Zenoss Core Dashboard

This week I am very excited because we released Zenoss Core 2.5.2 with a cool new feature,  Xen hypervisor monitoring.

I am very happy to see Zenoss put this out as open source software, because it’s the beginning of what could be a great piece of software. Now that this is out there for anyone to use I expect to get lots of feedback to extend and improve it.

This extension to Zenoss Core discovers guests on Xen para-virtualized hosts and provides monitoring of performance and availability via SSH. While the Xen hosts run on physical servers, the virtual guests are listed per host and linked back to any discovered instances on the network. Admins can quickly find the associated hosts and guests and monitor their Xen virtual infrastructure along side their entire physical, virtual, and cloud-based IT environment through a single interface.

I really think this is the beginning of a lot of virtualization and cloud monitoring capabilities from Zenoss Core. In recent weeks we got a couple neat extensions for virtualization and cloud monitoring including Amazon Web Services,  Google App Engine, libvirt (a virtualization library favored by Red Hat) and Ganglia integration.

Technorati Tags: Hypervisor, Monitoring, Xen, Zenoss Core

On February 6, the White House Open Government Initiative launched a government wide public participation opportunity.  As part of the Open Government Directive issued in early December, every major agency published an open government website.

In response the Open Source for America (OSFA) initiative has submitted their:  “Proposed Guidelines for Open Government Plans” to the Obama Administration for consideration. These plans are meant to encourage the government to embrace the open source ideals of participation, collaboration and transparency.

The proposal notes that there is, ” ….a tremendous opportunity to capture the innovation and ingenuity of government employees, who have the means to create their own tools to make themselves more effective, rather than waiting for a cumbersome and unresponsive procurement process. Open source software is, in fact, the most concrete form of participation available to the government’s constituents and its employees”

To get involved the Administration has invited public comments on each agency’s open government page through March 19, 2010. Open source advocates are encouraged to visit these agencies listed on the White House website and share their opinion.

Technorati Tags: government, Open Source, United States

In a time when many tradeshows are experiencing lower then normal attendance the 8th Annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE 8x) had record attendance this past weekend in Los Angeles. I was there exhibiting and conducting a community training day for Zenoss and was very impressed by not only the quality of the program but the enthusiasm of the attendees.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Mini Conferences

On the Friday before the main SCaLE expo and speaking program starts many people hold mini-conferences and the SCaLE staff has been excellent at helping to organize and promote the events. I conducted a  Zenoss Community Day that Friday with phenomenal attendance and enjoyed meeting a great group of open source management users. I also peeked in on Ubucon which had a standing room only crowd of Ubuntu users. There were also quite a few other special events that seemed to be well attended.

The Keynotes

I got to watch both keynotes this year and they were both excellent. Here’s a little recap.

Karsten Wade’s – Being a Catalyst in Communities – The scientific facts about the open source way

Karsten’s a bona fide community builder helping drive the growth of the Fedora project, an open source distribution sponsored by Red Hat. His talk was a great overview of how to drive community participation and better yet, what results not to discount. He also announced the newly published free book, The Open Source Way – Creating and nurturing communities of contributors. A blue print of how to apply open source principles to communities and facilitate participation. In his presentation he made reference to an initiative sponsored by Red Hat,  Professors Open Source Summer Experience (POSSE), to help professors understand how to get their students involved in open source which was very cool.

He also made some interesting references to research done by Etienne Wenger on Communities of  Practice, which are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly. Which is part of the science indicated in the time of the talk.

Tarus Balog’s – So, You Think You Want to Start an Open Source Business

Tarus is the lead of the OpenNMS project which he maintains in conjunction with a services business, The OpenNMS Group. He offers a very candid tale of his starting the OpenNMS group using the board game, Life, as a metaphor. It was very clever. Tarus and I share a common interest in open source IT management given the companies and projects with but we have some different philosophical views on how to develop those companies and communities. Despite that I really respect his passion for his project and his company. I thought his presentation was very well done and really enjoyed his talk.

Both keynotes are available here on UStream.

Sessions

I got to sit in on Stephen Spector’s presentation on Xen and had a lot of time to talk to him through out the show. Xen fascinates me as a open source virtualization technology it’s used everywhere and even serves as the infrastructure for Amazon EC2.

I was there to man the Zenoss booth so I missed out on a couple of scaling and cloud presentations but the word was they were all great:

• Ari Lerner’s presentation on Pool Party. Written in ruby, PoolParty provides a nice domain specific language for describing a repeatable, declarative cloud computing infrastructure. Mainly focusing on amazon’s EC2 offering, the presentation will cover basic concepts of cloud computing, how PoolParty works and how you can get into the clouds in one command
• Scaling Facebook via Open Source – Given their use of  of the following open source projects in highly available deployments I thought this would be interesting: Cassandra, Hive, Haystack, memcached, MySQL, PHP, Scribe, and Thrift.

If you are an open source fan or vendor and can make the trip, I highly recommend attending to SCale 9x next February.

Related Articles

• SCaLE 8x Report – (linuxjournal.com)
• Improving the FLOSS legal landscape (iquaid.org)
• SCALE8X Day 2. Ubuntu Kernel Hardware Compatibility Testing. (canonical.com)
• SCALE8X Final Day Ubuntu Hardware Compatibility Testing. (canonical.com)

Technorati Tags: Fedora, LInuxfest, Los Angeles, Open Source, OpenNMS, SCALE8x, Xen

How do you build one of the busiest websites on the Internet? You wouldn’t guess the right answer to be, “You download some free software and hack  it”…Actually  the question is how do you build one of the world’s busiest websites that will scale affordably? You use open source software.

Twitter showed everyone their cards recently by publishing all the open source projects that they are contributing to. This is the picture of how open source software should work.

Organization has a a big, hard problem to solve. They write some software or update existing software and then publish what they did for others to use.

The people writing the software are writing it to solve a real problem. Not to sell it to people with real problems or to prevent the problems a clever sales guy manufactures. Given Twitter’s massive amount of users and traffic it’s probably one of the most demanding IT environments in the world. If these are the people making the software than you have some idea that it an stand up to scalability issues in other use cases (Failwhale’s not withstanding).

Not only do the Twitter engineers donate their work to the open source community they also share their insights on what happens in their environment on the Twitter Engineering Blog.

As I look at what the Twitter guys are working on it’s pretty impressive and has a fairly substantial impact on high availability computing. Some of the projects that caught my attention:

• scribe.gem – A Ruby client for the Scribe distributed log server.
• contributions to memcached.gem – An interface to the libmemcached C client. (memcache is a distributed systems for improving performance across dynamic web apps)
• contributions to cassandra – A highly scalable second-generation distributed database.
• contributions to hadoop – A platform for analyzing large data sets.
• contributions to pig – A platform for analyzing large data sets.

Any how it’s good to see open source users giving back their improvements, I love it when a plan comes together.

Related Articles

• Twitter Loves Open Source And Launches A Directory To Prove It (techcrunch.com)

So what do you do on a cold winter’s Saturday in Austin? Well if you are interested in Cloud Computing and IT operations you go to OpsCamp. This past Saturday was the first of what we hope to be many OpsCamps, held in an unconference format, to discuss ideas around next generation technologies and strategies for IT Operations.

The OpsCamp crowd was an eclectic crew of systems administrators, open source software developers, traditional software people, and service providers who came together to figure out how to address the needs of IT operations and the tools they use to administer virtual/cloud systems.

One Theme – Everything Old is New Again

I sat in on quite a few conversations most centered around two old themes: Monitoring and Configuration Management. While the problems are similar the landscape is changing. The use of the term devops was very prevalent noting that systems administrators are often required to have some degree of scripting and software development skills to adequately do their job. Effective systems administration goes beyond keeping servers running but the automation of tedious process to increase productivity. In the monitoring arena concerns centered around the amount of data we collect and how to make that actionable to assure consistent service levels.

Lightning Talks

The event started out with a word from the sponsors who had five minutes to talk about their products and services or otherwise woo the crowd. The main sponsors each took their shot at defining their interests in the cloud and how they could help during five minuted lightning talks. Presenters included Erik Dahl (CTO of Zenoss), Brett Piatt (Technical Alliance Manager at Rackspace Hosting) and Luke Kanies (Founder of Puppet and Reductive Labs).

Thanks to the other sponsors Bitnami, Opscode, Spiceworks and Redmonk who also helped make the event happen.

The Unpanel

Rather than having a meticulously planned agenda OpsCamp is interactive. During the Unpanel members of the audience got on stage and talked about what they thought would be interesting topics to discuss this included OpsCode CTO  Adam Jacob, Zenoss CTO Erik Dahl, Puppet founder, Luke Kanies, Travis Campbell from the University of Texas, Systems Administrator Matt Lawrence, Damon Edwards — President of DTO Solutions, Andrew Schafer and moderator extraordinaire — John M. Willis. This led to an interactive session with the rest of the OpsCamp attendees to address the following questions:

• What is DevOps?
• What is monitoring?
• How do you monitor/manage/apps/systems that use multiple environments
• Should I be listening to events or actively monitoring systems?
• Have you thought about monitoring from the cloud into your data center?
• What are the new things that need to be monitored?

The panel discussion was very interesting as well as the audience inputs. The session runs about 30 minutes but is pretty interesting to get the takes on cloud computing challenges from some exceptionally bright people.

The OpsCamp Session Board

Sessions

After quite a bit of discussion the sessions were decided on the following sessions:

• Agent Evolution – Do we need agents for management and if so are they going to be heavy, tedious and burdensome as the agents we have come to know and love.
• The Evolving Role of the Sysadmin
• Monitoring for the Cloud or Service Level Assurance
• Toolchains for Clouds
• Vendor “schmoozing” to talk about the products the vendors had to offer for cloud computing

The Organizers

Even though the conference was an unconference I think a big nod needs to go to my fellow organizers (or my co-conspirators) who worked together virtually from all over the country to pull of the event. Many thanks go to Damon Edwards (DTO Solutions and part of the Control Tier project),  John M. Willis (cloud guru from OpsCode) and Dave Nielsen (Founder of CloudCamp),

Videos and Pics

Damon has some videos from the day with Luke Kanies of Puppet and Reductive Labs and Bill Karpovich, CEO of Zenoss on the Dev2ops blog. We also have a bunch of pictures from the event in the OpsCamp Flickr group.I created an OpsCamp Twitter list for those of you looking for some folks who are smart on cloud computing and devops.

Keep your eye on OpsCamp.com for future events. I believe this one was one of many to be held around the world.

Related Articles

• Opscamp Austin Roundup (johnmwillis.com)
• OpsCamp Austin: IT Ops and the Cloud (cloudswitch.com)
• Videos: Luke Kanies, Bill Karpovich, Ernest Mueller at OpsCamp Austin 2010 (dev2ops.com)
• OpsCamp Debriefing IT Management & Cloud Podcast #66 (redmonk.com)
• Something about Austin #opscamp (austin.metblogs.com)

Technorati Tags: cloud computing, CloudCamp, Configuration Management, Open Source, Opscode, Reductive Labs, Zenoss

Last month cloud computing and systems management expert John Willis published his best of Cloud Computing for 2009 list he calls the Cloudies.  I am not an expert on the latest developments in cloud computing so it was nice to get a list of the best (in his expert opinion) cloud computing tools. I was especially interested in the latest open source software and I did a little research on each of these projects to see if they had active development mailing lists, regular releases  and a real community behind them.  At first glance my final list read like a cast of manga characters with names like Bitnami, CollectD, Enomaly, OpenNebula, RabbitMQ and Zenoss. However they all seem to benefit from a strong development ethic, a growing community of users and the ability to address challenges associated with cloud computing.

• Chef – Chef  is a relative newcomer with their project being only one year old but they are aggressively developing their project as can be seen by the frequency of their code check-ins. is an integration framework for configuration management for all types of IT infrastructure but especially popular among cloud deployments. You write source code to describe how you want each part of your infrastructure to be built, then apply those descriptions to your servers. The result is a fully automated infrastructure. Chef is professionally supported and sponsored by Opscode.
• collectd – collectd is a daemon which collects system performance statistics store the values in a variety of ways, one implementation is to store them in RRD files. What makes collectd particularly useful is it’s plugin architecture which allow the daemon to collect information from a variety of services and servers like Apache, memcache and Linux Vserver. collectd on its own is really interesting but what I really see is an opportunity for collectd to feed other systems management tools.
• Eucalyptus - Eculyptus is an acronym for Elastic Utility Computing Architecture Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems, an open-source software infrastructure for implementing “cloud computing” on clusters. The current interface to Eucalyptus is compatible with Amazon’s EC2, S3, and EBS interfaces, but the infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. Eucalyptus is implemented using commonly available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Eucalyptus Systems provides consulting, training and support services.
• OpenNebula – This is perhaps the most interesting and most relevant project of the list for cloud computing, billing itself as the open source tool kit for cloud computing.  OpenNebula is a tool that can be used  to build any type of Cloud deployment  and manage virtual infrastructure in a data-center or cluster or to combine local infrastructure with public cloud-based infrastructure, for highly scalable hosting environments. OpenNebula also supports public clouds by providing cloud interfaces to expose its functionality for virtual machine, storage and network management.
• OpenQRM – I have been a fan of OpenQRM for a long-time or at least well before the hoopla around Cloud Computing and have had the opportunity to work with technology when it was still part of a now defunct venture-backed company, Qlusters, and then spun out as a stand-alone open source project. While OpenQRM is not what I would consider a tool for public clouds I think it’s geared towards people delivering private virtual clusters or cloud capabilities.  openQRM is a single-management console for the complete IT infrastructure and provides a well defined API which can be used to integrate third-party tools as additional plugins. What’s really interesting about OpenQRM is that it can suck up physical installations, create an image, write that image to a SAN and then run the virtual instances on demand.  I think the opportunity for OpenQRM is to be able to suck those images up and then spit them out to cloud computing resources like EC2, RightScale or Rackspace Cloud. UPDATED:
• Puppet – The Ruby on Rails project is a great configuration management tool, very similar to Cfengine (which pre-dates Puppet) and Chef (which was started after Puppet). Puppet is a model-driven open source framework designed to automate the building and configuration of servers. Puppet lets you perform normal administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) on any number of systems, using essentially the same code, even if those systems are running completely different operating systems.
• RabbitMQ – RabbitMQ is an enterprise messaging system released under the Mozilla public license that adhere’s to the AMQP standard (AMQP is a standard that allows middleware products to send messages to one another). What really strikes me about RabbitMQ is the activity in their community especially their mailing lists and IRC channels. This was astounding to me as I feel like I am pretty up-to-date on active open source projects but before John’s post I was in the dark about RabbitMQ. Of the ones listed so far it’s really one that I feel like there’s really something substantial there. Commercial support is available from RabbitMQ LTD.
• Zenoss -  Zenoss made John’s list because of it’s Amazon Web Services monitoring capabilities and its ability to monitor all sorts of other cloud and virtual infrastructure. I am also excited about Zenoss making the list because the Zenoss Community is working to extend Zenoss Core to monitor all infrastructure you already have. I am very excited about the future of Zenoss as the community continues to expand its virtualization and cloud computing capabilities.
  [Disclosure: This caught my eye since I am the community guy for Zenoss.]

I also think there are a couple of other projects that weren’t on John’s list but have both an open source and cloud computing component:

• Bitnami – BitNami.org simplifies the process of deploying web applications virtually and in the cloud. Each BitNami Stack contains an application that is fully integrated with all of the software it requires to run. BitNami Stacks are available free of charge as native installers, virtual machine images and cloud templates. Examples of BitNami-packaged applications include Drupal, Joomla!, Wordpress, SugarCRM, Alfresco, Redmine, Subversion and many more. Bitnami is sponsored by the cross-platform installer vendors, Bitrock.
• Enomaly’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) -  ECP is worth watching is as much for its firebrand leader Reuven Cohen and his expertise as it for the merits of the project . ECP is a programmable virtual cloud infrastructure for small, medium and large businesses. ECP can help you design, deploy and manage virtual applications in the cloud and in the process significantly reduce administrative and systems workload. Our browser-based dashboard enables IT personnel to simply and efficiently plan deployments, automate VM scaling and load-balancing, and analyze, configure and optimize cloud capacity in an easy to use utility. We’ve designed the ECP platform to work alongside your current virtual data center, providing additional value and cost savings.
• Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud – Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC) is included with Ubuntu Server Edition and integrates a number of open source projects (including Eucalyptus). Given the rabid Ubuntu fan base I think the UEC will immediately benefit. This gives users a turnkey package to deploy a private cloud. I also liked the he code name for Ubuntu 9.10 the latest release was Karmic Koala and as we all know Koala’s eat Eucalyptus (a clever little joke from the Canonical folks who develop Ubuntu).

I am sure there are other notable open source cloud computing solutions and tools that I haven’t mentioned and hope to add to this list going forward.

Updated:

My colleague Simon Jakesch (who’s a ton smarter than me) pointed out this omission from my list (which makes me feel sheepish since I have been working with Damon Edwards whose part of the ControlTier project for the last few weeks):

• ControlTier - ControlTier is an open source, cross-platform build and deployment automation framework. ControlTier can help you to coordinate and scale service management and administration activities across multiple nodes and application tiers. Where ControlTier is shines is as an orchestrator for administrative tasks like starting and stopping services and starting other programs. Many of the contributions and commercial support come from DTO Solutions.

Related Articles

• Open Source Meets Cloud Computing (Information Week Government Blog)
• Lowering the barrier to open source (NASA Nebula Blog)
• Forecast for 2010: The Rise of Hybrid Clouds (GigaOm)
• Application packaging for cloud computing: A proposal (c|net’s Wisdom of Clouds blog)
• Cross-Platform Clouds Coming to Storage (MSP Mentor)

Technorati Tags: Chef, cloud computing, collectd, Enomaly, Open Source, OpenNebula, OpenQRM, Puppet, RabbitMQ, Ruby on Rails, Sys Admin, systems managment, Ubuntu, Zenoss

Today I caught a tweet from Kara Swisher referencing some exclusive news she posted on Boomtown about VMware’s upcoming deal to buy Zimbra from Yahoo! This is would be VMware’s second acquisition of an open source ISV in under a year. In August 2009 VMware acquired open source java vendor SpringSource that not only developed the popular Spring framework but had also acquired open source systems management vendor Hyperic (May 2009) and commercial Apache support vendor, Covalent (January 2009).

According to CNET’s Matt Asay, Yahoo!’s  Zimbra business unit is still growing and has an impressive customer base:

Lost in the news of Zimbra’s release of version 6.0 of its collaboration suite is the importance of one very big number: 50 million. That’s how many paid mailboxes Zimbra claims now, a number that puts it within spitting distance of IBM Lotus Notes (approximately 145 million paid mailboxes) and Microsoft Exchange (approximately 175 million paid mailboxes). Whatever the truth to rumors that Zimbra is up for sale, Zimbra is an appreciating asset for Yahoo, not a depreciating one.

I also noticed a couple of months ago that VMware started to re-brand getting rid of their old blue logo and moving to a grey logo sans the “virtualization boxes”. According to this post by VMware CMO Rick Jackson:

Now, as we look at our current offerings based on vSphere, and our vision of delivering the infrastructure for unrestrained cloud computing, the image we are portraying to the market has evolved.  In fact, our message embodies the notion of freeing IT from the constraints of physical resources.

Makes you wonder in the long-term where VMware might draw the line...

Build, Manage and Provide the Silver Lining for Clouds?

Does this signal the beginning of a broader VMware open source acquisition strategy? Maybe they will complete their java application stack with a database.  Barring Larry Ellison offering to sell MySQL to VMware maybe there are some other opportunities. VMware might benefit from picking up EnterpriseDB or maybe become the patron saint for MySQL fork, MariaDB sponsored by MySQL creator Monty Widenius. Beyond the database there are a number of interesting buying opportunities out there for VMware should they have their pocketbook open. For one there is rPath which can build and update Linux virtual machines and provide automated provisioning of systems taking VMware’s management and deployment capabilities one step further.

Another option would be to get deeper in management by picking up one of the open source configuration management vendors like Reductive Labs that produces Puppet or newly funded cloud configuration rival Opscode and their open source project, Chef. They could even go old school and take a look at CFengine which is similar to Chef and Puppet but supports not only Unix-like systems but Windows too. Alternatively, they could acquire commercial open source vendor, Cloudera that provides support for Hadoop, an open source implementation of  MapReduce which is ideally suited for cloud deployment.

I guess that’s enough speculation for today. However, it will be curious to see if the deal goes through and if VMware pays a premium over Yahoo!’s acquisition price of $350 million back in 2007. It could as The VarGuy notes it could trigger a reset for how open source companies are valued.

Related Articles

• VMware Buying Zimbra – My Initial Thoughts (cloudave.com)
• Yahoo to Unload E-mail Provider Zimbra on VMWare (mashable.com)
• Yahoo! to offload Zimbra on…VMware? (theregister.co.uk)
• Zimbra notches 100 percent growth (news.cnet.com)
• Rumor: VMware Buying Zimbra Open Source Email? (thevarguy.com)

Technorati Tags: Cfengine, Cloudera, Covalent, Hyperic, MapReduce, MariaDB, Open Source, Opscode, Puppet, Reductive Labs, Spring Source, VMware, Zimbra

• Open Source Proves Elusive as a Business Model – NYTimes.com – Whether open-source firms are practical as long-term businesses, however, is a much murkier question.
  The best-known open-source company is Red Hat, which produces a variant of the Linux operating system for server computers. Like most of its peers, Red Hat offers a free version of its base product and relies on selling support services and extra tools for revenue. In its last fiscal year, which ended in March, the company’s revenue rose 25 percent to $653 million, and it reported net income of $79 million.
• Open-Source Business Models Aren’t Dead-End Streets – GigaOM – This year, open-source platforms and applications have shown how truly disruptive and influential they can be. However, The New York Times is getting lots of attention with a story that says successful open-source business models remain elusive.
• If You’re Looking For The Open Source Business Model, You’re Looking For The Wrong Thing | Techdirt – But that misses the point. Open source software, by itself, shouldn’t be much of a business. Just as music isn’t much of a business by itself, but it can be a huge component of a larger business, open source software is part of what helps many other businesses.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Open source business models? (startups.com)

Technorati Tags: Business, Open Source

A couple of  weeks ago I got an unhappy email from my web hosting provider telling me I was in violation of their Terms of Service. Of course I called them immediately and was told that there was a “phishing page” hidden in one of my web directories. My blog had been hacked, so I immediately started doing some house cleaning.

After the initial once over and deletion of any suspicious files I went looking for advice on how to “harden my installation”. Here’s what I found:

• Wordpress.org Codex Hardening Wordpress - Lots of good information here on hardening Wordpress including a general overview of Wordpress security considerations.
• Security Scanning Plugin – WP Security Scan is a plugin to alert you to vulnerabilities in your Wordpress installation
• Nice List of Tips from Noupe – Lots of simple to implement tips on how to lock-down Wordpress
• Change your Database Prefix from the Default WP – I used SEO Egghead’s Wordpress Table Prefix Rename Plugin to do this then deleted the plugin once I was done, worked like a champ.
• Blog Security Whitepaper – This was another good, comprehensive source of information on blog security but the last update was in April 2008 so I am not sure if everything is still relevant.
• 9 SEO Security Tips for Wordpress - Nothing unique from the other links but probably the best succinct list of things to do to secure your WordPress blog
• Monitor your Blog – I am trying the PHPIDS for Wordpress plugin which is an implementation of the PHPIDS  (PHP Intrusion Detections System) for Wordpress.  However this plugin seems to interfere with the Wordpress media uploader in my installation. (The effect of using the media uploader when this plugin is active causes the new post page to refresh to the home page of my blog).
• 20 Wordpress Security Plug-ins And Tips To keep Hackers Away – A bunch of plugins to consider to help tighten up your Wordpress security. Remember to turn them on one by one in case they generate conflicts.

One other key piece of advice, if you aren’t using a plugin or other code then remove it.Unused directories are great hiding places for malicious code and web pages.

Hopefully this will be a good resource for others and not an invite to anyone to test these tactics

Technorati Tags: plugins, Security, WordPress

As a long time fan of the Linux desktop I was interested to see the the Linux desktop usage number for personal computers increase to over 1.02%. I suspect it’s partially fueled by the popularity of Linux netbooks from the Dell (who offers an Ubuntu option) and Asus (that’s uses a special version of Xandros Linux).

While there’s no one company behind Linux for personal computers, it’s significant that Linux just broke through to 1.02 percent market share for personal computers, the first time it has ever risen that high, according to data compiled by Net Applications. (Meanwhile, even in beta, Windows 7 continues its march, now hitting .25 percent market share.)

I spent a long time trying to convince myself and others that the future for the desktop was an option of Windows, Mac or Linux. I am less bullish then I once was and now I use both a Mac and a Linux laptop. I really like the Linux desktop for it’s stability and I like the virtual desktop environment afforded by windows managers for Linux and the flexibility to adapt the interface in general to your personal needs.

However, I think we will always struggle with Linux as a desktop operating system as long as application compatibility falters (I can’t open sophisticated Excel spreadsheets from colleagues) and hardware vendors don’t feel obligated to support Linux (My Verizon EVDO card takes extra configuration for it to work under Linux while it’s a snap to set-up on Mac OS X).

So why bother with a Linux desktop at all? Well I found when using my Asus N10 netbook that my battery life is much better under Linux and I feel like the operating system is much more responsive than when I run Windows XP (I downgraded from Vista to reduce the resource requirements improving speed and battery life).  My theory is that over time we will see the focus less on the desktop operating system and more on the avialability of hosted apps that run on them like Google Docs and Zoho. I think at that point the emphasis on the desktop operating system will be greatly diminished.

[Desktop Usage Numbers via Matt Asay]

Technorati Tags: compatibility, Desktop, EVDO, Google Docs, Linux, market share, Ubuntu, Windows, Zoho