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Sunday, April 22, 2012

Oracle Linux:The Past,Present and Future Revealed

When Oracle CEO Larry Ellison started poking around the Linux market way back in 1998 or so, he turned to Wim Coekaerts for help. Fast forward to the present, and more than 8,500 customers run Oracle Linux. But how did Oracle get to this point? And what’s next for Oracle Linux and the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel? The VAR Guy tracked down Coekaerts and gained some candid insights — plus some strong opinions about Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and even Cisco Systems. Here’s the update.
Visit Oracle’s Redwood Shores, Calif., headquarters and you’ll be surrounded by a sea of suits — sales professionals and customer support experts who deal with CIOs and corporate customers. But poke around and you’ll find the blue-jeans-wearing developers and engineers who design Oracle’s products. That’s where Coekaerts fits in.
Down to earth and soft-spoken, Coekaerts doesn’t own a suit but Oracle still puts him in front of customers because he talks their language: Scalability, reliability, security, performance.

Getting Started

Coekaerts arrived at Oracle Belgium in 1995, right out of school, before moving to California. He has never worked anywhere else. By the late 1990s, Ellison tapped Coekaerts to assist on the New Internet Computer, a Linux-based appliance that flopped and died.
But the Linux experiment wasn’t a waste of time. Oracle also began looking at Linux opportunities on the server — mainly to make sure Windows NT Server did not dominate the market. “It’s pretty well known we don’t like Microsoft,” said Coekaerts. “We didn’t want Windows to be the x86 server standard, and Larry [Ellison} knew x86 was going to be important. Larry rocks. We have a great leader."
Oracle's first big Linux move on the server came in 1998, when Oracle ported its database to Linux two weeks before Informix (now owned by IBM) made a similar move. "We heard what Informix was up to and we had to beat them," recalls Coekaerts. "We did."
Oracle's first call more than a decade ago was to SUSE, but a relationship never materialized, said Coekaerts. The next call was to Red Hat. The goal was to make sure Oracle applications delivered screaming performance on Linux servers. Plus, Oracle wanted to map Unix's best features over to Linux. And Oracle wanted Red Hat to address bugs and issues that potentially limited Oracle application performance on Linux.
Oracle and Red Hat began working together, but Coekaerts claims Red Hat didn't hold up its end of the bargain. Hence, Oracle created Oracle Linux -- not necessarily to compete with Red Hat, Coekaerts says. Instead, to give customers one throat to choke when it came to running Oracle applications, databases and middleware on Linux.
Coekaerts also attended kernel-oriented Linux events and asked for enterprise features to be built into Linux. "But Linus [Torvalds] would say ‘do it yourself.’”

Big Moves

Oracle ultimately responded with its own, Red Hat-compatible Linux (Oracle Linux) and Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel. While some pundits allege Oracle has been out to destroy Red Hat, Coekaerts said otherwise.
“Our customers need bugs fixed and Oracle’s software fully tested on Linux. That’s why we went and did Oracle Linux. Red Hat has zero Oracle [software] knowledge, whether it’s development, QA or support. They couldn’t help our customers. So we introduced Linux support to help our customers.”
So far, roughly 8,500 customers run Oracle Linux and/or the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, up from about 7,100 customers last year.

Full Story:http://www.thevarguy.com/2012/04/19/oracle-linux-the-past-present-and-future-revealed/

Ubuntu Linux as smartphone OS soon?

It’s common knowledge that Linux, in some form, is being used by Google in its Android smartphone OS. In fact, many of the other mobile operating systems designed for smartphones and tablets are in some way related to Linux. Ubuntu Linux is best known for the most used Linux distribution around the world. Turns out, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux has bigger plans for the operating system. Going by the wanted jobs post made by Canonical on their site which clearly states - Business Development Manager (Ubuntu Phone OS) - it’s clear that Ubuntu is coming to the smartphone platform in a big way. The key responsibilities only confirm the doubts - the position requires the person to build a commercial environment around the Ubuntu smartphone OS.
buntu as an operating system has branched out into a number of flavours. Some of these are designed for netbooks. There has been talk in the past of a tablet variant of the operating system as well.  Any details on this front are expected sometime this year.  It’s still early and it’s hard to predict when the smartphone OS “product” will finally shape up. Canonical is unlikely to be making their own phones with their OS on it. Like Google, they’ll have to tie up with other existing OEM brands. Currently, phone manufacturers have a number of operating systems available, of which Android and Windows Phone are the most popular.

Canonical’s move to launch Ubuntu as a smartphone OS is likely to be a difficult one considering the lead that Google has, with their Android OS. Google also has more resources and a lot of experience in this field. Naturally they’re going to have to seriously up their game if they want to survive. Other similar attempts in the past haven’t worked out too well either. Still, it should add to the competition and if Canonical is able to deliver a unique and high performing platform, it may shake things up in the smartphone industry. Canonical already has an Ubuntu for Android build out, which basically allows PC-docked Android phones to run Ubuntu on PCs.

Credits:http://tech2.in.com/news/linux/ubuntu-linux-as-smartphone-os-soon/298722