Enterprise Unix Roundup: Does CERT Matter? – page 2

In Other News

» So, now that the holidays are over and the new year has begun, IT managers around the world are planning how they are going to spend the money in their brand-new, shiny budgets. We'd recommend hiring two smart, quirky pundits as high-paid consultants, but that pesky ethics thing keeps getting in the way.

Seriously, what do enterprise-level CIOs plan to spend their money on this coming year? If only someone had published a survey that asked such managers that very question, like Merrill Lynch's survey of 100 CIOs -- oh, wait, they did!

The survey queried top-level IT managers to see what, if any, changes they planned to make in 2006. The good news: Budgets are up. the so-so news: They're only going up 2.5 percent. (From 2004 to 2005, they only went up 2 percent, on average, so there's some improvement.)

All of this talk about the decline of Unix seems premature, too. Two-thirds of CIOs indicated they plan to purchase some Unix servers. The news looked even better for IBM. Of those CIOs picking up new Unix boxes, Big Blue was the rated at 29 percent as the preferred Unix vendor HP came in second at 19 percent, and Sun finished third with 14 percent, which does not reflect well for the huge Solaris/OpenSolaris push the company is making.

And how is Linux going to fare? Well, if you thought all of the legal harem-scarem was making a difference, think again. Only 8 percent of the respondents are weighing their Linux purchases against the threat of litigation; 81 percent thought all of the legal noise was just that -- noise. Looks like The SCO Group's OpenServer market just got smaller.

Of course, it's not just SCO banging the legal pans to try to flush out potential prey, er, customers. 11 percent of the CIOs said they were pressured in some way by a third-party vendor (7 percent of the booga-booga came from Microsoft, and the other 4 percent came from "other") about Linux legal risks.

So, taking the 40,000 foot view, don't look for huge changes in IT spending habits for Unix and Linux in 2006.

» Not much Unix news is expected out of the Consumer Electronics Show, but the operating system should make a good showing at the Las Vegas convention this week. One of the biggest rumors floating around the early part of the show was that Google's Larry Page was going to announce something big on Friday when he keynotes. Specifically, a Windows-killer called the Google Box that would be distributed at a major retailer (like Wal-Mart), work as both a PC and a home theater component, and run Google's own operating system (which very likely would have been some flavor of Linux or BSD).

Of course, Google moved to squelch the rumors, noting there are any number of hardware vendors out there it can partner with to deliver a packaged solution, so why would it get into the hardware business?

Because the entire world of Windows users is sick of facing yet another vulnerability that could turn their systems into zombies? Hey, Larry, just a thought.

» And while the rest of us were carrying on, one busybody was wrapping up some work of his own over the holidays. Of course, when the busybody is Linus Torvalds, we tend to sit up and take note.

On Monday, Torvalds wrapped up his work on Linux kernel 2.6.15. He seemed to be taking advantage of the rest of his crew taking the holidays off, working away at his own pace. He set loose the last release candidate for this kernel on Christmas Eve, telling his development team "Now, most of you are probably going to be totally bored out of your minds on Christmas day, and here's the perfect distraction. Test 2.6.15-rc7. All the stores will be closed, and there's really nothing better to do in between meals."

Now that's motivation.

Linux on PowerPC users will note that the 32-bit and 64-bit PowerPC kernel development trees have been merged into a generic PowerPC development branch. The new single tree allows for kernel compilation on either 64- or 32-bit PowerPCs.

IPv6 support was another focus of Linux 2.6.15. One the IPv6 fixes an address deletion issue where, "if you add more than one IPv6 address belonging to the same prefix and delete the address that was last added, routing table entry for that prefix is also deleted." Eleven other commits were made to this networking technology.

Elsewhere in the Corral

Recent relevant articles about enterprise Unix

• Early in the Massachusetts OpenDocument debate, one of the State Senators brought up the argument that OpenDocument would not be compatible with technology for the visually impaired. We snidely asked how hard it would be to make the fonts bigger? After reading a LinuxPlanet guest column this week from Rev. Scott Seder, who is legally blind, we discovered that there is far more to this technology. Currently, the technology is so expensive that only governments or well-funded nonprofits can provide assistive technology to the visually impaired. But, the very Windows-based status quo the Massachusetts politicians were trying to protect turns out to be horribly unstable and very expensive. The BSD-based OS X can do the same job, for far less cost. And Linux technology is almost there. If it could get there, Seder argues, the cost savings would be even more significant.
• Novell has a new CTO, a position that has been empty for a while. This LinuxPlanet article looks at what Dr. Jeffery Jaffe is bringing to Novell -- and what he thinks Novell will soon be bringing to the world.
• If you're considering switching to Linux for your networked print services, there are a few things to keep in mind, which you can learn in this article from Enterprise Networking Planet.

Tips of the Trade

When your laptop users request Linux, don't panic -- Linux works great on laptops. The tricky bit is selecting models that have supported hardware. This is a pain even in the Windows universe, because laptop manufacturers have this weird habit of never standardizing on parts that are known to work well, but are continually introducing new variations with new problems. You'd think that modems and network cards would be a done deal, but for whatever bizarre reasons they are always in a state of flux.

The hard way to deliver a nice Linux laptop to a user is to purchase the laptop, which means paying the "Windows tax," then wiping out Windows and installing your favorite Linux. None of the first-tier vendors -- Dell, Gateway, HP, or IBM -- support Linux on laptops, and will not sell you anything but a Windows laptop. You will probably spend a fair amount of time finding and tweaking drivers and struggling to get power management working reliably. If you wish to go this route, try Linspire, Xandros, or SUSE Linux. They work great on laptops and should work with a minimum of pain. Be sure to check out Tuxmobil and Linux-on-laptops.com before you make a purchase.

A better way is to purchase a Linux preinstall from a vendor that specializes in Linux laptops. There are quite a few of these. They are not afraid to use the L-word, and you get a machines that works out of the box. Most of them offer extra customization services, such as dual-booting and custom hardware configurations, so you can get exactly what you want.

Tuxmobil has a list of Linux-on-laptop vendors. A number of vendors, including AvaDirect.com andPowerNotebooks.com, will also sell you a bare laptop with no operating system installed:

Carla Schroder writes the Tips of the Trade section of Enterprise Unix Roundup. She also appears on Enterprise Networking Planet and Linux Planet, covering Linux from the desktop to the server room. She is the author of the Linux Cookbook and the upcoming "Linux Networking Cookbook."

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