Canonical Chases Deal to Ship Ubuntu Server OS 151
Kurtz'sKompund writes "Canonical, the company that supports Ubuntu Linux, is trying to work out a deal with hardware vendors such as Dell to make Ubuntu available pre-installed on servers. 'Canonical, despite obviously supporting such a deal, had little to do with Dell's decision. Dell said it was merited by customer demand. Likewise, the decision of whether Ubuntu Server will ship pre-installed will be determined the same way.'"
Pre-installed OS (Score:5, Interesting)
Pre-installed SHOULD mean "working drivers". (Score:3, Insightful)
Even with imaging WinXP, you'll need the drivers. You'll have to find the drivers. Somewhere. And build your image with them.
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Actually something I liked from the Compaq SmartStart. You would start your installation with the Compaq CD, tell it which OS, it would create a small drivers partition and manage the installation process setting up the hardware drivers.
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Actually something I liked from the Compaq SmartStart. You would start your installation with the Compaq CD, tell it which OS, it would create a small drivers partition and manage the installation process setting up the hardware drivers.
If you order a Dell PowerEdge Server (X950 series) without an OS, the server comes pre-loaded with this functionality. Or you can wipe the RAID setup and re-configure it boot off the CD and perform this. It supports Windows, and several favors of Linux (RHEL, SuSE), and possibly some Unix (IIRC). In fact, the pre-install program actually uses Linux to do this.
Re:Pre-installed SHOULD mean "working drivers". (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Pre-installed SHOULD mean "working drivers". (Score:4, Insightful)
Even with imaging WinXP, you'll need the drivers. You'll have to find the drivers. Somewhere. And build your image with them.
This isn't WinXP here. The type of hardware that ends up in server boxes usually has complete support in any recent kernel release.
And, companies like RedHat make sure all the kernel modules for HBA cards are compiled too.
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To OEMs:
Give us the hardware, thats IT. Nothing more please, its just more work for us erasing it.
Why they even bother doing this...it really am
I disagree... (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course, for installing on a hard disk, I want to make my own choices in hardware.
Re:I disagree... (Score:4, Interesting)
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It would be very nice if hardware vendors wouldn't be so inclined to the "certified for [whatever os]" and they'd go more for "this and this are the exact hardware specs" and "here comes the standard live-CD we'll ask you for when diagnosing hardware problems".
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But for servers it does seem kinda pointless. Servers should only be setup by just such techies. I'll take an UP TO DATE driver and OS cd, but I'll do the install myself.
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So would Dell sell Linux/Ubuntu pre-installed on servers, in a heart beat, once they have established the service/support/administration teams globally and they have developed market acceptance a
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My opinion is that a distro like Ubuntu server or CentOS should come with a minimal set up but have "what do you want to do?" menu. As you determine you need more features you would add them from a menu.. tied right back to the normal
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Business servers, which unless I misread the article, are the market that Canonical
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Re:Pre-installed OS (Score:5, Informative)
The typical PHB has by now recognized RHEL as *the* Linux for servers. Thru good marketing, development, support, and business, RedHat has become the de-facto standard for Linux in the enterprise server market.
Case in point - Not ONE of the enterprise apps I work with is supported on anything BUT RHEL, (or in one case SuSE) HOWEVER, I've tested many of them in the lab with Debian and Ubuntu and found that all work very well... but there's a snowball's chance in hell that management would let me use Debian or Ubuntu. RedHat's reputation as Linux for serious business is entrenched in their minds, and entrenched in the market.
I have a lot of respect and appreciation for RedHat's offerings. I prefer Debian, and in the corporate world, Ubuntu is the only Debian derivitave that has a chance of becoming a contender.
Being a default offering on Dell servers is a golden opportunity to start building the reputation they need. PHBs will see the Ubuntu option on Dell's web-site and after about a thousand times they may begin to wonder if it's something worth investigating.
If Canonical produces a systems-management/data-center platform that can compete with offerings available for RedHat, I believe that sysadmins, enterprise software vendors, and even managers will start to take notice. If Ubuntu can garner reputation as an alternative to RHEL, we may start seeing not just hardware support but also software support.
Granted, this is all just a wild dream for me, but let me tell you - if someday Oracle announces support for Ubuntu, it could be a dream come true!
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After what you explained we'd have two, different and incompatible Linuxes, RH and Ubuntu.
Unlike for you, the software I use does not run in both RH-3 and (not so old) Ubuntu, the libraries are too different and so are the kernels.
Linux really needs to get "binary compatibility", and so does Linux distros (LSB among others).
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Remember, PHB's don't consider anything nor do they investigate. They just listen to whatever salesmen story sounds best and accept that. If Dell said that their servers that come with a turd (or a 6-ft tall Ewok) perform better than the ones without, they would also believe that even though the turd (or the Ewok) doesn'
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And, yes, Oracle *does* run on all sorts of different distros... but good luck getting support.
We have an in-house Oracle support team and *still* we choose RHEL simply because that is all Oracle will support.
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Out of the 60-odd telco apps I have to support, about half of them use Oracle as their backing DB, and nothing else. Many will not run on a system without it pre-installed.
Heck, because of Oracle licensing costs, management chose quad-core Intel processors for our newest servers, instead of dual-socket-dual-core AMD systems. And those servers aren't even
Time is money (Score:3)
A lot of wasted time and frustration and for the people paying me by the hou
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I installed SME server on a similar computer (one of the older Compaq ones) and had no issues at all. It's a little known distro, but based on my experiences, I would recommend it :
http://www.smeserver.org/ [smeserver.org]
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-molo
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I would. It tells me that the OS works on that h/w (ie there are drivers).
These days, I buy h/w in the hope that it will all work. I try a live cd if I can, but sometimes that isn't possible and I resort to searching for comment/reports online.
Really though, why do you wipe the hard disk? Can't you just install over the top of it? Ignoring the previous contents of the hard drive is usually just a click in the installat
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I say take them on their own turf and watch MS scramble in an attempt to keep from losing their ground in the server b
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Car Analogy
How many of you have built your own car from a pile of parts so you could drive? What!!! You bought a pre-built car! You disgust me.
But is it supported? (Score:2, Informative)
I don't know if Ubuntu might ever match RHEL, but it's possible that Canonical might end up being RedHat's main competitor. Right now AFAIK that would be Novell and their server business is not doing amazingly well.
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Actually if it weren't for the massive boat anchor known as Netware pulling their numbers down Novell would be having a pretty amazing year. Their Linux business is doing very well.
the ballmer effect (Score:5, Funny)
In other words, "No, Microsoft, we haven't been talking to other OS vendors. It was the customers' fault. honest. Put down that chair."
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Servers...WTF? (Score:1, Insightful)
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Does it really matter? (Score:1)
I always wondered about that about the different distros: is one better than the other for a particular use? Isn't the base system/kernel/window manager the same?
I'm pretty much a Fedora type of guy, but that's out of habit more than anything. I do, however, prefer the distros that are incorporated with the "Unleashed", "Bible", etc... books because I like having a volume that I can pick up if I have a question that has the correct d
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http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/serveredition [ubuntu.com]
Haven't tried it myself, anyone know how it compares?
Worst-case-scenario for Linux as a whole (Score:4, Insightful)
I just can't help but worry that Canonical is overextending themselves (even if it is in reaction to Dell asking them to do so), and that the distro will eventually cave once bad PR builds up from a few high-profile failures at the enterprise/corporation level. Those in the FOSS community might not care about bad corporate PR, but it would certainly set Linux back quite a bit adoption-wise to have its golden front-runner made to look extremely foolish.
Re:Worst-case-scenario for Linux as a whole (Score:4, Informative)
2. My impression is that the "gaps" referred to in the article are mostly about certification from third parties like Oracle.
Thank you.. (Score:2)
Why would there be failures? (Score:4, Insightful)
#1. Hardware dies. Only an idiot would blame this on Canonical/Ubuntu. If it's under warranty, Dell should be able to replace it.
#2. Software corruption. This would be Canonical's/Ubuntu's fault. But I've run their stuff for years without any problems. Why would there be problems now?
#3. Driver problem. Well, this is why you have these "partnerships" so the software vendor can work with the hardware vendor to solve these problems BEFORE you purchase their products.
#4. Stupid admin problem. Yeah, like there's anything Canonical or Dell can do to prevent that.
So, the only real potential problem looks like the exact thing that such a partnership would be designed to resolve. I'm not seeing the problem here.
Re:Why would there be failures? (Score:4, Interesting)
That seems to be what the GP is talking about in terms of support. On the desktop you'll get questions like "I bought this computer with this newfangled leenooks thingy, how do I play my card game?"
On the server, you get questions that have nothing at all to do with the stupidity of the admin. Like "When the database has written 1 GB of data to the drive, the system stops responding and has to be powercycled causing a lot of data corruption, what's going on?" (true story, the answer is "plug in a PS/2 mouse [64.233.169.104]") Multiply that by however many Dell sells, and the grandparent has a point: can they handle it?
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So it would be the same for any OS?
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I think you meant the latter, right? Silly me for asking a question containing two opposite options.
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The big money is with support for servers, not desktops.
Why I will never let Ubuntu near a server (Score:2, Informative)
One frequently repeated argument is "people don't have to wait on windows, why should they on linux?"
Why Ubuntu? (Score:4, Interesting)
The install with netinst is very fast. What takes a long time is all the configuration of the needed services, and customization (backup scripts, various checks and email alerts, etc. In short everything one adds to
Am I not seeing some advantage that a pre-installed Ubuntu would bring? Maybe compatibility with newer hardware. I had to use backports a few times, and that was a hassle. Any other advantage I'm overlooking?
Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, perhaps the PHBs who are used to buying computers with Windows pre-installed will feel more comfortable about buying (or rather, approving the purchase of) a server if the OS is pre-installed.
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I haven't got a clue what I'm doing wrong, but every t
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Ubuntu Server is for novice system admins that just have to have all the newest bells and whistles. I'm in the group as far as my personal projects go. I would not consider installing it at work, though, even an LTS. (We -are- thinking about Gentoo, but that's headed by someone who uses it a lot already. We currently have RedHat.)
I can't count the number of times at work I've said 'Man, if we had Ubuntu server, upgrading that would be S
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Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:5, Insightful)
Case in point: the company I work for offers a relatively advanced web solution. The software doesn't actually deal with mission critical data, it is used for projections and on the fly analytic operations, on a user per user basis. So each user has a copy of the data and basically mess with it the way they bloody want until they get an acceptable result, print a report, then go to their primary system (which isn't by us, and is totally independant in every ways, shape and form) and perform mission critical operations THERE.
For our servers, we can toss the app on anything, passwords can be in plain text (well, could if users didn't reuse passwords all over, which isn't the case so I guess they can't!), the machine can be tossed and kicked around, it doesn't really matter if the system's down for a day, or a week, as long as it comes back and it "works".
This is actually an incredibly common scenario, and more and more as a lot of software is moved to simple web apps (because of the Web 2.0 overhype) and other such things, especially since hardware is so cheap (I've seen servers running cache engines made with less than 300 lines of code, including comments, in a farm... hardly mission critical either), so there's IS a pretty high demand for "dumb-friendly" servers that don't even require the sysadmin intervention when they screw up.
In such cases, something like Ubuntu Server probably fits the bill amazingly nicely. If the machine screws up BAD, you call the sysadmin...but the rest of the time, let said professional handle the important stuff, and have the junior manage the non-critical, novice friendly environments. Saves time and money for everyone.
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one option is to use vm's, that way you can isolate troublesome apps in thier own vms running whatever old OS they are happiest on without worrying about hardware compatibility or other stuff on the system.
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On the server side, I generally update my 6.06 boxen once a month or so, and the worst of it has been rebooting due to a small kernel rev. No muss, no fuss.
Gentoo OTOH, was a nightmare with system dependencies breaking inside the package manager. So I don't see the piming of Gentoo as so
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But Kubuntu... I've run the beta on Dapper, Edgy, Feisty and now Gutsy. There have always been little things wrong with anything new but they were always fixed on release. For example, my current problem: All video that gets run through Xine is slanted. Like WTF. VLC works fine. KMPlayer (using Xine) doesn't. Kaffeine (Xine again!) doesn't.
It's particularly exasperating since I moved from a perfectly working Feisty 64-bit to a broken Gusty 32
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Re:Why Ubuntu? (Score:4, Informative)
Netstat -an shows no open ports.
The root account is disabled.
Ps -ef shows some kernel modules, some gtty instances, and that's it.
Oh, did I mention I don't have an X console or anything?
Am I missing something? Last I tried CentOS (an older version, mind you), root was not only enabled, it was what you logged in as initially. When I installed Debian Sarge a few years ago for a class I was taking, the first thing we had to do after the initial install was shut down a couple of services so only SSH was running (FTP was one of them, if I remember correctly) - with Ubuntu Server, I'm going to have to turn SSH on, along with anything else I want on. That said, Ubuntu Server does make some interesting choices - for example, single user mode has network support. That's a little strange. Other than that, though, no complaints. Granted, SELinux isn't on, but that's fine by me - I didn't turn it on, and maybe I'd like to use something else. At least Ubuntu isn't trying to make that decision for me. Seeing as there's no way for anyone to access my box remotely at the moment anyways, I can make that decision on my own time.
Anybody care to elaborate on this?
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What takes a long time is all the configuration of the needed services, and customization
One word: puppet ... It's working wonders for us, though we're not exactly a mega sophisticated operation.
Also, I don't see Dell offering pre-installed Debian systems. If you're running Debian, that means you're wiping and installing anyway. There would have to be a bit of satisfaction in knowing you didn't pay the MS tax on a server, if you're just going to wipe it for Debian. Although now that I think of it, don't they have a "No OS" option for servers?
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I don't know what the "Server Support package" includes but it sounds fancy.
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I run Debian on my personal server and love that it never changes, but at work I need to use Ubuntu for some of the more recent packages it comes with.
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There's a great opportunity here. Ubuntu could be the Windows Server 2003 of Linux! Don't you see that?
Not all customer demand (Score:1)
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Canonical is hitting above its weight (Score:3, Informative)
Given that other Linux distros have more employees backing them, it is pretty impressive that Ubuntu has made the progress it has. Given all of the above, I am led to the conclusion that Mark Shuttleworth is indeed a very smart guy. In that light, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the servers ship and sell well.
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Myself, I consider 575 million US dollars to be remarkable riches.
Dropping 20 million bills on a space holiday - that's a remarkable amount of disposable personal cash.
Bootstrapping Ubuntu with $10 million out of your own pocket - remarkable.
HBDVC - remarkable.
You guys will have to seriously take it up a notch (Score:5, Informative)
Am I looking for a UI? No. I want a few basic things.
1: A proper, usable deployment system. debian-installer is good for the basics, but it's a pain in the behind to set up, and doesn't support scripting a RAID/mdadm install, or LVM. This "sucks". Take a look at Redhat or CentOS for a little inspiration.
2: A boot screen that doesn't look like vomited output. Why does the login prompt appear before services have finished loading? I support being able to use the machine before services have stopped. I do not need "Starting PostgreSQL" appearing as I'm entering my login credentials locally.
3: A server kernel that always installs. Why does the installer give me the generic kernel when I'm installing the server distro? Why do I have to manually install the server kernel on boot up, and then remove the generic kernel?
4: Easily add services. You get 'LAMP server' or 'DNS server' or nothing. I had to create a custom installer just to have openssh-server install by default on first load, without apache or MySQL, or other crap floating around in there as well.
It sounds whiny, I know, but we really like the debian-style package management system with the modern services Ubuntu provides. It's great for that purpose. As a real server distro, though, long way to go yet.
I hope this lights that fire under Canonical to pay some attention to Server.
Re:You guys will have to seriously take it up a no (Score:2)
Me Too (Score:2)
The good:
Lots of more packages available than RH and more support than CentOS.
The installation was great had LAMP on the CD - PHP5, MySQL5, Apache 2.
Adding packages is a breeze much better the the RPM tool of CentOS.
PhpMyadmin from the installer was a nice thing as that was missing from CentOS.
Updates are pretty painless too.
The not as good:
I miss th
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Certification? (Score:2)
I'd definitely consider getting certified but Canonical's certification program doesn't seem well developed. Unless there's another one I don't know about, your only options are Toronto and Seattle.
I'm definitely up for supporting Dell Ubuntu servers.
!ElLobo? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have seen in some slashdot stories this !Ellobo , but I have absolutely no idea of what does it mean. Does anyone knows the reference?
Thank you in advance
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El Lobo is a user who likes to troll Linux topics. He calls "Linux" "linuzzz". It's basically the same idea as the "Micro$haft", "Crapple" crowds, but with a different focus.
Does widespread trolling of Linux mean it is Ready For The Desktop, though? Only time will tell.
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Linux is the thing they ftp into to upload the php files. Most development is done on their local windows box running apache.
I really don't understand why you think people who can do a bit of web scripting are somehow Linux professionals..
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