Texas Linux Fest 2011

This is sadly a week over due in the blog space, but last weekend (April 2, 2011) was the second annual Texas Linux Fest in Austin, TX. This year was night and day compared to last year in terms of turn out, venue and number of vendors with booths.

There were roughly right around 500-600 people at the event in the Hilton Downtown Austin and we filled their conference rooms right up. The Fedora booth was extremely busy! I even had a couple people from other booths come over and make comments on how busy we were which was a pleasant surprise from fellow exhibitors. Even during the "lunch break hour" (the sessions broke for lunch but the hall where the booths were hosted never had a shut down moment) the Fedora booth was a notably happening location in the exhibition hall. There were vendors from all walks of the Linux ecosystem there: Fedora, Red Hat, IBM, HP, Dell, HostGator, RackSpace, Softlayer, Webmin, Cloud.com, OpenStack, Novell/SLES, LinuxJournal Magazine, and many more (apologies to those who weren't listed ... that's just what I could remember off the top of my head a week later).





The usual swag were big hits, the Fedora buttons, ink pens, stickers as well as pressed media were in high demand and we had a box of Design Suite media left over from the SXSW event that had gone on two weeks before that were extremely popular as not many people knew it existed. Many of the conference attendees who showed interest in the Design Suite were either those who dabble in graphic design or have a friend who does it in more serious context and they've been looking for a good avenue to show off the FOSS alternatives to the proprietary tools these individuals currently work with.

Dell also had a booth across the way from us and they were giving away a laptop at the end of the day. One of our fellow Fedora Ambassadors (Julio Villarreal) ran over and fired up some Fedora on it and the Dell reps who were there were good sports about it and let it run on there all day which I thought was another night avenue to show off some Fedora goodness.



I was also extremely excited to see so many new faces in the crowd, the volume of Linux users who were likely in high school or fresh into the college scene that were very interested in what Fedora is up to and has to offer was refreshing and I hope to see many of them become key players in the Fedora of tomorrow. The OLPC XO was a big hit as was my Genesi EfikaMX Smartbook that I brought along with me to show off what the Fedora ARM development team has been hard at work at (very big special thanks to Dennis Gilmore for putting up with my ultra ARM-noob self while trying to make that thing work in time for the conference). On the topic of Fedora ARM, there was a PandaBoard booth at the conference and a few of their booth exhibitors came over to check out Fedora ARM running on the smartbook and to ask questions about the efforts that were ongoing. They were very impressed!!

There were a number of users who were interested in the alternate desktops (LXDE was extremely popular) available on the installation DVDs that were on the booth table. We gave away roughly 500+ pieces of media, probably 200-ish case badges, similar amount of stickers, all of the buttons (think there were 150-200 of those), all of the stickers left over from SXSW, and a hand full of balloons and temporary tattoos.

The Fedora booth was stationed right next to the Red Hat booth which as I've expressed before I think is a very powerful statement to have us standing next to one another but as our own separate entities. Many times we at the Fedora booth were asked about the relationship with Red Hat as well as if we were Red Hat employees. None of us at the booth this year were "Hatters" and that came as a surprise to a number of the conference attendees but we still the same enjoyed explaining the heritage of the community centric Fedora and its long time relationship to Red Hat. Those talking points I felt were very effective in explaining many things that people "on the outside" don't 100% understand.

All in all I would have to say it was an excellent conference and I can't wait for more like it so that we can go out and show off the awesomeness that is Fedora!

-AdamM

Ask not what your distro can do for you, but what you can do for your distro.

I've had a lot of mixed feelings in the recent Fedora Community rivalries that have spawned as there are sentiments I agree with and disagree with from both sides but I haven't been happy with how some of the messages have been expressed. Today there was a blog post from spot that addresses many things of that nature. As I read this post I was reminded of a famous quote from John F. Kennedy's January 20th 1961 Inaugural Speech and I feel it applies today still to our Country but also in recent times to Fedora. We live in a community centric culture that is heavily based on merit, those who are willing to put in the time and effort are rewarded with the respect of their peers. We do also, however, exist in a community based around freedom and that affords each of us as contributors to contribute our time, effort, and skills to what we want to. Nobody can dictate how you spend your free time, period.

I'm tired of the fighting. Either come up with a solution and go with it, or just stop. I am directing this at both sides of the qualms too, don't think I'm taking sides or that anyone from one side hasn't done something that has angered the other. We're dividing ourselves and I don't see how its helping anyone individually or Fedora as a whole. So please, "Ask not what your distro can do for you, but what you can do for your distro."

-AdamM

Fedora 14 Xfce Spin with Compiz on top

I was recently using my favorite Fedora Spin and I realized that there was one key thing I missed about Compiz vs. Xfwm4 (now mind you I think Xfwm4 is an amazing window manager ... but this was an itch that needed scratching), it wasn't the desktop cube, the minimization animations, or any of the many wonderful compiz-fusion plugins. It was the Compiz Scale feature. It's one of those things that I find myself using quite often because of how busy my desktop gets. I am a big fan of Compiz and have been for some time but there isn't any official built in support for Compiz in Xfce 4.6.x (current stable version in Fedora as of the writing of this blog post) so I wanted to find a way to add in Compiz into Xfce in a somewhat "seemless" or "integrated" way. Here's a short write up of what I did and I hope someone is able to use it as a basis to their own path to finding a comfy desktop.

Install packages (as root):


yum -y install compiz compiz-fusion ccsm emerald emerald-themes


These packages will install and give you the CompizConfig Settings Manager as well as compiz "core" and the compiz-fuzion plugins/extensions along with the emerald window decorator which is necessary if you want to have custom window decorations without relying on other Desktop Environment integration pieces.

At this point we will likely want to attempt to run Compiz and make sure we can actually run it:


compiz-manager


This should replace Xfwm4 with Compiz, if not there is likely an error and in that case you will need to diagnose the issue as well as solve it before continuing.

Next we will need to edit the following file with your favorite text editor. If you don't have one I'll recommend the light weight IDE called Geany that comes with the Fedora Xfce Spin by default and is located in the Xfce Menu as follows Menu->Development->Geany. This recommendation comes mainly from the fact that it is easy to use for those not familiar with such editors as vim or emacs and this file is XML which Geany supports syntax highlighting for:


geany ~/.config/xfce4/xfconf/xfce-perchannel-xml/xfce4-session.xml


In this file you will need to find the section that looks like this:


<property name="Client0_Command" type="empty">


And edit it to look like this (i.e. - delete the above and insert the following in its place):



<property name="Client0_Command" type="array">
<value type="string" value="compiz-manager">
</property>



At this point you should be able to log out and back in and Compiz will have replaced Xfwm4 as your default Window Manager without any need to do strange "hacks." Thus demonstrating some of the power of standards compliant software and the ability to be interchanged based on preference or personal requirements.



I would like to take a moment to thank the Xfce Developers and Fedora Community for making things like this possible and allowing me to create the best desktop environment for me by using simple customizations/configurations. I'd like to thank Kevin Fenzi as well as Christoph Whickert for doing so much of the heavy lifting in respect to the Xfce Spin and everyone as a whole for allowing me to be part of the process, its moments like this where I truly appreciate the power of FOSS and the communities that form as a result. Long live Fedora!

-AdamM

New Year, New City, and the Start of a New Career

It has been far too long since I have posted to the world about happenings relevant to myself and to that of the Fedora world so I will attempt to recap a bit.

Where have I been and where did I go?
I left the humble little town of Huntsville, TX which is the location of Sam Houston State University. It is also where I earned my Undergraduate Degree in Computer Science, where I am continuing to pursue my Masters Degree in Information Assurance and Security via correspondence, and where I have spent the last three years working as a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Systems Administrator. While my time there was good, it was clearly time for me to move on so I began looking around for position openings at companies I was interested in working for. I was fortunate enough to get a recommendation from a fellow Fedora Community Member for a position as a Systems Engineer at Dell Incorporated. I was called in for an interview and I will assume I did well because I was later offered the position which I was extremely excited to accept. I now wear a Dell Badge and I wear it with pride, I'm privileged to get to work in a R&D lab on GNU/Linux technologies powered by Dell hardware (yes I have a Fedora machine on my workbench in the Lab). I'm really bad with words so I'll leave it at this: I absolutely love my new job. As a side effect of the new job I relocated to Austin, TX and I again find myself without the literary skill to explain my enjoyment of this town as a whole so I will again say this: I love this town.

What about Fedora? You mentioned Fedora!
I was very sadly out of the loop for pretty much the entire Fedora 14 cycle and I would like to apologize to appropriate parties for that. I am currently working on getting some priorities in line as well as having purchased a new laptop with a bit more power under the hood so that I can do more QA work in VMs. Fedora 15 will hopefully be something I can contribute more time to. I'm regaining interest in the Xfce world after my tangent off to both KDE and Gnome (I'm really just a DE nomad these days, I respect the power and offerings of all three major contenders) so I hope to find myself on the list of co-maintainers of the Xfce Spin once again and with any luck I can find myself there for the ongoing future. I've also in the last week been working on getting my EPEL responsibilities up to date with the latest EL6 release and I'm happy to see that not only is fedpkg proving to be amazing but also that there is an Olive Branch of sorts being extended to active EPEL maintainers lacking a RHN subscription for those interested in supporting EL6 for at least the time being while RHEL clones get up to speed. While this might not remain permanent, it is nice to see those within the firewall seeing the value and user base of EPEL desiring the community supported packages. I personally have two subscriptions that I use at the house because not only am I a big Red Hat fan but I'm always preaching that I don't mind paying for good software and chose to vote with my dollar. That being said, I don't think contributors should necessarily be expected to follow that same guideline so I like that steps are being taken to provide contributors with the necessary tools.

Well .... that's where I'm sitting these days, my apologies for my ramblings if they make little sense. My blog often flows from mind to keyboard without much of a writing fundamentals filter so for my imminent grammatical errors please be kind.

P.S. - For those who have requests in for a couple of my packages to be updated, I am working with them. There's one most notable which is Pida, its upstream release structure has changed a little so I'm going to be spending a little time getting familiar with the new code before slinging packages out.

Night all,
-AdamM

Restructure for the sake of progress.

There has recently been a lot of chatter about the future of Fedora, vision statements, goals, progress and where to go from here. I would like to voice my opinion on the topic and for all who disagree please let me know why and voice your solution because I am always open to new ideas and I am definitely not saying this is the only way to continue or to solve the current issues but its the idea I had.

First off, what's the problem? Well from my perspective there are a few but I only want to focus on a couple right now: There's a lack of focus which makes marketing really difficult as there are so many things to promote and we have such a breadth of innovation wrapped up together offering a multitude of solutions which is confusing for newcomers. This is something I would like to think that we as a project aren't fond of. Others might have opinions of what they think are problems and they might very well be problems, but these are the ones that I personally think I can offer an idea for solution.

Our lack of focus is pure marketing pain: This rounds out a bit of the recent talks about Vision Statement which I'm not against as many appear to be and I think the blog post from Thorwil nails this right on the head. What can we do, where can we go and how do we do it without breaking up the community? My proposal for this is to continue the Fedora Project in a similar manner as it is going now but to migrate a little on how the Fedora Distribution is handled. I think we as a group should focus on the concept of a "Fedora Experience" and ask ourselves "What makes Fedora, Fedora?" I think we need to strip out a lot of our ambiguity for the official Fedora Distribution. Lets get rid of the KDE LiveCD, lets throw out the Spins, and lets let the Fedora Distribution focus purely on the default Gnome offering along with all that entails as a start to finish desktop experience, the "Fedora Experience". Now before you get angry and want to throw me to the sharks please just read on and save the flame mob until the end. I just don't see a way to be able to carry on the way we are while continuing to grow adoption. If we refocus on just one installation of one environment then we are decreasing the strain of the documentation team, the QA team, release engineering, the design team, the marketing team, and others who partake in the wonders of the Fedora Distribution as we've stripped out the ambiguity of "Its Fedora because it came from fedoraproject.org" or "It's Fedora because its all one package repository" and we just focus on one environment.

"But Adam, you're just pissing people off and they will leave the project"

This is true and this is false, this is inevitable and its completely avoidable, this is heavily a loaded statement. My idea is that we will restructure ourselves into forking off brands who operate under the same parent project, The Fedora Project. The idea is that those of us interested in KDE (or $other) will break off and make "Kepi Linux" (random name I selected for sake of example) and what is Kepi Linux? Kepi Linux is a distribution of linux focused on delivering a KDE centric experience that is based on the Fedora Project, it is a brand. I'd like to take a moment to quickly direct everyone's attention to Steve Yegge's talk at OSCON 2007 it's only about 25 minutes but if you don't have that kind of time the jist is, "The look, feel, packaging, and naming of a product, i.e. the brand, is more powerful than the function." I want people to take that and think about it hard for a moment because as much as you'd like to argue it at first, when you mull it over you know its true in at least some capacity. So back to the Kepi Linux example, now we have this new brand, new identity, and new outlet that packagers and developers can come together an work on that allows the specific group to focus on their own space. Essentially the KDE SIG within the Fedora Project would be the driving force behind Kepi Linux. As long as it is structured such that we are still using the same package repository, still using the same build environment, same bugzilla instance (maybe with some changes for branding), the same account system, continue contributing code, content, and packages to the same project and still share the same over all goal of leading the advancement of free, open software and content then I think we can still as the community at large stick together while being slightly more focused on our own areas (brands).

This idea probably isn't perfect and I understand that a paradigm shift like this would require a *LOT* of work from a lot of people but I think it would be a positive change in the long run. If we were to make Kepi Linux we could even have an "About Us" page that describes how we are the KDE SIG and that Kepi Linux is a sub project of the Fedora Project but is different from the Fedora Distribution, this way we are removing the confusion from new users because if they want Fedora and they go to get.fedoraproject.org there is one option, period. We are removing the over saturation of the Fedora brand which I like to think will result positively.

Just my thoughts on the topic, take them for what you will.

-AdamM

Personal Priority Queue

There comes a day when I realize that I've found myself drowning long enough that something has to give. I contain only a certain amount of cycles that can only perform so many instructions within a finite amount of time. Sadly, no matter how much sleep I try and do without, I can't keep up or catch up and its time I enact a priority queue with my time.

Lets take a quick rundown of what gets higher priority and renice what is in need of it. First and foremost is my family, period. Highest priority is obviously set to my family. Then we make our way down the chain to the essential tie between my day job and graduate school. We'll apply them equal priority. Following that we can lump in randomness and hobbies with equal priority but the only thing I really want to discuss is Fedora. I love Fedora, I love working on Fedora and I wish I could work on it all day, everyday but a sad reality is that Fedora doesn't pay the bills and Fedora doesn't land me a Masters Degree (though I do try to incorporate Fedora into my assignments in my graduate courses when ever it is applicable).

What does this mean? Am I leaving Fedora? First off, I don't think I will ever leave Fedora because I believe in it too much and I love the community, what it stands for, and the efforts that are put into the project by it. However, I am going to have to scale back my time allotment which means I'm going to have to be more conservative with my excitement as it has gotten my hands in many pots and stretched me too thin ultimately causing my current predicament. I wanted to be able to contribute to Fedora in every way I am capable but the unfortunate fact is that I just can't pull it off. My problem is that I get too excited about too many different aspects of Fedora and I want to contribute all I can. I want to be a part of Fedora Design, Fedora QA, Fedora Ambassadors, Fedora Python SIG, Fedora Java SIG, Fedora KDE SIG, Fedora XFCE SIG, Fedora Desktop Team, Fedora Cloud SIG, Fedora ARM SIG, and other areas of the Fedora project that I find extremely interesting. Here I sit trying to find a way to keep up and I can't, I just can't. I will continue to maintain my packages and hang out in irc as much as possible but beyond that I am going to have to attempt to gracefully duck out of my other Fedora endeavors until I can find the time to really get back in the mix. I thank you Fedora, as a project and a community for offering such a cultivating and welcoming arena with so many outlets that I find so interesting that I want to dive in head first. I must take care of some other aspects of life right now but you will always be near and dear. In hopes that I am able to dive in full swing at a later date, I bid you all good luck and will continue to lurk around. :)

dvtm - dynamic virtual terminal manager

Not too long ago I found myself in need of organizing my terminal sessions, I had too many windows open and it was cluttering my work space and bloating my alt+tab layout. I poked around the internet and found the likes of Terminator[0] and it was nice but not my personal preference so I did a little more poking and I found my way to dvtm[1]. dvtm is a dynamic virtual terminal manager that will essentially perform tiling window management from within a terminal window. It was originally a port of dwm to ncurses and has made my life eponentially easier since I found it. I wanted to show off some screenshots in hopes that others might find it fits their needs!

The package was already available in Fedora but since I spend a large amount of my time on RHEL machines for my day job I went through the processes to get it into EPEL, so everyone can have dvtm! :)

Here's some screenshot awesomeness (same apps, just different layouts within dvtm):





Hope people want to give it a shot! Also, be sure to read the man page, all the questions I could imagine were answered there. Happy hacking! :)


[0] http://www.tenshu.net/terminator/
[1] http://www.brain-dump.org/projects/dvtm/

Big Fedora Logo For Fedora Planet!

Here's a big Fedora Logo (or at least as big as blogger.com will let me post) for those who were upset with the Ubuntu Logo that found its way on the planet.fedoraproject.org today. Enjoy and long live FOSS software!

Getting CyanogenMod on your Motorola Droid (Android 2.1 OTA) from Linux.

Step 1: Download sbf_flash[0], and follow his directions with 1 modification, shutdown your phone and hold "UP" on the directional pad before "just plugging it in" (note, the screen will be blank/black and have some white text on it in a very primitive font, if that's what you got you're good) and I believe the application must be run as root. Also, the sbf image you will need is SPRecovery[1]

[0] http://blog.opticaldelusion.org/2010/05/sbfflash.html
[1] http://www.mediafire.com/?jgt1gjgx5gv

Step 2: Download CyanogenMod's latest release (at time of this writing it was 5.0.7) and copy it to the root of your SDCard and rename it "update.zip"

http://koush.tandtgaming.com//motorola/sholes/update-cm-5.0.7.1-Droid-signed.zip

Step 3: Shutdown your phone and reboot into SPRecovery by holding the 'x' key on your keyboard while it powers on (be holding 'x' before you hit the power button just to be sure). This should boot you into SPRecovery.

Step 4: Make a backup!!! You are going to want to make a backup here just in case something goes wrong. Use the volume up/down buttons on the side of your phone to move the selection up and down and the camera button on the side of your phone (power button takes you back to the previous menu).

Step 5: Flash the update, select "install" and in the next menu tell it to allow update.zip, then select "Install /sdcard/update.zip"

Step 6: Install the Google Apps, first copy the gapps file over to the root of your SDCard, rename it "update.zip" overwritting the old one. And repeat Step 5 remembering to hold 'x' while booting to get to SPRecovery.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/mnzmk1nytt2/gapps-passion-EPE54B-signed.zip

Step 7: Reboot and enjoy

NOTE: If your phone goes into what appears to be an infinite reboot loop, pull the battery and then hold 'x' again when you power back up to get back to SPRecovery and tell it to do a wipe of user data, its an option in the main menu. This happens but not always so don't be alarmed if it does.

Step 8: (Optional) Download ROMManager from the App Market and buy the extremely reasonably priced Premium version that will monitor new releases of the ROM as well as automate the flashing process.

NOTE: ROMManager is going to require a different Recovery image but it will handle the installation of this and will continue to make life awesome for you .... again, *highly* recommended.

Feel free to come hang out in #koush on irc.freenode.net if you have questions or just want to talk about the awesomeness that is CyanogenMod on the Motorola Droid!

Death to ARM, Long live ARM!

Not all that long ago I wrote a blog post that expressed some frustrations I was having with ARM as a platform but in retrospect I think my statements were a bit hasty and overzealous. I stepped away from the unique aspect of ARM boards that make them so appealing, they are different, they are disjoint, but they are also extremely capable. We live in a world where you can't walk into the middle of a town and throw a rock in any direction without hitting a person carrying an ARM device which is an extremely powerful statement. Its a platform where extremely cool things are happening, it is the reigning champion of consumer embedded devices and as cloud computing (yes, I hate the term too but bear with me) becomes more and more the way of the future, embedded computing really will be a more viable solution for the dawn of tomorrow.

What does this mean? Well, that depends on who you are and where you sit in the world. It means to me that I think we within the Fedora Community need to put more efforts into the Fedora ARM SIG and even though I am an ARM SIG member I probably made my fellow Fedorans(?) a bit upset with my outcry as well as dealt myself a bit of a credibility blow which I have only myself to thank. In an effort to bring myself back from my current state I in the process of gearing up for doing some actual contribution to the Fedora ARM port, I've got a book entitled "Embedded Linux Primer" by Christopher Hallinan that I'm almost half way through and I've got a GuruPlug on order from GlobalScale because even if I hit fits of frustration along they way it would be ignorant of me to claim that embedded computing doesn't power the world, ARM is leading the way in that market, and I feel this is an area that Fedora could be great in. So lets hope that Apple doesn't buy ARM and screw us all. Long live Fedora and long live ARM!

UPDATE: I have cancelled my previous order of the GuruPlug in favor of a SheevaPlug for two reasons. 1) The GuruPlug requires me to buy JTAG board to do dev work and I don't want to shell out the extra cash. 2) I'm hearing reports of GuruPlugs doing random reboots when using the ethernet port. So now I just have to wait for my SheevaPlug in the mail!

Vote with your dollars

"Vote with your dollars," a phrase a co-worker said to me when we started discussing smoking vs. non-smoking dining options. It's an idea that has stuck with me ever since and I find myself applying it to anything I do these days. For example, I pay for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for my house even though I could run CentOS. Why do I do this? Because I want to support Red Hat, I want to vote with my dollars and let them know that I appreciate what they do for the open source software community at large with all of their endeavours.

This past weekend I found myself at a store, I won't say which one because I need not endorse them and they certainly don't need or want a mention in my measly little blog. At this store I was on a mission to purchase a portable mouse to go along with my new Asus EeePC 1001P (which I recently blogged about). The netbook is wonderful but when I've got it sitting on a desk I'd rather have a real mouse. As I was cruising for a perfect selection I found myself with two mice to decide between, both were capable and according to their boxes they had almost identical feature sets but one was cheaper. If I were a regular consumer, I would have grabbed the cheaper one and gone on with my life and not thought anything of it, but I am not a regular consumer. I'm a voter. There was another difference between these two devices and that was that the more expensive one had an image of Tux on the side and a listing for "Linux kernel 2.6+" in the system requirements field. I was sold. I voted with my dollars and gave my money to Logitech as they took the time and money to verify functionality on a Linux machine and to print the information on their labels. So kudos to you Logitech and I thank you for your help in the struggle to push the Linux movement. While many might find this victory small and meaningless, I think this is a big statement to the world. We came, we dominated, and now your peripherals wear our insignia. I happily paid the extra money to the company that was willing to give me some peace of mind that when I plugged that mouse in to my Fedora 13 Beta powered netbook that it would work and it did and I'm happy.

Why I hope Intel breaks ARM in half

I've been a growing fan of the ARM platform for a while now but as time goes on my frustrations with the extremely drastic differences between ARM boards has begun to get under my skin. I've often thought to myself, "Why can't we just take an x86 machine and shrink its components to make an embedded system on a chip that walks, talks, and acts like the same old systems we're used to?"

In walks Intel to slaps me in the face with a big fat, "oh yeah ... we're totally doing that" and I love it. Its an amazing concept because I can take this SoC that will give me potentially days of battery life and run software that I've been running on my laptops, desktops, and netbooks since I've owned a computer. You know, software like the entire Fedora Distribution and all packages that might entail.

Intel recently demoed tablets and cellular telephones running on Moorestown CPUs that are claiming to be twice as fast as the current Pineview line of Atom processors as well as sporting a two to three times longer battery life. I'm a proud owner of an Asus EeePC 1001P and I'm getting about 8.5 hours of battery life on that thing with casual wifi browsing and a couple ssh sessions opened and this is all powered by an Intel Atom N450 which is a Pineview core running Fedora 13 Beta (full Gnome, etc. and it runs like a champ). With these claims of two to three times battery life, we really are approaching literally days of computing on a single charge from a processor that I can just fire up Fedora on. I like where this is going.

Lets go on a tangent for a moment, Apple has put a bid out to purchase ARM and I honestly hope they win it so they can absorb another platform just to kill it off. My hope is that Apple will win ARM, developers and distributors will not want to pay Apple/ARM prices or deal with their unreasonable developer agreements and will find comfort in Intel's Moorestown. Android and MeeGo are already supporting the Intel Moorestown line thanks to thier Linux roots and I like to think its just a matter of time before the mobile market abandons ARM all together. With the trend of tablet computers and smartbooks starting to gain some speed I think to myself, why divide ourselves as developers among multiple different ARM specs instead of having a standard target archticture that's been around for decades? But I digress.

Back on topic but keeping in mind the content of the tangent, lets think for a moment what this would mean for mobile platforms. Now, I want to start with the disclaimer that I love Free and Open Source Software but lets face it, half the internet runs on Adobe Flash. So while Adobe is beating its head against the wall trying to reinvent Flash for mobile platforms using several different abstraction models to keep the insanity of supporting all flavors of ARM from killing them entirely, Intel is quietly about to unleash the answer to their problem. To be honest, I don't care about Adobe in this respect (sorry Adobe, I just don't) but what I do care about are end users. If the end user can get a brand new Moorestown powered netbook with a day or two of battery life, double the performance of the current Intel Atom processors, and slap Fedora on there with out of the box support for everything they need as well as the option to add third party repositories for things such as Flash then I'm on board. Because in reality, the only reason x86 hasn't made it to cellular phones yet is because Intel hadn't found a way to pull off the battery life needed to do it. Now that they have, and I say we break an ARM or two.

Fedora 13 Beta - Asus EeePC 1001P

It's tax season again and I got money back, not a very large amount but enough to cover a new budget netbook. With the budget in mind and the goal of long battery life I did my research and it was clear that the Asus EeePC 1001P (160gb version) was going to be top notch for the price. This little netbook (that I'm making this blog post from) is powered by the latest Intel N450 Pineview processor which offers some attractive bits in terms of battery life and form factor since it allows for a 6 cell battery that is almost entirely flush with the body of the netbook. For under $300 (USD) it is advertised to get up to 11 hours of battery life and is showing between 8 and 9 hours of battery life in real world usage.

I ordered it off Amazon.com and it arrived via FedEx on my doorstep yesterday afternoon and as per the included documentation it needed to charge for 8 hours before its first use. While I don't entirely trust or believe the battery needs that much time sitting on a charger I decided to play it safe. Once that horrible waiting period was over I was finally able to get it powered up and get Fedora 13 Beta installed. I was lucky enough to guess the right BIOS key so that I could get this little guy to boot from the USB stick with Fedora 13 Beta on it before Windows 7 (that came pre-loaded on this) ever got the chance to infect my CPU and other components.

Fedora 13 Beta installation went fine, but upon reboot the wireless card was not detected at all which was discouraging as all I could find on the internet were sources of needing to use ndiswrapper to make it function. Now, Fedora being notorious for leading the way and keeping in mind that I'm running a development build I had the bright idea to plug it into an ethernet port in order to download updates that have been rolling out as the bug squashing ninjas (Read: Fedora Contributors) find and fix problems in preparation for stable release.

Downloads done, presto rebuilds done, package installs done, reboot, wifi!!!

So here I am on my brand new netbook running Fedora 13 Beta + updates with *everything* fully functional and I couldn't be happier. One last piece is to find out why gnome-shell won't run but from what I understand its a graphics card specific bit because there are lots of reports of people having it up and running on other systems which is only a minor set back as gnome-shell is only a tech preview and is under heavy development itself. All in all, I'm extremely satisfied with Fedora 13 Beta + updates as well as with my Asus EeePC 1001P. Only recommendation I'd have to anyone in the market for one of these EeePC 1001P netbooks is to test out the keyboard, its just a preference thing. I like the keyboard on this quite a bit but I know of some who aren't fans so be sure to give it a test run before sinking the cash in.

Final words: Fedora continues to kick hind parts and take names, everything on this brand new netbook is working wonderfully and I couldn't be happier. Many thanks to all those involved in making my computing experience this amazing!

-AdamM

Texas Linux Fest 2010

This past Saturday was the Texas Linux Fest 2010 and Fedora's very own Max Spevack was a featured presenter. The Fedora crew (Max Spevack, David Duncan, Scott Collier, Julio Villareal, and me) arrived at 8am to setup and we transformed a simple and somewhat boring table with a plain white table cloth into an interactive environment for Fedora and the community at large via an impressive event box. The event box contained all the tools needed to make our booth top notch and in my opinion a contender for "best in show."

I would also like to note that there was a Red Hat booth right next to us where Thomas Cameron and a fellow 'Hatter' named Shawn(sp?) (I never caught her last name) were stationed. I want to mention how powerful of a statement I personally felt came as the result of Red Hat and Fedora having separate booths right next to one another at an event like the TXLF because while there is a closely knit relationship between Fedora and Red Hat, the two as entities are separate. While these two are separate they are not necessarily disjoint and I think it is a powerful move to make that distinction to the Linux community who is not aware of that fact and still have the uninformed misconception of Fedora being Red Hat's development playground. I consider it important to show up standing shoulder to shoulder to represent our specific areas to the Linux community.

With that said, on to the starting line! At 9am the doors flew open at the Texas Linux Fest and the line from the registration counter was out to the parking lot. We had prime real estate and as the participants were funnelled through the entrace and were brought in through a walkway that ran right by the Fedora booth. The booth got immediate attention and the day was off with a bang, people everywhere, we were running through media quickly, the tattoos were a great success, ink pens being taken, and all the usual reactions I would expect conference goers to have to swag. The main piece of the "swag grab" that I enjoyed was that the people who would come up to the booth didn't just grab and go, they would walk up, we as Fedora Ambassadors would engage them in conversation and a few minutes would pass (or hours in a couple instances) and they would pick up a couple items from the table and continue on their way.

We had one gentleman who was having issues with his Broadcom wireless card (surprise, surprise), he was a relatively new user and I was happy to help him. We scrambled around for almost an hour trying to find a free network drop to plug his laptop into an ethernet cable to install the appropriate kernel modules from rpmfusion. Once wifi was setup and successful, the gentleman who I had been helping quickly ran to the tables of other distributions who apparently hadn't had as good of luck as I had in getting his wireless to function and said, "The Fedora guy made it work." I'd call it a victory :)

As the day went on, conversations of everything from wacom tablets to ARM Architecture strategy was discussed between Fedora Ambassadors and those in attendance of the Texas Linux Fest. We at the Fedora booth used a convertible tablet laptop that I had from work to have a hand written "running list" of topics to take away from the event as a somewhat informal way of gathering information based on what the community is interested in, what they would like to see from the Fedora Project in the future, and what they love about Fedora now. We had quite a bit of positive feedback and a few requests for the future of Fedora, I'd call this a win as well.

All in all it was a spectacular event and I look forward to next year's TXLF!

I unfortunately lack a high quality camera, but David Duncan is not bound by this limitation and has some amazing photos here.

I went ahead and exported the output of the Xournal document from the tablet writings to a pdf and it can be viewed here.

UPDATE: I got word from Thomas Cameron that Shawn's last name is Briscoe. So thank you to Shawn Briscoe for coming out and kicking hind parts along with Thomas Cameron at the Red Hat booth! (I know this is a Fedora Ambassador's report but if you're this far in my blog post then you know my opinion on the co-existence of the two groups).

Package Management with Fedora

On March 3, 2010 I met with the Sam Houston Association for Computer Scientists in order to give a presentation on Package Management within Fedora. The Sam Houston Association for Computer Scientists (SHACS) is a student chapter of the ACM at Sam Houston State University and is an organization that I have been fortunate enough to be invited back to a number of times to present about Fedora and on this occasion I was fortunate to have around 30 people in attendance.

This Presentation was given about package management. I began covering about the overview of what a package is, describing how packages are groupings of files and metadata about those files in order to be installed unto a functional system. Some of these files may be executable, others will be for configuration of the executable application, documentation, or many other types of content. At this point I asked one of my favorite rhetorical questions, "Why should I care?" I went on to explain about how this concept can be used to break users from the bounds of their commonplace "next, next, finish" installation methods, the constant upgrading of individual applications one at a time, and using yet another utility to upgrade the operating system itself.

Going away from this concept for a moment, RPM makes its way on to the scene of the presentation with a quick overview of the history, what RPM is as a package format including a quick overview of macros and standards they represent, and then moving on with RPM the essential utility that allows us all to survive in a package powered world.

Now that have learned to install packages, what about all the dependencies? How will we be able to handle all of this by hand? Short answer: yum. Long answer: Yum is the YellowDog Updater Modified and it performs a large number of important functions and the most commonly known is that it automatically installs dependencies of packages without any further user intervention. Now we go back to the original rhetorical question, "Why should I care?" Well here we are, lets imagine being able to update, install, and remove any application on your system with a single tool, a single application, a single interface. Now take that and imagine it is also able to update itself along with everything else on your system. That's exactly what we have. None of the old traditional concepts that have snaked their way into proprietary operating systems that plague the planet, but pure open source package management that is your one stop shop.

"But Adam, I don't want to use the command line! It's scary!!" Don't fret! Here comes PackageKit to save those who are mouse interface inclined! At this point in the presentation I walked through some basic steps of how to navigate through PackageKit which took a very short time since it is so pleasantly straight forward.

Last little bit of the presentation is going over the concept of a repository so that users know where their code and content comes from, the ideas of where it comes from and the flow of developers/packagers that contribute to a repository that once tested and proven stable it released upon the public for installation via tools such as yum.

That's all for now! Apologies for taking so long to write up a report.

-AdamM

Slides from presentation (odp)

FUDCon - Day one : The awesomeness that is.

So Day one has come and gone. Let me put this simply, Fedora User and Developer Conference Toronto 2009 is epic freaking win. We have essentially destroyed the BarCamp style conference because there are too many interesting projects that are talk worthy going on within Fedora. There were so many proposed talks that the entire schedule got pushed back an hour and a half due to the pitch of talks and the voting on topics. The rooms were packed, some talks were pushed out to the back with standing room only if you didn't make it to the room on time and these were not small class rooms, this is quite a large university we're being hosted at.

There was also a lot of very cool efforts being put forth in order to do a "live FUDCon" for those of us Fedorans and all interested parties would be able to participate and get in on the FUDCon action from remote locations. We had irc transcribers for each session as well as audio/video for the rooms in which had the hardware/facilities to do so.

For those of you who were unable to attend, please feel free to check all the logs here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FUDCon:Toronto_2009_BarCamp_Schedule

I attended the "Observing Fedora with SystemTap" session during the first round of sessions which was quite impressive. You are now able to perform in depth analysis of any aspect of your system because there is support in the kernel for observing essentially everything and getting reports back. I loved this both from the systems admin side where I want to try and track down issues and bottlenecks as well as from the developer side because it could potentially make targeting down bugs very easy. I did the irc transcribing for that session so I highly recommend checking out the log http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-room-1/2009-12-05/fudcon-room-1.2009-12-05-17.13.log.html

Second round of sessions I attended the State of X / State of the Kernel which was a presentation by X and Kernel hackers (respectively) that was quite enlightening to the future plans of kernel and X technologies and it continues to impress on how much is being done and how fast it is happening. The open source support for hardware, including things like USB3.0 (which is already there even though the hardware isn't out and nobody else has support for it), is incredible. I also irc transcribed that one, so I highly recommend checking those out also ;) ... http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-room-1/2009-12-05/fudcon-room-1.2009-12-05-19.06.log.html

Third sessions round I went to the "Designing the future of Free Software Operating System User Experiences - GNOME Shell (Gnome3 UI)" session which honestly got me excited about Gnome again. I actually got so excited that I yesterday got in touch with one of the gnome-shell package maintainers and got myself approved as a co-maintainer and my idea is that since Gnome Shell is currently in Fedora 12 as a tech preview, and since we as Fedora are generally the first for everything I figured "why not push git snapshots of the latest features of the gnome-shell UI out to those who are interested in next generation user interfaces?" Yeah, I thought so too. Gnome3 will be a great advancement in user interaction with a computer, it is the first time (that I can think of) that anyone has ever completely attempted to redesing how a user interacts with their machine. There is no longer just the age old "let me click this button that sits in a panel that gives me a menu listing what applications I have access to". It is a completely new take on the world of desktop computing and its definitely a project to keep your eye on. I irc transcribed this one also ... check it: http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-room-1/2009-12-05/fudcon-room-1.2009-12-05-20.10.log.html

Fourth round is up and I found my way over to Mo's "Designing UI mockups in Inkscape" which was extremely useful in so many ways. I actually used what I learned in her session later that night to throw together some mockups of an idea myself and herlo (irc nick on Freenode) were throwing around of Paul W. Frields pet project called PulseCaster (https://fedorahosted.org/pulsecaster/). So, not only was the session quite good and I almost immediately found a use case for the knowledge and techniques that I learned from the presentation but I also found a bug in Inkscape which I had others verify and we confirmed an already existing bug in bugzilla. I <3 FUDCon.

Last session of the day I walked into a session called "Moksha and Fedora Community -- Real-time web apps with Python and AMQP" which blew my mind. This is Web3.0 (not by definition, but that's what I'm calling it), Luke Macken and J5 completely just stepped over web2.0 and said "pffft, childs play" (well not really but in my mind I assume it went something like that). This session showed off technology that allows real time message passing in a web browser as well as "native" support for standard protocols. The project page is https://fedorahosted.org/moksha/ and I think everyone on the planet should take some time to go there and enjoy the demo, prepare to have your mind blown. Oh, and I also irc transcribed that one as well http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fudcon-room-3/2009-12-05/fudcon-room-3.2009-12-05-22.07.log.html ... presentation slides found: http://lmacken.fedorapeople.org/moksha-FUDConToronto-2009.odp

Ok, so sessions are done but we are in now way, shape, or form done. It is time for the "State of Fedora" speach by the Fedora Project Leader, Paul W. Frields. This is where our fearless leader takes the time to look back and look forward, take note and discuss what we've learned and what we can learn. It was a heart felt speach adressing a lot of things that are so great about our community and what makes Fedora so great. Paul also announced the codename of Fedora 13, which is Goddard (I probably mispelled that, sorry). This was a solid way to wrap up an amazing day.

Alright, that was Saturday. Stay tuned, I will report on Sunday (which was also awsome). I will probably report a little on today as well, but today seems to be at least somewhat consumed by attempting to get my blog updated to reflect the awesomeness that is FUDCon.

Community and the Loyalty that follows.

I would like to start with a statement: I eat, sleep, and breath Fedora.

In my time within the Fedora community I've grown to love everything that the project is and stands for. Its offered me opportunities to learn new things and give back to the community as I am able to. I've also grown a large amount of loyalty to the project. There's another aspect of the Fedora world that is disjoint but still very closely related: RedHat.

I am a RedHat Enterprise Linux administrator by day, this is how I pay the bills. Though there is another part of that which I have grown into, the community. The RHEL and Fedora communities definitely merge at some point and its amazing to see. We see projects like EPEL[0] that attempt to broaden RHEL's horizons and past projects like Fedora Legacy[1] that attempted to bring the Fedora world a longer life span much like RHEL's. Disjoint but very much related.

Back to loyalty, I recently made a post[2] about RHEV being a failure becuase it required Windows in order to run the RHEV-M portion of the product and I was promptly chastised for it as you would expect any loyal community to do. I was spoken to by both RedHat community members as well as Fedora community members, including but not exclusive to some of those that bridge the gap, and at first I was defensive.

I had to step back and ask myself though, why be defensive? Have I not faught this fight before? Have I not defended the decisions of those within my community have made, just as these members are doing?

Then it dawned on me, I'm not being flamed or shunned. This is my community, these are my people and as I am theirs and they are simply trying to show me that I'm making a mockery of nothing.

I was upset because RedHat had released a product that required a Windows box in order to use the full feature set, but this is a temporary issue and there was no revert in functionality and nothing was being taken away from me. This was simply another example of the tried and true methods of RedHat purchasing an emerging company and opening their once closed software such that the world of F/OSS may benefit.

As our favorite Hello Kitty touting community member put it: "if Red Hat had never released the product you would not have access to the feature AT ALL. now you can access it with windows, and a little later with linux." She is absolutely correct.

Did I over react? Yeah, probably. Should I have? No, probably not.

This is where I find myself, as a loyal community member to both Fedora and RedHat. Even though I stand within these divides I somehow overlooked the processes I know and understand that must be taken. In my dayjob I know these enterprise decisions well, our vendors paint us the picture of the race to market constantly. So why do I get angry when RedHat does something that every other company does? I sometimes forget RedHat is a company and companies need to make money for themselves, for their shareholders, and just in general to move forward. I forget sometimes RedHat is a company because of their embrace into this community, their shared loyalty with their community, and their epic (yeah, that's right... I said epic) list of contributions to this community.

For sake of my loyalty, I apologize for my oversight towards the process.

In Fedora we trust.

-Adam


[0] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
[1] http://www.fedoralegacy.org/
[2] http://pseudogen.blogspot.com/2009/09/rhve-redhat-failure-not-soon-to-be.html

Get to know a Fedora Ambassador or User

Name: Adam Miller
IRC Nickname: maxamillion
IRC Channels: #yum #linode #centos-devel
#fedora-noc #fedora-mini #fedora-bugzappers
#fedora-qa #fedora-spins #fedora-kde
#fedora-campusamb #fedora-ambassadors
#fedora-admin #fedora-devel #fedora-python
#epel #rhn #rhel #centos #fedora #xfce
#Cyanogenmod #moksha
Location: Huntsville, TX USA (Sam Houston State University)

RHEV - The RedHat failure not soon to be forgotten

Lets take a moment to look at Open Source Virtualization, there's Xen, OpenVZ, UML, KVM, and VirtualBox. Now for the datacenter you're really only looking at Xen or KVM (though OpenVZ seems to have a little bit of a following in the datacenter, its not an "Enterprise" offering from the big companies). Xen is on its way out, lets be honest, it has moved further away from the upstream
kernel as time goes on and Citrix is Microsoft friendly so people will embrace the FUD. What's left? Oh, KVM.

KVM is a really cool concept, I'm a big fan of turning the linux kernel into a hypervisor. That's just a really cool idea and has apparently proven itself to be quite useful and in some reports it is claimed to be faster than Xen so all the better. RedHat buys Qumranet, good move, now what? Lets write an Open Source Virtualization Suite that rivals the likes of VMWare ESX/ESXi + vSphere such that everyone in the world can enjoy the benefits of virtualization without being bound to closed source software from companies like VMWare. Again, good move. So what next? Lets force our Open Source faithful as well as all our customers to run a Windows box in order to use this pleasant administrative interface that front ends our completely Open Source Virtualization Environment. Wait ... what? You're kidding right? Nope.

So the office where I work has a site license for RHEL, lets just say that we weren't a mixed OS environment which would be completely feasible seeing that we have a site license. So you're trying to tell me that my CIO cut a FAT check to your company for a site license of an Operating System (as well as a nice repository full of software) and now I have to go elsewhere for another Operating System (that is closed source no less) in order to run your next generation Virtualization Suite? Kiss my ass.

If I were to roll out Open Source Virtualization tomorrow on RHEL, it would be RHEL 5.4 KVM + Convirture[0] not RHEV because I don't have a Windows box in sight.

I've heard rumors floating around that the plan was "get to market fast, port to Java later for cross platform". That's awesome, but in the mean time you're pissing people off and last time I checked its not good to make those who pay your bills angry. I'm not giving up on RedHat, I still really respect them as a company in many many ways (many thanks for all the sponsoring of Fedora!) but I feel like they really dropped the ball on this one, come on guys:

"We will be the leader in Open Source Virtualization" -
Brian Stevens (CTO & VP, Engineering)

Yes, you will but you need to work on moving the management end to an Open Source platform so your statement doesn't seem loaded.

Thanks.

rant.end()

-Adam

[0](http://www.convirture.com/index.php)

Firefox: The progression of popularity and the stigma of the Geek.

Lets take a moment and look back about 5 years at the state of the GNU/Linux desktop from an emerging web based world. There was really only two web browsers worth mentioning, Mozilla and Netscape (which in hindsight were essentially the same thing). The problem? They were heavy set in terms of the resources they required, so what happened? Mozilla released Phoenix, and it was amazingly fast and nobody could believe how quickly it would fire up and run on their old Pentium II machines that they slapped Linux on in an attempt to breath some life back into them.

At the time only those "in the know" were running the browser but it was quickly gaining steam just in time for a name change to Firebird due to angry people with trademark hooks on the name and for a decent amount of users this caused enough confusion for there to be a riff in its general usage but as time progressed and users were aware of the name change things were back to normal. Forums were booming with the merits of the browser as the popularity gained, it was insane how fast your browser could be. It truly raised the bar for expectations of what users compared all other browsers to. Now that we've gotten some happy users, lets go ahead and change the name again. This time the Firebird database people are upset so Mozilla politely obliged and changed the name again. Thus, Firefox is born and the web browser revolution is under way. Firefox hits the ground running with features no one can compete with, it is wildly extendible, is "secure" (I always use that word with a grain of salt), open source, and its fast. This is truly innovation that will go down in the history of computing.

Lets fast forward to today and walk into a room of GNU/Linux aficionados and ask "What's your opinion of Firefox?" and as we make this inquiry let us remember that this was the same demographic that half a decade ago was singing the praises of the now main stream browser. The responses you will receive are probably going to be something along the lines of "I don't use FirefoxOS", " pwns Firefox in the face", or "Bloatware is annoying". What happened? Geeks are fickle creatures, that's what happened. We love the latest and greatest tech that nobody else is using because its new and shiny, its fast, it shows promise, and because nobody else is using it we are somehow elite for doing so. What about when that new shiny tech reaches maturity and succeeds in a big way? Firefox happens.

Here's the reality of the situation, yes webkit is cool as hell from a geek standpoint because its new and its shiny but Firefox is tried and true, it supports all the latest and greatest web tech, is popular as hell, its well supported, stable, "secure" (remember that grain of salt), cross platform, fast, extendible as ever, open source, and it just flat out works. I'm not saying you should turn your nose up at webkit in any way, shape, or form because it truly is the new shiny tech that shows a lot of promise. But I'm tired of people bitching and moaning about Firefox's "issues" when all the arguments I have heard thus far are simply cases of a Geek stigma haunting what is now too mainstream to be "cool" or "l33t" enough for those of us who pride ourselves on our technological prowess.

Lets try to be Geeks and be happy for that which emerges from our depths as a great mainstream success in the user share market.