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This week I had the pleasure of taking some personal time to play around with Sun Microsystem’s VirtualBox. What else can I say but, “Wow.” I am impressed with this excellent application. I had downloaded (v2.1.4) and configured it for Fedora Linux on my laptop. It was extremely simple. It came as an rpm and the installation took care of everything, including adding the shortcut launchers in my GNOME menu.

Yesterday afternoon I was speaking with a local administrator of one of the companies that I work for and in the past we had discussed topics such as GNU/Linux among other technical things but certain “concerns” always seem to come back up, not only with him but also other Microsoft using technical individuals that assume open source is bad, against Microsoft and anything good, and/or insecure (”a result of the source being available to everyone”). Where have these false ideas sprouted from?

What can I say but Knoppix is a great distribution! Always has been. Even back when I was in college I used to use Knoppix on the Microsoft Windows 2000 client desktops just so I can remain somewhat sane and continue to work in an environment I was more comfortable in. Even when I used to be a service technician, Knoppix was always around to be able to perform data recovery/transfers from one medium to the other. Over the years I have continued to use Knoppix as the excellent tool for data recovery that it is.

To date, I don’t think I have ever seen any other operating environment support so many file systems and volume managers. You name it and I can assure you that one way or another, it runs on Linux. The problem with having multiple choices of methods or applications in configuring and managing your storage is that there may come a time where you will have to toggle between multiple interfaces in order to accomplish one set of tasks.

In my review of the ASUS Eee PC 901 with Xandros Linux pre-installed, I received a comment which disturbed me. The part of the comment which disturbed me was in response to my negative views on modeling the Simple Mode icewm with Microsoft Windows XP themes. The response to my comment on this theme for the window manager was: “And what is the problem with that taking into the account the target user they had in mind? They just want to keep it somewhat familiar and simple. Fair enough.”

For those of us who have traveled outside of the world of Microsoft Windows and into UNIX-like operating systems, we should already be somewhat familiar with the X Window System. Some of us even understand its full potential and use it in ways that most have never dreamed of.

Perhaps pre-alpha was a bit too early for Mozilla to release its Fennec mobile browser for Windows Mobile. Early adopters who downloaded the application after it was announced Feb. 10 found it essentially doesn't work. "The bad news is the browser is basically useless for many people," Mark Finkle, a Fennec developer, wrote in a blog post describing the problem.

Yesterday I finally received my ASUS Eee PC 901 pre-installed with Xandros Linux. Note that Xandros is a Debian-based distribution. I was really excited to start playing with this new toy. Almost from the beginning I was experiencing problems and after doing some Internet searching, I realized I was not the only one. All problems though were related to the operating system and not the hardware.

For the first time this week I finally had the pleasure of taking Damn Small Linux (hereafter, DSL) for a test drive. One of the companies that I work for required an easy, lightweight and quick solution to salvage an older project.

If you didn’t notice yet, I enjoy doing a lot of “thinking about the past.” Last weekend I walked into a Target and while browsing through their electronics section, I noticed that they were selling a version of the ASUS Eee PC 900. Priced at approximately $250 and coming with a version of Xandros Linux. For well over a year I have been reading of these new sub-notebooks coming pre-installed with GNU/Linux but I had never seen one in person. This notebook is probably the smallest I had seen (8.9 inch). I immediately wanted one but did not get it…yet.

Sometimes I sit back and wonder about the direction technology has taken, especially with regards to operating systems. I think back to my Apple days and even when I got my first PC running MS-DOS with Microsoft Windows 3.11. Obviously, some of you can go even further back in history while others not far at all. But when I think about it, I think of how simple things were and by the end of the day, it all still worked! As the years had gone by additional “fluff” has been added to these simple computing machine, now adding complexity into the equation.

In continuation to my last post, I wish to pick up from where I left off. I had expressed some disappointment with my initial experience just after I installed the Intreprid Ibex (8.10) server edition of Ubuntu...

I know that a great percentage of you may feel otherwise but coming from a data storage background, I must say, I was a bit disappointed with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Please do not misundertand me, I praise Canonical for all that they had accomplished. While my distro of choice may not be Ubuntu, my wife uses it with no troubles at all. As a desktop client, it is one of many excellent choices.

It still amazes me to see storage administrators bringing the same Microsoft Windows mentality to the UNIX and Linux environments. That is, after changes to a configuration are made “reboot the console to view all changes.” Now while Microsoft Windows does a fairly decent job of updating any changes made to the SCSI Subsystem, UNIX and GNU/Linux still handle it somewhat differently. Rebooting the console should be the LAST thing anybody does. These operating systems are so modular that in most cases there is absolutely no need to reboot; unless you have made changes to the kernel.

The European Commission could force Microsoft to bundle Firefox with future versions of Windows. The revelation came as part of Microsoft's quarterly filing with the Security and Exchange Commission. Among the statements is a clause outlining the penalties being considered by the European watchdog, which recently ruled that Microsoft is harming competition by bundling Internet Explorer with Windows. The most interesting situation outlined in the filing would see either Microsoft or computer manufacturers forced to install Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari by default alongside Internet Explorer on new Windows-based PCs.

According to recent IDC reports Microsoft does not own the enterprise market; favoring UNIX and Linux Operating platforms. Although one needs to be reminded that it is not Microsoft’s primary market. It is the end-user that Microsoft is concerned with and it has been that same market that has helped Microsoft get to the position it is currently in. But does that really matter?

There are certain topics that never cease to amaze me when I work closely with storage administrator to even developers and QA engineers. Some of those topics are very specific to host side storage tuning. That is, there have been many occasions when certain knowledge in the storage industry has never been acknowledged and taught. Eventually bad practices develop which can eventually lead to disastrous results. It becomes even worse when you get into operating platforms that many may not necessarily be accustomed to such as Linux and UNIX. This blog entry focuses on some SCSI Subsystem details for the Linux platform.

For the past couple of weeks I have been focusing my free time on continuing the development of scsigen v2.0. I am currently working on the Linux 2.6 version and it will be followed by Sun’s Solaris/OpenSolaris. Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD will come afterward. From experience I have learned to always find out what the user wants or desires in features and functionality. I am not here to introduce a new industry but provide easy-to-use solutions that are contained in simple packages. Project details are listed in the link provided above.

In 1976 one man changed the face of text editors. That man is Bill Joy who developed vi for BSD UNIX.

In my last post I had made some comments about the Microsoft Windows not being capable of enterprise high performance computing. In the comments (upon request) I had posted some details on the SCSI subsystem of the Operating System, talking of the scatter gather lists when sequential SCSI commands are being coalesced just prior to being sent to the SCSI-based media. I wanted to continue on that topic and focus specifically on the NTFS file system and why it too is not intended for enterprise class usage.