Newsletter September 2009

Dear reader,

Autumn heralds the return of our newsletter, compiling essential news from the Open Source world and our company. We hope you find it useful. As always, do not hesitate to send your comments through our contact form.

This month, we have:

Table of contents
  • Editorial - Going Drupal
  • Linalis News – introducing new training courses and practical workshops
  • Partner News – Acquia, Canonical, Jaspersoft, OpenERP, Pentaho and Red Hat
  • Open Source news – Amongst those who spent their holidays contributing to a project, and the ones announcing new products just after returning to work, there is a lot of news this month!
  • At the periphery - where we will look at interesting political, legal or fun news related to Open Source
  • Tips of the month – from our tech blog – double SSH tunnel, secured reboot of a remote server
  • Upcoming training courses – New training courses have been scheduled and our discount packs for LPI training courses

See you in October for the next issue !

Editorial - Going Drupal

 

If you regularly visit www.linalis.com, you would have noticed that we recently transformed our website. More usable, useful, dynamic and comprehensive and developed with the Drupal CMS.

Drupal is one of the most advanced, popular and mature Content Management Solutions. Amnesty International, the Edipresse group, NASA, Sony Music, the US, French & Dutch Governments are but a few users of this Open Source solution which hasreceived several awards.

At Linalis, Drupal is one of our tools of choice for building the websites and intranets you need, be it your main image on the internet, a blog, an event website, a community website or an e-commerce shop. Finally, we are getting more involved with Drupal in several ways:

  • As we announced previously, we were accepted as an Acquia Silver Partner. Acquia was founded by the creator of Drupal. This partnership is the recognition of our ability to successfully manage any Drupal project.
  • We have added a new practical workshop to help organisations to quickly get up to speed with Drupal's power and flexibility. It is included in our current seminars about CMS.
  • We are also organising a webinar on Drupal, entitled "The reasons why and how to migrate your website to Drupal". It will last about 1 hour, is for IT managers and will take place on October 1st. To attend, please contact us by email or by phone at +41 (0)22 348 30 15
  • Finally, we have added several new features while migrating to our new Drupal website, including a technical blog and RSS feeds for news and upcoming training courses.

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Linalis News

 

Our customers already benefit from our full LPI training courses, aimed at enabling trainees to pass the Certification exams, and the demand for these is growing.  Indeed, we have recently updated the LPI training courses to meet the revised certification program of the LPI.  The feedback we have been receiving tells us that the attendees are really appreciating these improvements.

We have also introduced new, solutions orientated, Linux training courses aimed at meeting specific customer needs. The objective of the new courses is to enable the attendee to implement a specific solution using Linux.

Typically the courses are a subset of several LPI courses, created to set up a specific solution or to perform solution orientated tasks. The courses are shorter, either two or three days, fully supported by training material and we currently offer courses that teach the trainees how to:

New solution orientated courses will be introduced in the near future.

Linalis has also launched a series of one day workshops, aimed at practical advice and working sessions on a specific topic.  The new workshops are intended to give the attendee a springboard to being able to implement and use a specific open source product during the workshop.

The attendees will then be able to repeat the exercise on their own infrastructure immediately after the session to start working with the product.  The number of attendees will be limited to allow a high degree of one-on-one consultation.

The following workshops are scheduled in November 2009 in French and in January 2010 in English, are for one full day and are priced at CHF 800 per person.  Follow the links to review a brief description of the workshop and to subscribe:

As an Accredited Training Partner of Pentaho, the leading Open Source Business Intelligence Suite, we have introduced scheduled courses for the Pentaho Bootcamp (an introduction to each of the tools in the suite) and the Pentaho Data Integration for Database Developers.

We are providing these courses in several countries (Switzerland, France, Germany, Spain, UK) and in several languages (English, French and Spanish), so please consult our training schedule for details and to subscribe to these popular courses.

As always, should you need more information, please do not hesitate to contact us.

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Partner News

Acquia

The company has raised $8 million in funding this summer, and we can begin to see the results: they announced in a row two new services, Acquia Hosting and Drupal Gardens. Drupal Gardens is a Sofware as a Service version of Drupal, allowing less-technical users and SMBs to access a preconfigured Drupal installation hosted by Acquia.

Acquia Hosting is Cloud Computing hosting service for businesses, allowing them to adapt in real time their Drupal installation depending on the website load, and to pay only for the resources they really use.

Acquia also launched services like Remote Administration. It consists in the Acquia team managing your Drupal installation's maintenance and upgrades. No need anymore to worry about upgrades and potential security and compatibility issues.

See the services we provide around Drupal

Seminars from Jaspersoft

Our partner Jaspersoft scheduled several webinars in the next few weeks. Here are the dates:

  • September 24th : JasperReports Professional 3.6: Seeing Is Believing, at 14:00 GMT
  • 22 octobre : Jaspersoft Demo Hour, at 10:00 ET

See the services we provide around Jaspersoft

Canonical double its efforts

While getting Ubuntu 9.10 (codename "Karmic Koala") ready, to be released on October 29th, Canonical is more productive than ever and announced several new services. These should allow the company to reach financial sustainability and to no longer be dependent on its founder and patron, the milionnaire Mark Shuttleworth.

First a new support option is available, targeting SMBs. Smaller and more flexible, SMBs can migrate to Ubuntu more easily than larger companies and often don't have an IT departement.

There is also Ubuntu One to host your data online. This kind of service was made popular by Dropbox and MobileMe ; it allows users to synchronize and share their files from any system.

Ubuntu One main advantage is that it integrates very easily into other applications. Free with 2 GB of storage, it will cost you 10$ a month to have 10 GB.

Finally there is the Ubuntu Software Store project, aimed at becoming the all-in-one interface for software management on Ubuntu, including screenshots, comments and ratings, advanced search capabilities... and also a payment gateway, as on Apple App Store or Android Market from Google.

See the services we provide around Ubuntu

OpenERP launches a hosted version

Following the current trend of SaaS (Software as a Service), OpenERP launches On Demand OpenERP, a hosted service.

The cost per month will depend on the amount of hours of use and the amount of storage space used. It can even be free for very small businesses (less than 60 hours a month and less than 1 GB of storage used).

Pentaho bootcamp

Red Hat 5.4

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 was released on September 2nd. Still compatible with earlier Red Hat 5 releases, it brings some new features:

  • the inclusion of KVM for virtualisation, in addition to Xen
  • new drivers to support recent hardware
  • an update of its Cluster Suite tool
  • improvement on sound, display, netowking and laptop support
  • and a clean-up of the documentation

Red Hat also updated its systems management tool, Red Hat Network Satellite, and released the version 5.0 of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform.

Last but not least, they launched the DeltaCloud project. DeltaCloud wants to create a set of common APIs to connect to numerous private and public Cloud Services (Amazon EC2, Rackspace...). It will then be possible to develop applications that will not depend on a given cloud service.

See the services we provide around Red Hat

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Open Source News

InfoWorld's Best of Open Source Awards

Each year, the Infoworld magazine give awards to the 40 best Open Source project for business. Among them, a lot of products we worked with, namely our partners Drupal, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, but also SugarCRM, Cacti, OpenNMS, Nagios and Xen.

(Source: infoworld.com)

Xen Cloud Platform

The Xen.org community plans to build an Open Source cloud computing solution. Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) will bridge private and public clouds and allow them to cooperate through open standards.

(Source: zdnet.co.uk)

Nokia N900 : a Linux computer versus Apple and Google

While the iPhone is ubiquitous and Google attacks with its Android, Nokia's new approach takes a different angl e with the N900. Where you need specific tools to create an application that will only run on iPhone or Android, the N900 embeds a complete Linux system which is able to run most of existing Linux applications.

(Source: linuxfr.org)

Novell and Red Hat's financial results

Recent quarterly results from Novell and Red Hat are giving us precious information the health of the Open Source market.

Novell's revenues are shrinking everywhere excepted for its Linux division, which grew 22% up.

Red Hat, which is a fully Open Source company, announced good results, with a 20% increase, and its recent acquisitions will allow it to have more sources of revenues in the long term. While Red Hat's revenue growth has slowed down a bit, the company managed nevertheless to keep all its main customers, which means the company is still very trusted.

(Source: ostatic.com)

Scribus 1.3.5

Among Open Source publishing software, Scribus is the leader. Available on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, its 1.3.5 releasesupports new vector illustration formats (Adobe Illustrator, InDesign...), brings new templates, a new GUI and numerous improvements in PDF support.

(Source: ostatic.com)

Oracle Sun buyout - EU concerned

While US have approved Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, UE is more concerned by Oracle, leader in proprietary databases, owning MySQL, leader of Open Source databases. MySQL was acquired by Sun last year.

The UE fears that Oracle could reduce competition in the database market and slow down or stop MySQL's development in favour of its own proprietary solutions. The European Commission will report its decision to 19 janvier 2010, in order to examine closely the deal and its effects.

(Source: infoworld.com)

Microsoft launches the CodePlex foundation

Microsoft already launched the CodePlex Open Source project hosting platform, currently hosting more than 10'000 open source projects. On September 10th, it launched this time the CodePlex foundation, which aim is to create more interactions between open source developers and ISVs. The foundation should make ISVs to get more involved in Open Source projects.

Still, the initiative was once more controversial since Microsoft is currently the only sponsor, that there is a strong orientation towards Microsoft technologies and that the hosting platform bans some Open Source licences such as the GLP v3 (which prevent the code to be reused into closed source products).

(Source: ostatic.com)

Apple open sources Grand Central Dispatch

Apple open sources majors parts of Grand central Dispatch, one of the key elements of the latest Mac OS X. Grand Central Dispatch frees developers from threads management.

Thread management is a difficult and time-consuming task, nevertheless a key one to take advantage of modern CPUs. Freeing the developer from managing threads allows for developing better applications faster.

(Source: osnews.com)

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At the periphery

Microsoft, Windows 7 and the Linux threat

Shortly after Microsoft officially acknowledged Linux as a threat for the first time, an employee of Best Buy uploaded slides from a Microsoft presentation intended for the company's workers (who will sell Windows 7) and bashing Linux. It confirms that Microsoft is concerned about Linux.

Liux kernel's major contibutors

The Linux Foundation updated its study on Linux development statistics. Among interesting data, there are more than 1000 contributors and 200 companies contributing to Linux kernel development, major contributors being Red Hat, IBM, Intel, Novell and Google. There is a 10% increase in the number of developers since last year. For more information, please download the study in PDF format.

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Tips of the month

Some handy technical tips form our blog contrib.linalis.com.

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