Monthly Archives: August 2014

Major South Korean Pharmaceutical Company Ditches Windows for Ubuntu

South Korea has been very friendly with Microsoft and its products, so it’s understandable why succeeding in that country with an open source product would be very difficult. Canonical is now trying to make a dent there with its Ubuntu operating system.

Canonical published some very interesting details about a South Korean company called Bukwang Pharmaceuticals, which ditched most of its Windows OSes for Ubuntu and saved a lot of money. On top of the obvious savings, it also got a lot of good press, and other businesses found out that it can be done.

“Bukwang Pharmaceuticals has been developing and manufacturing drugs and personal hygiene products in South Korea since 1960. Today, it has over 600 employees based at various sites across the country. Prior to its switch to Ubuntu, the company had 620 desktops, with 60% running Windows 7 and the remainder on Windows XP. When Microsoft’s support…

View original post 145 more words

C25K – Week 4 Day 1

I completed C25K Week 4 Day 1 (3.20 km), in 18:17, pace 05:42 min/km, with @RunDouble http://rndb.co/f4ZY

Nike+ Track

C25K – Week 3 Day 3

I completed C25K Week 3 Day 3 (1.83 km), in 14:59, pace 08:10 min/km, with @RunDouble http://rndb.co/k520

GPS fritzed during the run again today, messing up my pace time. Last workout of Week 3. Next run is the first workout of Week 4. 5 minutes walk, followed by and interval of 400m run/200m walk, then an interval 800m run/400m walk, and then a repeat of the two intervals, before a 5 minute cool-down walk.

Nike+ Track

C25K – Week 3 Day 2

I completed C25K Week 3 Day 2 (1.83 km), in 13:18, pace 07:16 min/km, with @RunDouble http://rndb.co/z50E

GPS fritzed during the run, messing up my pace time.

Virtualisation

Wow, you learn something new everyday. I’ve just found out about two variations on virtualisation. Linux Containers (LXC) and Vagrant.

Linux Containers (LXC) is known as OS-level virtualisation, meaning the kernel looks after the virtualisation, and there is no need for some extra management software along the lines of VMWare or Virtualbox. The guest OSes run as containers, similar to chroot jails, and all containers, including the main one you booted from, share the same kernel and resources as your main container. As such, LXC only supports linux-based guest OSes. You can’t (easily, anyway) run Windows under LXC. Homepage, Wikipedia.

Vagrant is a strange one. It sells itself as being a way to keep development environments consistent, and I can understand why — if you have a team of people all with a VM of the same OS, but end with different results because they have tinkered with the settings on the VM OS, Vagrant prevents this by keeping the core one in the cloud, and each time the machine is started up, it checks itself against the cloud version, updating itself if needed. That guarantees consistency. Homepage, Wikipedia.

I haven’t tried both of these tools in great detail yet, but here’s some related links for you to check out: