Thursday Jun 30, 2005
I haven't had time to blog much recently, beyond penning a quick response to some speculation about Sun's desktop future. Some jokers on slashdot were even claiming we were dropping GNOME. Surely anyone reading this blog knows that not everything they read on the internet is true!
Shortly after GUADEC we had a mini-reunion of globe-trotting Sun desktop engineers here in Ireland. I enjoyed seeing gman and Yippi and others again. Gman lives in the country where Hobbits, Trolls and other creatures were filmed for Lord of the Rings. Yippi lives not far from my grandfather's home town of Ohlman, Illinois (Population 0.)1 Yippi gave me some tips on taking the Irish driving exam (next time I'll remember to watch "The Dukes of Hazard") and he gave me a quick refresher on how to use Sun's collect tools for detailed user and kernel time profiling of functions and lines of code. I would highly recommend this tool for anyone interested in performance. So far I've only looked at the behaviour of the resize benchmark in various themes, but I'll publish more if I find something interesting to GNOMErs. As Calum noted, the fact that we're spending more time on the Solaris desktop could help us contribute more to the GNOME community. Yippi first demonstrated forte collect and the analyzer GUI shortly before our team was tasked to focus almost exclusively on JDS linux where these tools don't exist, so some of us had forgotten about them. Before I forget, I also wanted to point out Richard McDougall's article's on using dtrace and vmstat for memory analysis. That's about all the news I have at the moment.
1Anyone who has read
Huckleberry Finn or seen
"Oh Brother, where art thou?" would have some understanding of my Grandpa Delmar's south midwestern accent, expressions and humor.
. . . there warn't anybody at the church, except maybe a hog or two,
for there warn't any lock on the door, and hogs likes a puncheon
floor in summer-time because it's cool. If you notice, most folks
don't go to church only when they've got to; but a hog is different.
--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.
--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Thursday Jun 30, 2005
I wasn't at JavaOne to hear what John Loiacono said about the future of JDS on linux. But the only quote I could find was:
"You're going to see less of an emphasis on JDS on Linux," Loiacono said. "The strategy has changed slightly."
Tech news writers are jumping to some wild conclusions based on these 17 words. First of all, Sun certainly isn't abandoning the open source applications and libraries above the kernel that non-technical folk seem to think of as Linux. And Sun just introduced a slick new desktop workstation and a slick new laptop, so they will certainly need a desktop (few of us would recommend polluting it with that expensive but popular O.S.) Sun continues to make Sun Ray server software (SRSS) available for Solaris X86/X64, Solaris Sparc and several flavors of linux. And, especially with the help of Tarentella, Sun Ray clients don't care what O.S. you want to display on your desktop (even that expensive one, it's your money!) So the question remains, does a long term refocus on Solaris and Open Solaris necessarily mean the end of a linux kernel based desktop? Smart business leaders are still looking for alternatives to expensive desktop operating environments and Sun has the technology for several viable alternatives. But whether Solaris, Open Solaris, Linux or something else best meets the needs of Sun customers is something Sun customers will decide. Solaris 10 is now available for X86/X64 and Sparc. Solaris has some awesome enterprise class provisioning, instrumentation, scalability and stability. Solaris's performance is close to (or surpasses) that of linux. Once drivers exist which allow Open Solaris to support most enterprise class hardware, will there still be a reason for a linux kernel under the hood? You tell me, you're the customer, I just work here.
Update:
Here is an attempt to unravel the media spin and FUD surrounding the original comment. Customers will decide what "general purpose desktop" means. There are some who can't conceive of a general purpose desktop without Microsoft ABIs, but others may just want a browser, a JVM and the ability to securely run a few applications. Solaris (especially with Sun Ray) is already a cost-effective desktop for these users. On a lighter note, here is an interesting article about the origins of urban legends. It includes the legend which led Mark Twain to quip, "The report of my death was an exaggeration."
Saturday Jun 18, 2005
This weekend's weather was very unusual for Ireland, warm and sunny with a light southerly breeze. The members of Sun Ireland's sports and social club met at Fingal sailing school, beside a thatched cottage in Malahide. The instructors gave us brief lessons and practice in uphauling the sailboard sail, turning the sailboard, righting the sailboat, and a few other things. Our little girl watched from shore and laughed "tip over!", "tip up!" There were quite a few capsizes and we were thankful that even the murky water of the broadmeadows estuary was relatively warm.
P.S. Yeah we were sailing uphill ;-)
P2.S. What does this have to do with OpenSolaris? Oh, it was fun to see Java and Solaris engineers in open boats on the open water and later hear them openly debate in a pub.
Tuesday Jun 14, 2005
OpenSolaris is live! Unfortunately the CD drive on my laptop is dead. Sometimes even a minor problem can get in the way of our enjoying something really cool. It's like when your brand new car runs out of gas. I'm hoping we can smooth over any rough edges in OpenSolaris. The number of OpenSolaris blog entries is overwhelming. Hackers, kernel experts and students have some great new reading material! I'm already impressed by outside contributers to OpenSolaris, such as Blastware's planned port to PowerPC. I don't know who will be more excited, those of us who would like Solaris on our Apple Powerbooks, or those who want to run it on IBM's hardware.
How can a desktop mechanic help? Well, I don't think there's an "OpenSolaris for Mechanics" yet, but here, in no particular order are a few tips which helped me. I'll post them here in case they might help newcomers to OpenSolaris. If others have tips or links to tips, please let me know.
OpenSolaris
Solaris
Thursday Jun 09, 2005
In case anyone missed it, Johan Steyn began his blog with an interesting GNOME vs CDE performance measurement. He looks at time and network traffic to a Sun Ray appliance on Solaris and Linux. A few interesting comments have already been entered on this topic. Since monochrome fonts can make some GNOME applications at least as fast CDE, would it be possible for fast scrolling (moving?) text to be rendered monochrome and only anti-aliased when stationary? Would it make sense to put this intelligence into individual applications or would it be more appropriate to put it into Cairo or somewhere else? Can extentions such as Xrender and DAMAGE and compositing libraries such as Cairo help optimize the traffic between the thin client and the server?
Wednesday Jun 08, 2005
I thought OSX on Intel was just another rumor fueled by the craving for an alternative X86 desktop operating system. This longing leads to some wishful thinking.
Will OSX turn a sow's ear into a silk purse?
Will OSX "X86" run on a typical X86 P.C.? Maybe, but don't expect Apple's legendary fit, finish and integration when you run OSX on a
bargain basement collection of P.C. parts. Apple historically kept their O.S., development kit and hardware in a closed ecosystem. MS Windows, GNU/Linux and Solaris have a head start on dealing with hardware that is differentiated by more than keyboard color.
John Dvorak seems to think that OSX's "superior performance against Longhorn" will help it grab X86 market share from Windows and Linux. I found this interesting because even though most of us know that
GNOME desktop performance has room for improvement, on my Pismo G3 powerbook GNOME 2.4 (yellowdog linux) was noticibly faster than OSX Jaguar. And since it is difficult to detect a consistant difference in desktop performance between GNU/Linux and Solaris, it seems that both are contenders for displacing Microsoft Windows desktops on Intel.
Platform hopping is becoming more popular. IBM seems to be demphasizing the X86 architecture, Apple is switching from PowerPC to Intel. Microsoft is rumored to be planning a switch from Intel to PowerPC in their game consoles. And of course, Sun's own Solaris is now available on Intel's X86, AMD (32 and 64 bit) and UltraSPARC architectures. Is it possible that finally, almost a quarter century after IBM's first personal computer introduced a near monoculture in desktop CPUs and Operating Systems, the industry is going multiplatform? I should confess that one of my first assignments at a medical device company was to replace any Sun specific code with the posix equivalent. If any of my old friends there happen to be reading this and are renegotiating vendors after the competing product was EOL'd, I hope they know it wouldn't be difficult to switch back to Sun. Writing portable code certainly helps negotiations with hardware vendors. Portable operating systems such as OSX, GNU/Linux and Solaris will help reintroduce competition to desktop hardware.
Who cares?
I'd like to see the numbers on which Steve Jobs based his claim that Intel work/watt is better than PowerPC and I'd like to see the same benchmark on AMD, Via and UltraSPARC (Niagra when it's available.) I'm sure the smart people at Apple do know how to make cool products without intel, they just chose not to at the moment. As Greg Matter notes, it would be wiser for Apple to move to
an open architecture. It will be a while before I consider buying new Apple hardware. Until then, here's a fun JDS (GNOME) menu tweak, it takes me about 2 seconds to switch my Sun Ray appliance from Linux on X86 to Solaris on X86 or Solaris on UltraSPARC (see image.) We just added some utswitches to the menu so we could quickly choose between Sun Ray servers. This is a user tweak, not a planned O.S. feature, but it gives you an idea of just how stateless the Sun Ray appliances are. They can switch from one user running GNU/linux X86 to another user running Solaris on UltraSPARC in less time than it takes to adjust the height of my desk chair. The resulting desktops appear and perform almost identically (though the UltraSPARC server in our lab is the fastest hardware on my menu.) I often have to type uname -a in a terminal to remind myself which OS and architecture I'm logged into.
Wednesday Jun 01, 2005
This is good news, Ireland's first offshore windfarm went live a few days ago. It's 10 miles offshore and each 104 meter radius G.E. is rated at 3.6 Megawatts. Awesome! I think there is already a sailboat race planned to go past there. It was also interesting to hear that Warren Buffet was investing in a Scottish energy company. One of Scotland's energy companies is investigating wave energy. Between Scottish waves and Irish wind, we could probably supply most of the E.U.s energy needs.
In other environmental news, my great Aunt is president of an Iowa renewable energy organization. She started using biodiesel in her new car partly because it was cheaper than regular diesel. She sent me this irish biodiesel link but the only diesel I use is to heat my house. My next door neighbors use turf, which is sort of renewable, if you don't mind waiting a few thousand years. What's the catch to biodiesel? I think it's that governments don't collect as much tax from biodiesel. I began using ethanol blended gasoline 10 years ago because it was taxed less and therefore cheaper than regular gasoline. A few years later it was mandated and it became more expensive!
Now the bad news. Someone has measured a slowing of the gulf stream. It's time to put on a wooly sweater.
Wednesday Jun 01, 2005
Mr. Villasante, the head of software technologies at the European Commision's information society had a few harsh accusations of corporate open source involvement. The first thing I thought of when I read this is that neither Sun, nor IBM, nor HP nor anyone else would or could force anyone outside of internal paid open source developers and contractors to write software. If companies could force free developers to do the all of dirty work, why would they spend so much money on i18n, a11y, bug fixes, productisation, support, documentation, marketing and all of the other less interesting ingredients in the open source bakery?
If it's all take and no give, why would corporations ever throw IP over the wall? I don't think the open source world be better off without AT&T's VNC, Sun's OpenOffice, IBM's documentation, Netscape's Mozilla, RedHat's kernel patches, Ximian's Evolution, RealMedia's Helix, SuSE/Novell's YaST...
I also disagree with this quote from Mr. Villasante:
"What I think is that Europe doesn't have a software industry today -- the only one we have today is in America. In the future we may have China or India. We should decide if we will have a European software industry in the future,"
I worked in IT in the U.S. I find the European open source economy to be much more progressive. Europe is a powerful force in the software world precisely because it is less afraid of mixing open source software with business. But sometimes I wonder if the E.C. has any idea how open source software works. Again from Mr. Villasante:
"Open source is a complete mess -- many people do lots of different things. There's total confusion today..."
Companies can't force unpaid open source developers to do anything they don't want to. Nor can governments. And that is exactly as it should be.
Update:I'm tempted to remove this whole posting, but I'll leave it here to prove that I can be wrong too. It sounds like Mr Villasante's talk was much more positive about open source than the zdnet article implied. I'm glad to hear that someone who 'gets it' is in such a position. Now why doesn't the U.S. have an open source czar? And why do tech publications get it wrong almost as often as my supermarket overcharges me?
Update:Here's another take on Mr. Villasante's talk. From this and what Simon indicated, I'd have to agree with most of what Mr. Villasante says, though it still surprises me that the E.U. is falling behind the U.S. in open source. Isn't it puzzling that some in the U.S. consider open source "unamerican" and in Europe some consider it too American? We need to grow it on both sides of the Atlantic to prove the critics wrong.
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