Posts Tagged ‘ Linux ’

Save a Whole Web Page

By Fei Lumbania on February 24, 2010

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
group-shot
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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