Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Interop, Downloads

Dominic Sartorio on SpikeSource and Open Source Interoperability

Community Contributor — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:33:00 GMT

First, many thanks to Microsoft’s Port 25 Team for the opportunity to post today!

Today SpikeSource announced the availability of five additional PHP-based applications on the Windows Server 2008 platform. Gallery, Mantis, Moodle, PhpBB and WebCalendar are available for free download from www.spikesource.com. We welcome you to take a look and to offer your feedback!

Similar to the previous applications we released on Windows Server (Drupal, Alfresco), SpikeSource delivered these as turnkey “SpikeIgnited” applications, with all components needed to run the application available in a single one-click-install distribution. We have also included a variant of our SpikeNet update service optimized for Windows Server 2008.

“That’s great”, you might say, “SpikeSource has ‘Ignited’ a few more apps, so what’s the big deal?” We believe the big deal is that these applications also run on a stack of other Microsoft products in addition to Windows, namely, IIS/Fast-CGI and SQL Server Express, with which many open source products have historically not interoperated well. Quite a bit of engineering went into assembling this “WISP” stack and building/testing these PHP applications, and this know-how is an important step towards improving the interoperability between the worlds of Microsoft and open source.

Why do this? Because customers want it. Throughout SpikeSource’s history, nearly 50% of our customer’s request Windows versions of our open source applications, and most of them also care about interoperating with IIS, SQLServer, Sharepoint, ActiveDirectory and so forth. Our experience is representative of the industry. Ask any commercial OSS ISV with a server-side application, and they’ll tell you the same thing, with similar numbers.

Also, last December, the Open Solutions Alliance (www.opensolutionsalliance.org) published a report (pdf) summarizing the results of its customer outreach efforts. One of the key findings was that customers want better open source and Microsoft interoperability, and moreover, they felt this was the issue that the industry has collectively done the least to address. While there has been a lot of unfortunate history that has gotten in the way of this, ultimately customers don’t care as much about grudges as they care about everything simply working. Together, SpikeSource and Microsoft’s open source lab are doing something about it.

The release of these five PHP applications is just a first step. By taking five commonly used PHP applications and making them run better on a Windows stack, we took a step towards better interoperability, and we also built some technical expertise that we intend to leverage more broadly and share with the community in the future.

So, stay tuned, and we welcome your input. What other types of open source applications are important to run well on Windows? What specific technical issues do you have that you would like to see us solve? What more can we do? Please send us your feedback!

Dominic Sartorio
Sr Director, Product Management, SpikeSource
President, Open Solutions Alliance

Virtual Machine Additions for Linux 2.0

jcannon — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:41:00 GMT

A quick note to let our community know that Virtual Machine Additions for Linux 2.0 has been released - bringing the version number up to 2.0. For those unfamiliar with Virtual Machine Additions for Linux, it is technology layer designed to improve the usability and interoperability of running Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines inside of Virtual Server. From the release notes, it looks like this version adds support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. You can find additional information on running Linux as a guest operating system with Virtual Server on TechNet.

Qualified distributions now include:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
Red Hat Linux 7.3
Red Hat Linux 9.0
SuSE Linux 9.2
SuSE Linux 9.3
SuSE Linux 10.0

Check out download details here.

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Windows Media Player Plug-in for Firefox

hjanssen — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:04:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog called ‘We're Writing Firefox Plug-ins? Interview with Ian Gilman and Thoughts on 10 Months at Microsoft’ (Who came up with that title anyway!)

In which I chronicled my first 10 months on the job. Also in there I mentioned Microsoft writing plug-ins.

Well today I am very proud to announce that we have released another official Microsoft plug-in. It shows another level of interoperability and eagerness in working with the Community to get this released.

This plug-in allows you to use Windows Media Player inside of Firefox. It is designed to support the following Windows platforms;

Windows XP SP2 (x86)
Windows XP SP2 (x64)
Windows Vista (x86)
Windows Vista (x64)

Port25 is hosting it, and you can download it from here; Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin - Download

It was put together by the Windows Media Player team, and special thanks go to Eric Anderson and Thobias Jones. (And all the other people in the Windows Media Player team). I also wanted to thank Mike Schroepfer and the Mozilla Foundation in helping us get this released.

From now on when you go to the plug-in site at Firefox, you will be automatically routed to Port25 to download and install the plug-in.

It is backwards compatible with the old 6.4 Windows Media Player. And among other things has the following new features;

New robust design that addresses all of the known issues with the old plug-in
Windows Media Player will now work with Firefox on Windows Vista
Support for the Windows Media Player OCX scripting interfaces

We will post some links to example code in the next few days to help people use some of the new features.

Install it, and to test it just go to Port25 and check out any of the videos.

Windows and Linux Integration: Printer Sharing between Windows and Linux

MichaelF — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 22:13:00 GMT

Last Thursday we posted an interview with Jeremy Moskowitz in which we mentioned the book he authored: Windows and Linux Integration.

As promised, today we have posted a complete chapter from his book dealing with: Printer Sharing between Windows and Linux

Please respond with any questions or comments, we'll see if we can get Jeremy back on to answer your feedback.

UNIX Interop in Vista Beta 2 and Longhorn Server

jcannon — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 17:06:00 GMT

Another guest blog this week from Identity Management Program Manager, Shamit Patel:
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Hi,
Last week, we released two new utilities to help customers achieve UNIX / Windows Interop. The first is a set of utilities and the SDK for the Subsystem for UNIX Architecture (SUA) in Vista Beta 2 & Longhorn. For those unaware, SUA is a native subsystem residing on top of the Windows kernel, just like the Win32 subsystem. It provides the basic infrastructure to run UNIX-based applications and scripts on Windows Vista (Ultimate and Enterprise) and Longhorn Server.

We've also released the UNIX-side components for Identity Management with UNIX. This essentially provides the utilities which enable password sync between Windows and UNIX environments. These are the UNIX-based utilities to enable successful synchronization.

I realize many of you may not be testing Vista or Longhorn, but for those who are, or have corporate testing, we would love to hear your feedback on the product, scripts and documentation.

View full post on Longhorn Server Identity Management for UNIX components and Vista Beta 2/Longhorn Utilities and SDK for UNIX Subsystem.
Download Utilities and SDK for Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications in Microsoft Windows Vista / Longhorn Server Beta 2.
Download UNIX Side Components for Identity Management for UNIX – Shipped with Windows Server codenamed Longhorn Server Beta 2.

Thanks all,
Shamit

Security and Directory Services for UNIX Guide Released

admin — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:23:00 GMT

We've got a quick guest blog before the holiday weekend on a new set of interoperability tools released this week by Microsoft, and in conjunction with some very talented folks in our partner, sales & services group. Welcome Luis Camara Manoel, Program Manager for in Communications & Collaboration...take it away Luis:

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(Luis Camara Manoel)

Hi all,
The Interoperability and Migration Solutions team at Microsoft is very happy to have just released the Windows Security and Directory Services for UNIX Guide. This guide details step-by-step instructions for providing security and directory services for mixed Windows and UNIX environments using Active Directory. The approach we followed here describes multiple options to achieve two different system end-states:

1. UNIX clients are enabled to use Windows Active Directory Kerberos for authentication while continuing to use a UNIX-based store for authorization.

2. UNIX clients are enabled to use Windows Active Directory Kerberos for authentication and use Active Directory LDAP for authorization.

We have also added some tools and templates to help plan, develop, deploy, and operate these solutions.

Although this release addresses AD integration only for Solaris 9 and for RedHat 9, it is pretty simple to see how it would apply to other UNIX and UNIX-like systems.

You can download the guide at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5118169 and please let me know what you think. I am very interested in finding out how the guidance is received.

Have a great holiday weekend,
-Luis