Wikipedia adopts Ubuntu for its server infrastructure

The Wikimedia Foundation, the organization behind the user-driven Wikipedia project, is in the process of migrating its servers to the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Wikimedia’s move to Ubuntu is part of an effort to simplify administration of the organization’s 400 servers, which previously ran a mix of various versions of Red Hat and Fedora.

Ubuntu has achieved an unprecedented level of success in the desktop Linux market, but the distribution has been slow to gain acceptance on servers. Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu could help increase the distribution’s visibility in the Linux server market and demonstrate its viability in large-scale deployments.

Although the Wikimedia Foundation is a nonprofit organization that is primarily funded by donations, the organization’s technical requirements are significant. Wikimedia CTO Brion Vibber published some statistics in the slides (PDF) from his presentation at the Wikimania conference which took place in July at the new Library of Alexandria.

Wikimedia’s entire collection of web sites—which includes Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikiquote, Wikinews, and several others—serves up roughly 10 billion page views per month. At its peak, traffic can sometimes reach 50,000 HTTP requests per second. The organization’s hardware budget to date is roughly $1.5 million, and it spends $35,000 per month on bandwidth and physical hosting. All of its technical infrastructure is managed by a small IT staff consisting of only four paid employees and three volunteers.

In an interview with Computerworld, Vibber provided some insight into some of Wikimedia’s technical challenges and discussed the benefit of migrating the entire set of servers to a single distribution.

He says that the original Wikipedia site grew from 15 servers to 200 servers within the first 18 months. Replacing their previous mix of distributions with a consistent and uniform Ubuntu solution has simplified administration considerably for the organization. “We can run the same combination everywhere, and it does the same thing,” Vibber told Computerworld. “Everything is a million times easier.”

Canonical initially announced the availability of Ubuntu for servers in 2005 and has taken several major steps since then to boost its popularity, including a partnership with Sun and several certification initiatives for major enterprise software packages. At the Ubuntu Live conference last year, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth said that the company will increasingly fund server improvements and also announced Landscape, a server management tool.

Despite these efforts to push Ubuntu in the server market, Canonical has had difficulty competing with Red Hat and Novell for enterprise server marketshare. Some changing trends could, however, soon give Ubuntu an advantage. Organizations are increasingly turning toward free, community-driven Linux distributions as in-house Linux expertise becomes more accessible. During a presentation at the LinuxWorld conference earlier this year, 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman said that Ubuntu and CentOS will both gain enterprise acceptance as a result of this trend.

Wikimedia’s adoption of Ubuntu is a reflection of the distribution’s growing strength and popularity as a server solution, but it doesn’t appear that it will translate into revenue for Canonical because Wikimedia will be maintaining its systems largely without commercial support. Now that Ubuntu is gaining traction with large-scale free deployments, the next challenge for Canonical will be getting some mindshare with enterprise adopters who are willing to sign up for support contracts.

Google’s Picasa for Linux catches up to Windows

Google has brought to Linux the beta version of its new Picasa 3 software for image editing, cataloging, and uploading.

The new release catches the open-source operating system up with Windows, which got the Picasa 3 beta one month earlier. There’s still no word about a Mac OS X version, although Mike Horowitz, Google’s Picasa product manager, told me earlier that “Macs are important to us…We’re always looking for new ways of making sure our users are happy, so it’s something we’re looking at.”

The new version adds a retouching tool, automatic synchronization of photos on the PC with those stored at Google’s Picasa Web site, and a collage mode that lets people combine numerous snapshots into a poster-size collection, Google programmer Lei Zhang said in a blog post announcing the new version. The new version also is faster, he added.

However, it does lack the Windows version’s movie maker feature that can turn photos into a slideshow with a soundtrack that can then be uploaded to YouTube.

The software runs using Wine and an open-source software layer that translates a program’s Windows instructions into commands for Linux instead. Google has contributed about 850 patches to the Wine project so far this year, Google said. Better video support in Wine is still a work in progress, though, which is why the movie maker feature is disabled.

Google’s Android not an iPhone

The only real thing that the iPhone and the Gphone have in common at the moment are five letters.

Google’s plans for the mobile phone market have caused quite the stir Monday, even though the company’s press conference Monday morning didn’t add much to what we already knew about Android, a collection of software that could be a catalyst for Linux on mobile phones over the next few years. Still, when any company the size of Google makes noise about steering its ship in a certain direction, people take notice.

One nice development is that we can stop calling the damn thing the Gphone, which stopped being cute awhile ago in the fine tradition of J-Lo, A-Rod, and K-Fed. But while both Apple and Google will be selling mobile phone software in late 2008, the companies seem determined to walk a fine line in their new dual relationship as trusted partner and wary competitor.

Android is a nice idea; take the promise of Linux as a mobile operating system and finally give it a backer with some legs. This could set Google up nicely for the future if mobile phones continue to turn into little computers, since companies like Symbian and Microsoft are far from entrenched in this market.

Apple is also eying that future. Much of what Google said about Android during its press conference–such as the desire for a better Internet experience on mobile phones–was uttered by Apple CEO Steve Jobs in January during the presentation of the iPhone. And it’s already sold 1.4 million iPhones in three months.

So this time next year, are we going to be talking about the looming showdown between Google and Apple in mobile computing, or the surprising resignation of Google’s Eric Schmidt from Apple’s board of directors?

Linux PC hits shelves at Wal-Mart for $199

It probably won’t run Crysis or other state-of-the-art games, but a Linux-based PC that Wal-Mart began offering this week for $199 should get the job done for e-mail, Web browsing, and other everyday computing tasks.

The Everex TC2502 Green gPC is one of the first Linux-based desktop machines to be offered for sale by a major retailer. As such, it could become a barometer of open source software’s potential for success in the consumer market.

The gPC comes preloaded with the gOS operating system — a Linux variant — and a 1.5-GHz processor manufactured by Intel clone maker Via Technologies. The rest of the specs include an 80-Gbyte hard drive and 512 Mbytes of DDR 2 memory.

There’s no monitor included, but buyers get stereo speakers and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive.

As for software, the gPC comes with the free OpenOffice.org 2.2 productivity suite. The suite, which includes word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, recently won backing from IBM.

Everex is a Taiwanese-based PC maker that’s looking to carve a niche for itself in the computer industry’s economy section. A version of Everex’s gPC that runs the basic edition of Microsoft’s Windows Vista is on sale at Wal-Mart for $298.

The retailer is making the gPC available at selected stores and through its Web site.

The price difference between the Linux and Windows version of the computer reflects what some in the tech industry derisively call “the Microsoft tax” — a Windows licensing fee that PC makers must pay to the Redmond, Wash., software maker for each computer sold.

It’s unlikely that Linux-based PCs will displace Windows-powered computers anytime soon. For one thing, there’s only a limited number of applications that will run on Linux.

Linux advocates argue, however, that until they become more mainstream, open source systems could fill some important niches — such as the market for cheap PCs aimed at students in low-income areas.

Photoshop for Linux? Don’t hold your breath

There’s a few applications that would help make Linux more of a mainstream OS, but don’t expect to see them ported to Linux anytime soon. One of the least discussed in this fashion? Adobe Photoshop.

Yes, I know I’ve said before that in my purview Linux doesn’t need mainstream success to be “succesful”, but this is one of those canards that gets waved under my nose often enough that it needs to be addressed at least once.

Why Photoshop? For one, apart from Microsoft Office, it’s one of the most broadly used programs in the whole of the computer world, both Mac and PC. Everyone either wants Photoshop or “a program like Photoshop.” And in many cases, they don’t have the luxury of choosing: they’re in a graphic-arts or design job where Photoshop is mandatory, not optional. By far the most overriding reason is support for CMYK colorspaces (you can’t do proper graphics work for print without CMYK support). Lack of proper CMYK support is one of the biggest reasons why GIMP, the open-source Photoshop-like app for Linux, hasn’t been able to displace Photoshop in a professional context.

And why no Linux-specific version of Photoshop? First, and most likely, Adobe probably believes there just isn’t a market for Photoshop on Linux — yet — especially since the perceived size of that market isn’t even a fraction of its total sales, whether for Mac or Windows.

There’s also the question of commercial application support on Linux, a topic which deserves its own post but which can be summed up this way: Closed-source apps generally only get supported on a couple of distributions at a time — Red Hat and SuSE are two of the biggest, although Ubuntu is turning up more and more — since the effort involved for more than a couple of distros is more than many software companies want to take on.

(This is where I agree at least in part with Alex Wolfe about there being too many distros — too many for the software makers, but that still means a plurality of choices for the users.)

What’s ironic is that a while back, Adobe had an IRIX version of Photoshop available for a number of Silicon Graphics computers. I played with an SGI O2 workstation that had it running, and it operated exactly like its Windows counterpart. Surely it wouldn’t be difficult to take the work done for the IRIX version and apply that to a Linux edition? Probably not — programming for IRIX, Linux, and the Mac OS are almost certainly as unalike as it gets in many ways.

Finally, there’s the problem of third-party add-ons. Photoshop has a giant library of plug-ins, and many Photoshop users are married to their plug-in collections. Said plug-ins would not work on Linux, unless a) they were rewritten from the ground up (not terribly likely) or b) the Linux edition of PS had, say, some kind of back-end into Wine that allowed the plug-in to run correctly. There’s always the possibility of running the Windows edition of Photoshop in an emulated Windows session or in Wine, but that sort of defeats the point.

So if Adobe ever bothers to offer Photoshop for Linux, I suspect it’s going to be for very specific breeds of Linux, and not Linux generically. I’m dead certain Adobe is not about to make Photoshop into an open-source product; they’re going to be as stalwart about this as Microsoft is about Office. But again, it’s a question of how much Adobe feels it’s likely to get back for that effort — which, at this point, is probably not a lot at all.