Two months after the launch of Fedora 12, we spoke to Paul Frields, Fedora Project Leader at Red Hat, about how this release has been received by the community, and what is in store for the next. Though it started as a technical discussion on what Fedora 12 offers IT admins and developers, it graduated into a more serious conversation on the relationship between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the distinction (if any) between commercial and community Linux.

Uptake of Fedora 12 has been very good overall. There have been a number of very visible improvements in free video drivers for ATI and Intel that make for a better experience out of the box.  Those improvements allow users to make use of 3D effects on the desktop, as well as kernel mode setting for an attractive and smooth boot experience. The free Nouveau driver for NVIDIA cards has also greatly improved to allow kernel mode setting, and Fedora continues to contribute to moving that driver forward to support features like 3D.

A very visible set of features came with the fit-and-finish improvements in the user desktop.  Menu cleanups, better icon spacing, a new notification engine, improved tooltips, consistent ordering of status icons, and a fresh and usable desktop background were just some of the improvements.  These improvements result in a generally more pleasant user experience on the desktop, from which everyone benefits.  An in-depth interview about those features is found here.

One of the “come from behind” hit features in Fedora 12 seems to be the Automatic Bug Reporting Tool (ABRT).  It captures information when a program crashes, and helps the user report that bug, along with full debugging information, into the Bugzilla tracker that Fedora uses. Developers get a lot more helpful information about bugs and can figure out where they need to prioritize their attention.  We used ABRT during the development of Fedora 12, and it was handy for fixing a number of bugs for which it would have been very difficult to discern the cause without ABRT.

For the IT admins reading this interview, could you explain what the virtualisation and networking improvements in Fedora 12 are?

One of the most prominent features is the tool set for working with virtual guests, outside the virtual environment itself. With libguestfs and guestfish, a sysadmin can make changes on a guest image without having to actually boot up that system.  If that image is used as a “golden image” or baseline for many systems, the capabilities of these tools are extremely valuable.  Good sysadmins are always looking for clever ways to avoid having to do things manually that can instead be automated.  If the sysadmin doesn’t have to start up guest systems to make changes, but can script this work, common changes can be built into all sorts of clever automation, allowing sysadmins to better manage their time.

Another major improvement is memory management across multiple guests. In a lot of cases, virtualisation is used to host a large number of very similar guests.  With Fedora 12, we’ve introduced a kernel shared memory feature that eliminates duplicate memory areas across guests, pointing instead to a single page in memory.  So if you have any two virtual guest machines, each assigned, say, 512 megabytes of RAM, that load many of the same things into memory, the actual memory usage of each machine may be much lower than that 512 MB.  Of course, that means that on the same host hardware, you can now fit more guests into the same amount of physical RAM.  And this is managed without any special fiddling with configuration, again making life easier for the busy system administrator.

There are many other virtualisation improvements, and there’s an in-depth set of interviews about them here.

From a developer’s perspective, what are the most interesting features in Fedora 12?

Linux, and Fedora in specific, has always been the best-engineered and featureful platform for development, out of the box.  With support for dozens of complete programming language, any programmer can scratch an itch using Fedora.  We’ve offered a number of graphical, integrated development environments (IDEs) in Fedora for some time, including the very popular Eclipse IDE, with support for many languages and also plugin development.

But now we’ve also added a refresh of the SystemTap profiling capability, which allows developers to trace information about code and kernel execution without having to instrument, recompile, reinstall, and reboot their systems.  SystemTap 1.0 now includes support for updated GCC debuginfo, kernel tracepoints, static probe markers, and tools and development extensions for a number of advanced functions.  And furthermore, SystemTap 1.0 has been integrated with the Eclipse IDE so that programmers can launch SystemTap scripts on their C/C++ projects from within Eclipse, and link SystemTap data with Eclipse graphics.

With Fedora 12, we also added support for the latest NetBeans 6.7.1 IDE, which includes Maven support for creation of plugins and web services, as well as other features.  (More information is available here.)

Which of these improvements in Fedora 12 do you think will be significant value-adds to future versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

Because Fedora operates as the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can expect to see a number of these features in future releases. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is by far the preferred open source platform for businesses that want to make smart, future-proof investments in IT on shrinking budgets.  So the virtualisation, development, and user-facing features of Fedora 12 — better performance, more extensive and efficient support of hardware, and improved ease of use — are all indicators of substantial advancements and value in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

What next? What are the key features the team plans to work on for the next release? That is, on what lines should contributors start thinking about now?

Besides the usual improvements that come with the newest releases of popular desktop environments, we already have many features on the slate for Fedora 13, which is due for release in May 2010.  These features include a parallel-installable Python 3 software stack, language package plugins for the yum software management system, an improved user account tool for single-user systems and small deployments, colour management for displays and printers, and a truly minimal boot environment for installation or testing through the boot.fedoraproject.org site.

If you were asked to give one piece of solid, valuable advice to IT admins using Fedora, what would it be?

Get involved in the worldwide Fedora community.  You can get instant access to helpful advice, tips, and knowledge through our mailing lists and forums.  You can meet like-minded admins that are using Fedora to get a peek at next-generation open source technology.  And you can leverage the collective experience of tens of thousands of Fedora users around the world.  And most importantly, you do not have to be just a voiceless consumer of technology, as is the case with many proprietary systems.  With very little effort, you can become part of the process of improving and shaping the direction of the technology leader in Linux distributions.  It all starts by visiting our helpful page on interacting with the community.

If a team of developers caught you by surprise and asked, “We want to contribute to Fedora. What do you want us to work on right now?”, what would your answer be?

It would depend on what their developer skills are!  If the developers worked primarily on web applications, either PHP or Python, I’d get them involved in our Websites team and on the rollout of our new Fedora Insight system.

I would point experienced C/C++ developers with a background in user applications to our Desktop team that works on core functionality at that level.  On the other hand, if they were hardware hackers, I’d probably point them to the upstream kernel community and encourage them to use Fedora for their testing platform since we have a great track record for working with the upstream kernel community, and not hacking around them.

We also have teams that work on illustration and design, marketing, documentation, and infrastructure/system administration.  To become a member you do not need to be specially “voted in”, or approved–to join, you simply create an account at join.fedoraproject.org and then jump in to help on one of the lists in your area of interest, as shown on the “communicating and getting help” page.

There are plenty of ways to get involved with Fedora — we believe in encouraging people to be self-starters, volunteers who look for ways to help, rather than being treated as employees and told where to work.  It’s easy to find things that need doing, and people become contributors by simply finding something that interests them, telling people they’re going to work on it, and then doing it proactively, in collaboration with other Fedora Project members.

Assume an IT administrator who is not cost constrained. He is faced  with a choice between RHEL and Fedora. Can you give us three reasons in favour of each choice? That is, three reasons why he could choose RHEL,  and three reasons why he could opt for Fedora.

…..

Can you explain the symbiosis between Fedora and RHEL? How does each contribute to the other?

I think these two questions are best answered together.

Fedora is not something recommended for use in long-term production environments.  That’s not because it’s unstable, because it isn’t; and of course it has advanced, next-generation features.

Fedora might be unsuitable for many IT administrators because of its short lifecycle: the end of life for a Fedora release comes a month after the second following release.  A month after Fedora 12 was released, Fedora 10 went to end of life and no longer receives security or errata updates.  That lifetime is only about 13 months, and most administrators don’t want to roll over their production environments annually.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, on the other hand, is supported by the world’s leading open source company for at least seven years after release.  That means IT departments can be assured of a stable, reliable platform for rolling out their deployments, that respects their bottom line and planning cycle.

However, Fedora gives IT departments something valuable on top of their investment in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.  Fedora represents a way to be involved in the future of the platform they already invest in, and Linux technologies that will shape the industry tomorrow.  This is something no proprietary platform can offer.

So for instance, an administrator might have a closet full of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers running virtualized guests and the software stacks of his or her choice, but on the desktop the administrator team might be using Fedora to plan for the next generation of production environments they’ll use a couple of years down the road.

This is how IT environments can maximize their investment in open source.  Linux helps IT environments do more with less, saving time and money through virtualisation, higher performance, energy efficiency, and a number of other features.  By taking that cost savings, and applying it to solving real, business-specific IT problems, any business can improve their bottom line.

This relationship between Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the key to both Red Hat’s success and the success of Red Hat customers. And it’s equally applicable whether you have two system administrators and a rack of servers, or two hundred IT admins and a global, enterprise-class architecture.

What do you think is the key difference between commercial and community open source projects? When will this difference fade?

I think the Fedora Project has done quite a lot to break down the onus around what some people consider “commercial” open source projects. In Fedora, Red Hat is a contributor that puts resources and effort into specific areas of interest.  In the same way, any volunteer can do the same thing.

Fedora in one sense is a gigantic, effective R&D laboratory for any person or group who wants to collaborate with others using open source methods, to produce results that can be used, modified, and redistributed freely by anyone.  We have contributors outside Red Hat, for example, who work on projects such as a learning environment for children called Sugar, and a collection of electronic device design and analysis tools for use by engineers.

Red Hat’s particular interest lies in core pieces of the Fedora platform that are the upstream for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux product. So it works first in upstream communities like the kernel, X.org, and so on to originate new free software under the GPL.  Then it also contributes to Fedora, to integrate that software in a form that is freely available for anyone.  There are only a few people in Red Hat who are paid to work full-time on Fedora; most engineers who are producing software split their time in this fashion.

This is the exact same route that any unpaid volunteer can participate in Fedora.  So the distinction between commercial and community has become a bit outdated in the case of the Fedora Project.  Fedora is a great place to contribute to technologies that will be the most relevant around the world in the future.

How important is India, from the Fedora community perspective? That is, how good is the developer base, how involved are Indian developers, what have the key contributions of the Indian Fedora team been and what are they working on now and how can Indian developers be motivated to do more for the community?

Fedora places a high value on growing our community worldwide, including India. This heat map shows a distribution of Fedora mirror usage worldwide.

The Fedora heat map

As you can see, India has a considerable concentration of Fedora systems and users, and the number of local mirrors carrying Fedora is steadily increasing in India. In January of this month, for example, another public mirror was added in Mumbai. We also have a number of very valuable members of the Fedora community working from India, including Susmit Shannigrahi who coordinates our FreeMedia project; Debarshi Ray who maintains a number of software packages in Fedora and also originates some desktop software himself; and Rahul Sundaram who has been a member of the Fedora Project since its earliest days and works on a number of areas including marketing and documentation.

One way Indian developers can be motivated to do more in the Fedora community is by meeting in real life. There are a growing number of free and open source software conferences happening in India, and we encourage developers to make the time to attend and spread Fedora, and also to meet and discuss areas where they would like to aid in the development of free software and specifically Fedora. The social bonds that develop at real-life conferences are indispensable in building strong community and collaboration.

Fedora employs a strategy of creating sustainable community through regional leadership, through contributors known as Ambassadors. We also have a specific list for use by users and contributors in India where developers can interact with each other and the Ambassadors. We have several key Ambassadors who coordinate regional work in India, and they are all members on that list, so we encourage developers to join it and get in touch with each other.

“Vision is perhaps our greatest strength… it makes us peer into the future and lends shape to
the unknown.”—Li Ka Shing, a businessman from Hong Kong.The story behind how the founder of Koenig Solutions came up with a radical business model, to turn a struggling training and
certification institution into a profit churning multi-city entity, may interest many existing or
wannabe entrepreneurs.In 2000, when the dotcom bust hit the IT industry, entrepreneurs running the IT training and certification businesses also felt the heat.The options were either to quit and save themselves from further losses; or to tie a knot at the end of the rope, hang in there, and look for opportunities in the middle of the crisis.
Rohit Aggarwal, founder of Koenig Solutions, chose the second option and decided to not only stand firm in the face of this onslaught but also emerge out of it stronger. Driven by his vision to make a success out of his hard-hit IT training certification business, he decided to explore new options and innovate around the existing set of resources.Supported by a team of dedicated
professionals, including the current general manager, Sandeep Dhawan, he decided to downsize and focus only on the profitable niches. On analysis, the team discovered that,occasionally, foreign students attended courses at Koenig. The company saw an opportunity to make extra bucks by bundling travel and hospitality with its core teaching and training offerings.

The turning point

This was an experiment that worked well for Koenig. The team bundled a hotel tariff in the course fee, and began making money on commissions from the hotel where the students would stay. “Although it was a miserly sum of Rs 200 per day, it seemed like a princely sum to us in those days,” recalls Aggarwal. The first student who opted for this courseplus-hotel package came from the UK in 2002. “He was happy with our solution and agreed to become our referral in the UK. This encouraged us. Foreign students started coming in regularly, albeit in small numbers. Since these students saved a lot of money compared to training in their own country, they were quite happy,” he adds.
At that time the team felt that if the institution could get 10 students every month, it would be a great achievement. This target was achieved in 2004. “Soon the true potential of offshore training started to dawn on us. We set a target of 100 students per month, which we achieved in 2009. We are now targeting 1,000 per month, which is to be achieved in the next few years,” shares Aggarwal.

Blending tourism with training

Initially, Koenig’s business idea was to save costs for its customers. Tourism was not a significant aspect of its value proportion. But in 2004, based on the feedback received from its customers, who liked this unique blend of tourism and study, it decided to strengthen this aspect.Going forward, some students remarked that Delhi was not the ideal place to study because of its traffic, noise and summer heat. This prompted the team to open a centre in Shimla. Then another centre came up in Goa, in 2005.
Talking about the key factor that has helped shape the Koenig growth story, Aggarwal says: “The success of our business depends upon ensuring that our customers have a hassle-free stay in India. We have developed strong relationships with reliable and customer-oriented vendors and hotels in India, and most of our customers recommend India as a tourist destination to their friends and colleagues.”
Surmounting challenges But success didn’t come easy to the team. Aggarwal recapitulates those days when, compared to western standards, the institution’s infrastructure and facilities were ramshackle, with even computers being obsolete. But there were a few things that kept Koenig ticking. “The trainers
and staff kept going with full motivation. The students liked the concept of the ‘one-on-one’ training that was imparted,and also the abundant attention that they received from the administrative staff.”
Over the years, Koenig improved its services. “Thefacilities and computers became state-of-the-art and
comparable to the best in the world,” says Aggarwal.

A business model that may grow, dramatically!

Offshore training is a novel business idea that Koenig has pioneered in India, claims Aggarwal. He feels that the concept has the potential of evolving into a full-fledged industry. He explains: “We are diverting clients from other countries to India and, in the years to come, this will be another business
on par with today’s call centres, BPOs and other ITES (ITenabled services).”

Aggarwal takes pride in several other innovations that Koenig has come up with over time. “The concept of ‘oneon-one’ training and the holiday-cum-training are the key innovations. Apart from this, we constantly upgrade our facilities and innovate in the HR processes (which are critical to retain the best IT talent) to meet international standards. In fact, as of today, our students prefer Koenig primarily because of quality. Cost is a secondary consideration.”

For budding entrepreneurs who wish to set up a training and certification business, Aggarwal has a few words of advice: “Focus on quality. Far too soon, service providers fall into the trap of seeking short-term profits, thus compromising on the quality of their core offerings. Though there is no dearth of training providers, there is a virtual vacuum for businesses that deliver superior quality that’s beyond their price point. So businesses that are paranoid about quality will always do well.”

“A service provider determined to ‘wow’ the customer and continuously innovate to meet the customers’ latent needs cannot but be successful in the long run,” he asserts. And, we
agree!

Most football freaks would agree on José Mourinho being the iconic coach of this decade, having consistently shown his ability at taking strong raw talent and transforming it into championship-calibre teams. After ensuring FC Porto was decorated with medals of the Portuguese Liga, Cup of Portugal, UEFA Cup and UEFA Champions League, he went on to guide Chelsea through two consecutive Premier League titles and helped Inter win the Supercoppa Italiana and National Serie A titles. In 2004, EnterpriseDB, a solution provider of an open source relational database management system, performed similar magic with PostgreSQL, a leading open source enterprise-class relational database management system (RDBMS). PostgreSQL was a promising star in the database market when it was originally built twenty years ago; EnterpriseDB helped transform the world-class technology of PostgreSQL into an enterprise class product with the release of Postgres Plus Standard Server and Postgres Plus Advanced Server.

“Postgres Plus is an open source database typically deployed in high profile, mission-critical applications. Our open source products provide capabilities that address a range of enterprise requirements (application development enhanced performance, runtime management, usability, and scalability), which enable organisations to build and deploy applications that solve critical business problems. We also provide 24×7 ‘follow the sun’ technical support, training and professional services needed to support all phases of evaluation, development, deployment, and ongoing production of mission critical systems,” says Ashish Mehra, director India operations, EnterpriseDB Software India.

Based on open source PostgreSQL, which is developed by the largest independent RDBMS community in the world, EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus Standard Server and Postgres Plus Advanced Server are products suited for transaction-intensive and mixed-load applications. Typically, Postgres Plus is deployed as an online transaction processing (OLTP) database in support of enterprise applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERM), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and other applications that require databases to support high concurrency, performance, scalability, and security.

But with multiple players (both proprietary and open source) in the RDBMS market, what makes Postgres Plus products a cut above the rest?

While the total cost of ownership of a 16-CPU ( four server, four CPUs/server) Oracle configuration is $1,261,600 over three years, the TCO of a comparably configured Postges Plus Advanced Server deployment is $215,760. This would mean a TCO savings of $1,045,840, or 83 per cent.” Ashish Mehra, director India operations, EnterpriseDB Software India

Easy on the pocket

Being open source software, Postgres Plus is cost effective as compared to its strong proprietary counterparts like Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM. Postgres Plus Advanced Server includes a breakthrough suite of compatibility technologies that run Oracle applications with little or no changes at a much lower cost. “The most significant difference between the two databases is around cost. While the total cost of ownership of a 16-CPU (four server, four CPUs/server) Oracle configuration is $1,261,600 over three years, the TCO of a comparably configured Postges Plus Advanced Server deployment is $215,760. This would mean a TCO savings of $1,045,840, or 83 per cent,” says Mehra.

NTT, a Japan-headquartered telecommunications company, couldn’t agree more. They switched from commercial RDBMS products for their telecom business operation and back office systems to PostgreSQL and have availed significant cost benefits. “We originally estimated to save $20-30 million for five years by deploying PostgreSQL to in-house systems. But after adding Postgres Plus Advanced Server to our options, we now estimate the savings to double,” testifies Takeshi Tachi, senior manager, NTT Open Source Software Center, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation.

InMobi Global Media Adnetwork, formerly mKhoj Solutions, that opted for EnterpriseDB in 2007, saw similar savings. “We chose Postgres Plus to solve our pain areas, namely, scalability and support issues. Postgres Plus was one-tenth the cost of other RDBMS. Further, we have seen huge cost reductions in our IT costs thereafter,” says Mohit Saxena, VP (technology), InMobi Global Media Adnetwork.

We chose Postgres Plus to solve our pain areas, namely, scalability and support issues. Postgres Plus was one-tenth the cost of other RDBMS. Further, we have seen huge cost reductions in our IT costs thereafter.” Mohit Saxena, VP (technology), InMobi Global Media Adnetwork

Apart from the most obvious way of reducing IT expenditures by saving on commercial licensing fees, EnterpriseDB offers numerous strategies for organisations to cut costs. New line of business (LOB) application development and deployment, replication for reporting and business intelligence, and migrating non-mission critical and mission critical applications away from high-priced commercial databases are some leading strategies. “Query, reporting and BI activities degrade the performance of OLTP applications. By offloading those queries to lower-cost non-production databases, Postgres Plus’ replication capabilities can provide real-time data warehousing at a fraction of the cost of Oracle’s replication solutions. This eliminates OLTP performance problems while ensuring timely delivery of critical information to business stakeholders,” says Mehra. For example, FTD, the worldwide leader in floral-related products and services, implemented the Postgres Plus Advanced Server Replication Server module to improve performance of their production systems while still meeting the needs of their vendor network. “By moving their vendor-facing order tracking system away from their Oracle-based production environment and onto replicated systems running on Postgres Plus Advanced Server, the performance of their production systems increased more than 400 per cent during the next peak ordering season – all while reducing the cost of operating this system by more than 80 per cent,” says Mehra.

Rich features

The fundamental features of Postgres Plus Standard Server and Advanced Server distinguish them from their primary open source competitors, like MySQL and Ingres. “PostgreSQL contains a single unified storage engine capable of performing extremely fast for all load types: OLTP (with full ACID support), reporting and mixed usage. MySQL, on the other hand, has pluggable storage engines specialised for particular types of usage; this type of configuration can result in bottlenecks as applications grow and change. Subqueries, too, are poorly optimised in MySQL. Further, user defined data types in Postgres Plus give users more options for customised solutions than MySQL, also building room for database enforced encryption,” says Mehra.

The Oracle compatibility features found in Postgres Plus Advanced Server distinguish it from its distant cousin Ingres, another strong open source database competitor. “EnterpriseDB has added powerful and convenient Oracle features to Postgres Plus Advanced Server that are standard fare in the minds of many DBAs and developers, such as: function packages, dynamic runtime instrumentation, query optimisation hints, Oracle SQL extensions, explicit transaction controls, and data dictionary views,” says Mehra.

Further, Postgres Plus Standard Server and Postgres Plus Advanced Server come with many productivity tools like Postgres Studio (graphical tool for database and cluster creation/maintenance, SQL environment, and more), EDB SQL (SQL command line environment), EDB Loader (bulk data loader with error handling), DBA Management Server (for DBAs to handle monitoring, job scheduling, SQL terminal, software update management), DBA Monitoring Console (for resource usage and management), GRidSQL Monitoring Console for distributed data, and the Oracle Replication console.

Performance enhancer

EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus products have multiple features across many facets of the database to help improve performance. While GridSQL partitions data across multiple machines and transparently performs queries, Asynchronous Pre-Fetch can optimise regular index scans and bitmap index scans by issuing concurrent I/O requests to RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) hardware on Linux systems. On the other hand, Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) allows for high performance in applications that are both read and write intensive.

The best example of performance enhancement using Postgres Plus is hi5, a leading social networking site that deployed OLTP PostgreSQL installations, running on hundreds of servers. “The system supports the data transactions of more than 56 million active users each month. In June 2008, the company delivered more than 18.5 billion page views that were supported by PostgreSQL, serving nearly 11 million visitors to the site every day,” boasts Mehra of Postgres Plus.

NTT, too, saw better performance when they deployed Postgres Plus for transactional telecom business applications. “We deployed PostgreSQL for years, but earlier versions resulted in performance degradation in long-time operations requiring periodic data-vacuum operation. After PostgreSQL 8.3 released in February 2009, the performance degradation had been completely resolved, and EnterpriseDB has contributed significantly to this improvement,” says Tachi. Adding on, Saxena says: “Postgres Plus is the heart of our growth. With every release we have been setting new performance benchmarks. Postgres has helped us achieve even [previously thought] unachievable levels. This needs to be seen in the light of the fact that we are yet to use the capacity of Postgres Plus to its fullest.”

Scalability

EnterpriseDB solutions are highly scalable. Postgres Plus Advanced Server with the GridSQL configuration allows a single database to be partitioned across multiple commodity hardware machines for expandability. “InfiniteCache is a Postgres Plus Advanced Server feature providing an infinitely expandable cache across commodity hardware providing flexible growth management. The compression technology allows multi-gigabyte databases to reside in memory for lightning fast performance,” says Mehra.

Vouching for it, Saxena says: “InMobi is in a business where our traffic and our volumes are bound to grow exponentially. This is why we chose Postgres Plus and have faced no scalability issues so far. Today, we have two data centres in India and US. We plan to expand to Japan and see no problem with regard to managing databases so far.”

Strong technical base

Postgres comes with strong technical base and support. The Postgres community provides robust and well-tested fixes and enhancements across multiple platforms. Postgres user communities (like User Groups) provide a wealth of collaborative information to users, ensuring vendor independence and a strong ecosystem. This is where Postgres surpasses competitors like Ingres with no community outside of the Ingres Corporation.

Foolproof support

EnterpriseDB’s foolproof support has resolved the migration woes traditionally faced by organisations adopting open source RDBMS. EnterpriseDB offers a wide range of support options for Postgres — from free assets such as tutorials, product documentation and technical whitepapers to for-fee training, services, consulting, and subscription offerings. “Our training classes are developed and run by Postgres community’s leading contributors, like Bruce Momjian. Our Jump Start and Packaged Services offerings, like RemoteDBA and Architectural Health Checks, enable organisations to quickly develop skills and insight for fast realisation of the benefits of Postgres Plus,” say Mehra. “Migration involves two things – customisation and support. Migration is very easy with EnterpriseDB as they have plug-ins for all our existing databases. Further, their support is unmatchable. We use remote support from them,” testifies Saxena.

NTT, too, would vouch for it. Though their initial migration from commercial DBMS to PostgreSQL was a struggle, migration to Postgres Plus Advanced Server thereafter was a cakewalk. “Our estimates show that the total effort of [our] system migration project using Postgres Plus could be halved compared to the migration using the plain PostgreSQL,” says Tachi. The smooth experience has made NTT Japan look at migrating legacy accounting systems from commercial OS and DBMS to Linux and Postgres Plus Advanced Server. “We estimated this migration to be troublesome and not compensate the licensing cost saving before, but now we feel it is worth to try by deploying Advanced Server (Postgres Plus),” says Tachi.

Road ahead!

Today, EnterpiseDB employs over 100 associates worldwide, supporting more than 300 customers. Its business partners include Red Hat, Synnex, Compiere, Tomax, Contegix, Thunip, Elastra, immixGroup, Fujitsu, IBM, Continuent, and many other IT bigwigs. With EnterpriseDB winning consecutive trophies for Postgres, we might see them perform the same magic that Red Hat did for Linux. History sure does repeat itself!

Although the binutils project includes a 100-page guide to its internals, this article is aimed primarily at those wishing to develop/port binutils itself for the first time. The guide also suffers from the following limitations:

1. It tends to document at a detailed level. So individual functions are described well, but it is hard to get the big picture.
2. It is incomplete. Many of the most useful sections (for example, details of final relocation) are yet to be written.

Developers who require to port binutils to a new architecture are faced with discovering how binutils works by reading the source code and looking at how other architectures have been ported.

I, personally, went through that process when porting binutils to the Compact-RISC (a.k.a CR16) architecture. This article aims to capture the learning experience, with the intention of helping others, especially those looking to port binutils tools to a new target.

Binutils file organisation structure

The bulk of the binutils source code is in a small number of directories. Some components of binutils are libraries that are used internally as well as in other projects. For example, the BFD library is used in the GNU GDB debugger. These libraries have their own top-level directories. The main directories are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Directory structure

Here, in brief, is some information on these directories:

• include/ contains the header files for information that straddles major components. For example, the main simulator interface header is here (remote-sim.h), because it links GDB (in the gdb/ directory) to the simulators (in the sim/ directory). Other headers, specific to a particular component, reside in the directory of that component.
• bfd/ contains the Binary File Descriptor library. This library contains code to handle specific binary file formats, such as ELF, COFF, SREC and so on. If a new object file type must be recognised, code to support it should be added here.
• opcodes/ contains the opcodes library. This has information on how to assemble and disassemble instructions.
• cpu/ contains source files for a utility called CGEN. This is a tool that can be used to automatically generate target-specific source files for the opcodes library, as well as for the SIM simulator used by GDB.
• binutils/: Despite the name, this is not the main binutils directory. Rather, it is the directory for all of the binutils tools that do not have their own top-level source directory. This includes tools such as objcopy, objdump and readelf, amongst others.
• gas/ contains the GNU assembler. Target-specific assembler code is held in the config/ sub-directory.
• ld/ contains the GNU linker. Target-specific linker files are held in sub-directories.
• gprof/ contains the GNU profiler. This program does not have any target-specific code.
• gold/ contains the new GNU linker. This is a new linker being created to replace LD. At the moment it is still in development.
• elfccp/ contains elfcpp, a C++ library for reading and writing ELF information. It is currently only used by the GOLD linker.

In addition, there are a couple of other directories that you can find at the top level of a binutils source release. They are used in the binutils build process, but are not part of the binutils project:

• intl/ contains the GNU gettext library from gettext.
• libiberty/: Before POSIX and glibc, this was a GNU project to provide a set of standard functions. It lives on in binutils. Most valuable are its free store management and argument parsing functions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We laid our hands on all the three biggies—Ubuntu 9.10, Mandriva 2010 and openSUSE 11.2—and pitted them against each other. What followed was the battle of the century, as each distro pulled off one unique trick after another to stay on top of the game.

Ladies and gentlemen, behold, as we bring out the next generation of Linux-based operating systems, and try to find out which one has that little extra to make the cut as the best of the best!

The hardware

• Processor: AMD Phenom X3 8650 @ 2.3GHz
• Chipset: Nvidia MCP67 (nForce 630a)
• Graphics Processor: Nvidia GeForce 9400GT with 1GB of GDDR2 RAM
• RAM: 2GB of DDR2 800MHz Transcend JetRAM
• Hard Disk: Seagate Barracuda 320GB/Western Digital Caviar 160GB (hosts the OS)
• Screen: 15” TFT with a resolution of 1024×768

That’s a pretty respectable multimedia PC, except for the rather small screen size. However, it shouldn’t matter, because if the UI looks cluttered on my monitor, then the UI design is bad. Anyway, with the hardware specs behind us, it’s time to move on to the first distro of this review—Ubuntu 9.10.

Ubuntu 9.10—The Koala screams for attention

The Koala may have been the most publicised and talked about release of this month, something like the Linux 2.0 (a la the Web 2.0) for home users, aiming for a level of polish in its user interface hitherto unseen in the world of GNU/Linux. Apart from features like KMS and GRUB2, Mark Shuttleworth had considered ditching the yellow-brown colour palette for something new. Changes like ditching Pidgin for Empathy, which were rather radical at the time of the announcement, dismayed many Ubuntu fans.

Yet, Ubuntu has made it big. The user interface, though a bit loud in its shade of lemon yellow, is laudable (see Figure 1). It’s the same old GNOME though, and at version 2.28, a bit cleaner than the previous releases. In fact, I don’t know if it’s just me or it’s the Ubuntu customisations, but I did stumble a bit after the first boot into GNOME 2.28.

Figure 1: Ubuntu 9.10 desktop after installation

Continuing about the downside of Ubuntu 9.10, KMS and GRUB2 also came as big disappointments to me. Since I have an Nvidia GeForce card, KMS didn’t work at all (and sample this, an interview on Phronix says that Nvidia has no immediate plans to introduce KMS support into their drivers) and that, along with GRUB2, made for a very unpleasant boot indeed. It seems that the developers put so much effort into developing the KMS experience that they neglected the non-KMS sector. And considering that KMS is fully supported only on Intel chipsets, and a lion’s share of users use Nvidia and ATI cards, that’s a very bad decision indeed. Even Fedora was better than this.

Now for the good things… Empathy. Pidgin, heralded as the irreplaceable chat client in the world of both Linux and Windows, has finally met its match, and it seems our little bird flew away to the Empathetic competition. Empathy has come a long way since its introduction and is now a pleasure to use—and it’s certainly better than Pidgin, considering its support for rich chat features like voice and video.

The next unique offering is the Ubuntu Software Centre (Figure 2). Rather than use Synaptic by default for package management, it’s hidden away for the advanced users. For the layman, the Ubuntu Software Centre acts rather like an app store (except that there’s only free software here). Once you open it up, there’s a screen with lots of sections. Let’s say you want to install Amarok, which you know is an audio player. So you click on Sound And Video. From the listing, select Amarok. An arrow will appear in the selection, on the right side. Click on it. A mini-review of the software will appear, briefly describing it, along with a screenshot. Below it, there’s a button. Click on it to install. Simple, isn’t it?

Figure 2: Ubuntu Software Centre—a one-stop app store

Ubuntu also holds the distinction of being the first distribution to pay attention to those finer details that differentiate the polish of, say, Mac OS X and Windows to the crudeness of Linux. Packing in more smooth transition effects, extra wallpapers, visual styles and fonts than ever, users are now spoilt for choice (but weren’t we before?) over how to make their system look. Coming to looks, Ubuntu has now adopted the Dust colour scheme in the Human theme, with Dark Chocolate Brown window borders and selections, and off-white panels and bars with a slight chocolate hue. Nice colour palette, but I’d rather stick with the Dust theme. There’s a new icon scheme as well, called Humanity, but I don’t know if it’s just with me but many icons don’t appear in the Places menu and none in the Systems menu. Apart from this, Humanity is another revolutionary icon theme with mind-blowing icons. Overall, it’s a pleasure to actually work in this distro.

Now it’s time for Kubuntu. At first glance, it’s the same boot from Jaunty, and the stock KDE 4.3.2 without any customisations (see Figure 3). But look again and it’s a whole new story. It’s KMS here too, but this time KMS is a lot more subtle and at least the boot on non-KMS machines looks as good, if not better, than in Jaunty. With KMS on VirtualBox, those transition effects and the flicker-free boot experience did wonders. Boot into KDE4, and the KDM theme just blows you away. Enter your login details and you’ll be looking at the prettiest stock KDE4 you have ever seen. And mind you, KDE looks best in its stock theme. Change the looks even a tiny bit and you’ll cause a major wardrobe malfunction (or fashion disaster, however you want to put it)!

Figure 2: Live Kubuntu desktop with the Kickoff menu and µBlog widget

Kubuntu’s installer is another brilliant feature. A full screen image background modelled on the Air theme, with an installer wizard in the centre, guides you through the system installation.

I had a few complaints about Ubuntu, but have none for Kubuntu! None, except for font-rendering issues with OpenOffice.org, but I’m pretty sure that’s because of the fact that OOo is running under Qt. OOo never did like Qt!

Sabayon’s strength has always been to showcase the power of FOSS on the desktop. Once upon a time, it used to come preinstalled with Linux-compatible games. But the current releases have done away with the idea of showcasing the games factor and concentrate on giving an out-of-the box desktop experience.

Sabayon 5 (or Five oh!, as the project team likes to call it) came out on October 2, 2009. As has been the norm since the last couple of releases, it’s been divided into a KDE and GNOME live DVD. The last version LFY had bundled was version Four oh! (we skipped 4.1 and 4.2). It was a single Live DVD that contained both GNOME and KDE. So what our CD team has done this time is combine the two separate ISOs into a single live multi-boot DVD. The downside is, you’ll only get either of the two desktops, at a time.

The boot screen of the DVD gives you several options to boot the following: GNOME, KDE, a media centre desktop, UMPC, etc. I’ve only tried the first two.

Depending on your desktop of choice, you’ll need to select one and proceed. The boot splash theme is, as always, black with a few coloured stripes with the Sabayon branding in the centre—not that great, but pretty smart and professional-looking, nonetheless. Well, the same image is also the default wallpaper in both GNOME and KDE. Coming back to the boot process, the live distro boot speed is comparable to other popular distros, and midway through the boot process, Sabayon starts playing a song that has something to do with “the rock and roll hall of fame.”

Note: On my assembled AMD/NVIDIA system, without manual intervention, Sabayon booted to a 1024×768 px display—although it had detected and loaded the correct NVIDIA drivers. The easiest way to fix this is while you’re on the boot screen – at the point when you select between the different boot options, hit F4 and select the display resolution, there and then. On my Intel-based wide-screen laptop (which uses a resolution of 1200×800 pixels), things worked all right without any manual intervention.

KDExperience

Sabayon comes with a custom themed version of KDE 4.3.1 (v4.3.2 is not available in the software repository yet). Instead of the stock Air theme introduced in KDE 4.3, Sabayon uses Elegance—a dark theme that gels well with the overall Sabayon 5 look and feel. And unlike other distros, a number of other desktop themes are preinstalled to let you customise the desktop the way you want without requiring to download additional themes. Additionally, it comes with a decent collection of wallpapers too, and Kwin effects work out-of-the-box if you have a capable graphics card.

Figure 1: KDE Live desktop

As you can see in Figure 1, the resolution of panel is awkwardly set at a width of 1024px, leaving some blank space on both sides of a screen with a resolution of 1280×1024px (or, any resolution where the screen width is more than 1024px). Well, many not-so-mainstream distros have a fetish for this sort of a Mac OS X-ish panel setting, which sort of seems odd considering the fact that the rest of the screen on the left and right side of panel goes waste. Anyway, we all know how to set this straight, don’t we? Strangely, essential shortcuts like ‘Show Desktop’ and ‘Battery Indicator’ (for laptop users) are missing from the panel. Again, we know how to take care of this.

While the stock KDE only has ‘System Settings’, a home directory shortcut for Dolphin and the Konqueror Web browser as our default ‘favourites’ in the Kickoff application launcher, Sabayon has added more natural fits for our favourites here (Firefox, Kopete, KTorrent, Konversation IRC client, Amarok, VLC Player, OOo Writer and Calc). However, I believe a home directory shortcut would have been a better selection instead of an IRC client; besides, ‘System Settings’ is also an essential app for those who like to tinker with their system frequently.

Figure 2: Default Kickoff favourites

The default installation comes with lots of handy applications for most desktop requirements, but some of the essential apps like Digikam (digital camera tool) and the GIMP are missing. As for an image viewer/manager, Gwenview is also missing. So accessing images means opening them in the Okular document viewer. Of course, these can be had from the official software repository. In fact, although it comes with the Firefox 3.5 as the default browser, the repo also offers Chromium (open source Google Chrome) as an alternative.

After using Chromium for a week, I found it to be pretty stable. I’ll definitely recommend it over FF simply because of the well-thought-out UI which gives you much more screen space to view Web pages, compared to any other browser, besides the ability to run multiple incognito windows (private browsing sessions). Coming back to FF (and even in Chromium), one good thing is that mime types are properly set. So you’ll have no problem in directly opening e-mail attachments, or for that matter, when you download anything from the Web, straight inside the required application.

By the way, wireless connection on my Intel Wi-Fi based laptop worked out-of-the-box. What I also noticed is the NetworkManager system tray widget has been cleaned up a lot. I don’t remember seeing this polish when KDE 4.3 first came out. What struck me as surprising  was the inclusion of the Wicd network manager—which is basically redundant!

Sabayon comes with most of the multimedia codes preinstalled. So whether you throw DVD videos at it or DivX files, VLC should be able to take care of it all. Amarok, on the other hand, takes care of your MP3 music collection. The version is 1.1.80 (2.2 beta)—the final 2.2 version is yet to be made available in the repo. Note that although this version reintroduces an equaliser, yet it’s greyed out in Sabayon. Besides these two power apps, you also have the minimalist Dragon Player and the XBMC media centre application.

The version of OpenOffice.org is 3.1. It comes with an integrated Oxygen icon theme by default, which means better KDE integration because the icons don’t look out of place in KDE4 any more. However, the KDE4 integration is nowhere near complete—the Save as/Open file dialogue boxes are still that of the stock OOo, instead of being KDE4 based. Apart from this, English spelling packs are missing. Another thing to note here is that font rendering inside OOo and Firefox are not anti-aliased out-of-the-box—which makes them look a bit crooked.

It’s again that time of the year when a new version of Ubuntu is released. And like clockwork precision, the latest version of Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is out. This is the 11th release of Ubuntu and the maturity of the project and distribution is clearly visible. I have been using Ubuntu for the past 5 releases and I can definitely say that this release brings in the most number of changes. As the next release is meant to be a Long Term Support release, a lot of changes have been pushed in. Last month we saw a preview of what was coming in this version. In this article, we will take the new version for a test drive and look at how successful they have been in implementing their plans.

I did this review on a somewhat old system, a Pentium 4 processor along with 1.5 GB RAM and a Nvidia GeForce 6200 graphics card. The reason was to see whether Ubuntu was still good enough on a machine with moderate specifications. This is really important, given the low specifications of netbooks, which are really important targets for Linux.

Installation

So, let me start the review with its installation process. While I have been upgrading the distros for the past 4 years, I installed it right from scratch, this time. I think it is a good idea for everyone to do a fresh install with this release to get the full benefits of GRUB 2 and the ext4 filesystem. The Ubuntu installer, called Ubiquity, has always been easy to use and has been getting a little extra polish in every release. In this release, they added a very useful feature for newcomers to Linux in the form of a slide show during the installation process, which tells you the basics of the operating system. The installer also has the ability to set up an encrypted home directory. This is a really useful feature to have, in case your laptop, netbook, etc gets stolen or lost. The installation took me about 20 minutes.

The new Splash Screen from Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala

Boot up

After installation, I rebooted and was welcomed by a beautiful splash screen. Karmic also uses Upstart to handle the boot process. To have a quick bootup, the plan was to start X very early in the bootup process, so that usplash is no longer needed and replace it with xsplash. Although xsplash is present in Koala Karmic, usplash (the white Ubuntu logo on black background) is also available till xsplash is ready to be displayed. Even then, the boot up looks very professional and much better than the one found in earlier versions. Next loads the GDM, which has also been made prettier. It is amazing to see how much progress they have made, in a single cycle, in the boot experience area and definitely makes one have high hopes on the next version. My boot time in Jaunty, from power on to desktop being ready to use, was around 2 minutes and in Karmic it is now about 50% lesser! The plan for a 10 second bootup time in the next Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx” version is something I am really excited about.

Desktop showing new design work

GNOME 2.28 Love

Then, the desktop finally loads and the first thing I notice is that a new icon theme being used. They have switched to the humanity icon scheme, which really adds a lot of beauty and elegance. Some minor cosmetic changes like making the icons in the notification area gray tone, like in OSX, do make the OS look pretty. While Mark Shuttleworth had initially announced that the theme would change from brown to something else, it hasn’t happened in this release. A lot of new wallpapers have also been included this time. A particularly interesting one is a set of space wallpapers, which keeps automatically changing every 30 minutes. The wallpapers were selected by holding a competition and selecting the best amongst them. Such efforts certainly help in encouraging a lot more people to get involved.

Let’s look at some of the changes and updates in the applications, starting with the new GNOME 2.28. The latest GNOME release did not bring in too many new features as a lot of developers are in preparation mode for the GNOME 3.x series. So, mainly, there were a lot of cleanups. Yet, a few nice features were added like Totem got the ability to remember the position of video playback, before the application was closed, last time, and resume playback from that position the next time. This is a very useful feature for people like me who view many movies, soaps and videos on their computers. Evince also got the ability to view and edit existing annotations in the PDF documents. However, creating new annotations is scheduled for the next release. GNOME Bluetooth was added to handle bluetooth connections, along with many new features. It now allows the users to use bluetooth headsets very easily and also allows connecting with mobile phones and using it to browse the internet on the computer. GNOME Volume Control also got a lot of nice features added, like per application volume control, ability to control a subwoofer and channel fading. Also, as promised, a preview release of the new GNOME Shell is available for testing and to get a idea of what GNOME 3 will bring.

Empathy has become Ubuntu’s default IM and VOIP client, this cycle onwards, and has also added a lot of polish, along with a lot of new features. It currently supports audio and video chat on Google Talk and Jabber. If you need audio/video on MSN then, you should use the Telepathy team’s PPA at https://launchpad.net/~telepathy/+archive/ppa. It might be a little buggy for now, though. It also supports nice chat themes including those available for Adium. Another useful feature is desktop sharing, which worked nicely for me. The messaging indicator (the envelope in the notification area), which was introduced in Jaunty by the Ayatana team has been updated to support many more applications like Kmail, Gwibber, Empathy, etc in this cycle. Users who are not too comfortable with Empathy, can easily go back to Pidgin by installing it.

The Ubuntu Software Center

Ubuntu Software Store

This brings us to the point of the new Ubuntu Software Center. Many people new to Linux often feel that installing software is very difficult and requires a lot of expertise. To solve this problem, Ubuntu has taken inspiration from the Apple Store and Android’s market place, and replaced the old Add/Remove software application with a new Software Center application. It is designed with simplicity in mind and aims to make the process of installing new applications easier and much more fun. Initially, I was somewhat skeptical of how helpful this application is going to be. But after trying it for some time, I realised this is one of the best change in a long time. The version included in this release only has a few basic features. But it will eventually evolve to include social features like a rating system for the software and the ability to install the software installed by your friends,etc. The long term goal of the Software Center is to replace Synaptic Package Manager and Update Manager also. Though this will take a few more releases to actually materialize. A somewhat controversial goal is to allow purchasing of commercial software. While some purists may dislike this idea, it seems to be a natural move to facilitate the gain of a bigger market share for the distribution.

In keeping with the buzz around “cloud computing” Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) has launched a new Ubuntu One cloud synchronization service. It has some features similar to Dropbox, which is popular amongst a lot of Linux users. The benefit of Ubuntu One is that it is included by default in Ubuntu. This service allows to store and sync files, contacts and Tomboy notes. The information stored can also be accessed via the Ubuntu One website. Though native clients for Windows and Mac OSX will take some more time to develop. There are 2 subscription plans currently available. The free one comes with 2 GB of storage space and the paid plan costs 10 USD per month and offers 50 GB of storage space. Now, again while this represents another revenue channel for Canonical it has brought with it a lot of controversy. As the service is proprietary on the server side, many people felt that naming it Ubuntu One goes against the free ideals of Ubuntu. One thing to note is that the Ubuntu One client is open source and can be easily packaged for other distributions. It is clear that with ideas like this, Canonical is trying real hard to make it’s business profitable and no longer dependent on Mark Shuttleworth’s money.

Another new utility included in this release is the Palimpsest Disk Utility, also known as the GNOME Disk Utility. It allows for some simple disk operations like monitoring of the disks and creation, deletion and management of partitions, etc. In earlier releases, the absence of such a tool was cited as a big inconvenience. The Computer Janitor, which is used to remove unused programs and other cruft, has gained a better interface and some new features. The Network Manager which ships with this release is the latest 0.8 series version. It brings with it a lot of improvements for mobile broadband users and a much better interface. It also allows connecting to mobile phones via bluetooth and using it’s internet connection. Currently only the PAN bluetooth profile is supported. So only the latest mobile phones will work. Work is on to get Bluetooth Dial Up Networking (DUN) support in the next version, so that many more phones can be used.

In this cycle, Ubuntu had many projects to improve usability and user experience like the Papercuts project about which we discussed in the October issue. A Papercut is defined as a usability bug which is easy to fix. I would say that this project has been pretty successful as it has fixed around 65 of the 100 bugs targeted. The project wasn’t limited to GNOME bugs and included some KDE related bugs as well. The project also helped start discussions on usability problems in some projects. Some of the bugs fixed were as old as 5 years and were a source of a lot of frustration and annoyance. Of course the beauty of free software is that these bug fixes will be available for all the distributions to use.

While most of this article we have talked about the desktop version of Ubuntu, there were many improvements in it’s other derivatives as well. Kubuntu seems to be finally stabilizing with a much improved KDE 4.3. The Ubuntu Netbook Remix has also gained a lot of new features and some fine tuning. It’s selection of default applications has also been changed to better suit netbook users. A Kubuntu Netbook Remix was also released for the first time, which KDE fans are going to love. A version of Ubuntu based on the Moblin stack has also been released.

Final verdict

So, with this version does Ubuntu live up to it’s name of one of the most popular distributions? It certainly does and this version is certainly worth the upgrade for current Ubuntu users, especially those plagued by poor graphics drivers for Intel cards in the Jaunty release. There are 2 things which really excite me with Ubuntu. First is that, after six months when the next Ubuntu version comes out, which will be an LTS, things look really good for Ubuntu. Many computer manufacturers like Dell will use it for their netbooks, laptops and desktops. And when the cheap ARM chips based net books finally come out, Linux will certainly be a very good competitor to the proprietary Operating systems. The second thing is that with this release Canonical has come up with some innovative plans to profit from Ubuntu. If they actually are able to make money off the Linux desktop, it will be nothing short of spectacular!

Ed’s note: Do check out the complete Release Notes and LifeHacker for more images of Ubuntu 9.10.

Check out the reports on SubConf 2009, Day 1 & Day 2.

Today (29th of October, ‘09) marked Day 3 of SubConf 2009 which is also the last day of the event. Just like yesterday we had lots of talks planned with 3 parallel sessions at any point of time, but unfortunately there was only one talk in English for the whole day. The Subversion Hackathon went for the whole day where developers got together, discussed and wrote code for the entire day. The talks in day-3’s agenda was mostly concerned on Software Configuration Management and general concepts.

Perforce Stall

09:50 am – 10:35 am

Coding Control — Tony Smith from Perforce Software

Coding Control was all about ‘how to bring in agility and avoid fragility through software configuration management’. This talk mainly focussed on SCM and Agile development.

Michael Pilato

Key points from the talk:

1. SCM is at the heart of Agile
2. Model the flow of change
3. Expect things to change
4. Automate as much as you can
5. Always be constructive

Unfortunately, there were no questions asked from the audience at the end of the talk.

At the Subversion Hackathon room, developers wrote code all day. There were many good discussions about subversion code. We can say, this was a productive hackathon since there were approximately 34 commits the subversion repository with close to 800 lines of change!

The conference officially came to an end at 05:00 pm (German time), but the Subversion developers were not ready to move from the Subversion Hackathon room and they booked the room till mid-night.

To conclude, it was a great conference and there were lot of interesting things which I personally learned from the conference. Looking forward to contribute more to Subversion code base in the coming days. Hope we have more such subversion user conferences and developer hackathon in future.

If you’ve been following the Ubuntu release cycle you know that the .10 release is forth coming. Slated to hit the World Wide Web on October 29th, 2009, 9.10 promises to have quite a number of new features that should please even the most discerning of Linux users.

Here is a video showcasing the new version of Gnome, 2.28, on Ubuntu Karmic Koala. Do write to us with your feedback.

Click here to view the embedded video.

]]> http://www.linuxforu.com/previews/ubuntu-karmic-koala-preview-a-great-fusion-with-gnome-2-28/feed/ 1 http://www.linuxforu.com/news/subconf-2009-a-report-day-2/ http://www.linuxforu.com/news/subconf-2009-a-report-day-2/#comments Thursday, 29 October 2009 Senthil Kumaran S. http://www.linuxforu.com/?p=2559

Click here for the Day 1 Report of SubConf 2009

Today (29-10-2009) marked the Day 2 of SubConf 2009 in which there were plans for many talks by prominent subversion developers and others. Three parallel sessions on various Software Configuration Management related topics went on simultaneously, out of which this report captures only the English sessions that happened in Room:Madrid of the Conference Hotel.

10:00 am – 10:45 am

Keynote — by C Michael Pilato, one of the long term developers in the subversion project right from 2001 till date

The Keynote title read as “The Subversion Legacy (So Far) – Philosophical Musings of a grateful participant”. CMike walked through the past history of subversion, the development methodology, why CollabNet chose subversion to be run as an Open Source Project, how it all evolved, etc.

The following were some of the questions posted by audience at the end of the talk and responses from CMike:

Q1. Why do we have SubConf for Subversion?
Ans: SubConf is good for subversion because it helps users from all over the world to meet in such a great user conference in which we don’t sell anything (it is all there out for free), but get user’s feedback and experiences to make it a more happy ride in the future.

Q2. What does Subversion Community’s feeling about DVCS?
Ans: The Subversion Community is excited about Distributed Version Control Systems (DVCS), since we are part of advancing the “State of the Art” and we are happy that, ultimately we have competitors in the version control world :)

Q3. Is there any Subversion User Conference like this planned in the US?
Ans: There is none but you can get together with Subversion folks in other conferences such as the ApacheCon.

Q4. What is the number of developers working on Subversion?
Ans: Developers come and go, at any point of time we have from 10 to 20 developers actively looking at the Subversion code base.

Q5. Is there a dictator in the Subversion project?
Ans: No we don’t have any “Dictator”.

11:15 am – 12:00 pm

Subversion Release Process — Hyrum Wright (Release manager of Subversion project and President of Subversion Corporation) and Stefan Sperling (Subversion Developer)

This talk explained in detail about the various process involved in making a subversion release. Another focus of this talk was to get more people help with testing of subversion pre-releases which will help in catching and fixing bugs early, though we don’t want you to run trunk on your production data. Right now we have very limited buildbots, so we encourage people to donate boxes for the subversion project if they have any so that it can be used to run some tests remotely and collect results. We need to remove redundancy in tests and introduce more real time tests as the users face in BIG deployments.

Hyrum Wright and Stefan Sperling (left to right)

The following are some of the questions posted by audience at the end of the talk and responses:

Q1. Subversion community can talk with the universities to get help from their Software Engineering and Software Testing departments to test the pre releases of subversion by the students, which will be very useful.
Ans: Yes that is an excellent idea and made a note.

Q2. How to keep track of bugs that are found and fixed between the releases of Subversion?
Ans: They are available from the CHANGES and branch based STATUS files.

Q3. How does a bug fix go from a release branch to trunk in subversion code base?
Ans: We do it the other way :) by backporting fixes from trunk to the release branches.

Playing with GIMP is never boring, every time you do some experiment you come to know of some cool effect. The best part are the filters, which if applied properly, can produce jaw dropping effects. While experimenting with GIMP I came to know that how easily I could create a glassy text with gimp. Although I am not a image maker, or a GIMP expert, I am trying my best to describe this process. I have broken down this process in eight sections, each one describing how to make each image effect component. So let’s start.

Glass Text

1. Create a new 1280×1024 image (or your best monitor resolution) with a black background.
   

   Creating the Text layer

2. Select Text tool, select a big area and type in a text. I have used Bitwise font, downloaded from Internet.
3. Change the color of text to white {#ffffff}, text size to fit the selection and position to justify.
4. Then right click the text layer and select merge down. This will remove the text properties and make the text you wrote into just an image. After this you will not be able to alter the text.
5. Now apply the below filters with appropriate parameters so that the effect looks the best for you and looks good in your display. I have provided the parameters, which I have used, in curly brackets.
   • Filters -> distorts -> emboss {Azimuth=236, Elevation=144, Depth=90}
     

     Emboss layer (section)

     

     Emboss layer (full)

   • Filters -> Blur -> blur
   • Filters -> Edge Detect -> Neon {Radius=4.78, Amount=0.07}
     

     Neon (section)

     

     Neon (full)

   • Filters -> Enhance -> Sharpern {Sharpness=50}
   • Filters -> Artistic -> Softglow {Glow Radius=50, Brightness=0.85, Sharpness=0.90}
     

     Softglow (full)

   • Select the text portion then Layer -> crop to selection
   • Color -> Colorify To Alpha -> From:{#000000}
     

     Colorify To Alpha (section)

     

     Colorify To Alpha (full)

Layers

The first step will emboss the text, next we blur the text, this is needed for the next step. When Neon edge detecting the sharp color transitions will get white, in this case the edges would get white. edges of the text will remain. If this layer was not blurred then the neon edge detection would result in jagged edged, and bad looking fonts instead of smooth edges. The Azimuth will control the white lining of the texts when applying Neon edge detection. Here you can do some research to get the white text outline as per your need. Then the layer is sharpened to compensate the blur. The softglow is applied to make a glowing effect of the text, so not apply too much of it, even it will look good when working, at some later time too much soft glow looks very bad. Then we select the text and crop only the text area. Note carefully when embossing, the values are very important which actually set how the text will look. Then apply the colorify to alpha and make the black background to alpha. And that’s it you get the basic glass text.

Name this layer “glass_text”.

Click “New Layer” button in the layer window and floodfill it to black {#000000} , send the new layer to bottom and rename it to “background” , so that we have the glass texts glowing out of the dark.

The third Subversion conference (SubConf) 2009 started today at Munich, Germany. This is an annual conference in which the subversion committees interact with the users of Subversion Version Control system, get the user feedback and prospects for new features, and also introduce new features in future releases of subversion.

Today is the 1st day of the Subversion conference in which there were two events planned — namely, the “Subversion Hackathon” (which will span all three days) and “Subversion Developers RoundTable”.

Subversion Hackathon

In this event all the subversion committers, who were available today, joined together in a room where they coded and discussed about subversion features. Some of the things which were discussed in this hackathon were the usage of scratch pool inside the subversion code base and working copy next generation library related issues and solutions.

Subversion RoundTable

The subversion RoundTable went on for 1 hour 30 minutes, between 1900 hours and 2030 hours. This RoundTable had a panel of Subversion committers who interact with the users who are mostly administrators of subversion and some developers who uses subversion to version their code base. There were 10 people in the panel, namely Greg Stein, Julian Foad, Dave Brown, Stephen Butler, C. Michael Pilato, Hyrum Wright, Bert Huijben, Stefan Sperling, Niels Holfmeyr and Senthil Kumaran S.

The following were the questions raised in the RoundTable and the answers given by the subversion developers.

Q1. We have a Working Copy next generation library (planned for 1.7 release) under active development in Subversion, it would be great to have pre releases of the latest subversion trunk binaries released often before we get the official release, so that the users will have an opportunity to test them and report back bugs often.

Solution: The subversion community has not released binaries for any of the versions. It is the OS specific package maintainers who has provided with binary packages all these days. The community wants to give away binaries so that more people can test it, but we are in need of volunteers to do that. If you are interested in doing a regular builds of binaries, you are welcome.

Q2. A user had a work flow in which he wanted to have branches for single files.

Solution: Single file externals introduced in 1.6.x version of subversion was suggested to fit his workflow.

Q3. Will there be any change in branch and merging operations of subversion?

Solution: No, there are no such plans right now.

Q4. Is there a way to automatically resolve tree conflicts, like incoming move and incoming delete?

Solution: As of 1.6.x version of subversion, we have tree conflict detection in place, but actual resolution of tree conflicts is under development.
Trumerge is one tool which solves tree conflicts automatically and it works with 1.6.x.

Q5. Problem with UTF-8 in different operating systems

Solution: Some operating systems like Mac OSX normalize UTF-8 and store it differently in the client side. Subversion gets these bits from the client as it is and stores it in the server side. These representations, when they come to a different operating system, are messed up. It may get fixed in 1.7.x since WC-NG where the filenames are stored in the database after UTF-8 conversion in the client side.

Q6. SVN blame/praise/annotate takes a long time. For example, a svn node with 6000 revisions, 2MB size takes 4 hours when fired a blame. But these are faster in CVS. When white space changes are neglected then 4 hours become 1 hour which is again a huge delay?

Solution: CVS does a line based search and SVN does byte based search hence SVN will be slow. SVN can implement a caching mechanism to reduce the time taken. Alternatively, the implementation needs to be changed to reverse blame from forward blame which is not actively looked upon as of now. Also blaming within a revision range will be lot more faster.

Q7. Make subversion diff to create well formed XML in the diffs.

Solution: This can be achieved by plugging in an external diff/merge tool which generates well formed XML in diffs. Use 1.6.x or later version of SVN to plugin this external diff/merge tool since the exit codes are returned properly in 1.6.x.

Q8. SVN obliterate, when is it coming?

Solution: Still in development and we are working on it.

Q9. SVN search of repository, some better way of doing it.

Solution: Should be easy, possible and efficient with an SQL backend which will also have multiple advantages with compromise to speed.

Q10. Are the inherited properties implemented in WC-NG?

Solution: No, we do not have any such plan, as of now. However, WC-NG will help in doing it with ease. The basic notion of developing WC-NG library is speed, robust, enable future feature developments easy.

Check out the reports on SubConf 2009, Day 2 & Day 3.

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of free and open source software held during third Saturday of September every year. SFD 2009 was celebrated around the world with great zeal and vigour on the 19th September this year.

Free and Open Source Software(FOSS) Club of Jaya Engineering College, Chennai has been an active promoter in the field of Open Source. The Association aims at providing every student with the basic foundation and knowledge so that we build upon in the field of Open Source society. It not only sows the seeds for the academic excellence but also gives equal opportunities to the enthusiastic and creative skills of every student.

SFD ‘09 was celebrated on 19th September 2009, in Association with Indian Linux User group, Chennai & CSI Students Chapter. Shri K. Purushothaman, Regional Director, NASSCOM, Tamil Nadu & Kerala would be the chief-guest for the celebrations. Prof. M. Kumaran, Head, Jaya Open Source Centre welcomed the gathering. He have highlighted the power of open source software in the Educational Sector. Prof. R. Raja, Principal and Prof. T.N. Kapaleaswaran, Director, IT delivered the special addresses. Prof. A. Kanagaraj, Chairman, Jaya Educational Trust delivered the presidential address and spoke about the Economical and Licencing aspects of softwares. Prof. G. Bharathi Mohan, Co-ordinator, Jaya FOSS Club, thanked the gathering and delivered various ongoing activity of Jaya FOSS Club.

The wheels of progress turn slowly but surely, encompassing all within their turns. Jaya FOSS Club (JFC) released its souvenir “FLOSSAGE” for the year 2009-10. The magazine compiled many thoughts, ideas, works and achievements of Jaya Engineering Students. It unfolds various budding technologies on Open Source. It contains the current and the future projects of Jaya FOSS Research Centre.

Various Technical Talks by Professionals, Various Contests for Students and Demo stalls were the events that made people think about the burning issues in FOSS. The alumni of our college greeted the occasion and presented their technical talks to the gathering on Birth of Jaya FOSS club, How to make money out of FOSS, How to understand Open Source Projects, iTALC : Intelligent Teaching And Learning with Computers, “Free Software and its relevance in young engineers”,and FOSS in Cloud Computing.

They have done an outstanding job in evangelizing FOSS in communities in and around our college society, and a good portion of it has come through their Talks on Open Source where student representatives conducted full fledged celebrations and upheld the spirit of software freedom. Students and professionals from various colleges and institutes presided over the function.

Students from various departments had immense participation in demonstrating their knowledge on Open Source. There were around 30 Demo stalls which had brought in the efforts of many students in bestowing knowledge to other college students.
Live cd and Installation, FOSS equivalent, Office tools, Internet tools, Browsers, Educational tools, Mathamatical tools, Desktop’s, IDE’s, Compiler collection, FOSS CAD tools, RDBMS, EDA tools, LAMP, CMS, Localization, CASE tools, Scientific python tools, Virtualization, Troubleshooting in UBUNTU and Multimedia were some of the stalls put up in the campus.

There were many other interesting events for the participants which included terminal hack, online quiz, gaming, debugging all based on open source tools.
The students are trained on regular basis by the working group on various open source technologies. Working Groups work on various open source tools and helps in inculcating knowledge to the students. Jaya Engineering College has three Open Source Laboratories with numbering of 400 pcs. where all the Lab Courses of CSE and IT are conducted using Open Source tools like Gcc. G++, PostgreSql, Umbrello, Python, etc.

Jaya FOSS Club provides technical tutoring, FOSS resources and news. For deatils login into www.jayafossclub.org. SFD was a huge success in our Society. SFD itself has motivated many students to adopt the open source tools.

The Jaya FOSS Club is driving the effort, but the event depends largely on the grassroot activities of open source software, advocates organizing many events every year.

I was never into coding/development for FOSS. Though I had decent coding skills in some languages, I had never gotten the opportunity to develop mainstream FOSS. When I was told about HackFest at Shaastra ‘09, I decided to give the event a try. Here are my experiences at HackFest.

For starters, Shaastra is not the university in Tanjore, Tamil Nadu. That is SASTRA. Shaastra is IIT-Madras’ annual techfest. This year, it was conducted from the 1st to the 4th of October.

Day 1 of HackFest (1st Oct): There were talks on ‘FOSS and Technology’ by Atul Chitnis, founder of Foss.in, and on ‘FOSS Foundry’ by Shreyas Srinivasan, GNOME developer and co-founder of radioverve.

Chitnis was at his witty best, beginning his talk on a lighter note, talking a little about his past (and why it was relevant to the talk he was giving to us), and in the end, urging the audience to come up with questions of their own. The talk had Chitnis written all over it. He said that there was no organization that could do without free and open source software. “If you use any router today, chances are that it runs Linux. Then you’re a Linux user without you knowing it”, he said. He briefly compared the Linux and BSD kernels and also busted myths about licensing. That there was a lot of dry humour throughout the was evident as the audience chuckled every few minutes.

Srinivasan talked in the afternoon about how he struggled to add a feature to gnome-do. But that was not before he asked us a question about software we use everyday. “Emacs” someone said to which he said “I like”. Immediately, I, being a Vim fanatic shouted “Vim!” to which he said “I don’t like” asserting his position as an Emacs fanatic and making the audience laugh. His talk was filled with humour. The feature he had added, coming back to the point, was the ability to paste URLs into gnome-do in . mode (and tweet them). Gnome-do is written in C# . “Writing code is the easiest part. Even an Infosys programmer can do it”, he said, making the ones that were awake laugh loudly and waking up the ones that were asleep. “Downloading the source and building it is the hardest part”, he added after the laughter died down. He then walked us through what he had done to add the feature, which was apparently only 5 lines of code. This he said, was not accomplished before he had encountered the weirdest of bugs during the build and make process. One error which made the audience roar with laughter was “no: command not found”. The audience laughed again when he showed us a page in an online forum he had found when he had googled the error. Someone in that forum replied to a question on the ‘no’ command that he thought ‘no’ was part of Perl! =P Finally, he had found out that it was an error with because ‘mono’ was not present and then he was able to make. He ended it asking the audience to start developing and contributing back to the community.

Participants were split into 6 groups in the night: GNOME, Sugar, Firefox (Jetpack), the Linux kernel, FFMpeg and KDE based on our preferences after a briefing about each area and what to expect. I chose GNOME.

Arun Changanty, a CS&E student lead our team and taught us the basics of gtk+ programming. The session went on till 2:30am the next morning and I was amazed (coming from a non-cs background) to see how a little modification to the C programming style can let one develop apps using gtk+ libraries.

Day 2 (Night 2 rather): Now that we knew the basics, we set out exploring bugs. http://bugzilla.gnome.org was a good place to start. But we did not visit the page until later in the night. We wanted to do some really basic bug fixing first up. So we set out looking for gnome love bugs. Not having found anything we liked, we started searching on bugzilla. And we struck gold! Gnibbles apparently had a bug which allowed one to change preferences during gameplay if the preferences window was open before a game started. This we found out was because the preferences window was not *modal*. Bingo! we had it. Finding the location of the bug and fixing it was nothing for us with Arun’s help. We only experienced difficulties in building and making.

After toiling it out for hours, we finally had the diff (bug fix)! Arun was really magnanimous here. He let me file the bugfix in my own name. This was the shot in the arm I realized later, that I was badly wanting for so long to kickstart contributing to the community with code. We filed a bug on “2009-10-02 23:34:43 UTC” as the bugzilla identifies it. I had just contributed with code! Thanks to hackfest.

Night 3: Now I was really enthusiastic. I went around searching for bugs, found one in gconf-editor and right away, went to work. by “2009-10-03 23:03:38 UTC”, I had another bug fix!

Apart from the hacking nights, we had loads of fun in BoF sessions and constantly engaged in funny wars with some people supporting GNOME and others.

Thanks to the event, I had successfully started contributing back to the community with code.

It has been a while that WACOM is noted as a leading tablet manufacturer, among the graphic designers. However, this is the first time they launched a series of products that could not just be used by the designers, but by the “aam junta” as well, with equal ease. WACOM just launched the second generation of Bamboo series, in India, yesterday. As the company claims, it is the first interactive tablet that merges multi-touch functionality with pen tablet technology in a single device. Based on current consumer trends and the introduction of popular touch devices such as the Apple iPhone, Bamboo provides a simple and spontaneous way of using your computer. Operating Bamboo is as easy as a touch (finger-based input), or a stroke of our digital pen. The new family is comprised of four different products – Bamboo, Bamboo Fun, Bamboo Pen and Bamboo Touch.

WACOM Bamboo FUN -- Pen & Touch

The selling point of the Bamboo would be the high sensitivity of the surface. Moreover, apart from catering to design needs, it can transform any dektop and laptop into a very cheap tablet PC. Combined with today’s gesture and hand writing recognition software, this device could ease a lot of lives.

Bamboo would be very useful for those of you who use computers as part of your digital lifestyle to communicate, share and create content. It enables anyone to be creative. Bamboo is also a great tool for self-expression and personalisation when producing everyday documents, presentations and blogs, or when communicating with friends, colleagues and family through IMs and social networks.

Combining pen and touch technology into one stylish device delivers the best of both worlds, making it even easier, quicker and more fun to use a computer. With Bamboo second generation, a simple finger tap on the digital pad will allow you to select an icon, open a menu or start an application. Plus, a variety of intuitive two-finger gestures enables you to simply rotate an image or document, flip through a digital photo album or presentation, scroll through a blog or an excel sheet and zoom in and out of a photo or map.

With a sleek, black design Bamboo offers pen and multi-touch input in a single device and is equally suited for your home office and workplace. Bamboo can be used to customise your emails, letters, spreadsheets, presentations and documents with signatures, notes, doodles and scribbles. The addition of intuitive touch input with gestures simplifies navigation both on your desktop and when you surf the Internet. Bamboo comes bundled with Adobe Photoshop Elements and Ink Squared Deluxe.

Lastly, I shall leave you with a video, showing off how the Bamboo works and its potentials.

May 2009 saw the Ubuntu developers meeting in Barcelona for the UDS (Ubuntu Developers’ Summit), where they drew up plans for the next version of Ubuntu, codenamed Karmic Koala and set to be released on October 29. As it is expected that Ubuntu 10.04 (i.e., the version after Karmic Koala) is going to be a Long Term Support (LTS) release, a lot of changes are planned for this cycle. Which makes this one of the most exciting releases in a long time. Various changes have been proposed at the system level while trying to focus on improving the user experience. Many changes that were postponed in the previous cycles have been accepted this time in the hope of having a better LTS.

Foundation-level changes

Various changes to the core of the system are going to be made, such as:

• Making ext4 the default filesystem: This will lead to a substantial boost in performance as well as reduce fsck occurrences by about 10 times. This was present as an option for Ubuntu 9.04 but now will be the default choice for new installations.
• Moving to GRUB2.
• Moving to GDM: This should lead to much better and prettier login screens. It was not included in previous releases as it lacked configuration options, which are being worked upon in this cycle.

As many changes are being made to the core, I would recommend everyone to reinstall rather than upgrade from a previous release. The reason is that many of these changes will be held back if you upgrade, as it is difficult to update such software without breaking the system. So to get the maximum performance, reinstall from scratch.

Boot experience improvements

It is rightly said that the first impression lasts. Keeping this in mind, Ubuntu is aiming to completely revamp the boot experience. The target for the boot time is 10 seconds on a Dell Mini 9 for the 10.04 version. This would be reduced to around five seconds, along with SSDs and some customisation.

Apart from boot speed, many steps are being taken to make the whole boot experience much prettier and friendlier. The splash screen is being modified to add some much needed bling to it. The GDM is also being changed to make it more polished with various effects.

To achieve both speed and beauty, Karmic Koala will be the first Ubuntu version to have KMS (kernel-mode switching) enabled. It will only work with Intel and ATI graphic cards. Nvidia cards will not be supported until Ubuntu 10.04. KMS will ensure a flicker-free boot experience as well as fast user switching. Fedora already has KMS enabled from the past few versions. So it will be good to have this in Ubuntu too.

New default applications

The default set of apps included in Ubuntu has not been changed much over the past many versions. So the decision to replace Pidgin with Empathy has been somewhat controversial. Empathy is a part of GNOME and uses the Telepathy framework for protocol support, which makes it highly scalable and reuseable. It brings with it a lot of useful and exciting features like audio/video chat, desktop sharing, etc. Currently, audio/video chat is supported only for SIP and XMPP, while, hopefully, support for Google Talk and MSN should be added in time for Karmic. This change would mean we can finally stop using proprietary apps like Skype. Another exciting feature that Empathy has is geolocalisation support, which helps in sharing and viewing location information. Unfortunately, this only works with XMPP servers but not with Google Talk.

With the goal of having a more social desktop, Gwibber will also be included as a default app. This will help to keep in touch with friends via microblogging sites like Twitter and Identi.ca as well as Facebook, Digg, etc.

Gnome-Bluetooth will now be used to establish Bluetooth connections. This should fix many of the problems that users faced in previous versions, while also bringing in some cool features like A2DP support so that we can have out-of-the-box Bluetooth headset support.

While it was initially proposed to replace Rhythmbox with the Banshee Media Player, this plan was dropped due to its development schedule not matching with Ubuntu’s.

Papercuts project

How many times have you heard someone say, “Linux lacks polish and is rough around the edges…”? Well, it seems that the Ubuntu developers too have heard this and to fix it, they’ve started the Papercuts project. This will target around 100 usability bugs that are really annoying but not too difficult to fix. This project will add the level of professionalism and completeness found in commercial operating systems. The full list of bugs to be fixed under this project can be found at launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/karmic.

Ayatana project

As part of Canonical’s efforts to improve the user experience on the Linux desktop, the Ayatana project was started. Ayatana is actually a collection of various projects where design and user experience are given high priority. Currently, Ayatana comprises two projects. The notify-osd project, the new notification system that first made its appearance in Ubuntu 9.04, is being improved in this cycle. The other project is the messaging-indicator project that also was first seen in Ubuntu 9.04. This helps to reduce the clutter in the panel by reducing the number of icons. In this cycle, work is on to make it support many more apps like Empathy, Thunderbird, etc.

GNOME 3 preview

Though GNOME 3 is not scheduled to be released until March next year, a preview release of various GNOME 3 apps like GNOME Shell and Zeitgest will be made available via the repositories. This will help in getting a lot of exposure for these apps and help in a smoother transition to GNOME 3. People will be able to test the apps and give their feedback to the developers.

Android on Ubuntu

With many people interested in Android, Ubuntu doesn’t want to be far behind and is working on integrating Android apps into Ubuntu. This will help netbook users to run Android apps on Ubuntu, natively, which will open up a whole new world of apps for Ubuntu users. Ubuntu also wants to become the best platform for development of Android apps. These steps will hopefully help in increasing the number of companies offering Ubuntu on their machines.

While this just about sums up the main changes to be expected in Ubuntu 9.10, many other improvements can be expected. In the next few months we will see the release of many new operating systems like Snow Leopard and Windows 7, and to compete with them will be a tough job for Ubuntu and desktop Linux, in general. But looking at the features planned and keeping in mind how far we have come in just the past two years, there seems to be a lot of hope for Linux on the desktop. Next year could definitely be the year of Linux on the desktop!