May, 2008
Lotus Notes 8.5 Public Beta on Ubuntu Hardy
Markus Thielmann — Sat, 2008-05-31
I love Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino. Even if it's not free and open source software, it's a highly integrated groupware without comparable software solutions on the market.
With Lotus Notes 8.5, IBM offers -for the first time ever- Debian installation packages. According to IBM, Ubuntu will be fully supported for the release of 8.5.
Thanks to the new DEB-packages, installation is really easy. Right now, there are some minor issues with fonts selection.
2) Download the installation packages archive.
Install all packages:
tar xf notes85_notes_linux_deb_prod.tar
cd notes85_notes_linux_deb_prod
sudo dpkg -i *.debAfter you've successfully installed Lotus Notes, check out OpenNTF, which is a great source for some really useful FOSS Lotus Notes databases.
The availability of Lotus Notes and Lotus Domino is a substantial progress for the Ubuntu Project. There are thousands of business applications available for Lotus Notes. This eases migration from Microsoft Windows and offers a great value to Linux on the desktop.
I'm still missing the Lotus Notes Designer. Keep on working IBM!
[Thanks to Volker Weber for providing the relevant link]
Unofficial Ubuntu commercial
Markus Thielmann — Wed, 2008-05-21
Even if it's "fan work", I kind of like the idea behind the spot and I'm especially impressed by the age of the creator.
If I'm allowed to suggest one thing: It would be nice to stay with Ubuntu's default software repositories when presenting it's features. I doubt it's a good idea to show features which require a certain amount of knowledge to install or activate.
ZFS on Linux?
Markus Thielmann — Wed, 2008-05-21
Apparently Jeff Bonwick (CTO of Sun Storage Technologies and head of the ZFS project) and Linus Torvalds met early in May to discuss "something".
While Bonwick's blog post is quite cryptic and ends with "All I can say for the moment is... stay tuned", he left a few clues:
* The blog entry is titled "Casablanca" (obviously referring to the quote: "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship")
* The entry is filed under "ZFS"
* He talks about peanut butter on chocolate and vice versa
With all these hints, it's quite hard not to think about an integration of ZFS into the Linux kernel. In case you didn't follow the discussion around ZFS: The Zettabyte File System is a 128-bit filesystem developed by Sun and published as open source under the CDDL. It's well known for some superior features like support for high storage capacities, copy-on-write, snapshots and clones. Because of patent issues and license problems ZFS can't be integrated into the Linux kernel. I'm wondering if Sun is planning to change it's license and patent policy regarding ZFS.
I'd love to see Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex+1 booting from a ZFS partition.
Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex)
Markus Thielmann — Tue, 2008-05-20
On Monday, the Ubuntu Developer Summit for Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex started in Prague. I was quite tempted to attend the UDS, since Prague is quite near to Berlin, at least if you compare it to Sevilla or Boston. Unfortunately, my calender denied any more traveling this week.
It took me quite a while to find the icecast streams of the sessions at the official UDS Wiki page. They're incorporated to the UDS schedule like, well, last year.
Last years streams were really hard to understand, since there was only one microphone per room. Even if I can understand that it's quite hard to get people to use microphones when sitting right next to each other, I regret not to be able to follow the discussion "just in time".
I was really happy that Ubuntu came up with another (maybe even greater) idea, the YouTube Ubuntu Developer channel:
(Jono Bacon on Ubuntu's community management)
Jono also gave a good example on how to fight burnout by fulfilling one of "life's little ambitions":
OpenSolaris 2008/05 on VirtualBox
Markus Thielmann — Sun, 2008-05-11
In opposite to older releases, VirtualBox 1.6.0 seems to be quite stable and fast.
Since it's now Sun's property, I thought it might be a good idea to test OpenSolaris Indiana as a guest system.
Indiana is Sun's new "default" OpenSolaris Distribution. It's a full-fledged desktop operating system, including a Gnome-Desktop, a live-CD and a graphical installer.
Booting from VirtualBox is really simple, OpenSolaris uses Grub as boot-manager. One drawback: OpenSolaris Grub detects a already installed windows system, but it doesn't add already installed Linux Distributions to the boot-manager.
The Live-CD did start without any problems, however it took quite a time on my not-so-new equipment. While a Ubuntu Hardy VM starts in two or three minutes, it took Indiana nearly 15 minutes to present a graphical desktop.
Google is going to start display ads
Markus Thielmann — Sun, 2008-05-11
Marissa Mayer talking about Google's new ad strategy:
"Matching graphical-display ads with image searches ``represents a large opportunity, and there's lot of potential for advertising revenue there,' Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president, told Bloomberg Radio today. At the same time, the company must ensure such ads don't drive users away, she said..."
(Source: Alley Insider)
It doesn't drive users away, it just leads more people towards Ad-block systems (e.g. Adblock Plus).
It's a bad deal for Google and a bad deal for every other ad sponsored portal. One of Google's biggest achievement was a conservative ad placement strategy. In my opinion it was one of the keystones of Google's success.
Use Amazon S3 with Ubuntu Hardy
Markus Thielmann — Sat, 2008-05-10
Amazon S3 is an online storage web service offered by Amazon. I tested it back in 2006, since I was quite surprised that Amazon offered such an innovative product.
I found JungleDisk to be a nice and free utility to access your storage space, since Amazon doesn't offer standardized WebDAV access. While I was still hoping that Jungle Tools would release their software as free and open source, they decided to charge a (reasonable) fee of $20 for this software. I lost interest in continuing testing, since I intended to use S3 as backup space and still prefer open source software for critical tasks.
There were some open source projects trying to replace JungleDisk, but I couldn't get one to work reliable enough for a backup solution.
I was really pleased when I read that Steven Harms reviewed s3fs, a FUSE file system for Amazon S3.
Assumed you already own a Amazon Web Service Account, just make sure you've got Git and Python bindings for fuse installed:
sudo apt-get install python-fuse python-boto git-coreSince there is no Ubuntu package of s3fs available, checkout the source code:
git clone git://git.fedorahosted.org/s3fs ~/s3fsTo play around with s3fs, just start it up with:
# create a bucket, while providing your key pair.
~/s3fs/src/s3fs -C -c <bucketname> -p "<aws access key>" -s "<aws secret access key>"
# format bucket
~/s3fs/src/s3fs -C -f <bucketname> -p "<aws access key>" -s "<aws secret access key>"
# create mount point
mkdir ~/backupS3
# Unfortunately, I couldn't convince s3fs to accept the key pair as a command line option when mounting.
# So, just export them:
export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<aws access key>
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<aws secret access key>
# mount it!
~/s3fs/src/s3fs -o bucket=<bucketname> ~/backupS3/Finally you're able to use your S3 space with GUI-tools.
The s3fs project still considers the software as quite beta, so be warned:
"WARNING You should not yet store any data that you do not have otherwise backed up on s3fs! development on this filesystem is early enough that data loss/corruption may occur!! "
It works quite nice for me. I just wished s3fs could provide some visual feedback when it finishes copying. An integration with gvfs would be great, so I could get an simple progress bar for the copy process.