Media Reaction – Google Announces “Chrome” Operating System based on Linux

This was the day many people had been waiting and hoping years for… Google takes up the Open Source / Linux code base and enters into full competition with Microsoft in the operating system market. Now it is official, as Google announced on their blog yesterday. The “Chrome OS” will be, like Android, based on the Linux kernel and essentially a Google-sponsored re-write of the user interface over that to build a next-generation, cloud OS geared to run web apps. The most important point here is “browser” based vs. “desktop” based, because with that comes all of the potentialities of cloud applications, remote hosted drives, distributed computing, SaaS, etc. Since the Chrome OS is being specifically targeted at netbooks, many are also pointing to Adobe Air applications vs. traditional desktop apps as future standards. The last point though highlights the main asterisk to the announcement: the Chrome OS will be optimized for netbooks first, rather than desktop PCs, which most users and virtually all professionals & business users rely on.

Consider then a very methodical development cycle where Google moves from search, search advertising, apps & code / cloud offerings to launching 1) a mobile phone OS based on open source Linux code base, “Android” 2) a netbook OS based on Linux & browser, “Chrome OS”, to…. 3) full desktop OS (based on Linux) that is integrated with Google products and a direct competitor to Apple / OSX & Microsoft / Windows, (unfinished, but reportedly also pending as a next phase extension of the Chrome OS). The long range significance is that the leading IT company in the world is launching, progressively the open source movement into mainstream computing, and at every level providing free, open source software alternatives for both business and personal users to the proprietary offerings by Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, & other old school software companies. Again, this is great news for independent developers of web based applications, as it levels the playing field and allows for direct entry into the marketplace on the open source foundation following Google.

It can be argued that this is no big deal, Linux has been around for years, and still has only 1% desktop market share. But Google has 80% market share in search. If, by the law of averages, they can pull a 40% market share away from Microsoft & Apple in the next 10 years they can totally transform the popular foundation of computing a second time. Given the momentum behind Open Source at this time, changing consumer habits, and worldwide consumer trust in Google, I think there is a strong possibility in this.

The following posts include the initial announcement from the Google blog and the media reaction to the announcement:

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

7/07/2009 09:37:00 PM

“It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.”

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.”

“Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

“When Google (GOOG) launched Android, the open-source operating system designed to power mobile Internet devices, industry analysts were surprised to discover that PC manufacturers had begun to use it to power netbooks, the cheap, low-power laptops that have become among the biggest sellers in a dismal market. Now, Google has thrown itself fully into the netbook market with the release of Chrome OS, a new operating system based on its Web browser and designed to directly challenge Microsoft (MSFT) for the future of the personal computer. The search giant had originally planned to announce the release today but bumped it up to yesterday after the New York Times got wind of it.”

“In the end, Google’s strike may not cut deep into enemy territory. Chrome, the web browser, is still stuck at a tiny market share of 1.2%. Android is available on just two or three phones, not enough to really make an impact. Google Apps – productivity software to handle spreadsheets and word documents – has just come out of its “beta” test phase, but look around you and you will find most people still using Microsoft Office. The one field where Chrome OS may make a difference is the market for the open source Linux operating system. Chrome OS will use bits of the Linux kernel, the link between the computer hardware and the Chrome browser running on it. Google is bound to make Chrome OS much more user-friendly than most “distros” or versions of Linux available right now. Instead of slaying Microsoft, Chrome OS might corner the segment of the consumer space that might have been Linux’s. No doubt, Google’s charge with Chrome OS will needle Microsoft. But we won’t know for years whether it will deliver a mere pinprick, or is the fine point of the dagger at the heart of Microsoft.”

“Fast forward to today. The Chrome browser now has 30 million active users, says Google, and tracking services say it has 6% or so market share. Not bad for a browser that’s less than a year old. And now, WOW. Google just bolted a big ol’ bag of drivers (also known as the Linux kernel) to Chrome and are calling it the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s going to be hard for people to continue to deny its operating systemness now. The new OS will focus entirely on the web: ‘The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform.’ Now, finally, even the tech purists can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Windows is hardware management plus an application platform, and we call that an OS. Chrome OS is hardware management plus an application platform (the browser), and we call that an OS, too.”

“Google really can challenge Microsoft, because the proliferation of Web-based applications makes the operating system much less important,” said Zeus Kerravala, analyst at Yankee Group. “As we pave the way towards real Web 2.0, there will be less of a real tie-in to Windows.”

“Google, which already offers a suite of e-mail, Web and other software products that compete with Microsoft, said on Tuesday it would launch a new operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks.”

“Called the Google Chrome Operating System, the new software will be in netbooks for consumers in the second half of 2010, Google said in a blog post, adding that it was working with multiple manufacturers.”

“The effort marks the latest attack by Google on Microsoft, which dominates the market for operating system software that powers computer applications. The Mountain View, Calif., company, which makes 97% of its revenue from online advertising, has been trying to compete with Microsoft and other software makers by offering more software that runs in a Web browser and isn’t downloaded directly to computers. Now it appears to be broadening its approach, in a move that could give it greater distribution of its own online software services, including word-processing and email software.”

“But whether it can chip away at Microsoft’s dominance in the market remains unclear. In the months since its launch, Chrome has done little to challenge Microsoft’s lead in the browser software. And some hardware companies have been slow to adopt Google software — like its Android operating system, which is targeted at running applications on mobile phones — arguing it isn’t robust enough to handle many tasks.”

“The announcement contained a thesis statement that is a bit more significant than it might appear at first: ‘It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.’ That statement has both strategic and practical implications, which we’ll consider in turn.”

“From a strategic perspective, ‘what operating systems should be’ clearly involves a heavy dose of Google-driven Web apps, from e-mail to spreadsheets. The entire OS will be focused on getting users into a Web browser as quickly as possible; any other applications will be secondary and probably not provided by Google. Instead, once the browser launches, users can do their computing via online applications, saving their data in the cloud (think of all those “gDrive” rumors from the last few years)…”

“From a technological perspective, there appear to be some interesting aspects to rethinking the operating system. For one, by having an extremely narrow focus—bringing up a networking stack and browser as quickly as possible—Chrome OS has the ability to cut down on the hassles related to restarting and hibernating computers. And, aside from the browser, all of the key applications will reside online, security and other software updates won’t happen on the computer itself, which should also improve the user experience.”

“But let’s be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of bombs on its chief rival, Microsoft. It even says as much in the first paragraph of its post, ‘However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web.’ Yeah, who do you think they mean by that?”

“And it’s a genius play. So many people are buying netbooks right now, but are running WIndows XP on them. Windows XP is 8 years old. It was built to run on Pentium IIIs and Pentium 4s. Google Chrome OS is built to run on both x86 architecture chips and ARM chips, like the ones increasingly found in netbooks. It is also working with multiple OEMs to get the new OS up and running next year.”

“Obviously, this Chrome OS will be lightweight and fast just like the browser itself. But also just like the browser, it will be open-sourced. Think Microsoft will be open-sourcing Windows anytime soon?”

“I also suspect that some at Google were not entirely happy with the the direction that its Android mobile OS project is taking. Numerous netbook makers have made plans to install Android on small laptops. But Android was designed for handsets and a move to bigger devices is problematic. At a minimum, porting Android to larger screens would require major modifications in the user interface and possible some deeper components, such as the file system. This would lead to what computer scientists call ‘forking,’ the splitting of an operating system into branches that have serious incompatibilities between them. The push for Android on netbooks was being driven by manufacturers’ dissatisfaction with both Microsoft and current Linux distributions. In some cases, the computer makers wanted to build netbooks based on the ARM processor, such as Qualcomm’s Snapdragon platform, rather than an Intel or AMD x86 processor, and Android is designed for ARM. Done right, Chrome would satisfy those desires while helping Google protect the integrity of Android.”

TechMeme – List of Blogs Discussing Google Chrome OS:

“Discussion: Google Watch, MediaPost, Mark Evans, Fast Company, Between the Lines, TheNextWeb.com, ZDNET.com.au, Computerworld Blogs, TechCrunch, MediaMemo, Wall Street Journal, Open Gardens, Silicon Alley Insider, Mashable!, Google Operating System, CNET News, Computerworld, Bloomberg, Hardware 2.0, PC World, Network World, p2pnet, VentureBeat, Financial Times, blogs.chron.com, OStatic blogs, Tech Beat, pasmith’s blog, Ajaxian, Gadget Lab, Search Engine Watch, Search Engine Land, 9 to 5 Mac, Lifehacker, ClickZ, Android Central, Electricpig, Search Engine Journal, GottaBeMobile.com, Liliputing, SEO and Tech Daily, the Econsultancy blog, Gadgetell, jkOnTheRun, Guardian, Search Engine Roundtable, MacRumors, Music Ally, eWeek, TechFlash, CloudAve, Churbuck.com, PSFK, Neowin.net, Irregular Enterprise, AnandTech, Mobile Opportunity, DailyTech, Softpedia News, All things Indian Startups …, The Mobile Gadgeteer, AppScout, DailyFinance, Netbook Choice, T3.com News, Electronic Pulp, Gizmodo, Deep Jive Interests, Text Technologies, TECH.BLORGE.com, ReadWriteWeb, I4U News, Techgeist, SlashGear, istartedsomething, Blogation, Epicenter, HackingCough, louisgray.com, ithinkdifferent, paidContent, OhGizmo!, bit-tech.net, InformationWeek, Tim Anderson’s ITWriting, Microsoft News Tracker, Zoho Blogs, CellPassion, Intuitive.com, TeleRead, Tech Trader Daily, MobileContentToday, Download Squad, Engadget, TUAW and Raph’s Website”

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Media Reaction – Google Announces “Chrome” Operating System based on Linux

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Power Outage to Cost RackSpace up to $3.5 million in Refunds

According to a SEC filing by the publicly traded company RackSpace, the power outage that caused its servers to go offline for an extended period last month will cost the company up to $3.5 million USD in refunds. According to the report: “We have experienced power interruptions which have affected a portion of our Grapevine, Texas data center. We have posted updates on our recent power interruption on our website blog and our customer portal for the benefit of our customers. We are continuing to assess the financial impact of service credits due to these events. Currently, our preliminary range for the resulting one time service credits is estimated to be between $2.5 million and $3.5 million. Our website blog is located at http://www.rackspace.com/blog/ .”

The story of RackSpace’s downtime had a nice run across Twitter & the blogosphere, typical of which is this post by TechCrunch: “Last week, Michael Jackson’s death caused sites to fail left and right. Today, it’s a very different problem. The hosting service Rackspace has been completely down for the past 30 minutes or so… Apparently, it’s an entire network outage [Update below, while it was a massive outage, it wasn't a full outage, apparently.] and so the usually very responsive Rackspace team cannot even respond to emails or tweet (though I’m sure we’ll be seeing some updates from smartphones shortly).”

I have been personally considering migrating to Mosso, looking at their cloud sites and cloud servers options, as we also had trouble for sometime on our own host. Bottom line is basically every and any host is going to have issues from time to time, when everything is working normally you rarely stop to appreciate how good the service actually is. But most people have zero tolerance for downtime from a web host, as that is the basic fundamental service they are providing as a business. If the downtime issues continue, mass migration quickly ensues. Did the issue hit a crisis point for RackSpace?

From June 30th, 2009 RackSpace blog:

“Rackspace community,

Yesterday afternoon at 3:15CDT our data center in Dallas experienced an interruption in power to portions of the facility. The interruption caused customer servers to lose power and go down. We sincerely apologize for this disruption and know that it impacted our customers’ businesses as well as the experience of many who use the web. Although we have had some issues with this data center before, please know that we will do what it takes to improve its reliability and performance. We owe you an action plan to prevent this type of thing in the future, and we’ll get that to you as soon as it is ready.

Specific to this situation, here’s what we are doing right now:

The data center is currently running on utility power.

We are continuing to research the root cause analysis for yesterday’s generator failures. We have flown in our senior-level engineers from our global operations, and they are working with our external suppliers to determine the cause and how we can prevent this from happening again. We have the best outside experts from companies like Cummins, GE and Eaton.

We have re-serviced and re-checked our UPS units.

Tonight at 9:00CDT we will continue our testing of the generator bank in question as we narrow down the variables to determine and remediate root cause.

Our Support teams will continue to work with all affected customers to ensure they’re up and running.

We will continue to provide status updates on our customer portal (https://my.rackspace.com/) and on http://www.rackspace.com/blog/.

A copy of the incident report that we sent to affected customers can be found at the following link. Though we typically treat our incident reports as proprietary information between us and our customers, we are publicly posting the report for this incident due to high level of public interest that this incident has received.

I want to ensure you that we are doing everything we can to bring this to resolution as quickly as possible. We appreciate your support and understanding. Our promise is Fanatical Support, we believe in it, and we will work with each of our customers to honor that promise.

Lanham Napier CEO, Rackspace Hosting”

Have they solved the issue?

RackSpace Blog – July 7, 2009

Dallas data center update as of 1:30 pm CDT

“Today at approximately 11:00 AM, an electrical connection failed, causing a brief power interruption to customers on UPS cluster A. This failure also may have caused intermittent network performance issues for customers supported by UPS clusters B and E for a short time. For cluster A customers, we bypassed the UPS and restored power to the servers via generator within a few minutes. Currently systems supported by UPS cluster A are still running on generator power. Repairs are underway and we plan to return to utility power with UPS support as soon as possible. We will follow up with additional updates as new information becomes available.”

RackSpace will undoubtedly lose some business because of this, but they have been having massive growth even during the recession, and it seems they are planning to calm down quite a few customers with a refund or account credit. Since the failures seem to be related to mundane issues related to power generation and backup power supplies, and not the cloud server architecture, I would expect the problem to be easily resolved and hopefully no longer an issue in the future.

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Power Outage to Cost RackSpace up to $3.5 million in Refunds

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Acquia Launches Cloud-based Solr Search Indexing

Acquia, the start-up company founded by Dries Buytaert, the lead developer & founder of Drupal, has announced that they are now providing paid search indexing for Drupal sites on a subscription basis aimed at enterprise sites. Similar to Mollom, Acquia’s anti-spam software for CMS platforms, Acquia Search will also work for those running other open source software like WordPress, Joomla, TYPO3, etc as well as sites with proprietary code. Acquia Search is based on the Lucene and Solr distributions of Apache, and essentially works by having Acquia index your site’s content on their computers and then send it with encryption on demand to supply user queries using an integrated Acquia Search module. According to the announcement, Acquia is using Solr server farms on Amazon EC2 to power this on cloud architecture.

Many people have complained about Drupal’s core search functionality over the years, but the server requirements behind Solr and Lucene require a Java extension that most people are not equipped to manage on their existing IT architecture, staff, or budget. So Acquia is offering these search functionalities as SaaS, or Software as a Service on a remote-hosted, pre-configured basis. If you want to do it yourself, see:
http://drupal.org/project/apachesolr

Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solr

According to Dries:

“Acquia Search is included for no additional cost in every Acquia Network subscription. Basic and Professional subscribers have one ‘search slice’ and Enterprise subscribers have five ‘search slices’. A slice includes the processing power to index your site, to do index updates, to store your index, and to process your site visitors’ search queries. Each slice includes 10MB of indexing space – enough for a site with between 1,000 and 2,000 nodes. Customers who exceed the level included with their subscription may purchase additional slices. A ten-slice extension package costs an additional $1,000/year, and will cover an additional 10,000 – 20,000 nodes in an index of 100MB. For my personal blog, which has about 900 nodes at the time of this writing, a Basic Acquia Network subscription ($349 USD/year) would give me all the benefits of Acquia Search, plus all the other Acquia Network services.”

Put in this perspective, most Drupal users likely won’t be switching to Acquia Search anytime soon. But, for the most part… they have little need to. For small sites or social networks, Drupal’s core search is going to be generally sufficient. Drupal will index your site automatically on cron runs, and keep this index of keywords and nodes in a table of your MySQL database. If you are working a lot with taxonomy and CCK fields, then Faceted Search is a recommended choice: http://drupal.org/project/faceted_search

I have used Faceted Search on a number of sites and it is excellent for building a custom search engine around your site’s own custom vocabularies, hierarchies, and site structures. Faceted Search is also important in a number of Semantic Web integrations working with RDF data and other micro-tags attached to data fields. Acquia Search is designed to work in this way as well as to facilitate the number crunching involved when high traffic sites with extremely large databases of content need to sift through search archives quickly to return results from user queries. Consider the example of Drupal.org in this context – Acquia Search is the solution to managing over 500,000 nodes and millions of search queries on an extremely active site.

“Reality is that for a certain class of websites — like intranets or e-commerce websites — search can be the most important feature of the entire site. Faceted search can really increase your conversions if you have an e-commerce website, or can really boost the productivity of your employees if you have a large intranet. For those organizations, Drupal’s built in search is simply not adequate. We invested in search because we believe that for many of these sites, enterprise-grade search is a requirement… The search module shipped with Drupal core has its purpose and target audience. It isn’t right for everyone, just as Acquia Search is not for everyone. Both are important, not just for the Drupal community at large, but also for many of Acquia’s own customers. Regardless, there is no question that we need to keep investing and improving Drupal’s built-in search.”

In summary, Acquia Search is mostly targeted at enterprise level Drupal users with extremely large databases and high traffic, and is a cloud based solution that should not only speed up the rate of return on results, it should also improve the quality of the material returned based on faceted keywords & vocabularies. For those using Acquia’s personal or small business subscription accounts, the new search should appear as an additional “free bonus” with your monthly package of services. For users, even on a small site, the efficiency of faceted search may make information more accessible for visitors.

To learn more, visit: http://buytaert.net/acquia-search-benefits-for-visitors

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Acquia Launches Cloud-based Solr Search Indexing

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Facebook Announces Developer Contest for India

Facebook would become the first social networking site to showcase apps in Hindi as it calls for entries in English and Hindi to showcase web development skills in two categories of Facebook apps & Facebook Connect Integrations

New Delhi, India, July 3, 2009: The day for which the Indian developer community had been waiting has finally arrived. Facebook, whose mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected, announced today the launch of ‘Facebook India Developer Contest’ – a contest for Indian developers to showcase their web development skills by creating Facebook applications and Facebook Connect Integrations. The contest began on July 2 and ends on September 11, 2009 and is located at www.facebook.com/developercontestindia.

This is the first time Facebook is organizing a developer contest in India. Entries will be judged on originality, business potential, social utility, usefulness, expressive features, intuitiveness and potential of the application. There are three cash prizes; $4000 for the first place, $2000 for the second place and $1000 for the third, in each of the two categories.

To enter the contest, participants are required to create a Facebook platform application for use on the Facebook site or Facebook Connect integrations in English or Hindi and register their application in the contest’s homepage. The contest is open to Indian residents over the age of 16 with a facebook.com account.

Ruchi Sangvi, Engineer and Manager of the Facebook platform said, “India ranks second in the number of software developers with 3.9 million software developers; we are very excited to engage with the developer community. Facebook has experienced a tremendous growth in India. Through the contest, we hope to see many rich experiences that leverage the social graph and empower Facebook users to share and connect.”

Facebook Connect enables people to combine their Facebook experiences with any participating Website, desktop application or mobile device.  When websites incorporate Facebook Connect, Facebook’s more than 200 million active users around the globe can automatically import profile information and bypass the need to build a friends’ list from scratch. More than 10000 websites have incorporated Facebook Connect since its general availability in December 2008.

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Facebook Announces Developer Contest for India

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Replacing FPSS with Views Slideshow in Drupal – Tutorial

I have been using FrontPage SlideShow from JoomlaWorks on a number of sites, and would recommend it as a good CSS/PHP route to building a featured slide section that links to promoted content, articles, blog posts, groups, etc. One problem is that it is not free, the cost is around $35 for a license to use it on 5 to 10 domains. A second problem is highlighted by the example of releasing an installation profile for Drupal. We can release all of the code under GPL for the project except for FPSS. So, I began working on a conversion of our FPSS slides into Views Slideshow views.

The easiest way is to create a new content type, for example “slide,” and disable comments, post information, front page promotion, etc. Decide which size you would like to standardize all the images at, and then create a simple div structure with the image only as content. You can create a “views slideshow” view, sort only the “slide” content type, save it as a block or create a panels views block and embed it on a panels page. Use block or panels permissions to control the display. This is fine if you are using only images or banners made in photoshop that combine text and images, but if you want the to be text editable, viewable by search engines, and style-able by CSS, you will need to build a more complex template for your “slide” content type.

TUTORIAL:

1. Goto admin “content types” – create new content type “slide”
+ disable comments, attachments, and front page promotion in the content type form
+ goto themes “configure” – disable display post information for slides
+ you may want to disable the WYSYWIG editor (if any) on the slide node create form.
+ FCKeditor Global Profile: admin/settings/fckeditor/editg
—> visibility settings, add to exclude: node/add/slide
+ set the permissions – or skip if you only want admin to be creating this content type

2. Create a new slide – use a consistent template for this content type to build Views Slideshow displays
+ you can use html, css, php, etc. to create a custom template
+ we are looking to replace the FPSS template we are using now, and will give the template + css as a sample

Template:
+ paste in slide node create form – edit the links & paths to be consistent with your information

<div id="viewslide">
	<div id="slideleft">
		<div id="slidetop">
			<h2><a href="/articles/second-life">Prototype of a Sustainable Virtual Reality</a></h2>
		</div>
		<div id="slidenote">
			<p>Avatar: Elusyve Jewell</p>
		</div>
		<div id="slidedesc">
			<p>Unlike any other site on the web, Second Life has transformed the internet into an immersive, 3-D virtual world, a collectively authored mindscape navigated by cyberpunk avatars. How long until the VR goggles appear and we log our first sessions on the holodeck? A look at the future evolution of Second Life. <a href="/articles/second-life">Read more</a>.</p>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div id="slideright"><a href="/articles/second-life"><img width="520" height="206" src="/files/secondlife.jpg" alt="Second Life" /></a></div>
</div>

CSS – paste in style.css or equivalent
+ Note: in the Drupala theme this is in blocks.css

#viewslide {
	width: 698px;
	height: 240px;
	border: 1px solid #B0B0B0;
	margin: 0;
	margin-top: 5px;
	padding: 0;
}

#slideleft {
	float: left;
	width: 154px;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 10px;
	padding-right: 0;
	border-right: 1px solid #B0B0B0;
}

#slidetop {
	width: 134px;
	margin:0;
	margin-left: 5px;
	margin-top: -10px;
	padding:0;
}

#slidetop h2 {
	font-family: Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;
	font-size: 18px;
	line-height: 18px;
	color: #0088BF;
	font-weight:normal;
	letter-spacing:-1px;
	border: none;
	background: #fff;
}
div.block div#slidetop h2 {
	height: auto;
	margin-bottom: 10px;
	margin-top: 16px;
	padding-bottom: 3px;
	padding-left: 0;
	padding-top: 0;
}
#slidetop h2 a {
	font-family: Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;
	font-size: 18px;
	line-height: 18px;
	color: #0088BF;
}
#slidetop h2 a:hover {
	color: #CC3300 !important;
}

#slidenote {
	width: 134px;
	margin: 0;
	margin-top: -10px;
	margin-left: 5px;
	padding: 0;
}

#slidenote p {
	color:#28488C;
	height: 10px;
	font-family: Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;
	font-size: 8pt;
	font-weight: bold;
	line-height: 10px;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

#slidedesc {
	width: 134px;
	margin-right: 0;
	margin-left: 5px;
	margin-top: 5px;
	margin-bottom: 12px;
	padding: 0;
}

#slidedesc p {
	font-family: Arial,Verdana,sans-serif;
	font-size: 8pt;
	line-height: 10px;
	color: #333333;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

#slideright {
	float: right;
	width: 532px;
	margin: 0;
	padding: 0;
}

#slideright img {
	border: 0;
	margin: 0;
	margin-left: -1px;
	padding: 16px 0;
}

IE7 CSS Fix – paste in ie7.css
+ Note: in the Drupala theme this is in fix-ie2.css

#slidetop {
	margin-top: 10px;
}
#slidedesc {
	margin-bottom: 12px;
}
div.block div#slidetop h2 {
	margin-top: 6px;
}

IE6 CSS Fix – paste in ie6.css
+ Note: in the Drupala theme this is in fix-ie.css

#slidetop {
	margin-top: 10px;
}
div.block div#slidetop h2 {
	margin-top: 6px;
}

Note: this code is cross-browser tested in FF, IE7, IE6, Safari, Opera, & Chrome. It includes theme specific CSS fixes that may not be applicable to all theme code & CSS structures. It is configured to work with the Drupala & SEO-Mix themes for the Drupala installation profile.

3. To recreate the full effect of FPSS, you will need to open the images into an editor like photoshop and add a 20px background color: #CCCCCC (fade 64%) “tab” – use Arial font, change the alignment to vertical, and add a “read more…” text snippet along the bottom corner going up the side of the image.

4. Create a few of these “slide” content type nodes (full html) using the template, then goto views and create a Views Slideshow. Settings: page / block – views slideshow list view – fields: node body, no title, sort by random, and 10 nodes by page (filter to recommended 3 in panel settings), node: published, node-type: “slide”
+ Note: Views Slideshow also has its own configuration panels for fade settings, speed, etc.

5. Embed the Views Slideshow – goto panels – “views panes” and create a views block for the view just created (D5) – embed the block in any panels page or use admin/build/blocks to display in thee regions by path
+ You may want to “Set view URL to panel URL” additionally in the views pane settings

6. Goto “taxonomy” in admin and create a vocabulary for the “slide” content type if you want to create more views and sort the slideshows for particular pages.

Summary:

FPSS comes with 7 or 8 different templates at least and has quite a few features, very few of which are replicated here. We basically needed to change from the version of FPSS we were using to an open source alternative and Views Slideshow is a great module. Drupal designers who spend some time to create templates for Views Slideshow will find them extremely useful in serving multimedia content, or as a replacement for Flash in some situations. I also like and recommend FPSS and will probably continue to use it in some sites.

Example:

Views Slideshow: http://drupal.org/project/views_slideshow

FrontPage Slideshow: http://www.frontpageslideshow.net/

Drupal Module: http://drupal.org/project/fpss

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Replacing FPSS with Views Slideshow in Drupal – Tutorial

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