In the The BFC Computing Weblog, Bill McGonigle explains how Ditching Linux is actually a good case study for why Free/Open Source Software is better than proprietary software. In a word: standards. Bill swaps Linux for BSD, Mac OS for Linux and OpenSolaris for Linux and everything still works.
Tag Archives | Linux
DLSLUG notes, 7-June-2007
The Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group held their meeting on the usual first Thursday, but at a new location: the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center, where Bill McGonigle has recently set up his new offices. Nice place!
Seven attendees found their way to the meeting, and we had an informal chat covering a wide range of issue: the challenges of single-person consultancies, the business of consulting, Nagios, Dartware, a new version of Logo from MIT, having a presence at Hanover’s Street Fest (July 28, btw).
Bill had an interesting proposal: that the group create a “chuck box” (Boy Scouts’ term, ref: http://www.troop168.net/forms/patrolboxa.htm) that could contain a GNHLUG-booth-in-a-box: a banner, handouts, a tent/canopy,… what else? Interesting idea.
Bill also recommended we check out http://www.zazzle.com if we’re considering making promotional items.
Good times had by all. No DLSLUG meeting in July; instead, you’re encouraged to come to the GNHLUG-wide BBQ July 15th. Hope to see you there!
MonadLUG meeting notes, 14-June-2007: Ed Haynes of WindRiver: real-time and Linux
Bill Sconce posted the notes from the MonadLUG meeting of 14-June-2007, one I had to miss due to client projects. It sounds like it was a really interesting meeting. The push to tweak the kernel of Linux to be responsive in a real-time environment benefits us all, as some portions of that specialized work can be rolled into the main-line kernel code. This is one of the great benefits of Open Source, where developers “scratching their itch” – working on their specific needs – can contribute back to the greater community at little or no cost to them.
I heard a similar sentiment voiced at FUDCon ’07 Boston in presentations about the One Laptop Per Child machines: in tracing down some of the code that was running down the batteries on these cute little laptops, the OLPC crowd found entire classes of code that were working fine on desktop and server machines plugged into the wall, but wasting CPU cycles when a different algorithm could be implemented that was more power-friendly. This doesn’t just benefit the OLPC crowd; some of their work goes back into mainline kernels where it makes everyone’s laptop battery last longer, server stacks idle cooler, requiring less AC power and less Air Conditioning power, lowering the heat-disapation requirements of data centers, and slowing global warming. Yet another case of Open Source saving the world.
MonadLUG, 14-June-2007: Ed Haynes: Real-time in Linux
MonadLUG is fortunate this month to have Ed Haynes of Wind River make a presentation on Real-time processing in Linux. Group coordinator Charlie Farinella posts the announcement:
Who: Ed Haynes, Wind River
What: Real-Time
Date: Thursday June 14, 2007
Time: 7:00PM
Where: SAU 1 office, 106 Hancock Rd., Peterborough
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/MonadLUG
Linux is finding itself used in more applications that can be characterized as “Real Time”. What is a Real-Time system? What impact does it have to the Linux OS, and how has Linux evolved to better meet real-time challenges? What’s the difference between “soft” and “hard” real-time? A live demonstration will be held to characterize the performance of difference linux kernels.Presenting will be Ed Haynes from Wind River. Ed currently serves as a technical resource for the New England Wind River region. He has 10 years experience as a software developer on embedded realtime systems and also led IPv6 development at Nortel.
Sounds like a good meeting!
Is ZFS Apple’s secret weapon? | InfoWorld | News | 2007-06-08 | By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld
Gregg Keizer asks “Is ZFS Apple’s secret weapon?? Sun’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz said Apple’s upcoming Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard would rely on a file system that engineers at his company have spent years creating: ZFS.”
Very cool! GNHLUGgers saw ZFS presented at the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group meeting in April when Todd Underwood mentioned the OS X rumors. An XServe running as the front-end to a whole mess of disks could mean a very easy-to-use, near-infinite scaling of storage devices, ideal for any SME with delusions of grandeur. Looking forward to seeing what Apple does with ZFS!
Fedora 7 available for download – get yours now!
Fedora 7, code-named “moonshine” is complete and now ready for download. Check out the BitTorrent feeds at http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/ for the fastest downloads and to pitch in a little of your upload bandwidth to spread the good words.
Lots of neat stuff in this version of Fedora. First, the “Core” is gone from the name. The “Core” and “Extras” designations have been removed and the distribution united into one package. This isn’t just a repackaging issue, but a huge change in the governance of the Fedora project, one that’s taken a couple of releases to iron out. The entire distro was selected, built and distributed on public servers by the community, and not behind the walls of Red Hat nor any other private company. This openness, I’ve been told, extends to every aspect of the project. Openness and transparency is good. That doesn’t mean the project has been abandoned, though: I understand a number of Red Hat employees work on Fedora as a major part of their job. Yet another great example of how Free software can support people’s livelihoods.
A lot of work was devoted to the Pungi build process to assemble the distro itself. It’s now possible for mere mortals to create their own custom builds (“spins” as in spinning CDs, in the terms of the builders) to create their own specialized, targetted, rebranded, mini-, maxi- or personal distro. Examples of this already available from Fedora include a LiveCD and a KDE LiveCD. While it’s not running F7 yet, Pungi-built MythDora 4.0 (recently Slashdotted) is a great example of what we can create with the Pungi tool.
Lots and lots of other features are in the release notes and we all have our favorite to look for, so I encourage you to go there for the definitive list. For me, I’ll also mention better hardware support, Network Manager (rocks!), PPC support (time to dual boot the iMac!), boot-from-USB-live-distro!, better, faster, more capable, more compatible. Compare and contrast this with new distributions of other operating systems which are offering a pretty desktop and less ability to work with your stuff. It’s all about choice. This one’s an easy choice.
Notes from PySIG, 24-May-2007: Python logging and wxPython
Thirteen participants made it to the May meeting of the Python Special Interest Group of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group, held as usual on the fourth Thursday of the month at 7 PM at the Amoskeag Business Incubator, Manchester, NH.
It was a busy meeting. A quick round of introductions and announcements was followed by several terrific presentations.
Kent Johnson entertained us with Kent’s Korner, this month featuring the logging module. Simple logging can be implemented in two lines of code and customized with a third, but the module can be expanded almost infinitely to include multiple handlers arranged in a hierarchical fashion with different levels of filtering and multiple output. As usual, Kent did a fine job of showing simple examples and clearly building on them.
Bill Sconce decided to defer his second attempt at describing a hierarchy of data types, a discussion sure to rouse an interesting and educational debate amongst the participants. Stay tuned for a future meeting…
Ric Werme made the main presentation on wxPython. He brought the most extensive handouts we’ve had today, with an engaging backstory of his several-decades tinkering with graphing and the Petals of the Rose patterns. The demo was arresting, and source code can be downloaded here and here. Ric walked us through the wxPython wrapper, explaining the various widgets used and spoke well of the new wxPython book.
Thanks to Ric and Kent for their presentations, to Bill Sconce and Alex Hewitt for arranging the meeting and facilities, to the Amoskeag Business Incubator for their hospitality and to all who attended for their participation!
MonadLUG notes, 10-May-2007, dd and Seth Cohn, Drupal
Ten attendees made it to the May meeting of the Monadnock Valley Linux User Group, held as usual on the second Thursday of the month at the School Administrative Unit #1 offices, Hancock Road, Peterborough.
Bill Freeman presented his thoughts on the Man Page of the Month: dd. Bill provided two pages of notes. Quite the discussion followed obscure and useful things dd could do, such as preserve floppy drive images for posterity, copy music CDs to images for subsequent loopback mount and playing, copy and restore bootblock records and of course read and write tapes.
Seth Cohn was the featured speaker of the night and spoke on Drupal, the content management system. Seth has screenshots of a surprising number and variety of sites that are running on Drupal, presented a bit of Drupal history – seems it’s been around for a long time, and had a fairly stable history – and its current state, with fairly large and active communities of developers and implementors. He covered a bit of the architecture and philosophy of the modular design of Drupal and did the fairly painless install and initial configuration. 9 PM came too soon as there was lots more to see.
Thanks to Seth for presentation, to Bill for MPoM, to Charlie for organizing the meeting and to all for attending and participating.
Notes from CentraLUG, 7-May-2007: Ben Scott on OpenWRT
Seven attendees got to enjoy the last CentraLUG meeting at the New Hampshire Technical Institute Library this academic year. The school will be closing on Friday, and summer hours will not accommodate CentraLUG. Stay tuned on an announcement of a summer location for June, July and August (September will have no meeting due to the Labor Day holiday).
Ben Scott was the featured presenter this evening, showing off the OpenWRT Linux distribution for embedded devices. The list of supported hardware [Updated the link — Ted] goes far beyond the initial LinkSys WRT-54G model to include products from dozens of other vendors. Many attendees brought their own routers for show-and-tell or backup. I had a v.1 WRT54G which I opened for folks to inspect. I also brought the compact (and alas, not yet flashable) WRT54GC. Bruce Dawson brought the WRTSL54GS, a Linux-flashable unit that includes a built-in USB connection. While Ben wrestled with the network and projector, we entertained ourselves well (and heckled Ben).
Ben had a well-prepared presentation, with schematics of the units, pictures of the circuit boards and some of hacks performed upon them, and a live demo of upgrading the unit from stock firmware to use the OpenWRT firmware and X-Wrt interface [3]. The OpenWRT includes a package manager and a large number of packages have been ported to the OpenWRT environment, ready for download. and installation.
Installation was uneventful – the Murphy gods must have been busy torturing the students in their finals week – and simple: select the “upload” option from the web interface and point to the OpenWrt image. Installation takes a short time and requires the router to be rebooted. Ben strongly advised clearing your browser cache, since the “same device” is going to be responding with different responses.
Ben gave us a quick tour of the OpenWRT interface and plunged right into installing X-Wrt. X-Wrt extends the interface and makes management far simpler, with some pretty incredible tools, like live SVG graphs showing actual network usage. Pretty impressive stuff.
Folks considering buying a new WRT54 will want to look for a “GL” unit where the “L” is Linux, the “GS” versions “Speedbooster” with more RAM or the “SL54GS” “Storage Link” that includes the USB connection also.
Bill also notes that it is possible to “brick” a unit. Ben says there are ways to de-brick them. Google ought to help, as would a post to GNHLUG.
Thanks to Ben for the great presentation, to Bill Sconce for providing the projector and notes, and to all for attending and participating.
MonadLUG, 10-May-2007: Seth Cohn presents Drupal
The monthly meeting of the Monadnock region Linux User Group takes place as usual on the second Thursday of the month at the SAU #1 offices in Peterborough. Details and directions here.
Seth Cohn will be presenting Drupal, http://www.drupal.org. I’m looking forward to it. The LUGs have been privileged to see a couple presentations on CMSes: Jonathan Linowes presented Xaraya, and Barrie North Joomla! It’s great that there are som many great choices!