Email biz to merge with Telligent
VMware has offloaded Zimbra less than four years after buying the email-cum-collabware business unit from Yahoo! Terms are undisclosed.…
Read more at The Register
Red Hat’s Cloud Strategy Centers on Bundled Products and Top-Notch Support
Last week, Red Hat, unveiled the costs for its bundle of products and services aimed at giving it a strong foothold in the cloud computing market. The bundle includes Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which combine the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS (RHEL) and the KVM hypervisor plus Red Hat’s own distribution of OpenStack. If you look closely at the pricing, it’s clear that Red Hat wants to attract users of its existing Linux platform and support services to its cloud platform and associated support. Now, there are questions arising about the strategy.
One problem that Red Hat has as it tries to pin future growth on cloud computing is that it is entering the OpenStack game late. There are already more distributions available than the market can tolerate, and consolidation is expected. However, if you look at the costs Red Has has set for bundled platforms and support, users can dip their toes in the cloud and virtualization waters for low prices.
As ZDNet U.K. notes:
“Red Hat is entering into an arena already crowded with players who want to be a one-stop infrastructure-as-a-service provider – such as Microsoft and VMware – but Red Hat is hoping to best the competition with lower prices – one third of the cost of a competing VMware-based offering according to Red Hat – and an unlimited number of guest licences.”
“But while the price might be right, a lack of integration between the software layers in the stack may be sticking point for firms already considering a VMware-based alternative.”
That lack of complete integration could be a problem, but Red Hat’s legendary support may offset it. The company has proven that it can support open source platforms with skill, and putting good support for OpenStack in place likely explains why Red Hat was slow to enter the OpenStack market.
Here are the details on the subscription support, where support is available at either the Standard (business hours) or Premium (24×7) levels:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Premium: $4,499/socket-pair/year
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Standard: $3,449/socket-pair/year
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform for Controller Nodes Premium: $2,799/socket-pair/year
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform for Controller Nodes Standard: $2,149/socket-pair/year
In all likelihood, Red Hat will grab a meaningful portion of the fast-growing market for OpenStack cloud services in the coming year. This market represents a big stretch for Red Hat, though, which has focused primarily on Linux and middleware for a long time now.
Read more at Ostatic
Tizen Rising: Can a $4M App Challenge Do the Trick?
Read more at LinuxInsider
How to Turn a PC Into a Linux Web Kiosk
Although the PC market is in turmoil, it has never been easier to replace its
out-of-date, often unsupported, bloated & infected preinstalled OS with a Linux
alternative.
In this tutorial, I’ll explain how to turn your PC into a Web kiosk. What’s a
Web kiosk? It’s a PC that directs the public to a certain intended Web
application. Imagine public computers found at a library or a cafe, these would
be considered Web kiosks.
You might think configuring your favourite desktop operating system to start a
browser is easy enough, though the devil is in the details.
-
Is the system locked down so the user can only get access to the browser?
-
Does the system have a window manager which can allow a misuse like
hiding and minimising the browser? -
Does the system prevent downloads in order to save bandwidth?
-
Is the browser locked down so no malicious addons or configurations
can be set? -
When a user has finished using the kiosk, is that user’s data wiped
clean? Is it security reviewed & validated? -
Does the kiosk stay upto date with latest security and HTML developments?
-
Can the kiosk be setup without a URL bar or restricted so the user
can’t browse sites that have nothing to do with the intended
application?
Webconverger is such a Linux kiosk solution that is focused on all these
details, delivering Web kiosk software in deployments ranging from retail banks
to call centers to community centers.
To try Webconverger out on your PC without touching any existing data, you need
1Gigabyte of RAM and any USB stick you are willing to format.
Download Webconverger and follow the detailed instructions for Windows, Linux
or Mac on how to put Webconverger on it upon on a USB memory stick
Once you have the USB stick ready, you need to choose to boot from it in your
BIOS menu. Next you should see the Webconverger boot menu and the Live default
is just fine.
With any luck, you should now have a Web browser looking back at you. Browse
the Web and once you are finished, close the tab to ensure every trace of your
session is kept private.
If you install Webconverger, Webconverger will stay uptodate with its unique
git upgrade technology. So it’s as
close as you can get to zero maintenance.
So if you have a place that could use more traffic, set up a PC with
Webconverger Web kiosk and turn it into a destination.
In Memoriam of Seth Vidal
Editor’s Note: The Linux and open source communities unexpectedly lost an amazing person this week. Seth Vidal, a member of Red Hat’s Fedora Project team and a longtime open source software contributor and advocate, died tragically July 8 in Durham. Linux Foundation System Administrator Konstantin Ryabitsev knew him well and is allowing us to republish his personal blog post here. In honor of Seth, this will be the only content we publish today and over the weekend.
In early 2001 I was looking for a new job. My prospects weren’t stellar — I was a foreign worker with a funny name looking for an IT position during the worst dregs of the dot-com crash, and my resume only had one Programming-Slash-Admin job on it. It’s the kind of resume that hiring managers quickly file in the “if_absolutely_desperate” folder.
So it wasn’t with any particular hope that I responded to a posting for a sysadmin position at Duke University Physics. I mean, it sounded awesome, but I felt it was a very long shot. To my surprise, I received an email back that same evening. The guy’s name was Seth Vidal, and he said he wanted to chat.
“You do realize I’m an H1B, right?” I said. “Getting me hired will be pain.”“Duke’s pain, not mine,” he emailed back. “I searched your name and I liked that you’re active on open-source mailing lists.”
So I drove to Durham for an interview. Seth cringed a bit at my then-preference for Slackware and the fact that I liked to build software from source. He did agree that RPM dependencies were hell, though, and fully shared my view that telnet was evil (ssh was still making inroads at the time). He showed me the server room, which was really a converted mens’ shower, containing a few old desks with assorted beige towers on them. There was a utility rack at the back of the room, the kind you buy at a hardware store for your garage, with more beige towers. Many had their sides off for better cooling. It was hot in there, even though the thermostat was cranked to the lowest setting.
“I’m working to replace many of these with some more respectable hardware,” he said. “But I have to stretch the budget right now, and you’ll be amazed at how well Linux runs on this commodity stuff. Heck, we may even get a server room one day that has real racks and doesn’t have water valves right above the file servers.”
I struggled a lot during my first 6 months. Seth was a brilliant sysadmin with a mind-boggling ability to quickly figure out the root cause of this or that problem. Most of the time, I just felt like I was apprenticed to an irascible wizard — who was nevertheless amazingly tolerant of his pupil’s blunders. Oh, he got grumpy with me — a lot, actually, and often for very good reasons, in retrospect. I did do stupid things sometimes. Still do. But his scolding was always followed by coaching, and for that I will remain forever grateful. I learned so much from him in the 4 years when we worked closely together — and it went beyond mere tech skills.
Everyone knows of Seth’s contribution to solving the famed “RPM dependency hell” — he took some core ideas from YUP, the package manager used by Yellowdog Linux, and rewrote it from scratch, giving us YUM — a tool sysadmins use on a daily basis. Fewer know that Seth was also instrumental in getting CentOS and Fedora Extras off the ground. I remember when it was all hosted in his office — a half-rack on wheels that had a 64-bit Dell that was used to build the entirety of FC1 extras, plus an old G4 lying on its side that built PPC packages (those that would build). Another ex-workstation sitting on a shelf behind the half-rack hosted the fedoraproject.org website. All the exhaust fans made Seth’s office a really loud place to work from, and I knew it gave him headaches, but he left the rack there anyway — our server room was over its cooling capacity and he really wanted Fedora to grow and succeed. Little wonder that Red Hat eventually snatched him up to make it his full-time job.
If I were to think of Seth’s one core principle — which was both his fault and the damned best thing about him — that would be his genuineness. Anyone who’s ever participated in a mailing list discussion with him knows his famously curt manner and his complete lack of desire to entertain (what he deemed were) foolish ideas. He spoke his heart and his mind, and he was widely known for it. But Seth also cared — passionately, genuinely cared. He cared about his friends and about his family. He cared about his dog and about his co-workers (pretty sure it went in that order, but Cori is a very cute dog). He cared about his projects and about his ideals. When he asked you “hey, you doing okay?” that wasn’t because of some feeling of social obligation. He really wanted to know if you were okay.His friends, in return, genuinely cared about him — even if they secretly told each other that they needed a “Seth break” every now and again.
I left Duke in 2005, exchanging the stars-and-stripes for the maple leaf. While we remained in close touch, sharing IRC channels just wasn’t the same as working together under one roof. There were times when we didn’t have an occasion to chat for months. There were times when we did it every day. I last saw him when I was in Raleigh in November last year, to participate in Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Activity Day. He looked older, but he was the same old Seth. We chatted, we laughed at old memories, and we worked side-by-side well into the night.
“You know,” he said, looking up from his laptop. It was past 11 p.m. and the cleaning crew was wondering what we were all still doing there. “You really suck at C.”
“Yeah, well, so do you.”
“I know, right?”
Seth’s life tragically ended on a summer night when a car slammed into his bike and then drove off. It shouldn’t take a tragedy to remind you that life can end abruptly, but somehow it always does, and it makes us very angry. “What a meaningless death” we say.
What a meaningful life, say I. Seth was only 36, but look how much he managed to accomplish, how much loyalty and respect he commanded, how much merit his opinion had among his peers. For his having been here, this world is richer, and for his passing it is now poorer.
We can all add meaning to our lives if we stop treating life as some kind of mundane and exasperating filler between weekends, holidays, and those fleeting breaks every now and again when we get a minute to do things we enjoy. We call it “the human condition,” and we avoid looking at each other when we say that. But I truly believe that if we are just a bit more genuine, and a bit more passionate, and a bit more caring, then perhaps we will no longer have to use apologetic cliches when talking about our own lives.
We owe it to ourselves, and we owe it to our friend.
I miss you terribly, Seth. Rest in Peace.
This post was originally published on Konstantin Ryabitsev’s personal blog.
Former Microsoft Office Manager Learns How to Dance in a Year, Becomes a YouTube Hit
Former Microsoft employee Karen X Cheng quit the software maker over a year ago, with a farewell resignation video based on Don McLean’s American Pie. During her year away from developing Microsoft’s Office software, Cheng has learned to dance. She’s detailed her daily progress and now says people assume she’s been dancing for years. Cheng’s YouTube video has gone viral and amassed nearly two million views in just a few days. “This isn’t a story about dancing, though. It’s about having a dream and not knowing how to get there — but starting anyway,” says Cheng. It brings a whole new meaning to Office 365.
Read more at The Verge
Advanced Task Killer Pro Gets Hung Software Out of Your Way
Read more at LinuxInsider