No sooner had I written about the folder sharing problem between Ubuntu 14.04 VM running with VMware Player 6.0.1 and the Windows 8.1 update 1 host than VMware 6.0.2 update arrived and fixed the problem. I was able to successfully build the vmhgfs driver, after which I could mount the C:\Share folder as /mnt/hgfs/Share under Ubuntu 14.04. You can see the screen capture of File’s view of Share.

While I certainly understand all the attraction with portable devices, the real interesting work is being done on the server side. Ubuntu is positioning its server products for both individual use and as part of the “cloud” infrastructure. Ubuntu is now marketing the Ubuntu Server software stack with OpenStack, the open source virtualization/”cloud” framework. OpenStack is interesting in that its genesis came about as part of a collaborative effort between NASA and Rackspace in 2010. They developed it on Ubuntu, which became the default OS for deployment. Over the years that followed, just about everybody of note within the “cloud” vendor community joined in. It should be noted that NASA dropped out of active participation in 2013 citing “lack of technical progress [PDF].” It instead decided to look at using public “clouds” to use. Personally I look at this as some bean-counter having gotten into the middle if it. After all, if there’s anyone who should be providing technical leadership to drive technical progress, I can’t think of anyone better suited than NASA. But then, what do I know…

It was Ubuntu 11.04 that started to officially begin integration of OpenStack, starting with the OpenStack “Bexar” release. Full support came about with Ubuntu 11.10 and the OpenStack “Cactus” release. It wasn’t until 2012 and OpenStack “Essex” that Redhat announced a preview for RHEL (they may have started earlier with Fedora, as I remember Fedora 18 having OpenStack in its repository system). Formal Redhat support came at the end of 2012 with the OpenStack “Grizzley” release. Canonical had started integration and support within Ubuntu a full year before Redhat. The fact OpenStack was initially developed on Ubuntu, and official Ubuntu support starting with 11.04, are big pluses for Canonical over Redhat in my book.

Having written all those positive words, there are some negatives to consider. Just google for “openstack problems” and see what pops up. For example, there’s this story, titled ““Backbreaking” OpenStack migrations hinder enterprise upgrades,” with the following lovely summary:

OpenStack’s promise of an open-source cloud infrastructure free of vendor lock-in is big. But difficulties upgrading from one release to the next are a major kink that needs to be worked out before widespread adoption can begin.

Or consider this article written on The Register November 2013, titled amusingly enough, “Gartner: OpenStack in the enterprise? Ha ha ha, you must be joking,” in which they cite a Gartner analyst:

The OpenStack world has come in for criticism from a Gartner analyst because the claims made by companies backing the open-source project frequently don’t line up with reality.

In a forthright post published on Tuesday Gartner analyst and research director Alessandro Perilli chided the OpenStack community for a lack of clarity, lack of transparency, lack of vision, and lack of pragmatism.

OpenStack is touted as being an open-source infrastructure deployment and management engine that lets companies load up a free software suite to help them take on proprietary cloud giants such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

But besides Rackspace and HP, few public implementations of the product exist, and it doesn’t seem to have accrued the level of cash necessary for it to slow the rise of the mega-clouds.

Perilli put some of the blame for this slow growth at vendor marketing (and credulous tech press reports) that have claimed OpenStack is making huge strides into the enterprise, when in fact it’s barely there at all.

“Don’t believe the hype generated by press and vendor marketing: OpenStack penetration in the large enterprise market is minimal,” Perilli said. “Yes, there are some ongoing deployments that can’t be disclosed yet, but for one promising or successful deployment there are several that fail and that will forever remain undocumented.”

The criticisms line up with a recent wave of discussion that has percolated through the cloud industry as the community starts to wonder why after three years of major development the OpenStack technology is still lacking key features at its core, and why so few people seem to be making much money from it.

This reminds me of my so-called early days in 2007 with Ubuntu. As I noted in the last post, I dropped Ubuntu (and Linux in general) because of the difficulties upgrading from one release to the next. Yes, those updates were a “major kink,” primarily because of hardware (read: video primarily) regressions. If OpenStack has been, essentially, a series of pre-releases with major changes in the product, then it’s a train-wreck in progress. My experience to date have been with VMware (ESXi 4 and 5), and it has worked flawlessly. When I handled an upgrade from ESXi 4 to 5, it went without a hitch. I had over 60 VMs on a small two-server stack, and nothing happened. Except it all came back up and everything continued on, as it should.

I like the promises being made, but I won’t get stuck with a poor product because it’s free and open. Ideology, no matter how pure, don’t pay the bills if it leads to poor or broken products. The only way to test this out is to actually invest in some decent hardware and install the software. It may be that 14.04 LTS is the best way to get started with this.

I truly hope that Ubuntu has invested some considerable effort to polish and harden OpenStack for 14.04. They seem to have established themselves on the server front, as that’s the area where they seem to be “cashflow positive.” And I take everything, both hype and hyper criticism, with a lot of skepticism. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle of all that mess.

[1] I have not tried Firefox OS for mobile. And Tizen is a mess, what with Samsung having introduced three wearable product groups with Android, Tizen, and now Android Wearable, in that order.

Ubuntu is one of the best, if not the best, operating systems (including Windows 8.1 and Mac OS X Mavericks) you can install on any personal computer. Period.

If you’re considering an upgrade from Windows XP and don’t want Windows 7 or later, and further assuming you’re not beholden to some very specific software application that must run on Windows XP, then you should consider Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. It really does have what it takes to challenge Windows, especially anything older than Windows 8.

I upgraded my Samsung R580 notebook that had been running 13.10 to 14.04 without any incident. When it finished it came up with all my settings intact and everything functioned exactly as it did before the upgrade. I was quite impressed, since I haven’t had any major Linux upgrade that successful, and I’ve been a user of Linux since the very early days of S.u.S.E., when it was sold and shipped from Germany.

I’ve installed and upgraded it on both hardware and virtual machines, and it’s only on virtual machines that Ubuntu stumbles, and not because of Ubuntu. Ubuntu, as well as Fedora 19 and 20, and any distribution that uses a Linux kernel 3.13 or later, will not allow VMware Tools (from VMware 6.0.1) to install cleanly. Specifically the filesystem sharing driver, allowing a VM client to share a Window’s folder, fails to build due to arbitrary changes in how certain group and user permission data types are represented in the kernel vs how they’re represented around the rest of userspace. Normally, with my other VMs, I share common data via that shared folder, which makes development and testing across a heterogeneous environment rather easy. Failure to share and work well together is not a Good Thing. The only saving grace (or graces) are these: I can drag and drop bidirectionally between 14.10 and Windows 8.1. It’s slower, and I have duplication of files which I have to remove when I’m done, but it’s what I have to do for the time being. And because it works so well and looks so good I’m willing to put up with it until VMware pushes out an update adding support for this latest kernel.

The system does look really good. It’s a handsome looking environment. Ubuntu 14.04 shows even more subtle visual refinements over 13.10, and I was (and still am) very happy with Ubuntu 13.10. In spite of running into the folder sharing issue, installing a bog-standard new Ubuntu 14.04 virtual machine took all of ten minutes from start to finish. Yes, I dinked around with the background, but really, if you want something that you can load and go with RIGHT NOW, you can’t beat Ubuntu at this point in time. I have come to enjoy working with Unity. I’ve had my mixed reactions to Unity along with everybody else, but after 12.04 was released all those issues were addressed and I never looked back. What has made Unity the #1 desktop choice for me is the final tweak of allowing me to put the application menus back on each application, instead of leaving them at the top left corner of the desktop control bar, à la Mac OS X. The solution of having application window menus in-line with the window top is a reasonable and clean compromise. Windows 7 and 8 have tried to tackle the waste of screen real estate with the ribbon task bar (see Windows file explorer, for example), to the complaints of many. I actually liked that idea, but then I liked the original Metro look and I like Unity, so I guess there’s no accounting for taste. This last screen shot is my farewell to Ubuntu 13.10. It’s running Java 8 update 5 and  the JavaFX demo Ensemble. It’s interesting in that IMHO the JavaFX demos run better on Ubuntu 13.10 and 14.04 than they currently do on Windows 8.1 update 1. This leads me to my final prediction: my next notebook, the one I buy after my Samsung Series 7 Chronus running Windows 8.1 update 1, will be a notebook running Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Yes, Ubuntu’s that good. Update Some folks have asked about Ubuntu vs Arch Linux for Arm. They’re wondering if Ubuntu can be installed on the Raspberry Pi instead of Arch Linux Arm. The answer was “NO.” The last version that was installed on the R-Pi was Ubuntu 9.06 cross-compiled to run on the ARM V6 architecture of the R-Pi. After that release (starting with 10.04) Ubuntu was optimized to run on more advanced ARM architectures. The 14.04 release is optimized to support 64-bit ARM V8, such as the ARM Cortex A57 used in AMD’s Opteron A1100 processor. I’ve modified my declaratory statement above with one world; personal. Personal is primarily my notebooks and desktop systems running with Intel processors. That may change to include tablets running more capable ARM processors, but only if you want a complete end-to-end solution. For R-Pi work I still recommend and support Arch Linux Arm. The Arch ARM distribution is highly granular, more easily granular, and works quite well on the Raspberry Pi as they’re currently shipping. Even if there was a Raspberry Pi that was released with a 64-bit processor, I’d still stick with Arch Linux ARM if for no other reason than the body of experience and good will I’ve built up with this distribution on the Raspberry Pi. I’d be a fool to abandon that.

Update 13 May 2015

I have upgraded to Ubuntu 14.10 (see October) and now Ubuntu 15.04. Still feel the same way about Ubuntu. The fact that a five year old Samsung notebook is running the current Ubuntu release without issues is amazing. This notebook originally came installed with Vista, then was upgraded to Windows 7. It reached a point where Windows 7 was very unstable, which is why I switched to Linux, Ubuntu 13.10 specifically, December 2013 (read here).

Trust me. It’s all still very, very good. In spite of its noisy and noisome critics.