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I am currently employed with a large global company, working in a division that strictly focuses on embedded Linux development. Earlier this week, during our lunch hour, as one would expect with a predominantly Linux crowd, we had engaged in a conversation on the following question: What technology has Microsoft been the first to market? And of those technologies, which was developed by Microsoft?

This morning, I came across two Phoronix articles (here and here) generating some sort of hype with regards to a ZFS port for the Linux kernel, with article headlines as Native ZFS Is Coming To Linux Next Month. My response to this, as I will explain below is: Why?

Well, it has been quite a week, last week. Not too long after the OpenSolaris Governing Board issued an ultimatum to Oracle and closely following the unveiling of the Illumos project, Oracle officially announced (in a memo to internal employees) that they will be leaving OpenSolaris behind. To most (including myself) this is not at all surprising. The writing had been on the walls, yet many still felt hopeful. It is disappointing news for more than one reason. OpenSolaris was a solid and great operating system. Not many of my readers may really know too much about the SunOS family but when Sun Microsystems developed a software product, it was always a quality product; that is, stable and extremely well polished.

In what is supposedly a leaked internal memo to Oracle staff, the adoptive parent company of Sun’s OpenSolaris had announced the fate the project’s (and binary release’s) future. That is, they will support it no more outside of CDDL’d package updates for future Solaris (i.e. Solaris 11) releases.

Even though my goto operating system for servers is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, lately I have been working with Canonical’s Ubuntu Server 10.04 and I will admit that it has so far been a great experience. Just like what is expected of a server operating system, it is not intended for the general user base and focused more toward an experience Linux user; especially when by default there exists no GUI. That is one of the best parts in my personal opinions. Another great thing about the OS relates to its simplified installation process and how everything is automatically installed and to an extent configured should you choose to configure the server as a LAMP, DNS, etc. A couple of years ago, I had reviewed an older 8.10 release here and here and wasn’t impressed. Now, I can see things have changed for the better. Unfortunately I will not be discussing this. But before I get any deeper into this article, I wish to share my experiences with 10.04.

But what do you have now? The focus has shifted to mobility. A lot of applications are now provided services over the web (i.e. the cloud) and our mobile devices provide us access to these services. For the past decade Apple has made a huge comeback and found itself a market which has been leading to its recent success. Although, they continue to push their proprietary model on all their products.

It just seems that through all this hype of Google’s much anticipated release of its Chrome OS, many look to it as Google’s replacement to all competing Operating System when the reality shows that this will not be the case. First of all, let us look at the audience this new OS is catering to: someone who pretty much uses the web for everything (i.e. entertainment, productivity, communications, etc.).

I don’t get it. Or maybe I am not expected to understand it. Yesterday I went to a local Best Buy retail store to pick up a USB Flash Drive. After doing a quick price comparison I ended up purchasing the Greek Squad (the Best Buy) branded product. The next day I took the device into work and just as I was about to open it I quickly glanced at the back of the package and noticed: “Compatible with Windows 2000 SP4/Windows XP/Windows Vista/ Windows 7, Mac OS 10.x and above.“

In recent Linux related news I have been reading about the Ubuntu Control Center (UCC) and the Ubuntu Application Menu (Global Menu). The projects looked extremely interesting so I decided to install them and give them a try.

So, I just got my Android upgrade for my HTC Droid Eris phone. It upgraded from 1.5 (Cupcake) to 2.1 (Eclair). I must say that I am happy with the update. Although there were a couple of annoyances that had to be dealt with.

Earlier this week I came across this blog posting about data integrity testing on ZFS title: ZFS data integrity tested. It was a few months old from Robin Harris’ blog Storage Bits. I guess the most exciting part was validating Sun Microsystem’s claims to ZFS having the ability to correct data corruption even with error injection to both the disk and memory. ZFS continues to prove its worth on enterprise class systems and applications.

As long as I can remember I had been using the Netscape web browser which evolved to Mozilla and now Firefox. I still use Firefox and have grown so comfortable with it that I don’t really desire to move onto anything else. Needless to say, Mozilla’s products are not perfect and there is always room for additional features and what I believe to be necessities in order to function in today’s world of computing.

First things first, the installation was beyond simple. Answer a couple of questions and just sit back while the installer handles everything else. Once my OS was installed, the PC rebooted and in 10 seconds (possibly less), I was at the log in screen. Note that I am running on a 2 year old Lenovo R61i Thinkpad with 3GB of RAM, 1.8 GHz Intel Dual Core processor and a standard SATA 2.5? hard drive. Nothing out of the ordinary. It is amazing what can be achieved when you get rid of the traditional init daemon and replace it with Upstart.

It would appear that the OpenSolaris project is back on track. This is a bit long overdue. The acquisition of Sun by Oracle left a few projects in questionable states. It was unknown as to whether Oracle would continue supporting these open source projects. OpenSolaris was included in that list.

The past weeks gave me much to think about with regards to the future of Linux. Every year we always hear that “this is the year of Linux Desktop” and yet are surprised that nothing has changed from the years prior. Sure Linux is growing on the end user base but it is a very small growth; almost unnoticeable.

Two days ago, I ran through a long needed image update to the OpenSolaris 2010.03 preview. I was updating through the pkg update manager from build 129 to build 134. So when I say, it was much needed, I wasn’t kidding. Anyway, after over 1 GBytes of updates was completed, a new boot environment (BE) was created with the native ZFS snapshot feature and I shut down the PC for the night. The next day I turned the PC on into the latest boot environment to find that my gnome-terminal was giving me problems.

This entry is a continuation of one published in May of 2009. In fact it is relating to a comment made earlier today which I responded to in brief words. I am now taking the time to offer my viewpoint on the whole ZFS licensing under the CDDL and the reasoning for it. It wasn’t until I started working with the OpenSolaris kernel and by working I mean, modifying code and going through the build process that I finally realized why OpenSolaris was licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL).

It is hard to believe that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still has the majority of market share in the web browser world (62.12%). I am just glad to see the rising popularity of Mozilla Firefox (24.43%), Google Chrome (5.22%) to even others such as Apple Safari (4.53%), Opera (2.38%), etc. Whenever I spend time to do various Javascript to even CSS development for various dynamic webpages, I am always held back by the non-compliant Internet Explorer. Today I will be picking IE8 as it is the latest and greatest from Microsoft.

When I write about the disposable PC, blame for the creation and maintaining of such a culture does not belong to a single entity. It has gotten to the point where hardware has become so cheap that whenever someone who lacks any real technical knowledge comes across a computing problem (whether it be hardware or software related) has no problem running out and purchasing a new replacement. Microsoft and retail stores add to this culture.

On 23 October, 2009 it was announced on MacOSForge that Apple had decided to discontinue any and all development on the porting of the ZFS file system. I know that I am not the only one to say this but I am not surprised. Supposedly there were legal reasons behind this action but in the end, who cares? They are the ones losing out to continue with an out dated and still limiting file system.