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RedHat Goes Atomic
The Red Hat Summit kicked off in San Francisco on Tuesday, and continued today with a raft of announcements.
Red Hat launched a new fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the title “Atomic Host”. The new version is stripped down to enable lightweight deployment of software containers. Although the mainline edition also support software containers, this lightweight version improves portability.
This is part of a wider Red Hat initiative, Project Atomic, which also sees virtualisation platform Docker updated as part of the ongoing partnership between the two organisations.
Red Hat also announced a release candidate (RC) for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. The beta version has already been downloaded 10,000 times. The Atomic Host fork is included in the RC.
Topping all that is the news that Red Hat’s latest stable release, RHEL 6.5 has been deployed at the Organisation for European Nuclear Research – better known as CERN.
The European laboratory, which houses the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and was birthplace of the World Wide Web has rolled out the latest versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation and Red Hat Technical Account Management. Although Red Hat has a long history with CERN, this has been a major rollout for the facility.
The logging server of the LHC is one of the areas covered by the rollout, as are the financial and human resources databases.
The infrastructure comprises a series of dual socket servers, virtualised on Dell Poweredge M610 servers with up to 256GB RAM per server and full redundancy to prevent the loss of mission critical data.
Niko Neufeld, deputy project leader at the Large Hadron Collider, said, “Our LHCb experiment requires a powerful, very reliable and highly available IT environment for controlling and monitoring our 70 million CHF detectors. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is at the core of our virtualized infrastructure and complies with our stringent requirements.”
Other news from the conference includes the launch of Openshift Marketplace, allowing customers to try solutions for cloud applications, and the release of Red Hat Jboss Fuse 6.1 and Red Hat Jboss A-MQ 6.1, which are standards based integration and messaging products designed to manage everything from cloud computing to the Internet of Things.
LibreOffice Going After MS Office
February 10, 2014 by admin
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Libreoffice 4.2 is out and is a major upgrade release.
The popular alternative to Microsoft Office has been retooled to increase compatibility with that expensive proprietary productivity applications suite, including compatibility with Visio and Publisher files.
In addition to a much improved formula process for its spreadsheet application, Libreoffice 4.2 also includes a new startup screen and improved round trip compatibility for newer formats such as .docx.
Java accessibility features are being phased out in favour of the IBM IAccessibility2 package, which will supercede the Java version in future editions.
iOS users can take advantage of the Impress Remote Control feature that allows users to control presentations from their smartphones. This feature has been available on Android for some time but now Apple fans can use it too.
Libreoffice claims that this is the biggest recoding of its office suite yet and says that it now offers better integration with Windows 7 and Windows 8, with documents grouped on the taskbar and quickview thumbnails.
The news comes after UK cabinet minister Francis Maude recently announced that Parliament will move towards using open source software for its documents, and said that interoperability improvements such as those Libreoffice has introduced will be key to ensuring that all areas of government communicate a lot more effectively than they do right now.
Libreoffice has also made contributing to continued development of the open source office suite even easier with a new code submission and review portal known as Gerrit.
Red Hat Releases Linux E-Beta
Red Hat has made available a beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) for testers, just weeks after the final release of RHEL 6.5 to customers.
RHEL 7 is aimed at meeting the requirements of future applications as well as delivering scalability and performance to power cloud infrastructure and enterprise data centers.
Available to download now, the RHEL 7 beta introduces a number of enhancements, including better support for Linux Containers, in-place upgrades, XFS as the default file system, improved networking support and improved compatibility with Windows networks.
Inviting customers, partners, and members of the public to download the RHEL 7 beta and provide feedback, Red Hat is promoting the upcoming version as its most ambitious release to date. The code is based on Red Hat’s community developed Fedora 19 distribution of Linux and the upstream Linux 3.10 kernel, the firm said.
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to provide the underpinning for future application architectures while delivering the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed to deploy across bare metal, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure,” Senior Product Marketing Manager Kimberly Craven wrote on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux blog.
These improvements address a number of key areas, including virtualisation, management and interoperability.
Linux Containers, for example, was partially supported in RHEL 6.5, but this release enables applications to be created and deployed using Linux Container technology, such as the Docker tool. Containers offers operating system level virtualisation, which provides isolation between applications without the overhead of virtualising the entire server.
Red Hat said it is now supporting an in-place upgrade feature for common server deployment types. This will allow customers to migrate existing RHEL 6.5 systems to RHEL 7 without downtime.
RHEL 7 also makes the switch to XFS as its default file system, supporting file configurations up to 500TB, while ext4 file systems are now supported up to 50TB in size and B-tree file system (btrfs) implementations are available for users to test.
Interoperability with Windows has also been improved, with Red Hat now including the ability to bridge Windows and Linux infrastructure by integrating RHEL 7 and Samba 4.1 with Microsoft Active Directory domains. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Identity Management can also be deployed in a parallel trust zone alongside Active Directory, the firm said.
On the networking side, RHEL 7 provides support for 40Gbps Ethernet, along with improved channel bonding, TCP performance improvements and low latency socket poll support.
Other enhancements include support for very large scale storage configurations, including enterprise storage arrays, and uniform management tools for networking, storage, file systems, identities and security using the OpenLMI framework.
IBM To Become Cloud Broker
IBM is in the throes of developing software that will allow organizations to use multiple cloud storage services interchangeably, reducing dependence on any single cloud vendor and ensuring that data remains available even during service outages.
Although the software, called InterCloud Storage (ICStore), is still in development, IBM is inviting its customers to test it. Over time, the company will fold the software into its enterprise storage portfolio, where it can back up data to the cloud. The current test iteration requires an IBM Storewize storage system to operate.
ICStore was developed in response to customer inquiries, said Thomas Weigold, who leads the IBM storage systems research team in IBM’s Zurich, Switzerland, research facility, where the software was created. Customers are interested in cloud storage services but are worried about trusting data with third party providers, both in terms of security and the reliability of the service, he said.
The software provides a single interface that administrators can use to spread data across multiple cloud vendors. Administrators can specify which cloud providers to use through a point-and-click interface. Both file and block storage is supported, though not object storage. The software contains mechanisms for encrypting data so that it remains secure as it crosses the network and resides on the external storage services.
A number of software vendors offer similar cloud storage broker capabilities, all in various stages of completion, notably Red Hat’s DeltaCloud and Hewlett Packard’s Public Cloud.
ICStore is more “flexible,” than other approaches, said Alessandro Sorniotti, an IBM security and cloud system researcher who also worked on the project. “We give customers the ability to select what goes where, depending on the sensitivity and relevance of data,” he said. Customers can store one copy of their data on one provider and a backup copy on another provider.
ICStore supports a number of cloud storage providers, including IBM’s SoftLayer, Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service), Rackspace, Microsoft Windows Azure and private instances of the OpenStack Swift storage service. More storage providers will be added as the software goes into production mode.
“Say, you are using SoftLayer and Amazon, and if Amazon suffers an outage, then the backup cloud provider kicks in and allows you to retrieve data,” from SoftLayer, Sorniotti said.
ICStore will also allow multiple copies of the software to work together within an enterprise, using a set of IBM patent-pending algorithms developed for data sharing. This ensures that the organization will not run into any upper limits on how much data can be stored.
IBM has about 1,400 patents that relate to cloud computing, according to the company.
Red Hat Releases Fedora 19
Red Hat has released Fedora 19, codenamed Schrödinger’s Cat, which has support for 3D printing and is the first to use MariaDB as its default SQL database instead of Oracle’s MySQL.
Red Hat’s Fedora Linux distribution is the testing ground for the firm’s hugely successful Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution, and for that reason it heralds what will appear in future releases of RHEL. The firm’s Fedora 19 release brings support for 3D printing through OpenSCAD, Skeinforge, SFACT, Printrun and Repetierhost, and it is the first release to make MariaDB the default SQL database server implementation in place of Oracle’s MySQL.
The Fedora Project was criticised for delaying its Fedora 18 release, however Fedora 19 appeared on time. Fedora’s latest release includes Gnome 3.8 and the capability to enable Gnome Classic, a Gnome 2 type user interface, along with KDE Plasma 4.10 and Mate 1.6, with other window managers such as Xfce and Lxde available in different spins.
As Red Hat sponsors the Fedora Project it is not surprising to see Fedora include Openshift, the firm’s platform as a service infrastructure. Fedora 19 also includes node.js and Ruby 2.0, but arguably its biggest move is away from Oracle’s MySQL to the community maintained MariaDB fork, which suggests that eventually RHEL will make MariaDB its default SQL database implementation.
The Fedora Project has said that work on Fedora 20 has been in active development for several months and it plans to release that in November.
Fedora 19 is available for download from regional mirrors and users can also use Fed Up to upgrade from previous versions of the distribution.
Red Hat Outs Fedora 17
Red Hat has released its Fedora 17 ‘Beefy Miracle’ distribution just over a month after Canonical released its Ubuntu 12.04 distribution.
The Red Hat sponsored Fedora project serves as the proving ground for new features that eventually end up in the firm’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system. Now Red Hat has announced that it has released Fedora 17 including updates to Gnome, Eclipse, GIMP and Openstack along with numerous patches.
Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux distribution might have shunned Gnome 3 in favour of its Unity desktop interface but Red Hat continues to stick with Gnome in Fedora, shipping Gnome 3.4 as its default window manager. Fedora 17 also includes GIMP 2.8 and Openstack Essex, while developers who like to live on the edge can run Eclipse Juno, the full release of which is expected later this year.
Fedora project leader Robyn Bergeron said, “I am extremely proud of the Fedora 17 release. The addition of projects such as Ovirt [virtual machine management] and JBoss Application Server 7, enhancements in Openstack, and continued support for fresh releases of desktop environments demonstrate the Fedora Project’s commitment to deliver rich features and capabilities. This, combined with our leading-edge innovations at the operating-system level, truly makes Fedora 17 a comprehensive and robust operating system for all types of users.”
Will Linux See Growth Next Year?
Canonical has said it expects Ubuntu to ship on 18 million PCs next year.
Having just launched Ubuntu 12.04, Canonical is bullish about its future, with Chris Kenyon, its VP of sales and business development forecasting that the firm’s operating system will ship on 18 million machines in 2013. According to Phoronix, Kenyon claimed that will amount to five per cent of worldwide PC shipments.
Kenyon’s prediction represents more than double the number of PCs shipped currently with Ubuntu and while that might seem optimistic the firm has been on a roll when it comes to OEM support. Prior to Canonical’s launch of Ubuntu 12.04 it announced certification for HP Proliant servers, and yesterday it revealed that it has been working with Dell on an Ubuntu image for Dell’s headline XPS 13 ultrabook.
Although Kenyon mentioned PC unit sales, it is unlikely to forecast a similar growth in servers pre-installed with Ubuntu despite the firm’s certification for some Proliant servers.
Kenyon believes that most firms buy bare metal servers and load their own tweaked images. He said, “As a point of fact the vast majority of this [Ubuntu on servers] is not sold pre-installed. […] Pre-install in the server market is just irrelevant, it is not how the market works. Even when something gets pre-installed an enterprise will wipe it because they will have their own image. [OS pre-installation] is a distraction [for servers, but] it’s a very applicable question in the client world.”