaction that Torvalds seems to have with the current state of the Linux kernel. He couldn’t point to anything specific that he hopes to see in the kernel. “I don’t have features I’m looking forward to that would be impossible due to the model and the way the kernel is organized,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s already done what I want it to be able to do for a long time.”

He’s also happy with improvements to the Linux development model, which has made his job easier merging new code into the kernel. Now, working on Linux is “an absolute pleasure,” he said.

That doesn’t mean he had no criticism, however. “We are not the streamlined, small, hyper-efficient kernel I envisioned 15 years ago,” he said. “Our kernel is huge and bloated. Whenever we add a new feature, it only gets worse.”

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By Nancy Gohring
IDG News Service (Seattle Bureau)
September 22, 2009

SEATTLE - A new Linux netbook based on Moblin will be introduced this week, and it may represent a new way that the Linux community is approaching the mass market.

Leaders at the first Linuxcon Conference in Portland, Oregon, hinted at an announcement to come this week at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco that they say will reassert Linux’s initial momentum in the netbook market.

“You’re going to see this week interesting new netbooks coming out that are killer. They have the cool factor and they’re priced right,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation.

He believes that within a year, “no one will buy hardware or software.” Laptops will be free with a wireless service contract. Only free software like Linux can support that model, he said. “Microsoft’s economics don’t fit into that at all,” he said.

While Linux initially had a larger portion of netbook market share, Microsoft has now taken the lead. But that’s not going to continue, due to market forces and new products, Zemlin said.

“Microsoft went in and gave away XP for free to shore up market share in an emerging space that’s fast growing. But they can’t sustain that forever, they can’t do it with Windows 7,” he said.

An Intel executive believes that Microsoft will raise prices for vendors with the release of Windows 7. “What I hear when I talk to netbook vendors is Microsoft does not want to repeat the extremely aggressive pricing with XP Home. They want to significantly increase the price for Windows 7 netbooks,” said Dirk Hohndel, chief technology officer of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center. XP Home is the Windows operating system that Microsoft sells for netbooks.

Ultimately he expects different tiers of netbooks. The low-tier, low-cost netbooks will ship with Linux and Moblin. A higher tier will cost more and feature Windows 7, he said.

But beyond cost, there will be more significant differences between netbooks running Windows 7 and variants of Linux, he said. That goes to the heart of a change that leaders of the Linux community urged: Create something new and attractive rather than simply mimicking market leaders.

“We need to stop pretending that it will be a drop-in replacement [for Windows] and make it something better,” said Bob Sutor, vice president for open source and Linux in IBM’s software group. “This will be a major thing that determines the future. I think making it a complete drop-in solution is a dead-end strategy. They’ve got a little bit more money,” he said, referring to Microsoft.
Microsoft has market share and mind share and in order to win either, Linux will need to find a niche based on “what it does really well at what price for which people,” Sutor said.

The new netbook running Moblin will follow that philosophy, Hohndel said. “What we’re trying to do with Moblin is not to do a general-purpose PC but focus on … a different experience designed for young people on the go or someone who wants a second computer to take to Starbucks and Twitter,” he said.

Linux failed to retain its early lead in netbooks because it was trying to emulate Windows. “We were trying to win at their game. We in the Linux community are trying to be successful by mimicking what someone else is doing successfully. To me, that is a losing strategy,” he said.

One of the biggest shortcomings to Linux-based netbooks so far is a poor user interface, he said. The community must find a way to attract designers “but also change the attitude of developers to listen to designers,” he said.

Moblin is a Linux-based operating system designed for netbooks, mobile Internet devices and other small and midsize products. The project was spearheaded by Intel. Acer has said it plans to roll out products using Moblin. This week’s announcement may come from Dell.

The Portland event is the first Linuxcon conference, a get-together designed to allow organizations interested in Linux to find specific information about how to use the open-source software and for Linux developers to prove the success of their projects, Zemlin said.

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By Dan Nystedt
IDG News Service (Taipei Bureau)
September 9, 2009

TAIPEI - Foxconn Technology plans to launch its first smartbooks next year, which are mini-laptops that use microprocessors from Arm Holdings normally found in smartphones.

Smartbooks are similar to netbooks except that they don’t use Intel’s popular Atom microprocessor nor other x86 processors.

Foxconn has been asked by telecommunications companies in China and elsewhere to develop smartbooks due to their low prices, said Young Liu, special assistant to the CEO at Foxconn, on the sidelines of an Intel press conference in Taipei.

They’re attracted to the price range of a smartbook, US$100 to $200, he said. “That’s a lot lower than a netbook,” he said. “There will be a lot of demand for a sub-$200 device.”

His company is working on “less than five” smartbooks right now, he said, declining to name a specific number. The devices, codenamed Qbooks, use a few different Linux operating systems, including one similar to the Intel-backed Moblin OS and one developed by Foxconn. The company is currently looking into Google’s Android mobile OS for possible use as well, he said.

The smartbooks his company is developing will have screens between 7 and 10 inches, the same size as standard netbook screens.

He said Foxconn’s first smartbook will likely be available next year, but added that if Intel puts out a microprocessor that can compete with Arm’s chip on price, his company may use that instead and make netbooks.

Foxconn is the trade name for Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision Industry, the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer. The company owns several subsidiaries and affiliates operating under various Foxconn names, including Foxconn Electronics and Foxconn International, under the group umbrella, Foxconn Technology Group.

Smartbooks from several Taiwanese contract manufacturers were displayed at Computex Taipei in June, including Pegatron, the contract arm of Asustek Computer; Wistron, formerly Acer’s contract manufacturing operation; and Elitegroup Computer Systems.

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By Jon Brodkin
Network World (US)
August 18, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - IBM is slashing prices on mainframe Linux products and selling new mainframe bundles to try to reverse declining revenue.

IBM has cut in half prices for some specialty Linux processors, according to a report in the Channel Register. The vendor has also released seven new mainframe bundles designed for specific application workloads, with IBM saying that its goal is to lure customers away from Sun and HP platforms.

Last month, IBM reported that System z mainframe server revenue decreased 39% year-over-year in the second quarter, while overall company revenue declined 13%.

Mainframe revenue goes in cycles, with IBM posting big numbers shortly after new releases, and then seeing a gradual falloff thereafter, notes Pund-IT analyst Charles King.

Thus, a drop in revenue this year is not surprising, given that IBM unveiled a major new mainframe server, the System z10, in February 2008. But the revenue decline is still steep, because of the general downturn in IT spending.

“The mainframe business goes through some fairly cyclical ups and downs. … I do think that the latest drop is more severe than usual, but I don’t look at it as quite so desperate as I think some people do,” King says. “What you’re seeing is a mix of tough times combined with the natural falloff in mainframe sales.”

IBM’s recent moves are illustrative of its increasing reliance on Linux as a driver of mainframe sales, King notes. IBM has argued that the mainframe, combined with the specialty processor known as Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL), is ideal for consolidating x86 and Unix applications.

IBM acknowledged “new pricing” for the IFL processors, but did not offer specific numbers. The Channel Register article details a price change from $90,000 to $47,500 for IFLs running on the System z Business Class mainframe.

Cutting the price was essential to help IBM compete against the latest Intel processors, IBM told the Channel Register.
“The price change is in part because of the increased performance with the latest Nehalem EP Xeons,” Karl Freund, vice president of System z strategy and marketing at IBM, said.

King says he doesn’t expect a major price cut for something as widely used as IBM’s z/OS mainframe operating system. If there are additional price drops, King speculates that they would probably target other specialty processors such as zIIP (designed for business intelligence, ERP and CRM) and zAAP (designed for Java and XML).

Although recent mainframe revenue reports look poor in comparison to last year, IBM said it is having success on the Linux end. “More than 40% of new System z customers installed Linux last year, and Linux continued to grow over 15% during the first half of 2009,” IBM said in a press release.

Over this entire decade, IBM says IDC numbers show that its revenue market share for servers costing $250,000 or more has moved from 17% to 32%.

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By Jason Whittaker
PC Advisor (UK)
August 6, 2009

LONDON - Netbooks have soared in popularity over the past year, offering consumers portable PCs for word-processing and web browsing at rock-bottom prices. Such mini laptops use inexpensive processors that consume a minimal amount of power and thus offer a far longer battery life than most portables.

But there’s one problem: Windows Vista is a resource-hungry operating system (OS), and it will run painfully slow unless your system has plenty of memory and processing power. Installing Windows on a netbook also adds a significant amount to the machine’s overall cost.

To get around this, netbook manufacturers tend to favour Windows XP, Microsoft’s older, cheaper and less resource-hogging OS. But you may find that Linux, which this runs perfectly well on just 512MB of RAM, is a better alternative.

Linux will be unfamiliar to most users, but it’s a far more attractive proposition than it used to be. While most of us are put off by our lack of knowledge of the OS, the addition of graphical user interfaces to its various distros and the widespread availability of free Microsoft-compatible applications, such as OpenOffice.org, mean you no longer have to compromise on usability.

Over the following pages we aim to demystify Linux. It’s not just netbook owners who will benefit from using this alternative to Windows; as a free, open-source OS, Linux is also a great option if you want to breathe life into an elderly machine.

You can install Ubuntu alongside your existing OS, too, so if you don’t want to dump Vista entirely, you can keep it as a secondary option. You’ll find it’s faster than Vista Home Premium and less restricted than Vista Basic.

If you’ve tried Linux before and were put off by the setup process, fear not. If Windows is already installed on your PC, adding Linux is a simple, two-step process, with no drive partitioning required.

There are, of course, a few differences between the Ubuntu Linux distro we’ve installed here and the Windows interface, you can get to grips with most features very quickly. We’ll show you how to set up Ubuntu and get started with the most common apps.

Installing Ubuntu Linux

1. Ubuntu is available in server, desktop and netbook editions. The easiest way to get the latest version is to use Wubi. This installs Ubuntu as a standard Windows application. Simply indicate the drive where you want to load the OS, then click the Install button.

2. Ubuntu will appear as an option in your boot menu; select this and log on. The OS’s Gnome interface is similar to that of both Windows and Mac OS X. At the top left you’ll find menus to access Applications, Places (folders and drives) and System (tools and settings). To turn off your PC, click the symbol at the top right.

3. To modify the interface, go to System, Preferences, Appearance. The resulting dialog box contains separate tabs for Theme, Background, Fonts, Interface and Visual Effects. The last of these lets you alter visual settings, whether for aesthetic reasons or to speed up performance on a low-powered system.

4. Because Linux mounts drives before you can access files, no disk drives are displayed on the desktop when you first log on. Files, folders and drives are accessed via the Places menu at the top of the screen. For some of these you’ll need to provide your password before you can access the contents.

5. To set up a web connection, go to System, Administration, Network Connections. In the resulting dialog box, click either Wired or Wireless and hit Add. Enter your setup details in the next window. Click the Security tab and select the encryption type. Enter the key that you need to get online, then click Close.

6. To customise Ubuntu’s Applications, Places or System menu, right-click it and select Edit Menus. From here you can select icons and choose which apps should appear in the menu by ticking the box next to them. To add a new entry, go to File, New Entry, enter a name and browse to the command that launches it.

Get to grips with Ubuntu Linux

7. Much like Windows’ Toolbar, Ubuntu’s panel allows you to load applets for helpful tasks such as keeping an eye on the weather or storing ’sticky’ notes. You can run multiple panels on one screen. To add an applet, right-click the panel and select Add to Panel. Select an applet and click Add.

8. Several applications come preinstalled with Ubuntu. The Firefox web browser is accessible via an icon next to the System menu; Pidgin instant messaging and the Evolution email client can be accessed via Applications, Internet. To use Evolution you’ll need to enter a username, password and details of your email server.

9. OpenOffice.org is another application that’s preinstalled with Ubuntu. To use this productivity suite, go to Applications, Office and select Writer, Calc or Presentation. OpenOffice.org is compatible with Microsoft Word and has a similar interface. Those migrating from Windows should find it extremely easy to use.

10. Ubuntu also preinstalls The Gimp, a highly capable image editor that gives Adobe Photoshop a run for its money. Go to Applications, Graphics to launch it. As well as offering the basics for cropping, drawing, painting and adding text to images, The Gimp includes a number of filters and support for multiple layers.

11. To add new programs, right-click the Applications menu and select Add/Remove Applications. The Application Manager displays applications that are guaranteed to work with Ubuntu. Tick the box next to any you wish to install and then click Apply Changes. The app will be downloaded and automatically installed.

12. To access Ubuntu’s multimedia options, go to Applications, Sound & Video. Brasero Disc Burner creates discs for data, audio or DVD; Rhythmbox is a fantastic audio player that supports internet radio; and Totem is a fairly versatile video player. If you wish to play DVDs on your PC, follow the instructions at help.ubuntu.com.

13. Like Windows, Ubuntu requires regular updates. To check whether any updates are available for your PC, go to System, Administration, Update Manager, then click Check. Select the updates you want, then hit Install Updates. Click the Settings button if you’d prefer for your PC to be updated automatically.

14. To share your desktop with other Linux PCs on your network, go to System, Preferences, Remote Desktop and tick ‘Allow other users to view your desktop’. To access your desktop from another machine, go to Applications, Accessories, Terminal. Enter the command vncviewer -fullscreen and the IP address provided.

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IDG News Service (New York Bureau)
August 5, 2009

NEW YORK - Microsoft for the first time has named Linux distributors Red Hat and Canonical as competitors to its Windows client business in its annual filing to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The move is an acknowledgement of the first viable competition from Linux to Microsoft’s Windows client business, due mainly to the use of Linux on netbooks, which are rising in prominence as alternatives to full-sized notebooks.

“Netbooks opened Microsoft to the possibility that some other OS could get its grip on the desktop, however briefly,” said Rob Helm, director of research for Directions on Microsoft. “Now it’s alert to that possibility going forward.”

In its annual Form 10-K report for the fiscal year ended June 30, Microsoft cited Red Hat and Canonical — the latter of which maintains the Ubuntu Linux distribution — as competitors to its client business, which includes the desktop version of its Windows OS.

Previously, Microsoft had only noted competition from Red Hat to its Server and Tools business, which includes the Windows Server version of the OS for server hardware, in its 10-K reports.

“Client faces strong competition from well-established companies with differing approaches to the PC market,” Microsoft said in the filing. “Competing commercial software products, including variants of Unix, are supplied by competitors such as Apple, Canonical, and Red Hat.”

The filing goes on to note, in a thinly veiled reference to netbooks, that Linux has gained what Microsoft characterizes as “some acceptance” as an alternative client OS to Windows, in particular in “emerging markets” where “competitive pressures lead OEMs to reduce costs and new, lower-price PC form-factors gain adoption.”

It also mentions the work of Microsoft’s own OEM (original equipment manufacturer) partners Hewlett-Packard and Intel to support Linux on PCs.

Seattle-based blogger Todd Bishop called attention to Microsoft’s acknowledged change to the competitive landscape in a blog post on the TechFlash Microsoft Blog. He also posted a link to Microsoft’s 10-K filing.

While Linux on servers is a well-established market among business customers, Linux as a viable alternative to Windows on PCs has never taken off. However, the emergence of the netbook as a low-cost, smaller form factor to the traditional notebook PC has certainly changed that, so much so that Microsoft lately has been pushing a lightweight notebook as an alternative to netbooks, Helm said.

“Microsoft would like the netbook to go away and be replaced by lightweight laptops — ones with long battery life that cost enough to justify running full Windows on them,” he said.

Helm added that Microsoft is trying to discourage the production of inexpensive computers where Windows becomes the most expensive component because it can’t make as much money on Windows on these devices, and they could drive down the price of Windows.

Microsoft’s current Windows client OS, Windows Vista, had too large a hardware footprint and was too expensive for netbooks, giving Linux an opening in that market when it emerged late last year. However, Microsoft’s eight-year-old Windows XP OS is still the dominant system for netbooks, and the release of Windows 7 in October will feature a Starter Edition that is especially geared toward that market as well.

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By Paul Krill
InfoWorld (US)
July 27, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO - Look for personal computer users to soon get their hardware in the same way that they get their cell phones: for free as part of telecommunications service subscriptions, the executive director of the Linux Foundation said on Friday afternoon.

In a presentation at the O’Reilly OSCON (Open Source Convention), Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin said a trend will emerge in which users would select a wireless or network service provider and get a free PC with a data plan. AT&T, he said, already is offering netbooks as part of a service plan, with the user getting the netbook for $50.

In an interview on Thursday, Zemlin elaborated on his free PC vision, enabled by the rise of netbooks running Linux. “What made the cell phone industry in the U.S. in particular take off in the mid-90s was the free phone,” he said.

Carriers, he predicted, can provide Linux-based devices and develop their own app stores. Device makers also can provide these store, like Apple has, Zemlin said.

During his keynote, Zemlin emphasized the use of Linux in multiple types of systems and how Linux was changing the game in operating systems even on the client. “Today, everybody in the modern world uses Linux multiple times a day,” he said, citing examples such as laptops, Google searches, and other systems.

Meanwhile, phones and PC devices are starting to converge, offering a lot of the same functionality, he explained. A PC can be cheaper than a phone, he said.

“If you look at what the iPhone has, it looks pretty similar to that PC,” said Zemlin, comparing the iPhone to a $1,000 ThinkPad PC.

Linux also is benefitting from the down economy, with customers looking to save costs, Zemlin said. It also is overcoming potential legal hurdles with developments such as Microsoft now embracing the GPL, Zemlin said.

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By John Fontana
Network World (US)
July 21, 2009

FRAMINGHAM - In an historic move, Microsoft Monday submitted driver source code for inclusion in the Linux kernel under a GPLv2 license.
The code consists of four drivers that are part of a technology called Linux Device Driver for Virtualization. The drivers, once added to the Linux kernel, will provide the hooks for any distribution of Linux to run on Windows Server 2008 and its Hyper-V hypervisor technology. Microsoft will provide ongoing maintenance of the code.

Linux backers hailed the submission as validation of the Linux development model and the Linux GPLv2 licensing.

Microsoft said the move will foster more open source on Windows and help the vendor offer a consistent set of virtualization, management and administrative tools to support mixed virtualized infrastructure.

“Obviously we are tickled about it,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “Hell has frozen over, the seas have parted,” he said with a chuckle.

Microsoft made the announcement at the annual OSCON open source conference that opened Monday in San Jose.
Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Linux driver project lead and a Novell fellow, said he accepted 22,000 lines of Microsoft’s code at 9 a.m.PST Monday. Kroah-Hartman said the Microsoft code will be available as part of the next Linux public tree release in the next 24 hours. The code will become part of the 2.6.30.1 stable release.

“Then the whole world will be able to look at the code,” he said.

The stable release is an interim build between each main release, which come in three-month cycles. The first main kernel release to include the open source driver technology will come in December as part of the 2.6.32 release, Kroah-Hartman said.
The drivers will initially be part of the Linux kernel’s staging tree, a place where code is stored and polished before it is moved into the main tree. The code of every first-time kernel submitter begins life in the staging tree.

Kroah-Hartman said Microsoft’s submission was routine. “They abided by every single rule and letter of what we require to submit code. If I was to refuse this code it would be wrong,” he said.

Sam Ramji, who runs the Open Source Software Lab for Microsoft and is the company’s director of open source technology strategy, called the Linux kernel submission the company’s most important Linux/open source commitment ever.

“It is a significant piece of technology. It is a strategic technology and it is under the GPLv2 license that the Linux kernel uses, and which the community is organized around.”

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By Ellen Messmer
Network World (US)

FRAMINGHAM - Open-source software is not only as good as proprietary vendor software in many cases, it’s better — and certainly a lot cheaper, according to James Sims, vice president of information technology and chief information officer at the grocery retailer, Save Mart.

With about 245 stores, three warehouses, 20,000-plus employees, and a trucking fleet as part of a multi-billion-dollar grocery operation, Modesto, Calif.-based Save Mart has discovered that where it made a shift to open-source software for databases, operating systems and network management, it lowered costs by more than half.

“Open source is profoundly less expensive,” says Sims, citing the adoption of SuSe Linux, the Ingres open-source database, MySQL, and Hobbit open-source monitoring as changes that contributed to over 50% in IT savings in comparison to the proprietary software from Oracle, Microsoft Windows or HP OpenView that was replaced.

Open source “is free but we do pay for support and services,” Sim’s points out, noting that Save Mart has established vendor alliances with Novell, Red Hat and Ingres to support open-source software the grocery retailer uses.

Save Mart’s first experience with the Ingres open-source database came when it acquired grocery stores from Albertsons about two years ago, and because the acquisition didn’t include software licenses, the decision was made to try the Ingres open-source database.

At the time, it was viewed as a bit radical to make this shift, but Save Mart has had such a positive experience, it’s now likely to migrate away from Oracle’s database which it uses elsewhere, if only because Oracle has turned out to be “one of the worst business partners we’ve had” because of abysmal service and support, says Sims.

“We get better service and support with open-source and Ingres than with Oracle,” says Sims, with about one-quarter of the overall costs.

Every little bit helps in the grocery business, where profit margins are razor-thin, Sims notes. A shift towards open source also means that Save Mart puts more value on IT staff with interest and skills in Linux and open source.

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By the Computerworld Philippines Staff
May 1, 2007

Without a doubt, Linux is making waves in the Philippine enterprise space. This was the consensus among the IT heads of four of the country’s top companies who took part in Computerworld Philippines’ third CIO Roundtable for the year.

The four CIOs invited to participate in this issue’s roundtable feature were Henry Rhoel Aguda, chief information officer of Digital Telecommunications Philippines Inc.; Francis Cruz, IT consultant of 2Go Express; Kelsey Hartigan Go, executive vice president for IT, SM Prime Holdings Inc.; and Paul Zaldarriaga, vice president of corporate information management at Jollibee Foods Corp.

During the very lively two-hour discussion at Oakwood Premiere, the IT bosses—all of whom had a lot of enthusiasm for Linux—disclosed how their respective companies are benefiting from open source technology.

Computerworld’s monthly CIO roundtables are sponsored by HP Philippines Corp. and are moderated by the publication’s editorial team.

Excerpts of the roundtable discussion follow:

CWP: Various reports say that Linux use in the business world is growing rapidly. Is this true for your company?

Go: It’s growing. But, primarily, we use it as backend servers. We’ve been using Linux since 1999 even before I joined the company (SM). It saves on costs because before we used to buy SCO Unix where you’re limited by the number of users. With Linux, it operates the same way, never crashes, and is quite stable. My main reason, however, is I have familiarity with it.

Zaldarriaga: I would say in Jollibee it is a major thrust from our end. On a personal basis, I started using it in my previous job. I was running the software development subsidiary for a major multinational vendor and at that time we were running our Domino e-mail system on Windows NT. It reached the point where we really had to upgrade and so we attempted to migrate the Domino e-mail engine into Linux. In fact, my staff then was very reluctant because they didn’t know how these things were going to work. But I told them to go out and experiment, try it out. I told them if our e-mail system is not up on Monday, I promise I won’t get angry. And so they did it over the weekend and, by Monday, we were up. Domino ran on Linux, no problem, everything was working fine. But what we found out that in terms of overhead was that it actually used less memory and there was no performance degradation. That was my first personal experience.

And even before that I learned Linux from Dominique Cimafranca. In terms of advocacy, Dominique was really pushing us to use Linux because, according to him, this is the next wave. This was when Linux first came up. And so I asked him to teach my staff to develop Web sites on Linux. I wanted to look at a platform that we could offer small and medium enterprises. I felt if we can teach them how to use open source that would be an interesting play, because that would really be e-services, not software licensing just e-services. With Linux, we were able to again develop Web sites very easily. To my mind, that was the major paradigm. Linux now gives people an option. You don’t have to rely on proprietary platforms. The interesting thing is there are certain technologies that bring about other technologies or other paradigms. Linux would not have been possible without the Internet because that’s where you have the sharing. Without the Internet, open source will be nothing today.

Go: If I may add, a lot of people are concerned about the security of Linux. But, on the other hand, because it is open source, it is always up for scrutiny. In the global community, there’s a patch that comes out probably the day after anybody sees a bug. Because of this openness, people can see the loopholes and people accept that there are loopholes and they get fixed immediately. We are also doing a lot of Web development internally for applications. We have our legacy applications, our billing systems and so forth and so on but sometimes there are users who begin to read certain information and we need to come up with applications for them to represent these information at a quick and timely manner. So we came up with a Web-based application in less than a week using the Lamp model—like Linux, Apache, Mind Scale, Post Press and PHP. With those in place, it was very, very easy for us to roll out applications, and they’re Web-based. You don’t have to install it in the client. You just need a browser and that’s it.

Zaldarriaga: It’s interesting, you got the Internet, Linux, and Web-based applications, all these technologies are coming together and it’s good for the market. The driving force, to my mind, behind open source and maybe Linux—and this is what killed the mainframes and to a certain extent other hardware platforms—is the commodity pricing of hardware by Intel. For a very long time, Intel had to be on Microsoft and did not have the robust functionality of the operating systems of other units and mainframes. Now with Linux, what I’m seeing is that it’s the Unix people—because of their affinity with commodity hardware—who are bringing Linux to the Intel platform. So now, if you want to go to Intel, you have two choices: Microsoft and Linux. Everybody wants to be at the commodity Intel space. If you’re not there today, you’ll be paying an arm and a leg for it.

Cruz: When I joined the company (2GO) in 2002, they were running mission-critical systems on IBM. The company was growing very fast that the technology they had could no longer support the growth. So we had to buy new hardware. At that time, Oracle released a new version of database called 9i, which was the first version of Oracle that supports Linux. We needed to migrate all our databases to a new hardware or platform. So I was part of the team that conducted the study on whether to migrate to 9i on Linux or continue using IBM hardware. Based on the cost of the hardware, we would be sharing the same server to run around five databases each. But, at that time, no one else was using Linux for enterprise applications, especially for the mission-critical ones which generate around $8 billion or about P30 billion a day. So by migrating our systems to Linux, we were taking a big risk. Eventually, we decided to migrate to Linux in 2003. Oracle promised that they’ll be introducing clustering in the Linux version so in case one server goes down, the other one can take the load.

So for me, it was a very big challenge, especially knowing that we had that higher level of comfort in using the Unix OS, because we are also considering migrating everything to Linux using Intel hardware. While we were comfortable using the Unix OS, we decided to migrate the mission-critical databases to Linux on a clustered architecture, starting with the smallest applications. It took around two years to migrate all the mission-critical applications. Right now, all the mission-critical applications are running on Linux, which is still on Red Hat 2.1.

Aguda: For our company, our Linux adoption is not growing as rapidly as those of most companies, but it’s growing in a significant manner because now we’re realizing the advantages that it offers with some of the applications we’ve implemented Linux on. First, it’s very flexible to implement. Second, it’s quick to deploy. There are no issues on licensing agreements, and finally, it’s very cost-effective, especially when you’re launching something very quick and you need to experiment with a lot of stuff. The problem we usually have with implementing systems is we have to go through the regular process of getting the budget. Normally, if it’s a mission-critical application, the budgeting process will take a few months. But if you have a good idea that you need to deploy quickly, you can just get an ordinary computer loaded with the Linux variant of your choice and experiment with it. Launch it, and once you’ve launched it and established a proof-of-concept type of situation, you can go for a bigger system. So that’s where we’re finding Linux to be good at, and we’re seeing that on the server side of Linux we have a lot of advantages that we can explore.
CWP: Do you have any problems with top management in terms of justifying your use of Linux?
Aguda: Our top management is technology agnostic, so they will depend on the recommendation of technical experts. In our case, what we try to do is to present to the management something that will meet the business requirements, so it has to be cost-effective, quick to deploy, and easy to maintain. Total cost of ownership should be sensitive to the business’ state at that time, so if the appetite for the business is to save up on capital expenditure, then those are things that we look out for. I think Linux is something that can meet those requirements for as long as we use it for the right purposes.
CWP: What is your company’s strategy with Linux? How much does your company rely on Linux in achieving its goals?

Aguda: Right now, a small percentage. Still 95% of our applications are outside Linux, the 5% there would consist of Web-based applications, Web-based services that we need to experiment with, domain name services, and, essentially at this point, we’re still figuring out the right areas where we can deploy Linux, but it’s a technology that we need to adopt, we need to build expertise on, and once we do have that, I think that’s where Linux will fly as a technology platform in our company. But this year, we’ll be embarking on training some of our people on Linux, encouraging them to explore open source applications and, hopefully, we’ll get one major application again in Linux.

Go: Our ERP (enterprise resource planning system) runs on Linux. Our billing system runs on Linux. Our e-mail is running on Lotus Domino, which runs on Linux. Our firewall, our e-mail gateway, our DNS (domain name servers), our Web services—everything runs on Linux.

We do have proprietary operating systems as well because of the nature of the applications, but as much as possible, we try to find Linux counterparts for them. If we run it on Linux, not only do we save on license costs, because, well, at that time when we were just starting, we didn’t have to reboot our servers every week.

CWP: What proprietary software do you use?

Go: It depends on the application.

Zaldarriaga: In the case of Jollibee, there’s really no mandate to just stick to Linux or roll out Linux. I think when it makes business sense for us, when the application that we really want runs on Linux, we do that. Where there is a choice, and the economics are favorable, we would implement Linux.

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