Ubuntu Michigan LoCo stud and overall nice guy Rick Harding has just published an Introduction to Bzr in Python Magazine.

There will be a follow up article next month as well. Special thanks to Robert Collins for helping to answer Rick's questions about bzr.

A couple of months ago, just before the Hardy release, I posted some hints for having a smooth upgrade. As the Intrepid Ibex release is three weeks ahead and beta is flying around, I’d like to remember on the hints with some minor updates:

After these steps, feel free to give “update-manager -d” a try. Take notes of things that look strange and check launchpad bug tracker if they are already reported. Now it is up to you to help making Ubuntu a better distribution and Intrepid a really success.

Launchpod: the Launchpad team podcast!

Hosts: Matthew Revell, Graham Binns and Joey Stanford.
Theme: Obscurity by Barry Warsaw.

Talk to us! Episode 13 of Launchpad will be recorded in London at the end of October. Send us your questions because the full Launchpad team will be available to take them!

Download ogg vorbis file.

Podcast feed.

Update: Wiki is fixed now....

Regarding the latest UWN (BTW, why it is not on the wiki but on the forum, I thought the wiki is the main information source?)

SRU means : (C&P of the forum page)

Glossary of Terms

1. DRBD - a block device which is designed to build high availability clusters.
1. KVM - Kernel based Virtual Machine
1. SRU - Search/Retrieve via URL

But what the Ubuntu Server team meant: SRU == Stable Release Update

If it would be on the wiki (I didn't check I have to confess) I would have already updated that...

Please fix ;)

Having a real hardware raid controller is a nice thing: Especially in a server setup it helps you keeping data safe on multiple disks. Though, a common mistake is, having a raid controller and not monitoring it. Why? Let’s say, you have a simple type 1 array (one disk mirrored to another) and one of the disks fails. If your raid systems works it will continue to work. But if you did not setup a monitoring for it, you won’t notice it and the chance of a total data loss increases as you are running on one disk now.

So monitoring a raid is actually the step that makes your raid system as safe as you wanted it when setting it up. Some raids are quite easy to monitor, like a Linux software raid system. Some need special software. As I recently got a bunch of dedicated (Hetzner DS8000 and other) servers with 3ware raid controllers, I checked the common software repositories for monitoring software and was surprised not finding any suitable. So a web research showed me that there are Linux tools from 3ware. Of course they don’t provide .deb packages so you need to take of this yourself if you don’t want to install the software manually.

But there exists an unofficial Debian repository by Jonas Genannt (thank you!), providing recent packages of 3ware utilities under http://jonas.genannt.name/. Check the repository, it offers 3ware-3dms and 3ware-cli. 3ware-3dms is a web application for managing your raid controller via browser, BUT: think twice, if you want this. The application opens a privileged port (888) as it is not able to bind on the local interface and has a crappy user identification system. As I am not a friend of opening ports and closing them afterwards via firewall I dropped the web solution.

The “3ware-cli” utility is just a command line interface to 3ware controllers. Just grab a .deb from the repository above and install it via “dpkg -i xxx.deb”. Aftwerwards you stark asking your controller questions about it’s status. The command is called “tw_cli”, so let’s give it a try with “info” as parameter:

# tw_cli info
Ctl   Model        (V)Ports  Drives   Units   NotOpt  RRate   VRate  BBU
------------------------------------------------------------------------
c0    8006-2LP     2         2        1       0       2       -      -

tw_cli told us, that there is one controller (meaning a real piece of raid hardware) called “c0″ with two drives. No we want more detailed information about the given controller:

# tw_cli info c0
 
Unit  UnitType  Status         %RCmpl  %V/I/M  Stripe  Size(GB)  Cache  AVrfy
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
u0    RAID-1    OK             -       -       -       232.885   ON     -      
 
Port   Status           Unit   Size        Blocks        Serial
---------------------------------------------------------------
p0     OK               u0     232.88 GB   488397168     6RYBP4R9
p1     OK               u0     232.88 GB   488397168     6RYBSHJC

tw_cli reports that controller c0 has one unit “u0″. A unit is the device that your operating system is working with - the “virtual” raid drive provided by the raid controller. There are two ports/drives in this unit, called “p0″ and “p1″. Both of them have “OK” as status message meaning that the drives are running fine.

You also ask a drive directly by asking tw_cli for the port on the controller:

# tw_cli info c0 p0

Port   Status           Unit   Size        Blocks        Serial
---------------------------------------------------------------
p0     OK               u0     232.88 GB   488397168     6RYBP4R9            

# tw_cli info c0 p1

Port   Status           Unit   Size        Blocks        Serial
---------------------------------------------------------------
p1     OK               u0     232.88 GB   488397168     6RYBSHJC

So you might already got the clue: As tw_cli is just a command line tool your task for an automated setup is setting up a cronjob checking the status of the ports (not the unit! the ports - trust me) regularly and sending a mail or nagios alarm when necessary. I just started writing a little shell script which, right now, just returns an exit status - 0 for a working raid and 1 for a problem:

#!/bin/bash
 
UNIT=u0
CONTROLLER=c0
PORTS=( p0 p1 )
 
tw_check() {
  local regex=${1:-${UNIT}}
  local field=3
  if [ $# -gt 0 ]; then
    field=2
  fi
  local check=$(tw_cli info ${CONTROLLER} $1 \
    | awk "/^$regex/ { print \${field} }")
  [ "XOK" = "X${check}" ]
  return $?
}
 
tw_check || exit 1
for PORT in ${PORTS[@]}; do
tw_check ${PORT} || exit 1
done

As you see you can configure unit, controller and ports. I have not checked this against systems with multiple controllers and units as I don’t have such a setup. But if you need you could just put the configuration stuff in a sourced configuration file.

After writing this little summary I checked all servers I am responsible of and noticed that nearly every server with hardware raid has a 3ware controller and can be checked with tw_cli. Fine…

Let me know how you manage your 3ware raid monitoring under GNU/Linux and Debian/Ubuntu based systems.

For last Kubuntu Tutorals Day and again at Ubuntu Developer Week I gave a quick introduction to PyKDE creating a simple web browser using Qt's WebKit widget.

Now I have put the Python KDE tutorial on techbase so you can learn how to make a web browser too.

I am an American. I am also a Christian. I am not a fundamentalist, and I do not believe it is appropriate or somehow necessary to force others to follow what I believe. I may discuss my beliefs at times with people who are interested, when it is appropriate, but I do not believe in coercion.

There is something that I have found disturbing in US politics, and specifically among a certain subset of Christians, who have very strong beliefs (not a bad thing), who are very vocal (not always bad, but needs to be done in an appropriate manner and in an appropriate location), and who are very pushy and insistent that others follow their beliefs (that’s what I’m ranting about).

I lived outside of my home country for seven years, and it is only upon my return that I have noticed this, although looking back, I can see quite clearly that this is a movement that has been growing in strength for many years.

Many of these presumably well-meaning people like to make the claim that America is a Christian nation and was intended to be one by the men who founded her. Remember, I am a Christian as I say this; I don’t believe this belief has any foundation in reality. History does not back it up, and most of the time directly contradicts this claim.

Many of the Founding Fathers of the United States were Christians. Some were Catholics, some were Protestants of various traditions, and still others were Deists or essentially non-religious. What they all agreed on was that they didn’t want any of the others in their group to be able to tell them what they must believe, how (or if) they should worship, and who (if anyone). They all agreed that the State having any control over such things was dangerous and only caused division, strife, and persecution.

None of them seemed to think that religious beliefs should have no place in the public discourse, only that those beliefs should and could not be allowed to coerce anyone else into following their tenets.

I find it hard to believe that any of them would have a problem with someone saying, “Merry Christmas,” or “Happy Hanukkuh,” or “Eid Mubarak Sa’id.” I do believe all of them would have had a problem with the State demanding that everyone say, or support, any one of them.

Thomas Jefferson spoke his mind very clearly when he said, “I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.”

I happen to agree. I don’t want you to tell me what I must believe or follow any more than you want me to do so.

Even if they were to push an agenda that I might agree with from a standpoint of religious doctrine, I cannot agree with those who would try to force a religious based political agenda on the masses, at least not one that is based solely on an ethic birthed in a faith that is not shared by all who are to be affected. This is true whether being pushed by Imams in Iran, hard line Rabbis in Israel, radical Hindus in India or the Religious Right in the USA.

Obviously, some laws are based in religious concepts, but that does not make them religious laws. Truth is truth, whether it is spoken by a religion you agree or disagree with, or by someone with no religious affiliation. Pretty much all of us, at least in the statistically important sense, would agree that murder and theft are generally bad things. These have foundations in religion, but may also be argued from other standpoints like logic and respect, and are not the sole domain of one religious viewpoint. In a pluralistic society, that is reasonable.

What is not reasonable is saying to an entire society that your viewpoint is obviously the one on which the society was founded, even though your viewpoint didn’t exist as recently as 30 or 40 years ago (to be generous), especially when history itself requires a rewrite to support the idea.

If people who subscribe to a strong religious viewpoint want others to take them seriously, it would behoove them to look into ways in which they may engage their culture in a conversation, respectfully sharing and giving reason for why their way is better, rather than trying to force that way upon the masses through legislation, thereby causing great alienation, anger, and making people run as quickly and as far from these viewpoints as possible.

I've had the opportunity recently to review some training materials as part of my job. VTC offers a lot of streaming video tutorials on various software. I decided to search for Ubuntu and one series showed up. Charles Griffen authored and published these video tutorials, and they're available from a wide array of sources. Amazon retails a DVD version for $99.95.

To inform the broader Ubuntu community and to learn from the mistakes of others, I've decided to publish a critique of Charles Griffin's Ubuntu Tutorials:

Information

The content itself is basically a brief overview of the default Ubuntu Desktop components, spread out over five and a half hours. The audience appears to be expected to be comfortable with Windows and computers in general as he walks them through burning and verifying a LiveCD. In addition to the basic overview of the GNOME desktop software, he covers briefly how to use the command line, WINE/Crossover/Cedega, and Automatix.

The tutorials are based on Ubuntu 6.10. This is very old and unsupported software, and the videos haven't been updated to reflect any changes in behavior or software. If revisiting the video every six months takes too much time, 6.06 LTS might have been a better choice for the longevity of material.

He spends five minutes on legal restrictions on media formats, but doesn't communicate solutions or even the fundamentals of the problem of patents. For example, DVD playback isn't illegal, if you've negotiated a patent license, or if someone has negotiated one on your behalf, like Dell does for their customers. Canonical even offers such things for sale, if you wish to protect yourself from liability.

The videos completely neglect the Wiki and Launchpad as an avenue for support, instead suggesting the purchase of official support from Canonical or community support from forums. While speaking about the community, he neglects the foundational Code of Conduct that lay out the etiquette expected among developers and the community.

He advocates the use of EasyUbuntu and Automatix in his video. By the time these videos were published, Automatix was known by developers, including Technical Board member Matt Zimmerman, to be fatally flawed. After Matthew Garrett published a document reviewing the flaws, I feel it's irresponsible to continue publishing a recommendation of Automatix.

Narration

Charles's voice is smooth and comes across well over the recording. The pacing is quick enough that the potential boredom of the subject isn't multiplied by numbing slowness. He is well rehearsed and professional. Much of this seems to come from his work on LinuxReality, a podcast oriented towards new Linux users (now defunct).

Most of these tutorials come with subtitles. This is great for accessibility, but there are several errors, some of which are substantial. The file browser is universally misspelled "Nodilus" (it is "Nautilus"). More importantly, the command line tutorial makes a specific point about forward slash versus backslash, while the subtitles get it precisely backwards!

The diction is annoying. He uses the word "one" to refer to you, the viewer, a lot. Your English teacher in high school might have marked you down for informality, but nobody takes their advice seriously, and neither should you. Otherwise, the tutorials remain relatively free of jargon and accessible to the audience. Where important jargon is used, it is explained adequately.

Presentation

The video itself is based entirely off of screen capture streams, even when a diagram or two would be far more illuminating. The VTC website offers Quicktime or Flash playback, which may annoy advocates of open codecs. Admittedly, it is a bit of a challenge today to host video that is universally playable today. (HTML5 offers hope, but that's a subject for another time).

The VM image used for recording is in need of upkeep -- update-manager is prompting for updates in the notification area, and the volume is muted or broken. Busted audio might not be so bad except the tutorial covers some audio applications... without working audio.

The video isn't high quality. The recording was done at maybe 5 or 10 frames per second, and the resolution is too small to adequately display some applications, making the whole experience look cramped. Still, it's high enough quality that most text is readable, a problem I've encountered personally when running Desktop OS's at TV quality resolution. The low resolution does have the advantage that it can play from a DVD to a regular television and still be readable.

Conclusion

These tutorials are outdated, but convey a wealth of information about what to cover and how. Personally, I was a bit disappointed that the tutorials didn't teach me anything new about the Ubuntu Desktop, even about programs I haven't used much. (Does anyone use Evolution seriously?)

I get the impression that making such a set of tutorials takes more effort in planning, recording, and editing than a single person can muster. I may seem harsh in writing this critique, so let me be clear: Griffin makes a valiant solo effort, but the rapid pace of Ubuntu and Linux in general is depreciating the quality of his instruction. The Screencast Team brings a lot of expertise and knowledge to the table, and if they decide to do an "Ubuntu Introduction" project in the future, I hope they'll consider how to improve upon the works of others, and find ways to cope with the high rate of change!

If you are one of those people who got stuck converting your xxx_vpnc.conf file into something that Network manager on Gnome or KDE can handle, here goes the short description.

In Debian/Ubuntu you need to install network-manager-vpnc and on Fedora the package name is NetworkManager-vpnc

After you have installed the respective packages, click on the Network Manager icon on the task bar, VPN Connections -> Configure VPN.

Choose Add in the dialog box appears. After that choose a VPN connection type. In most cases it will be Cisco Type.  Give a connection name in the dialog box that appears. This can be anything. Say you are connecting to your XYZ university’s vpn then the name could be XYZ. Now for the list of fields and their corresponding meanings.

The Gateway maps to your IPSec gateway. Group Name is your IPSec ID.  You can either choose to enter your User Password and group Password here or you will be prompted to do so during connection. The User password corresponds to your user account password and the Group password maps to IPSec Secret. User name in the optional field is the “username” you will use to log in to your VPN. Thats it. You are ready to go. Choose Apply and now from the drop down menu of Network Manager choose VPN Connections -> the name of the VPN connection. Have fun!

All set for yet another hectic week! Have a nice week ahead.

I added microblogging support to Planet KDE. A surprising number of KDE developers seem to be communicating their lives over Twitter so it seems something that should be opened up for all to read. It's in a sidebar that you have to click to show so it shouldn't get in the way if you're not interested. It's a bit of an experiment, I'm not entirely convinced of the usefulness of it but we shall see. Currently only Twitter is known to work but it's probably not hard to ensure other microblogging sites work (does Facebook let you have a public status update feed?). I expect the content of the microblogs will be generally more personal than normal blogs, currently it's quite Amarok biased since those Amarok people love Twitter. You can add yourself through the normal means, editing the config file, submitting a bug or poking me on IRC.

Also in Planet KDE news, if you missed out a couple of days you may find you've missed out on important blogs. No more with the old blogs page which shows the next 30 blogs.

Ooh, new KDE forums. Lovely to see another piece of the improved KDE infrastructure in place.

Article submitted by Noel David Torres Taño. Guess what? We still need you to submit good articles about software you like!

One of the packages I manually install in every new installation is smartmontools. I’ve some expertise in managing computers and networks, and it is a fact that pirate hackers and software bugs are not the main cause of problems in small and medium installations. Hardware is.

Thus, you have hardware that can fails, and Murphy says that if it can fail, it will. The point is not to avoid hardware failures, which would be impossible, but to detect them early or even prevent them.

Particularly for hard disks, the tool in charge is smartctl from the package smartmontools. IDE disks (if they’re not of the age of dinosaurs) have an integrated self-testing tool called SMART which means “Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology”. Modern SCSI disks have it too if they’re SCSI 3 or newer. It happens that inside the disk chipset there are routines to check parameters of disk health: spin-up time, number of read failures, temperature, life elapsed… And all of those parameters are not only registered by the disk chipset, but they have designated security limits and both parameters and limits can be checked by software who access the disk using the appropriate I/O instructions.

And that software is smartctl, a piece of the smartmontools deb package. Of course, since they access the disk in a raw way, you need to be root to use these commands.

smartctl can ask the disk for its smart identification:

# smartctl -i /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Fujitsu MHV series
Device Model:     FUJITSU MHV2060BH
Serial Number:    NW10T652991F
Firmware Version: 00850028
User Capacity:    60,011,642,880 bytes
Device is:        In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is:   7
ATA Standard is:  ATA/ATAPI-7 T13 1532D revision 4a
Local Time is:    Mon May 12 02:39:31 2008 CEST
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

More interesting, smartctl can ask the disk for its parameter values:

# smartctl -A /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   100   100   046    Pre-fail  Always       -       124253
  2 Throughput_Performance  0x0004   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       18284544
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   100   100   025    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       1199
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   024    Pre-fail  Always       -       8589934592000
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000e   100   087   000    Old_age   Always       -       1761
  8 Seek_Time_Performance   0x0004   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
  9 Power_On_Seconds        0x0032   079   079   000    Old_age   Always       -       10866h+57m+47s
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       1199
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032   099   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       283
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       6953
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       45 (Lifetime Min/Max 14/58)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       62
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       459276288
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate   0x000e   100   082   000    Old_age   Always       -       22371
203 Run_Out_Cancel          0x0002   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       1533257648465
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0

As you can see, there are some attributes marked as “Pre-fail”. If any of these attributes goes beyond its threshold, the disk is about to fail in hours, maybe minutes.

Even if there are more options to smartctl , the last ones I will comment here are -a and -t.

smartctl -t launches a disk test. It needs a parameter indicating the type of the test, and in the longest case it can last for tens of minutes and will check the electrical and mechanical performance as well as the read performance of the disk, going through all its surface. smartctl -a, in its turn, shows all available information about the disk, including self testing results. Since tests will span minutes or tens of minutes, we can not see them happening. All what we will get when launching tests is like:

# smartctl -t long /dev/sda
smartctl version 5.38 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST SECTION ===
Sending command: "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in
off-line mode".
Drive command "Execute SMART Extended self-test routine immediately in
off-line mode" successful.
Testing has begun.
Please wait 41 minutes for test to complete.
Test will complete after Mon May 12 05:44:03 2008

Use smartctl -X to abort test.

Here, we’re being informed that (maybe) we will get a slightly lower performance on the disk for the next 41 minutes, since the test has started. It is completely background, or better ‘underground’, since it does not happen under the kernel control at all: everything is happening internally to the disk, and all what we can get is the result.

smartctl -a, in turn, show a very large amount of SMART information about the disk: almost all stored SMART information parsed for us. It is usually better to use a more specific switch, see the man page for details.

Finally, I want to comment that there is a daemon in the smartmontools package, smartd, who can take care of doing tests for you. It works by running smartctl in a periodic way (typically every 30 minutes) and logging all errors and parameter value changes to the syslog. The default configuration in Debian will also mail root if there’s any problem detected. I will not explain here about it, because I want you to read its (short and easy) documentation, but remember that in order to use it you must enable it in /etc/default/smartmontools.

The smartmontools package has been available both in Debian and Ubuntu since a long time ago.

Wow, OLF was amazing.

Many photos are available here; feel free to add your own to the pool:
http://flickr.com/groups/938355@N22/pool/

The booth was absolutely crowded for most of the conference. Even though it was slightly odd that OLF was just an expo room over from the US Fencing Competition, it was a great opportunity to introduce new users to Ubuntu and Linux in general, and most of them left the show very impressed. I also had the chance to attend a surprise BoF meeting, though I snuck in late.

A few shoutouts:

I’ll be posting full impressions tomorrow on FOSSwire.

One particular moment that I thought was interesting was when Jono asked who in the audience (of around a thousand) used Ubuntu, and 90% of everyone raised their hands. Someone post a picture of that in the Flickr pool above!

Though, I think the phrase “Show me some candy” will trigger a somewhat unpleasant mental image for those who attended Jono’s keynote from now on.

Explaining open source is sometimes a little tricky. (Only sometimes though. Honest.) Depending on who I'm talking to I'll explain that working on an open source project is a little bit like volunteering to sing with the church choir. Even if the person isn't religious, they can usually appreciate the beauty of a group that sings in unison. They also understand the more the choir practices together, the better they sound. On more than one occasion this explanation has been the "aha" moment that snaps my life and my business ethics into focus for a friend or a client. The analogy doesn't, however, work when trying to explain crowd sourcing.

I am working on a new project that will offer (free) audio interviews with community "elders." The audio interviews will have transcripts and will need to be translated into multiple languages. I've convinced the project lead to turn to the internets and use crowd sourcing to make these translations happen. On the one hand they may not be perfect, and they may not all happen instantly, on the other hand I think it would be an amazing school project for someone that is learning a second language...to translate and part of the audio interview and to help spread the cultural knowledge from one community to another.

The project lead is skeptical about this whole "people will work for free" thing. She's asked me to find some more reading material on crowdsourcing and gift economies to get a better understanding of what it's all about (and why we do it and why it makes perfect business sense). I have to admit that I know it works more based on my gut than because of specific research. I've found the following articles with a quick google search. Do you know of more? Please leave your suggestions in the comments!

(Yes, I'm pretty sure this is me crowdsourcing my crowdsourcing research. The irony is not lost on me.)

I also want to open up the real can of worms: licensing. If you were doing this kind of project, how would you license the content on the site? Would you use different licenses for the "primary source" material and the contributed translations?

Punch, Jab, Win

What a night. Today Vitali Klitschko, older brother of Vladimir, won the Heavy Weight World Championship Fight against Samuel Peter.

(Taken from rtl.de)

Now, the Klitschko Brothers have four boxing championship titles alltogether. Ukraine can be proud of their sons, and Germany can be proud of the trainer. Anyways, a good fight, and Samuel did what he had to do...it was really a "nigerian nightmare" (Samuels fight nick)

Loungemetal

Do you know what Loungemetal is? A couple of days ago, I didn't know it, too :)

There is a band named "Hellsongs", coming from Sweden, and they invented this "new" genre.

If you want to listen to one of my favorite songs, just tune to YouTube. But I really think you won't recognize it...normally it's being played like this.

(Picture of Hellsong taken by Per Kristianson)

That was the title of my talk today at Ohio Linux Fest. I told everybody I'd put my slides up here, so:

I think there should also be a video appearing on the OLF website some time soon. I'm sorry, I know I was speaking a bit fast. I pretty much always talk fast.

So when it comes to "contributing to linux" there is always an unrepresented group of heroes doing the right thing that you will never hear about.

I'm talking about people like the organizers of Ohio Linuxfest.

These people will likely never be on the cover of Linux Journal, featured on LWN, or mentioned in a kernel changelog. Having helped plan conferences in the past, I can tell you that the intense amount of planning (sometimes years in advance!), coordination, sheep herding, and hard work that goes into events like this is absolutely insane. It's a shame that there is so much work done behind the scenes that make community conferences Just Work(tm) that isn't being recognized - it's a significant contribution.

We're not just talking about a few hours here and there, we're talking about work so hard that many people make personal sacrifices to make events like this happen. So hats off to the conference planners all around the world!

Roughly three weeks ago I decided to take a little swim upstream. I swam for a few hours and found Sid. I played with Sid for a day or two and I had a great time. However, even though Sid had grown on me, I could not help but feel there was something unstable about our new relationship. I did not experience any craziness first-hand, it was more of a gut feeling that things could go screwy at any time. Having just swam from a place where things tend to get somewhat turbulent every six months, I was keen to find something new, yet stable enough to build a future on. The idea of a future with Sid was really beginning to freak me out, so I decided I had probably swum a little too far.

I said a fond farewell to Sid and started floating back downstream. I was not floating for long when I came across Lenny. For a brief moment I thought I must have been caught in an underwater current and been dragged back upstream, Lenny looked and behaved in a near identical manner to Sid, though Lenny lacked the unstable aura. Lenny and I have been getting along really well since. Sure, I would probably still classify our relationship as being in "testing", still, I do not think it will be too long before it can be reclassified as being truly "stable". I am looking forward to it.

Tags: debian, fun, ubuntu

Its been slightly more than 24 hours since I upgraded to the upcoming “bleeding edge” Intrepid Ibex edition of Ubuntu!

The Good:

I am extremely happy about the Network Manager working flawlessly for me (until now ) even on a WPA2 system which I had troubles before. My WIFI LED is back indicating wireless connectivity and activity Love the New Human Theme. I rarely used any of the default Ubuntu themes but I like this one very much. Check screenshot here. The games that I play have got some major upgrades. Pidgin has undergone some cool development. One must use it to see and feel it Its a great feeling when you are using the latest and greatest of the Free Software world. Flickr uploader now allows me to add to groups and also set Privacy. That is cool! Lots more…

Bad:

The Ugly:

I’ve got a Blackberry 8320. Its used more for checking email, IM, and twitter/identi.ca than actual calling. If it crashed and burned, I wouldn’t really care that much. But…it would be  nice to back up just in case. Barry is the open source solution out there and now the folks who made the PocketMac sync app are coming out with a Linux version. Of course, why they are calling it “PocketMac for Blackberry (Linux Edition)” is beyond me. If you are interested in beta testing the Linux version, go register.

Somehow I missed that Linus Torvalds is now blogging. He says its supposed to be a family blog and there isn’t much on it yet, but I hope to see some of his legendary commentary, like what he thinks of the OpenBSD crowd and the Intel e1000e hardware designer. You can read more of his choice words at Wikiquote.

Some updates and statements..:)

Personal Life - Company Work

Right now, I'm trying to follow up on normal life...after the product launch we were still busy and doing the usual "bugfixing round for releases". Fun, really, because people coming from non-technical areas like Marketing or Sales always think that software is bug free when it's releases.

Leonov - The Ultimative Launchpad Client

Something about Leonov. Yes, true, because of personal issues (like earning money ;)) Leonov development stucked a bit. But I'm back on track with Leonov. So stay tuned for next week, with some incredible updates.

Ubuntu and Kubuntu, the neverending story

It's good to see, that people find out things, we found out already. Regarding Jonathan Thomas and Kurt van Fincks article about Kubuntu and Ubuntu and the responsibilities of Canonical in this matter, (Always in your mind should be the article of my dear friend Jono B.)

Full Disclosure: I'm not related to Canonical, and I'm not related to any company providing distributions. I'm a free contributor, and I'm a professional sys-admin who uses Ubuntu Server Edition in Companies. And I was one of the people of 2006 who discussed the very same matter with Mark during Linux Tag 2006 @ Wiesbaden. I'm not bound to one desktop system, but I have to admin, my love is Qt/KDE but I'm using also many many gtk apps with proud.

Guys, the problem is not "There are no Devs for Kubuntu" the prolbem is: "The Ubuntu Base Devs (the people doing the dbus, hal, bootup etc. base distro infrastructure) are doing mostly Gnome integrations, because they are coming from the GTK side of life and sometimes they don't care". (Dear Colleagues, that shouldn't be read as a attack).

This is the prolbem. If you stop this work for those infra devs, we could see the very same problem on Ubuntu side. Integration work can't be finished in time of release by only 2 gnome devs.

And this is our real problem. The Core Infrastructure Dev People should not just only view on their favorite desktop set, but should really focus on infrastructure questions. They deliver the basement, they tell: "Dear Gnome, Dear Kde, you need to integrate this new version of dbus into your apps, you have 2 months time, we'll give you dbus now".

Mostly, if something like this is done, upstream already has some "gtk" or "kde" code at hand to make our lifes more easy.

But having Core Infrastructure Dev People working also on desktop integration, mostly on Gnome side, it will give the outside view of seeing Kubuntu as a second class citizen in our Ubuntu Environment.

So, what's left? Easy.

@Kurt, as you are working for the Sponsor of Ubuntu/Kubuntu, you should ask why you work at it. If Canonical doesn't set on the idea to sell support for Ubuntu (forget about G or K) to the world, I don't think you would have a job at Canonical, but somewhere else. (Forget the fact, that Canonical is not mainly a Distro Publisher)

One of the "Make Money Fast" ideas of C. is to earn money with people buying support for Ubuntu. So you have people with the Love of G and you have more people in Europe with the Love Of K. Therefore it's in your employers interest to focus on both (or all) main Desktops, or to just abandon one (or more) and tell the world "We focus on K or G" (which Mark as the Uberboss can't do so easily because of his "mistake" of the past ;))

(PIcture taken by Martin Schmitt - stoppedphoto.com - Picture Licensed CC 2.0)

So what we need, we need at least one KDE Dev inside the Core Infrastructure who can tell people that new dbus crack won't work on KDE because there needs to be some changes, and that the core infra team should wait for it, before pushing it to the core or let this new kde dev work on the integration together with the guy who does the gnome integration.

Or just stop working on desktop integration which is coming directly from the core team. Let's do the work inside the desktop teams, but this could really lead to bad user experience and to some more rants about "Ubuntu is a stepchild of whatever".

Anyways, without a good community even Gnome would fail, the same goes for KDE or XFCE...so let's focus on making Linux as OS in general a better experience then Windows or Mac OS X (did I say, that I was confused, when I saw MAC OS X and I thought "Hell, this is a nice looking Gnome")

Rich Johnson (nixternal) on listening to the completed Severed Fifth album Denied By Reign:

Denied By Reign. Released Oct 21st.

I’m proud of Ubuntu, but I’m always a little sad when I see news items like this.

I don’t want to see everyone who contributes to the World Resource Institute and the Conservation International Foundation to start giving entirely to the Greenpeace Fund. They’re all doing fantastic work and doing it in slightly different ways. Changing allocation between these organizations doesn’t have any real benefit.

I want to see the news of everyone moving their money out of Exxon and General Motors and putting it into the things linked above or anything like them. Then big stuff starts happening; multinationals have less to work with and environmental groups have more. That’s a win.

Organizations moving from Free Software to Free Software is a distraction. There is no net gain; there is no more freedom; there are no more users and no more chances to create new Free Software developers. It is news when an organization moves from proprietary software to Free. That’s important, and we should stay focused on that goal.

It turns out we've not been really effective in communicating what's going on in the User Experience Hackfest that's going on right now in Cambridge. It's kind of good and bad at the same time: bad, because it's important to keep everybody in the loop; good, because it means we've been quite good on focusing on work :-) So here's a short summary of things, and hopefully more will come (especially a few mockups/whiteboard pictures that people are working on right now).

First, a big thanks to everybody involved -- artists, designers, hackers: we have some good range of skills represented here. Also a big thanks to the companies involved, who accepted to let their people come and actually even pay for the travel and accomodation. We have people from Canonical, Imendio, Intel, Novell (who is also hosting the hackfest) and Red Hat here, which is quite awesome. That's quite an investment from those companies, and it's really cool to see them step up like that. Novell has also sponsored a dinner for all participants on Tuesday; it was funny to have a seafood-lovers table and a vegetarian+others table ;-)

On Monday, we started by discussing the current status of GNOME, where we're good at, where we're lacking, etc. We then started focusing on a few topics. Those topics turned out to be well adopted and that's mostly what we worked for most of the week; more details on them in a few sentences. On Tuesday, we had some great presentations from Dave Richards and OLPC people, and both were quite helpful in different ways: getting closer to our users, and thinking out of the box. They definitely had an impact on what we did afterwards.

So, since Wednesday, we're working on the three topics that emerged during the first day: desktop shell, access to documents, and adding effects/animation to the desktop experience. I won't detail everything here, but I think we've ended up with some good stuff:

I guess it's quite hard to get a good feeling of all this right now, but once the wiki page will be a bit more filled, things should get clearer. We still have a few hours ahead of us, but I already feel like it was a good and productive week, with great results. And I'm getting really excited about what we'll do in the next 1-2 years!

English version below.

Die Demonstration, die sich gegen den keimenden Ãœberwachungswahn wendet, der zunehmend in jedem Bereich Lebensbereich statt findet, startet morgen, am 11.08.2008 in Berlin. Treffpunkt ist der Alex. Dazu ruft die AK Vorratsdatenspeicherung auf. Es handelt sich dabei um eine Veranstaltung im Rahmen einer internationalen Aktion "Freedom Not Fear".

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Zu den Forderungen der Demonstranten gehören der Abbau der Überwachung, die Analyse und Korrektur der gegenwärtigen Überwachungsbefugnisse, Verzicht auf neue Überwachungsgesetze, sowie die Gewährleistung der Meinungsfreiheit sowie dem freien Meinungs- und Informationsaustausch. Nähere Informationen sind auf der Aktionsseite zu erfahren.

Laut Heise werden 30.000 Teilnehmer erwartet. Ich bin dabei.

English:

Tommorow takes place the German part of international campaign "Freedom Not Fear". The demonstration starts at 2pm CET at Alexanderplatz, Berlin, Germany. AK Vorratsdatenspeicherung (german) calls for participation due to the sprouting surveillance delusion in more and more fields of life.

The claims of the demonstration are reduction of surveillance, evaluation of surveillance competences, abdication of new surveillance acts and implied warranty of freedom of opinion as well as exchange of opinions and information.

Expected are 30.000 participants. I will be one of it.

Haven’t got any attention on this, so I figured I would throw it to the blogosphere and see what happens. I have reproduced this on several different machines. I assume everyone’s automatic Xorg config is working well, so nobody has tried to look at their log files?

Basically, ‘cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log’ or ‘less /var/log/Xorg.0.log’ show me the log, in it’s entirety. ‘more /var/log/Xorg.0.log’ only shows me the very top of it. This happens using the Ubuntu Beta Live CD prior to installation or any system modification.

Yes, I reported it.

Wikimedia is moving all 400 of its servers from Red Hat and Fedora to Ubuntu 8.04.

After reading the article in its entirety, a few thoughts were going through my head. First, was why not CentOS? Wikimedia mentions that they are running different versions of Red Hat and Fedora, which is a problem in itself that I’ll also address, and that they could run 100% Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, licensing costs with Red Hat Enterprise Linux are extremely costly. In fact, what many don’t realize, is keeping updated licenses on RHEL is more expensive than keeping updated licenses on Windows. So, the question arises then, why not just run CentOS? Well, they don’t mention it in the article, but I can make a couple bets as to why not. First, as fine as the CentOS community and distribution are, they walk the razors edge. On average, CentOS is about two to four weeks behind RHEL on patching security vulnerabilities, bug and holes. So, because CentOS is behind RHEL in fixing these bugs, they have a choice to make. Either they can wait for Red Hat to fix the bug, and then compile and ship the patch themselves, or on a more timely manner, they can patch the bug on their own, risking breaking binary compatibility with RHEL. Either case, it’s a lose-lose scenario in terms of security and stability. I doubt this is an attractive option for Wikimedia.

The second thought that went through my mind, was why are they running so many different versions of Red Hat and Fedora? As mentioned in the article: “Over five years, the servers were running a variety of versions of Red Hat Linux and Red Hat Fedora, making it more complicated to install applications and maintain the servers.” Yeah. You think? Doing software development, I have become familiar with different versions of development tools on different platforms causing problems. It’s probably due more to a lack of discipline and not understanding the spec on those tools on my part, but when developing, it’s a pain to keep my code working well on several different platforms. On top of that, directory structures change, standards evolve, and tools disappear and morph as platform versions increase. GNU/Linux is an evolving ecosystem, so there is no guarantee between different versions

Why not standardize, on say Fedora 6? Well, again, not mentioned in the article, but I bet I can make a few bets as to why Fedora wasn’t picked also. Fedora, and its community, are rock solid. It’s a good distribution, and has a lot going for it. However, Fedora places itself to be a test bed for new technologies and changes. Some call this “the bleeding edge” with respect to the newness of software. As such, thing are going to break. That’s just a guarantee. Hang around my office long enough, and you’ll hear the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth about X11, wireless, sound, and other things. Fedora, although it strives for stability, never really gets that opportunity. Instead, each release is broken somehow, someway. Even Fedora 6. Further, patches and updates are only provided for 1 month after the following release (this usually means 13 months). After that time elapses, any instability, bugs and holes remain. Upgrading your servers every year, so you keep the latest updates and patches on your system, probably isn’t attractive.

So, it seems then that the Red Hat based distributions are cutting it (you have the same problems with openSUSE and SLES as described above), which really only brings us to the Debian based distributions. Ubuntu was picked as the platform on which to build their infrastructure. There are some good reasons for this. First, with Debian derived distributions, you can upgrade to the latest release without taking your box offline. With a company like Wikimedia, that’s probably a good thing. Second, Ubuntu has the largest, most vibrant and diverse open source community in the world. It’s unparalleled popularity on the desktop coupled with routine updates and a company willing to back it as the “enterprise” platform,