Update: Wikipedia moves its servers from RHELold Red Hat Linux/Fedora to Ubuntu

I found it interesting to read this Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols post about Wikipedia moving its servers from a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux old versions of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

It’s hard to see exactly why they didn’t opt for the free CentOS version of RHEL, so it’s not just about the distro being free and having long-term support.

Some say it’s the easier upgrade path for Debian-based distros like Ubuntu, the difference in package management between apt-based Debian-like systems and RPM/Yum-based Red Hat-like systems.

Whatever the reason, it’s a big win for Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical. I’ve never really thought of Ubuntu as a server OS because they seem to be all about the desktop experience, and I figure that Debian is a way more popular choice on the server.

But there must be something (or a combination of somethings) from an operational standpoint, whether it be installation and maintenance, long-term support, hardware compatibility, remote/automated management options, reliability or performance that is driving a company/entity like Wikipedia to adopt Ubuntu on the server.

Note: I found out through Matt Asay’s post on this subject, where the comments include a response from Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, where he sort of clarifies the fact that Wikipedia/Wikimedia never used the paid-for, supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux but instead was using old versions of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux. (Actually, the commenter before Vibber says that Wikimedia used RHL instead of RHEL, and Vibber only says that his company was “never, at any time, a customer of Red Hat.”

In a word: yikes. That’s old code. But it’s good to see that it still works.

And for clarity’s sake, here’s The Register’s article on the subject, which makes somewhat clear the use of RHL, and why Wikimedia is choosing Ubuntu’s LTS distribution:

Wikimedia has 350 servers today supporting its operations and fewer than 20 desktops, with the exception of a couple of servers still running a Red Hat Linux and a Windows desktop machine that is used to run QuickBooks to do the accounting for the foundation.

All remaining servers and many desktops are running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. All future servers will be setup with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and Wikimedia intends to push that LTS-only idea to the limit by not changing Linuxes unless it has to.

Update: Wikipedia moves its servers from RHELold Red Hat Linux/Fedora to Ubuntu

I found it interesting to read this Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols post about Wikipedia moving its servers from a combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux old versions of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux and Fedora Linux to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

It’s hard to see exactly why they didn’t opt for the free CentOS version of RHEL, so it’s not just about the distro being free and having long-term support.

Some say it’s the easier upgrade path for Debian-based distros like Ubuntu, the difference in package management between apt-based Debian-like systems and RPM/Yum-based Red Hat-like systems.

Whatever the reason, it’s a big win for Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical. I’ve never really thought of Ubuntu as a server OS because they seem to be all about the desktop experience, and I figure that Debian is a way more popular choice on the server.

But there must be something (or a combination of somethings) from an operational standpoint, whether it be installation and maintenance, long-term support, hardware compatibility, remote/automated management options, reliability or performance that is driving a company/entity like Wikipedia to adopt Ubuntu on the server.

Note: I found out through Matt Asay’s post on this subject, where the comments include a response from Brion Vibber, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, where he sort of clarifies the fact that Wikipedia/Wikimedia never used the paid-for, supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux but instead was using old versions of pre-RHEL Red Hat Linux. (Actually, the commenter before Vibber says that Wikimedia used RHL instead of RHEL, and Vibber only says that his company was “never, at any time, a customer of Red Hat.”

In a word: yikes. That’s old code. But it’s good to see that it still works.

And for clarity’s sake, here’s The Register’s article on the subject, which makes somewhat clear the use of RHL, and why Wikimedia is choosing Ubuntu’s LTS distribution:

Wikimedia has 350 servers today supporting its operations and fewer than 20 desktops, with the exception of a couple of servers still running a Red Hat Linux and a Windows desktop machine that is used to run QuickBooks to do the accounting for the foundation.

All remaining servers and many desktops are running Ubuntu 8.04 LTS. All future servers will be setup with Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, and Wikimedia intends to push that LTS-only idea to the limit by not changing Linuxes unless it has to.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS update: Almost four months have passed

It’s been a little while since my last report on how Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has been doing on the $0 Laptop.

In short, all continues to go very, very well. At this point I could see ratcheting down my use of Debian on this machine and pretty much devoting it to Ubuntu all the way.

Why? Everything in Ubuntu works with as little effort as possible.

I have made some strides in getting Debian Lenny working better on the Gateway Solo 1450. I got sound to return by installing the ALSA modules myself. I’m having a problem with the upper GNOME panel looking a bit funky at times, with graphical “ghosting” marring its appearance. It’s not a deal-breaker, but it also doesn’t happen in any other distro.

And again, Ubuntu just does what it’s supposed to do.

I still haven’t conquered suspend-resume in any other distro. In Ubuntu, that just worked.

If for some miraculous reason suspend/resume works in CentOS/RHEL 5.2, I’ll re-evaluate things, but a test of 5.1 today confirmed that it does not work out of the box. And I tried to install 5.2 on a free partition with the super-small network installer, which hung up early in the process. I bailed out of it and figured I’d forget about the whole thing until the CentOS 5.2 live CD image is released.

CentOS 5.2 is out

CentOS 5.2 — the free version of the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — is here.

I saw it on the mirrors last night, but as with most things Linux, a Distrowatch item means that it’s really ready.

Here are the release notes from the CentOS team.

There are DVDs, CDs and a 7.7MB netinstall image. No live CD yet, but that will be coming soon enough, I figure.

For the past few CentOS releases, I’ve been trying the live CD just to see what kind of hardware detection I can get on my various PCs. I’ll be anxious to give 5.2 a spin because Red Hat is promising better support for laptops.

Already CentOS/Red Hat 5.0 has been pretty good on my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop. Not so good as to bump Ubuntu or Debian off of it, but good nonetheless.

And Fedora 9 didn’t suspend/resume it. So it doesn’t look good for CentOS/RHEL 5.2, but I will still give it a try.

One thing that’s new about RHEL is that Red Hat has pledged four years of “intensive” support, up from three, followed by what appears to be three years of less-“intensive” support, but support nonetheless.

So you can count on seven years of security patches on any Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, and that means CentOS will do the same.

Previously in Click:

• Red Hat’s desktop strategy: Can you figure it out?
• Why yes, you can use apt and Synaptic in Red Hat or CentOS
• CentOS 5.2 almost here
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 — a way bigger deal than you might think

Red Hat’s desktop strategy: Can you figure it out?

Red Hat has a Linux desktop plan. It’s just a little difficult to figure out exactly what it is.

I think Red Hat knows this. And it’s OK with it.

One day Red Hat bigwigs are saying that they are not interested in aggressively pursuing the Linux desktop market, that Ubuntu has much of it sewn up, and why do it anyway when all the money is in servers and the support Red Hat so richly provides to those who want it?

Good question.

But I see a strategy in there somewhere. Steven J. Vaughn-Nichols, late of Ziff Davis, now writing just about everywhere else, including his own Practical Technology, has met recently with a bunch of Red Hatters. In SJVN’s recent post, the Red Hat people still push Fedora, the community distribution that serves as a testing ground for future Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases, but the company is sometimes not-so-quietly working on making its flagship RHEL product a better fit for the desktop — and laptops, too. And Red Hat does see a niche for RHEL apart from the server:

What Red Hat is working on is continuing to make RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) business desktop friendly. Whitehurst said many business customers want the Linux desktop. They don’t want to move their desktops lock, stock, and barrel to RHEL, or any other Linux desktop. What Fortune 500 companies do want though is to start moving up to 25% of their desktops to Linux.

Why? Because they want the benefits of Linux. Besides the usual advantages of improved TCO (total cost of ownership) and improved security, Red Hat’s corporate customers want a Linux desktop that can be carried as a virtual machine on a USB key and can be be managed by Red Hat’s management tools. Is this for someone who wants a Windows XP Home replacement? No. It’s not. It is, however, something that can catch the attention of CIOs who want a Windows XP Pro replacement.

And who can resist SJVN’s money quote from Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst?:

“There are companies that sell hundreds of products for millions of dollars and there are companies that sell millions of products for hundreds of dollars. Guess which kind of company Red Hat is?”

It’s a riddle, right?

OK, forget about all of that. Just read Red Hat’s own press release for RHEL 5.2, which not only talks up all the work they’re doing to make suspend/resume work but highlighting the inclusion of desktop applications that aren’t a generation too old for office use. I’m talking about OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox 3, the latter of which just had its final release this week.

Here are a few quotes from the RHEL 5.2 press release:

“We took part in the beta program of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2,” said William Cattey, Linux Platform Coodinator, MIT Information Services & Technology. “Re-basing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux desktop to have the latest Firefox, OpenOffice and Adobe Reader is very important to us because it gives our users the same key applications available on other platforms.”

“LVM is very satisfied with our experience using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop on the certified Lenovo T61 and X61 laptops,” said Werner Schmidt, LVM’s CIO. “We have deployed over 2,000 Lenovo laptops running Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop and plan to roll out several thousand more over the next several months.”

The key in all of this is the corporate/enterprise connection, the idea not of wholly changing desktop platforms but bringing needed diversity to the desktop with Linux where appropriate, and leveraging the whole Red Hat relationship with server customers to solve problems on the desktop while adding incremental revenue and giving those customers even more reasons to stick with — and continue paying for — Red Hat.

And all those management tools, most of which I know nothing about, that Red Hat offers to keep servers in line and up to date — all that stuff can also make desktop management a more orderly procedure than the absolute mess that’s going on now with Joe Worker’s desktop PC.

Not that Ubuntu isn’t also working on corporate, managed solutions for desktop PC management, but when it comes to paying for support, Ubuntu doesn’t seem to be offering any deep discounts over what Red Hat is charging. And if a huge enterprise already has a lot of Red Hat on the premises, a little more doesn’t hurt, right?

And there’s another side to this valuable coin: While Ubuntu is mainly thought of as a desktop system, it’s no secret at all that parent company Canonical is making a huge push into servers, with certifications coming for use on hardware from any number of vendors, commitments of long-term support and the same kind of sysadmin-helping tools that help leverage things for Red Hat.

So if Ubuntu is leveraging its desktop success to build a potentially lucrative server business, Red Hat needs to expand its own desktop commitment to keep and grow the already lucrative server market it currently dominates.

Who wins?

Damn near everybody, I figure. More competition means better products, most of which can be had for free. Remember, if you don’t want to pay for Red Hat, there’s always Fedora, or the RHEL clones put together by CentOS and Scientific Linux. And if you’re deploying Ubuntu in an enterprise situation, you can pay Canonical, or leverage the substantial Ubuntu community to solve problems.

And while some of us can’t imagine paying thousands of dollars a year for support on a server, that kind of thing starts to make sense in the enterprise when you weigh it with your own labor costs.

It’s an equation that has worked in Red Hat’s favor for a long time. And a few extra variables in said equation are just part of the game.

Rumor of the day: Oracle and Red Hat acquisition/partnership/???

Today’s rumor, which suggests that Oracle may buy Red Hat, or something along those lines, comes from Matt Asay.

Why yes, you can use apt and Synaptic in Red Hat or CentOS

I had no idea that the Debian-derived apt and Synaptic are viable choices for package management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the free RHEL-like CentOS. Not that I have anything against RPM and Yum, but it’s nice to have choices.

Dag Wieers shows you how on his blog, which I found via Planet CentOS. (Have you noticed that Planet CentOS is a great place to find out stuff?)

It’s all courtesy of a project called APT-RPM.

CentOS 5.2 almost here

The best way to follow CentOS news is at Planet CentOS, which is just like Planet Debian and Planet Ubuntu, only more succinct.

All three of these blog-aggregator sites, which collect posts from developers, package maintainers and others involved in their respective Linux projects are very much worth reading on a regular basis.

But the reason for this post is that CentOS 5.2 — the free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 assembled by the CentOS team from the source code of RHEL — is just about ready for release, according to Tim Verhoeven:

We are currently in the progress of doing QA testing. All packages have been build. The current plan is to be able to finish all QA test this week so we might be able to release 5.2 next weekend or in the days after it.

While Fedora 9 didn’t properly suspend/resume my Gateway Solo 1450 laptop, I’m still holding out hope that RHEL/CentOS 5.2 will, since greater laptop compatibility is one of the selling points of this significant new RHEL release.

I call it significant because it is bringing some new, very-much-up-to-date versions of popular applications to RHEL/CentOS. Until now, I think that desktop users of RHEL/CentOS have had to be content with Firefox 1.5 and OpenOffice 2.0.

Among the big changes: Firefox 3, which hasn’t even had its final release yet, and Open Office 2.3.

So while the people at Red Hat may be downplaying any aspirations they have on the desktop, this new release, even though it’s 5.2 and not 6, shows that they aren’t relying on Fedora 100 percent for desktop users, many of whom are not anxious to do a major upgrade every six months.

Another thing about CentOS: Lately CentOS has been releasing a live CD and a small network installer image in addition to the full set of CDs and DVD.

I plan to grab the live CD as soon as it’s available to see how the Gateway likes it.

But what about my VIA C3 Samuel test box? It runs CentOS 3.9 and won’t boot anything after that …

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS still No. 1 for my laptop

At the risk of repeating myself, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS works great

When it comes to my main computer — a late-2002 Gateway Solo 1450 (1.3 GHz Celeron, 1GB RAM), Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is the best operating system I’ve ever run.

After pretty much a full year of Debian (first Etch, mostly Lenny), also great but not as great as this new version of Ubuntu, so many things are working so well that I’m reluctant to do anything but keep using this long-term support version of Ubuntu, which will have three years of updates and patches on the desktop.

I keep cranking live CDs of new Linux distributions into the laptop to see if they can do Suspend/Resume, how their desktop environments look and work, and basically whether or not they can do as well.

Fedora 9, Mandriva 2008, PCLinuxOS 2007, OpenSuse 10.3, nothing has been able to handle this particular collection of hardware better than Ubuntu 8.04.

I’m still waiting for CentOS to release its free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, which might offer greater hardware detection on the Gateway than Fedora, or might not.

And I’m open to any distribution that can meld as well with what I call the $0 Laptop.

But for now, I’m reluctant to mess with what, since its release in April, has been a very good thing.

Ubuntu 8.04 LTS running very well

I don’t know why I’m compelled to continually report on how well Ubuntu 8.04 LTS is running on the $0 Laptop, but I keep doing it.

From the graphical polish to Suspend/Resume, Alps touchpad control and everything else I’ve done with it, this is the most impressive Linux distribution I’ve run thus far.

For use on this laptop — a Gateway Solo 1450 — it’s better than Debian Lenny, my other go-to OS.

Today I tried a live CD of Fedora 9, since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 supposedly has beefed up its support of Suspend/Resume on laptops, I figured that maybe, just maybe, that functionality was present in Fedora 9.

It very well might be, but in the Fedora 9 live environment, Suspend/Resume doesn’t work on this laptop.

Moving on to Debian, in the Lenny updates I installed today, there was a new kernel among them. I booted into it after the update, and the new 2.6.24 kernel still doesn’t support the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip on the Gateway.

In order to have working sound, I’m still using the original Lenny 2.6.22 kernel, which does support the chip. I do understand that I can manually add the module I need to support sound in the new kernel, but I’m waiting to see if and when Debian decides that it would like a certain number of its users to enjoy sound. Until then, I’ll stick with 2.6.22.

In case you were wondering, and I know you were, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS supports sound just fine on the laptop, even with a 2.6.24 kernel. Score another one for Ubuntu. If the binary blob in the kernel for the ESS 1988 Allegro sound chip were the only such blob left in the kernel as configured by Debian, then I’d understand its sudden exclusion from the distribution, but I have a very good feeling that this is not the case.

I will consider adding the sound modules myself, as detailed in one of the relevant bug reports, but I’ll more than likely turn to Ubuntu for the simple reason that it just runs better. And this is coming from a person who has championed Debian quite a bit. (As an aside, I love bug reports that give you a fix for the problem that often works but leaves the bug intact to a) annoy some users and b) drive others away.)

I’ve thought about it quite a bit. If you’re running a standard desktop computer, it’s easy to make just about any Linux distribution work well, if it will work at all. You’re not often worrying about unsupported touchpads, uncontrolled CPU fans, flaky or nonexistant Suspend/Resume, other power-management issues and the like. I can run Debian Etch with carefree abandon on some of my desktop systems, but getting Etch to work well with an Alps Touchpad is just not in the cards … or maybe it is, since I found some new suggestions for configuring xorg.conf to make the Alps perform better. But since I’ve made the move to Lenny, I’m probably not going back to Etch on that system, even though the sound-chip issue continues to piss me off.