Foresight Linux Planet

I’m extremely proud to announce that the XFCE desktop environment, well known for being a lighter alternative to GNOME or KDE, is completely translated (upstream) to Brazilian Portuguese!

A total of over 80 different programs and components off the XFCE and Goodies repositories, with over 6000 strings, I believe that XFCE is the first complex desktop environment to be completely translated to Brazilian Portuguese! The core components had been 100% translated for about 1 week now, as can be see in the stats page, mas yesterday I finished my research and noticed that all the other components were also finished. Now I get to keep my eye on any changes that may happen until the 4.4.6 release takes place.

rPath is pleased to announce that rPath Linux 2 is now available and recommended for general use as an appliance platform. rPath Linux is a base operating system platform on which you easily build customized virtual or software appliances, or even an entire operating system of your own. Building on the rPath Linux foundation, use rPath's tools to create and maintain your own minimal operating system stack, with "Just Enough OS" to support the applications and services you include.

What's new?

rPath Linux 2 is the next step in the evolution of the rPath Linux platform. In addition to a technology refresh (new versions of included packages), rPath Linux 2 is better tuned as a platform to show off your work.

• Just Enough OS: rPath Linux 2 is smaller than rPath Linux 1. The group-appliance-platform recommended base software set is approximately half as large in rPath Linux 2 as rPath Linux 1, and the kernel is approximately a third smaller.
• Brandable Boot Splash: rPath Linux 2 implements a graphical boot process which is easy to customize to look the way you want. It does not require that your appliance include the X Window System, and thus uses very little disk space.
• Additional security mechanisms: several additional runtime security measures have been added to most packages ("stack protector" and "FORTIFY_SOURCE") and are enabled by default when you build your own software on the rPath Linux 2 platform.
• More robust system boot: The syslinux boot loader is now the default bootloader. This well-maintained boot loader is highly extensible, easily branded, and most importantly can be automatically updated safely and reliably. The syslinux boot loader has been the most common boot loader for ISO images for most Linux distributions for years; now it is the most capable system boot loader as well.
• The new Appliance Installer option installs your appliance software on systems in only a few minutes, requiring less memory than the earlier package-based installation mechanism. (It is still possible to use the slower package-based installation mechanism if you need to do so, but all the images we are building for the core OS at this time use the faster appliance installer.)

rPath Linux Images

rPath has built three sets of images for rPath Linux 2. Each set is based on a different group which defines the included software set:

• group-dist: A developer tool consisting of a large installation intended for developing Conary-based appliances, particularly for using Conary to discover a wide range of potential build requirements for packages, and for experimenting with the contents of the rPath Linux 2 operating system. (Remember that rPath Linux 2 is not a general-purpose desktop operating system; although X is included in this image, it is not an X desktop!)
• group-text-devel: A developer tool consisting of core text-mode-only development tools, useful primarily as a platform for running the rMake build tool to build packages.
• group-appliance-platform: A developer tool which contains only core software recommended to be on all normal Conary-based appliances. This is not intended to be useful itself. Instead, you can install this image and then migrate to a group that you have built using the group-appliance superclass during testing, before you create any images. You can also use it as a "vanilla" base installation on which to install software during the process of experimenting with defining an appliance. After installing appliance-specific software in an image installed from group-appliance-platform, the command conary updateall --items will show you group-appliance-platform plus the software you have installed, which you can then compare to the group recipe you define when following the step-by-step instructions for building appliances

rPath Linux 2 is the software in the Conary repository; these images are merely snapshots of some of the contents of the repository.

Updates, Bugs, And Features

rPath Linux 1 and rPath Linux 2 will be updated in parallel while rPath Linux 1 is maintained (at least until November 2008). Because rPath Linux 2 is an appliance operating system rather than a desktop operating system, rPath recommends that users of rPath Linux 1 update to an appropriate Conary-based operating system for their needs. Foresight Linux is the most widely-used and actively-developed Conary-based desktop operating system. Many purpose-built server appliances are maintained on rBuilder Online for various services. If none of them meet your needs, consider building your own purpose-built server appliance on rBuilder Online. It is easy to do, and step-by-step instructions teach the process easily.

rPath Linux update advisories, both for security and maintenance updates, are published in several ways:

• To receive only security updates but not maintenance updates, subscribe to security-announce@lists.rpath.com.
• To receive both security and maintenance updates, as well as summaries of changes by group version, subscribe to update-announce@lists.rpath.com or subscribe to Advisories:rPath_Linux_2_Changes.

Please help us make rPath Linux better! Create issues to report bugs or ask for new features in rPath Linux. Visit the rPath Issue Tracking System at https://issues.rpath.com/ and use the "rPath Linux" project to file your request.

Thanks

rPath would like to thank everyone who helped test the software that has become rPath Linux 2. Special thanks go to Foresight Linux for building Foresight Linux 2 based on rPath Linux 2 betas. Conary made it possible for the Foresight developers to test the software on Foresight development and QA branches before publishing updates tested as part of Foresight to Foresight users.

A recent update to rBuilder which enabled support for using extlinux in images built for rPath Linux 2 and appliances based on rPath Linux 2 introduced a bug which causes Xen domU images built either for rPath Linux 2 or for appliances based on rPath Linux 2 to fail to boot. Until this issue is corrected (soon), rPath Linux 2 Xen domU sample images will not be made available.

So, I'm now on Planet GNOME as a GSoC student.

Speaking of, the project is slowly starting to come along now. I've spent a few hours here or there looking through libempathy and getting a feel for the APIs. Still have yet to really see what kind of condition the Python bindings are in -- probably saving that for next week.

Though, that might not happen since it's vying for time against GEB, and that's some stiff competition to run against.

My pet project BillReminder was featured in the third episode of ProgBox, kicking off the brand new section “Pimp My Project“! It was also featured as an exemple on packaging software for Arch Linux (sorry, Brazilian Portuguese only) written by Hugo Dória.

So, watch the show, read the guide if you can, and use BillReminder!

This is my last week of school-related activities for a while, so I can finally get full swing into Summer of Code work. This means, according to my schedule, to be looking over documentation and APIs right now. Hopefully tomorrow night I can take a crack at that.

Additionally, I've started to fill up my new-found time with a rather fun undertaking -- my own personal copy of Godel, Escher, Bach. I'm enjoying it rather much.

The maintenance of rBuilder Online has been completed.

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.

rBuilder Online is currently undergoing maintenance, and will be available by 23:30 EDT (UTC-4). During this time, rBuilder Online and all rpath.org repositories will not be available. A message will be posted when this maintenance period has been completed.

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.

Over the last week I’ve spent some time implementing the new wiki structure and content discussed at Foresight 20/20.

All the spaces have been consolidated into 6 major spaces (plus the newsletter):

• Community
• Development
• Documentation and Howtos
• FAQ
• Foresight 1.x
• Getting Involved

Content was moved around to the correct spaces. This has resulted in relative links need to be updated on some pages, and the wiki links now reflect the move to the new space, but this is minor in the scheme of things.

Some very old and outdated information, especially on pages that only had one or two sentences, was removed or consolidated into one page.

The major to-dos remaining include updating the Get Involved sub-team pages with team members and outstanding tasks where missing, moving some 1.4 development specific information in to the 1.x space, and the Community space in providing more information on current members, developers, and how to join. Additionally, I want the Community space to be transparent in to the workings of Foresight. I also need to add some missing Focus meeting minutes, and make sure I update that information more often as needed.

The beauty of a wiki is anyone can edit it - so jump in and help out!

No Tags

I host this blog, as well as e-mail for dragonstrider.com and a host of other services on an old PC behind my cable modem at home. This has served me well for the most part, but it requires onsite maintenance when it goes down. This is bad when I'm at work, or vacation, as happened this week. So, I bit the bullet and researched some Virtual Priate Server (VPS) hosting providers.

I ended up choosing Slice Host as a no-frills, just the tech if you please, Linux/Xen-based VPS host. Their entry level plan (slice) gives you 256 MB RAM, 10GB storage, and 100GB of bandwidth for $20/month, and you can scale it with a reboot up to 4GB/160GB/1600GB for $280. /proc/cpuinfo shows that the host for my entry level slice is a two way "Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2212" operating at 2.0 GHz. There's a separate swap partition (so swap doesn't count against the 10GB limit), as well as web based management tools for rudimentary Name Services, starting, stopping and rebuilding your slice, a web console (in case ssh isn't working for some reason), some statistics and reporting, and my favorite part, a rescue mode.

Rescue mode lets you boot your slice in a rescue environment, mount your root file system in an alternate location, and do what you want (or need) with it. This makes it pretty easy to run your appliance from rBuilder Online on a hosted slice. Here are the steps to get this working. Choose a Xen Appliance Image (32 or 64 bit, though 64 bit is preferred) that is a single file system image.

• Create a slice (doesn't matter what kind, we're going to blow it away anyway).


• Reboot your slice into rescue mode


• SSH or console in using the password mailed to you (yes, rescue mode gets started with a randomized password)


• wget -O - <link to the rBO image> | tar -xz # This downloads and extracts the filesystem image


• dd if=<path to filesystem image file> of=/dev/sda1


• e2fs.ext3 -f /dev/sda1 # This forces a file system check, without this check the next step will fail.


• resize2fs /dev/sda1 # Resize the file system image to match the available size


• mount /dev/sda1 /mnt


• copy the following networking configuration files from your rescue image to your new slice image mounted in /mnt
  
  
  
  • /etc/sysconfig/network /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 /etc/resolv.conf


• Edit /etc/sysconfig/network to fix the hostname to the desired value


• chroot /mnt


• passwd # changes the root password since the rBO images ship with root's password blanked

At this point you can do any additional configuration you wish, such as adding additional users, making sure that openssh-server is installed and configured to start on boot, etc.

When that's done, shutdown, exit rescue mode from the Slice Host panel, and log in to your new appliance.

There is quite a bit of noise when the slice boots up with an rPath Linux based appliance because the kernel in the image isn't used for booting, and modules.dep isn't located for the booting kernel, but that seems harmless.

Now to build an appliance to run on the thing... I used the rPL 2 beta 3 text devel image as my image while developing this HOWTO.

The maintenance of rBuilder Online has been completed.

• Support for Citrix XenServer images
• Support for 64-bit Amazon Machine Images
• Support for images larger than 2GiB
• Amazon Machine Images now have a properly-formatted /etc/fstab, allowing auto-mounting of scratch space
• Images delivered as compressed tar files no longer erroneously report missing contents or "trailing garbage" errors. Furthermore, the compressed tar files are now named with the '.tar.gz' extension rather than '.tgz', which caused problems with some archivers on Windows.
• Support for bootman and the EXTLINUX bootloader have been added for images built from groups that contain them
• Stability and bug fixes

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.

rBuilder Online will undergo scheduled maintenance starting Thursday, May 8 at 21:00 EDT (UTC-4) and ending at midnight. During this time, rBuilder Online and all rpath.org repositories will not be available. A message will be posted when the scheduled maintenance period has been completed.

Thank you for your interest in rBuilder Online.

As some people may have noticed Firefox 3 Beta 5 has been pushed to Foresight Linux 2 QA and will soon be default in Foresight Linux 2.

The first thing that I noticed when I updated was that none of my extensions worked. After a few minutes of googling, I found that there are a couple ways to work around this. Some projects have development builds of their extensions that work with beta 5 and some don’t. For those that don’t you can try disabling extension compatibility checks.

Note that both of these options are potentially dangerous and may cause firefox to become unstable.

I disabled compatibility checks and downloaded the developer release of Tab Mix Plus, an extension that I can not live without. All seems to be working so far.

Disabling compatibility checks:

• go to “about:config” in your address bar
• right click to get to New -> Boolean
• set extensions.checkCompatibility for the key
• and false for the value

Developer versions that you might be interested in:

• Firebug
• TabMixPlus

Thanks to the following two blog posts that were great resources.

1. http://aralbalkan.com/1335
2. http://www.ilovebonnie.net/2008/04/22/finally-firebug-and-tab-mix-plus-for-firefox-beta/

conary-policy 1.0.18 is a bug fix release.

• ConfigLogBuildRequirements caused builds to fail when encountering a line ending in "result:  " (two or more trailing spaces) while processing a config.log file. This is corrected. (CNP-128)

The Foresight Forums continue to grow!

Recently added were a number of forums supporting International users, including Forums for Portuguese, French, Spanish and German users.

Thanks to the moderators of these forums, doniphon and Og Maciel, Stef, Zodman, and Mark__T respectively.

One of the easiest ways to contribute to Foresight is to jump on the Forums and help answer user questions.

See you there!

No Tags

I finally have my pet project BillReminder packaged for Ubuntu Hardy and Debian, thanks to Diogo Autílio and Gabriel Falcão! The packages (*.deb) can be downloaded from the project’s downloads page, or for the lazy:

• Ubuntu Hardy
• Debian

As always, constructive feedback, patchs, and sugestions can be provided via our support system.

• The paradigm of the open organization « flors
  Quim Gil blogs about the requirements of running an open organization
  (tags: community)

No Tags

I’m getting disappointed reading the current news coming out of the OLPC camp. The reason I supported the project (and forked over my $400) was for two reasons. 1) I agree with education being the answer to most of the world’s problems and 2) I support open software. This project seemed to endorse both. I feel like both are deeply ingrained within each other. Not only does open software allow for creating awesome machines that are going to be usable for years without corporate lock in, but they also provide a learning experience for everyone regardless or age due to the nature of being able to play and pick apart the machine.

Hearing that the goal for the OLPC project is now to “get the technology in the hands of as many children as possible” I find myself disgusted. From the beginning it wasn’t a “laptop” project but a “education” project. That was stated so many times at talks over the past few years. Now all that has gone away. I’m totally fearful that this is just going to be another corporate sponsored “lock in another generation to our software” project. The world doesn’t need this. The world needs what OLPC was.

I hope the OLPC leaders listen to arguments like these. You aren’t helping anyone by spending money to help Microsoft get XP onto low power laptops. It’s wrong on so many levels. These kids need to be able to explore these systems and learn.

Even more important though is the apparent lack of my number one reason to be interested in the project. EDUCATION should be the primary concern, Not the spreading of technology. If the goal of the project is suddenly to only provide technology then I agree with all of the original naysayers: the money would better be spent on nutrition and poverty projects.

Bug Fixes:

• A bug causing python-setuptools to incorrectly appear to be an excessive build requirement has been fixed. (CNY-2738)
• A bug in which python-setuptools was sometimes incorrectly not recognized as being needed in buildRequires has been fixed. (CNY-2772)
• A regression has been fixed that caused rMake to abort when recursing through a group recipe that added troves with full versions. (CNY-2768)
• When reporting possibly excessive buildRequires, not mentioning buildRequires at all in the recipe caused Conary to report the immediate superclass's buildRequires as the recipe's buildRequires. This bug has been resolved. (CNY-2769)
• A bug that caused the --context flag to not be recognized when specified before a command has been fixed. (CNY-2770)

I am giving a presentation on the GNOME Developer Kit this Saturday (May 3rd) at the Chicago GLUG meeting.  I am wondering what people would like to hear about or would be interested in hearing about in regards to a presentation on the GNOME Developer Kit.

So as some of you have seen or heard my old laptop was in need of on upgrade. I could barely run more than 2 applications at a time and it was having unpredictable behaviors with traveling and the lid hinge was broken. So I took the money I got back from taxes to buy me a new laptop. I got a Dell Vostro 1400 laptop. It runs Foresight smoothly except for a few issues which I am working on solutions for and will document the fixes so others can benefit.

• Can’t Perform Graphical Install: There is a problem with Intel cards not support VESA so when anaconda tries to do a graphical install X crashes and I have to do a text based install. ISSUE
• Intel HD Audio Does Give Sound: I don’t get any sound from internal speakers or headphones. ISSUE

I will post a solution to these issues when I get them fixed.

Changes in 2.0.13:

Build Changes:

• When cooked, factories can now package additional files in their :recipe component. (CNY-2748)
• Moved VersionConflicts to pluggable policy and removed default exceptions. (CNY-2716)

Client Changes:

• PGP Keyring location is no longer determined using $HOME, which is unreliable; a getpwuid(3) lookup is used instead. (CNY-2722)
• The number of retries for providing a passphrase when signing troves changed from 3 to 5. (CNY-2709)

Code Changes:

• Some incompatibilities with python2.5 have been removed.

Bug Fixes:

• More optimizations for the pathId lookup query times for some package builds. (CNY-2742)
• A bug that caused an InsufficientPermission error when a user only has repository access permissions added by trove calls getNewTroveList() has been fixed. (CNY-2755)
• A bug that caused a request to add access to a trove for a role to be ignored if the same trove was used previously to grant access to a different role has been fixed. (CNY-2758)
• A bug that caused an InsufficientPermission error when a user requests a changeset to which the user has been granted access with addTroveAccess has been fixed. (CNY-2760)
• The XML writer in xmldata.py is now encoding using UTF-8. (CNY-2756)

Changes in 1.0.17

• Description and Licenses policies can now be used to set metadata information for troves. (CNY-2715)
• The RequireChkconfig policy now accepts empty lines in the chkconfig header. (CNP-81)
• The new HttpdConfigRequires policy adds dependencies on /usr/sbin/httpd for all /etc/httpd/conf.d/*.conf files. (CNP-110)
• The FixObsoletePaths policy has been modified to run before AutoDoc. It will now delete empty Obsolete paths rather than attempting to move them. (CNP-70)
• The RemoveNonPackageFiles policy has been modifed to run before most policies designed to Normalize filenames in order to reduce the occurrence of non-package files being masked. (CNP-122)
• Moved VersionConflicts to from Conary to conary-policy and removed default exceptions. (CNY-2716)

• Laundry basket: US$15
• Shower curtain: US$10
• 15 gallons of water: a few bucks

• A makeshift swimming pool in a hot Spring day: priceless!

Thanks to zdz for posting a comment on my T61 Lockups post.

He was absolutely right - it was an Intel / xorg driver issue causing the lockups.

A big shout out to doniphon for updating and testing Xorg at the 20/20 Conference last week. I’m running the latest Xorg on my T61, and the lock-ups are gone!

And I’m still loving the T61. Great Linux support, good form factor, and a great value. All I have left to do is figure out a bug with suspend.

No Tags

Those who follow me on Twitter, or put up with my constant complaining via Google Talk are well aware that I've had sound issues with Fedora 9 lately (installed on my slave HDD).

Turns out, these issues are fixable, if hard to track down.

What issues per se? Tinny, scratchy sound. Oh noes, mi amigos.

Here's how to see if this is your issue:

$ dmesg | grep intel8x0

If you see something about it setting to ###### usecs, and that lovely number isn't 48000, add this to your /etc/modprobe.conf:

options snd_intel8x0 ac97_clock=48000

Thanks to ivasquez, nirik, yarddog, and tyrok from #fedora!

One of the first sessions on Saturday was a discussion on defining the development process for Foresight. (Unfortunately this was a session I missed, but it sounded fairly technical anyway!)

Most developers have been committing packages to the 2-devel label (rather than :devel) and the decision was made to stick to 2-devel. Additionally, one big change is the concept of creating a new repository outside of Foresight for true development and big changes that are tested in this sandbox beore moving to fl:2-devel. In my opinion, this is a great idea, as it’s fairly easy for users to install packages from the 2-devel label. (Epiphany is a great example - right now in 2-devel it’s based on Webkit - a few users have encountered errors based on the Webkit dependencies needed). This should make it better for users, as the chance to break their desktop will diminish.

Labels for these new sandboxes will be based on the JIRA issues that define what the work being done is.

For more details, see the JIRA issue discussing the new development process.

No Tags

• Lightbox 2
  A script to include images in a web page.
  (tags: webdesign)
• Penguins Unbound
  A new LUG in the Twin Cities (separate from the TCLUG)
  (tags: linux usergroup)

No Tags

rPath Engineering uses Bamboo in combination with a web power switch to track how new code tests against its test suites. Each lava lamp in this picture corresponds to a product's test suite and is "on" if the tests are breaking. When everything is working, though, the "cold beer" light is on (see the smaller light above the mounted monitor).

Some users have reported not being able to get their iPods working with Banshee in the latest Ubuntu release.

This would be Ubuntu's fault.

Simply unplug your iPod, run this command, and plug it back in to experience screamin' goodness:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/hal restart

Enjoy kiddos.

• What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris » Thoughts by Ted
  A few things Sun did wrong in trying to build the OpenSolaris community
  (tags: community)

No Tags

One of Sunday’s sessions / hackfests, was a discussion on how to re-organize the wiki. As many wiki’s become over time, the Foresight wiki has many pages which are now out of date, especially due to the transition to Foresight 2.0.

One of the comments that was shared by Stef on Saturday as it related to documentation during the community session (more on that in another recap post), was the goal of each tool. Paraphrasing Stef, what I took away was:

• Foresight website: Permanent and official source of news and Foresight information
• IRC: Live help (especially to quick and easy questions)
• Foresight forums: More detailed help that can’t be done quickly in IRC, and user documentation such as tips and tricks and user generated help
• Foresight wiki: Knowledge base

Foresight uses Confluence for it’s wiki, which is quite powerful, but very different from MediaWiki, which many users are familiar with. Confluence uses the term “spaces” to divide different sections of the wiki. The landing page for the Foresight wiki lists the different spaces on the left, most recently edited pages on the upper right, and pages you follow (customizable by you) on the lower right hand side.

Today the landing page lists every space available. We agreed to display six spaces permanently on the landing page:

• Common Questions (FAQ)
• Using Foresight
• Get Involved
• Community
• Development
• Foresight 1.x

Common Questions
Common Questions will be the home to the FAQ, and other user generated information such as tips and tricks that migrates from the Forums to the wiki. The goal is to have a meeting / hackfest once a month to go through content that should migrate.

Using Foresight
Home to the User Guide, and other permanent documentation for users about using Foresight on a day to day basis.

Get Involved
One of the major changes to the wiki. Today there are spaces dedicated to Development, Docs, QA, etc. There is a lot of overlap that each of those spaces has information for the user, as well as how to join a specific sub-team. We will consolidate this information for the sub-teams in Get Involved, and the other spaces become reference material / knowledge base without cluttering it up between these two areas.

A second, important feature of Get Involved, is to document a list of tasks or ways to get involved. Derrick (aka Devnet) shared some great information in Saturday’s Community discussion around this. It’s easy to have users join a team, but to truly have them involved, you have to share with them the goals and tasks of what needs to be done.

Community
Here is the knowledge base for what the Foresight Community is about. Different than the Get Involved section, this space lists Community news and events, such as upcoming conferences, Focus meeting notes and upcoming meetings, and how to become an official Foresight member and developer.

Development
This space is for developer documentation, including how to set up a build environment, creating packages, or migrating to the QA environment. This space shares the Foresight roadmap.

Foresight 1.x
One of the most in-depth discussions was regarding what to do with all the content that is now considered out of date that relates to Foresight 1.x. We don’t want to just delete that content, both for users or developers, as a large part of our user base is probably still running Foresight 1.x. Here we will be migrating all the wiki content that relates to Foresight 1.x, and archive it. At some point in the (far) future we will have to make a decision on long we keep it, but for now it’s important to have this information available to users, but it does need to be separate from Foresight 2.0.

Other changes to the wiki include:

• Making other spaces that exist not display on the landing page, such as the Newsletter space
• Maintenance including removing dead links
• Deleting or consolidating information on older pages. (Our favorite example page of this is the Howto Save Energy page. We all got a good chuckle.)
• Applying tags to as many pages as possible to make it easy for users to find content.
• Updating older pages and creating pages that we need.

One thing I need to find is the Firefox searchlet devnet was talking about, to make it easy to search for content as well.

For a list of the full meeting notes (including pages marked for updating, deleting or creating), you can view the JIRA issue here. Thanks to everyone who attended the session, it was a great discussion with concrete next steps. Now it’s time to make it happen!

No Tags

We eventually put out the long promised alpha1 of Foresight Xfce Edition.
It's not perfect (that's why we call it alpha1), but works for me since a long time.
We're still missing some applications, and xfce goodies.
Openoffice is replaced by abiword and gnumeric. And there is no compiz in the default install (that's a feature).
Get it here
Feedback and Comments (and helping hands) are welcome.

I'm really excited about the press buzz rPath is getting about the upcoming availability of using Novell SLES as an optional base for software and virtual appliances. It was great to read reports even from our local news resources about how rPath is continuing blaze its own trails.

From everything I have observed, rPath still believes the goal of appliance development is to provide only the JeOS (just enough operating system) required to run the application around which that appliance is centered, and for all appliance administration to be performed from a convenient, remotely accessible GUI (not a command line).

Unfortunately, though, as press releases and rumors go, things get lost in translation. For example, this person seems to think rPath is abandoning its own base OS technologies as he states that the company is "working with Novell instead of continuing with their own Linux flavor." In fact, as the original press releases indicated, SLES will be offered in parallel with the Linux Service (part of the rPath Appliance Platform), and both JeOS offerings will use the innovative Conary system management rather than RPM+Yast.

Additionally, as a properly developed appliance is "black box" in nature, the ultimate consumer of an appliance product should never really care what's running the application under the hood. What this new offering provides is less about the ultimate appliance consumer and more about the appliance developer, typically a software company developing server software. By selecting SLES as a JeOS option when developing appliances, rPath's customers who were already developing for SLES have the option to use OS pieces with which they are familiar, have tested with their applications, and (most importantly) have already approved with their legal departments.

I hope that rPath, its customers, and its advocates can continue to clarify what it means to be an "appliance" and emphasize the JeOS perspective when referencing the OS pieces underneath.

So I just got back from Foresight 20/20 yesterday and it was a great success.  Foresight 20/20 was the first ever Foresight user and developer conference and we had 30 attendees throughout the weekend.  I arrived on Friday evening and met some other early arrivals at rPath’s HQ and then we went to go get some Thai food and then drinks.  It was so great meeting all these people I work with and talk to only online.  It was the first time I met many of them such as pscott, doniphon, dugan, jforbes, hpa and great meeting up with pcutler, kenvandine, ryanK, msw, jtate, elliot and stefw again.

On Saturday we officially started the conference and I met even more Foresighters (etank, jkeyes0, OgMaciel, devnet, gxti, and SM2k) .  It started with a talk by Ken about the vision of Foresight.  After that we had a discussion about what we each felt needed fixed with Foresight.  This is a great way to start the weekend because then it helped to plan events geared toward fixing those issues.  We also were given a overview of the roadmap for Foresight and its future.  After that we had a hands-on packaging session where people could write packages and work with mentors to help improve their recipes.  We then broke out into groups and went to go grab lunch.  After lunch we broke out in 2 tracks I attended the track with the community building session followed by the Marketing session which I lead.  After we finished with the conference for the day we went out to eat as a group and then went out for drinks.

Sunday was more of the unconference/unstructured style which I really like and think worked very well.  We started off by having people suggestions possible session and hackfest these included packageKit hackfest, What we want from PackageKit, Foresight used in a business model, Foresight wiki cleanup hackfest, creating derived distros of Foresight, planning for the next Foresight 20/20 and many more.  I was leading the wiki cleanup hackfest and then attended the packageKit idea session.  After the conference ended on Sunday I played some smash brothers on the Wii with Elliot, jforbes and pscott.  After we finished that and cleaning up after the conference we went to get supper and drinks at Raleigh Times, I highly recommend it.  During dinner I had a great talk with dugan about what ChiPy has done to attract members to their meetings and how they structure their meetings.  He was interested as he is trying to help improve the NYC Python Group.

Overall I feel that Foresight 20/20 was a great success and I will go no matter where its located.  It was great putting faces to the nicks I talk to all the time in irc.  Also the sharing of ideas in person was such a useful benefit to get everybody on the same page with a high level understanding.  I look forward to the next Foresight 20/20 and would recommend coming to anybody no matter if you are a Foresight developer or just interested in learning more about Foresight.

Build Changes:

• Conary now warns about some possibly unused build requirements. This requires conary-policy 1.0.16 or later. (CNY-2232)
• Suggested additions to buildRequires lists are now separately encoded in the XML build log. (CNY-2621)
• Loaded recipe modules are no longer tracked in sys.modules (RPL-2409)
• The source components needed to build everything in a group can now be found when the group uses searchPaths. (CNY-2710)
• The SubscriptionLogWriter (CNY-2622) sometimes caused builds to fail. This issue has been resolved. (CNY-2717)
• Group builds now store the searchPath used with the built troves in the repository. (CNY-2721)

Client Changes:

• Conary will now re-read /etc/resolv.conf if an error occurs when resolving a hostname. (CNY-2703)
• Conary now caches the result of IP lookups and uses the cached results if an IP address lookup fails during an update. (CNY-2260)
• Migrate now preserves local installs only of groups and kernels. Before, all manually-installed components and troves that were referenced by the group being migrated would be updated instead of erased. (CNY-2569)
• An API (the createSourceTrove() method of client objects) has been added which creates source troves without using the conary.checkin module. (CNY-2498)

Bug Fixes:

• The internal function _ensureReadableRollbackStatus now directly ensures that it collects the necessary state it needs to succeed instead of relying on that state having been previously collected. (CNY-2711)
• Conary repository migration from repository databases created by conary 1.2.x has been fixed. (CNY-2731)
• In rare cases, some output could corrupt logging data during builds. This has been fixed. (CNY-2734)
• MySQL performance when inserting troves with large numbers of files has been fixed. (CNY-2737)

Repository Changes:

• The addUser() xmlrpc call no longer automatically creates a matching role. (CNY-2604)

Server Changes

• The repository code and repository schema have been updated to allow for faster processing and lookup of file pathIds. (CNY-2468)

• Policies now work with more recent versions of Conary (2.0.12 and later) so that Conary can warn about possibly excessive buildRequires elements. (CNY-2232)
• The new EnforceLocalizationBuildRequirements policy warns that gettext:devel and intltool:runtime are required if POTFILES.in exists. (CNP-115)
• The EnforceConfigLogBuildRequirements has been expanded to look for header files and static libraries mentioned in config.log files, as well as more binaries. (CNP-35, CNP-123)

Client changes:

• rMake will now use user-specified conaryProxy, overriding the use of rmake's internal proxy. (RMK-850)

Bug Fixes:

• Handle a case where restarting a job would override a package's logPath even though the trove before it had no log. (RMK-827)
• Fixed a logic error wherein a reused variable caused loading jobs with multiple contexts to get slower and slower for each additional context used. (RMK-853)

Today I subscribed to ShowMeDo, a web site dedicated to providing tutorials in the format of screencasts. The tutorials cover many programming topics with Python being the one that got me to get a paid subscription. I managed to watch a few episodes during my lunch break… and was blown away at how easy it is to follow the sessions!

Before anyone ask, I’m not getting paid for this plug… I know quite a few people who have shown interest in learning Python but didn’t know how to get started. If you follow a tutorial series, not only will you learn some valuable skills, but you’ll also have a working project to play with.

I highly recommend it!

Basically, I'm just making sure that Planet-SOC is now aggregating my blog.

Planet Banshee & Planet Foresight guys and gals - sorry for the 'spam'!

I am officially a participating student in Google's Summer of Code 2008.

Awesome. =]

The Foresight 20/20 conference wrapped up today in Raleigh, North Carolina.

With 29 registered conference attendees, I would estimate 25 or 26 showed up over the course of two days, which is fantastic attendance. Conferences like these are not only great at building relationships as you finally meet people face to face you’ve spoken to forever in IRC, but also add an energy that only comes from being in the same room with your fellow project members.

Friday night was fairly informal as people arrived, all with different flight times. Most of the out of towners, including myself, had dinner at a Thai restaurant, then headed to the Flying Saucer in downtown Raleigh, just down the road from North Carolina State University. The Flying Saucer is a huge bar with a nice outdoor patio, and stocks over 100 different kinds of beer. You name it they probably have it (except for Pabst Blue Ribbon, which Ryan did try to order at one point). They also have a club you can join with a kiosk that helps you go on a journey of trying all the beers, with varying prizes the more you drink over time.

Saturday was the first day of the conference, and was kicked off by Ken VanDine giving his “State of the Vision” (his title!) address on the current state of Foresight, how we’re different, and where we’re headed. This was one of the few sessions actually recorded on a camcorder, so we’ll need to find a volunteer to edit and post the video. This was followed by Ken and Antonio sharing their goals for Foresight’s roadmap.

Saturday was the fairly structured day, with tracks including Community building, Development Process, Marketing, and QA Process. Each session was assigned a task in JIRA, and the meeting notes are available in JIRA. Over the next week, it’s my goal to write a post about each session, and recap what was discussed by project members.

Saturday evening we headed out for dinner as a large group, and back to the Flying Saucer for more beer.

Sunday was our unconference day, similar to a Barcamp. We kicked off the day with session recaps from Michael (Development Process), Paul Scott-Wilson (QA Process) and Kevin (Marketing). From there we quickly brainstormed what hackfests and sessions we’d like to see throughout the day, wrote them on a whiteboard and then each attendee put a tick mark next to the sessions he or she was interested in attending.

Over the course of the next week or so, it’s my goal to blog about the majority of the sessions and hackfests on Saturday and Sunday. These will include an overview of the session, goals, and action items to keep moving Foresight forward that were discussed. As mentioned above, each session was captured as an action item in JIRA, and I will link to the JIRA issue, and provide a recap.

Thanks again to everyone who came, the first Foresight 20/20 Conference was a blast, and I look forward to many more.

No Tags

I’ve finally found time to upload some of my pictures and movies to Flickr and Youtube.

Videos:

• Yv singing something she learned at school from her friends (with a butterfly painted to her face).

• Kate babling away!

Pictures:

• More pictures here!

• A New User Guide to Linux Communities - Yet Another Linux Blog
  A great introduction to how Linux communities can work
  (tags: linux community)

No Tags

Foresight developers and community members have been hitting the streets in NC over the past couple days.  What brings them from all around the world to the humble south you ask?  Foresight 20/20 of course!  It has been so exciting preparing for the first official gathering of Foresight developers, we will surely have fond memories of this event.  If you are in the area, we will be kicking off in the morning at 9am and after wrapping up for the day heading out for dinner and drinks, on both Saturday and Sunday.

• HOWTO/AudioDevices - BlueZ - Trac
  Get a Bluetooth headset working with PulseAudio
  (tags: linux hardware)

No Tags

GNOME Do’s final project report has been released. GNOME Do was originally started as an academic project by a few students at the University of Pennsylvania.

I would like to direct you to page 13, where Foresight and Shuttle both receive mentions:

Our most recent release was 0.4.2., released on April 15, 2008. GNOME Do now has packages in every major GNU/Linux distribution, and is even installed by default in Foresight Linux and a few others. Shuttle, a boutique PC retailer, is now selling a line of loc-cost Linux PCs that have GNOME Do running on them by default.

Thank you to David and Douglass for all their hard work, and the mention!

No Tags

Disappearing completely would just make too many folks happy - and I certainly can't have that.

Anyway, during the course of upgrading my internet subscription, I mysteriously and unexpectedly lost my connection for well over a day. Thankfully, all seems sorted out after AT&T tweaked some of their wiring in my neighborhood.

I also, during the course of my downtime, have had my current feed built into the Planet Foresight appliance, so I'm once again syndicated there.

Now to catch up on hundreds of feeds and dozens of emails. =[

There is a Foresight Flickr group I created a while back, for screenshots and conferences. If you have a Flickr account, or want to follow along as the conference progresses, you can find the group here: http://www.flickr.com/groups/foresightlinux/.

pscott has spent a chunk of the day getting Foresight to run on his Asus EeePC - he’s booting Foresight from an external USB hard drive, and had to compile a custom madwifi driver to get wireless to work. It runs well - fairly snappy, and according to him, comparable to the Xandros OS it ships with.

No Tags

My flight got in late last night, and Ken was kind enough to pick me up from the airport, where I met pscott and doniphon face to face for the first time.

After a snafu at the hotel (long story for a different time), we are hanging out at the rPath offices. Walk in to their office and you know exactly where you are, this is on the wall:

I’ve met tons of people today so far, including devnet, stef, elliot, Og, Up2, mkj and more.

pscott and I are hanging in an extra office while the others have to work, waiting for some other folks flights to get in.

You should have come to the Foresight 20/20 conference, you’d get one of these:

I’ll try to keep up with photos and blog posts throughout the weekend.

(Sorry about the blurry photos, it’s the camera, I swear!)

No Tags

Openbox just keeps getting better and better! The new support for XDG files is just what the doctor recommended. See the full changelog here.

Yesterday’s news about the Suse Appliance Program had me grinning all morning long… and I just had to forward what my co-worker wrote:

Billy Marshall, CEO, rPath (2006): The Standard OS is Virtually Gone

Nat Friedman, CTO, Novell (2008): The Standalone OS is Dead

Indeed, we’re flattered.

Yes, indeed!

Billy Marshall, CEO, rPath (2006): The Standard OS is Virtually Gone

Nat Friedman, CTO, Novell (2008): The Standalone OS is Dead

Indeed, we’re flattered.

• Bug #160309 in xserver-xorg-video-intel (Ubuntu): “X crashes when idle”
  An Ubuntu bug report that seems to match my Xorg / freezing issues on my T61
  (tags: hardware)
• [PATCH] intel: fix crash triggered by dpms low power mode with hardware overlay running
  Xorg patch for Intel to fix the freezing problems
  (tags: linux)

No Tags

• Memtest86.com - Memory Diagnostic
  A free downloadable (2 meg!) ISO to boot your computer and test your memory
  (tags: hardware)

No Tags

Yesterday I sent out an email to the members of the Ubuntu Brazilian Council (of which I’ve been a member for quite some time now) informing of my decision to step down. For the last few months I have been extremely busy at work as well as keeping up with the translations for GNOME, XFCE, Ubuntu and my pet project BillReminder. As if this wasn’t enough, Kate, my youngest child is now 14 months old and walking all over the apartment… and Yv is almost 7 already!

Just as I had stepped down from leading the Brazilian translation team before in order to give someone else a chance to guide the group, I once again believe it is time to let the “new blood” do their thing.

Looking back when I first started in the community in 2005, I can say that it was lots of fun being able to pave the way to the newer generation of free and open source software users in Brazil. It makes me feel extra proud when I remember that I’ve accomplished things without actually living in Brazil during all these years. Sure there were many bumps along the way, and unfortunately some friendships were tarnished due to different opinions but I firmly believe I did the best to keep the community’s best interest. I did what leaders are supposed to do: make decisions… and I have no regrets!

Does that mean I won’t be involved with the Ubuntu community? Absolutely not! Through the years my interest has expanded beyond Ubuntu and today I am involved in many different communities, distros e projects. I will still be very much involved with the Ubuntu guys and am looking forward to the newer crop of administrators and leaders for the Brazilian community!

My new T61 laptop is freezing, typically after 5-10 minutes of inactivity, but every once in a while I’m using it. It seems as if I’m actively using it, it won’t freeze up, but soon as I stop, within 5-10 minutes it just hard locks. I’ve used my T61 up to two hours without lock-ups, set it aside, and bam, frozen.

I’ve browsed through the /var/logs/messages file a number of times, but I don’t see anything in the file - just the reboot messages. I spent 3 hours last night running Memtest86, and my memory passed all the tests. I also re-formatted and re-installed Foresight a second time. I can’t figure it out.

I would really hate to have to re-install Vista to see if it happens there too before calling Lenovo’s warranty service.

Anyone have any ideas?

No Tags

Jeff just released a bugfix release for whaawmp. It doesn't lockup anymore, if xvideo isn't available and it works with other imagesinks too now.
I hope to put out an alpha of Foresight Linux Xfce Edition this week eventually.
We will see. Get latest whaawmp while waiting :-)

Once upon a time, I worked for a failed startup.

This startup’s name was Alerts.com. Heard of ‘em? Didn’t think so.

Anyways, this was Web 1.0, back when the money flowed freely, Aeron chairs were bought by the metric ton and everyone had a business plan to make millions based on “eyeballs”. Let’s face it: we were collectively high as a kite.

Initially, it was to be called Emissary Software but then someone decided that no one could spell “emissary” so it became “alertmewhen.com”, and later, just plain old “alerts.com”. We had a big pile of Java code that scraped the websites of companies that partnered with—and sometimes even paid—us. Customers could sign up and get alerted when, say, the price on a widget dropped, or when a stock price met a certain goal, or if there was a severe weather alert posted in the area, etc. We had deals with c|net, MarketWatch and Weather Underground. Not bad for a scrappy startup that dared to be in North Carolina¹.

We almost got acquired at the height of it all for a stock deal from LifeMinders (heard of ‘em? didn’t think so) that turned out to be utterly worthless. The deal imploded right at the same time that the stock market tanked. After laying off a bunch of people and garnered recognition on that infamous site we “reinvented ourselves” as an “enterprise software company” that purported to graft our alerting technology onto weird-ass things like huge hulking CRM applications². Ultimately, we spent more time playing foosball than actually working, and the remaining husk of a company was sold to Alphablox³ for a pennies on the dollar. Good times, good times.

It wasn’t a total loss. I learned a lot about coding as well as some wisdom about what not to do when working for a software company. I have some tchotchkes to show for it, including two champagne glasses that promise “the first of many” successes. I met some good folks including one who is directly responsible for getting me into weblogging. Let us also not forget that I became halfway decent at foosball⁴.

Tonight, a former co-worker let me know that someone has gone and opened a new alerts.com site that instills an eerie sense of dejà vu. Some of the new site’s copy is a bit similar to our old site:

Ours (c. 2000):

Once the Alerts.com system is enabled on a partner’s site, any visitor can request to be notified when specific Web content—a target stock price, availability of a product, an auction bid, a news article, a weather forecast, discounted airfare, etc.—appears or changes.

Theirs (2008):

alerts.com is your central destination to access, manage and orchestrate how to receive updated news, headlines or the scores of your favorite team or player, get birthday or party reminders, be notified when a fare goes up or down, if severe weather is moving to town, if the price of a gadget has now dropped to where it becomes a steal, and many more.

Besides run-on sentences, their website contains the standard Web 2.0 look and feel (rounded boxes, reflected menu bar, etc.). There’s no actual functionality, just a survey on what you’d like to be alerted on, and an e-mail signup to alert you when, uh, alerts.com is ready.

Anyways, good luck to you guys. You have a lot of competition.

¹ People in The Valley just don’t understand: us NC types are fueled by BBQ and sweet tea.

² It will have to be a cold day in Hell before I consider working on Siebel again.

³ Alphablox is now owned by IBM which means they own whatever code I wrote for Pearl Diver (the platform that ran “alerts.com”).

⁴ The best way to taunt someone in foosball is to start humming that Glenn Frey classic “The Heat is On” before serving. Trust me.