Utah Open Source Planet

The blog code has been updated to be compliant with the recent release of Django 1.0. And a small patch from Jeff.

I thought this article was really cool.  History is no longer something I simply grep

Here is the article: 15 Examples To Master Linux Command Line History

One of the guys that I work with sent me this link.  Its a really good presentation that GKH gave at Google Tech Talks.  For those that don’t know who GKH is, he is a Novell employee that started the Linux Driver Project.  There were some really cool stats about the kernel and its development in there.  For example, on a per day basis there are 4,300 lines added, 1,800 lines removed, and 1,500 lines modified on the stable kernel (2007 - 2008). You have to watch to see the rest.

Came across this article from Matt Hartley.  He gives openSUSE a very positive review.  Go check it out.

I’m sitting in the airport waiting to head out to San Francisco.  Starting tomorrow as many know is Linux World Expo.  I’m really excited and can’t wait.  I’m going so that I can help with the opensuse booth.  This year there is an openSUSE community day.  If you go to that link there is a list of the events.  They have some really good presenters that will cover some really cool topics.  So, if you are passing though make sure that you stop by the openSUSE community day.  I can’t wait!

From what I understand there are some really good booths to stop by as well,  One of them is Linux Journal.  I’ve been working with them to get our conference in their magazine and the person that I was talking to said there will be some sort of really cool secret swag this year.

If you are going to be there, I’ll see you then.

It has finally arrived! The list of approved speakers (though it might not be final and more might be added).  For those of you out there waiting to see if it is worth paying for admission to the Utah Open Source Conference, the wait is over.  Not that this should have ever been questioned.  If you see your name and wonder why you haven’t received a notice yet, its on its way.  Congrats to all the presenters.  See you all then!

So apparently its only a monolopy at 90% share if its against Microsoft according Brad Smith one of Microsof’t’s top lawyer (according to the article)  So Microsoft is all up in arms that it isn’t fair that Google and Yahoo can have a deal that would supposedly give them 90% market share.

This leaves me wondering.  So, typically people claim well Microsoft it the better product why else would they have ~90% market share.  References you ask…  Well you’re in luck.

(Some dates are old)

Wikipedia ~90%

WindowsITPro  ~93%

OneStat.com ~97.5%

Market Share by Net Applicatoins ~91%

Yes I know this isn’t the greatest list or maybe even a good list, but well you get the idea.  If you have better links or to the contri then post them in a comment.

Well I’d talk about the article, but well you are just going to have to read it.  Just a quick gem though from the article:

The big question is: Given that Red Hat bases its Fedora distribution on OpenSUSE, and that Fedora and OpenSUSE are both distributions with advanced features intended for power users, why would you pick one over the other?

openSUSE Examined

One of the major projects that I have been working on for the last year or so has been the Utah Open Source Foundation and their annual conference.  I’m incharge of sponsorships and marketing, so if you are interested in sponsoring or helping us market the conference better… Please let me know!

Yesterday Jayce, one of the guys in our group, was interviewed on couchcast.org.  It was really good, so if you missed it you are lucky they have a stream up that you can listen too.  Plus, I think there is a discount code that was announced there.

A direct link to the article and stream: Utah Open Source Conference Preview - Jayce Hall of UTOS - Jul 07, 2008

I saw an email about this and went to tigerdirect.ca to check it out. HP 2133 Mini-Note on TigerDirect.ca. Also here is the ad from the email.

Well if you want your voice to be heard and believe that openSUSE would be so much cooler if only they would add or change something, now is your chance.  There is an ideas page for openSUSE 11.1.  There are already several ideas up there and I’m sure they are looking for some refinement and new ideas there.

This is the perfect time to do it as they are gearing up for openSUSE 11.1 alphas.

openSUSE 11.1 Gnome ideas (These are for the Gnome desktop)

Its that time of month again where we crazy opensuse fans get together.  So for those that don’t know where we meet,

its at the Applebee’s in Sandy, UT @ 7pm.

This month we are going to try and do something a little more than just hang out.  We want to look at OBS a little and talk about improving banter and giver.  All three of these are awesome projects.  So, kudos to those that have put them together.

Many of you know, but for those that don’t I was hired back on as a full time employee.  Its been about a month since I started as the build guy for the mono-a11y team.  For those that don’t know what a11y is, its accessibility.  The 11 referring to the 11 letters between the letters a and y.  The wiki link belong explains a lot about the mono-a11y stuff, but quickly the stuff we are doing is making all winforms stuff accessibility on Linux.  One of the advantages, I think, is that we are helping out in other a11y project and improving accessibility in general on Linux.  So if you have problems with the mono a11y packages, you know who to complain to. Not a whole lot to say right now, but here are some links.

Mono:Accessibility - This is our main wiki ‘landing’ page

openSUSE:Accessibility - This is the new ‘landing’ page for openSUSE accessibility stuff

mono-a11y packages - For those of you that are feeling brave.  Currently there isn’t the olive package and a small problem with on of the other packages, so give it a day or two for it to be fixed, I hope

Just to remind everyone, the OpenSUSE Launch Party is TODAY!!!!!!!!!

Not mentioned is that there will be door prizes to the first 40 people and a raffle.

So again, the details:

June 19, 2008 @ 18:00
1800 South Novell Place, Provo, UT
Building A (Open Source Technology Center)
Pizza is being provided, so PLEASE RSVP - sshaw at decriptor dot com

The much anticipated opensuse 11 is just around the corner.  On it’s release we are planning on have a party here on the Provo Novell campus.  For details and all that fun stuff head over to:

Opensuse 11 Launch Party Details (under provo)

Huge thanks to the OSTC (Open Source Technology Center) who is sponsoring the location and pizza, so if you want some you have to RSVP: sshaw at decriptor dot com

This time we are going to look at RC1 as it was just release last week, and in general just discuss opensuse stuff.  Applebees provides free wireless and there are outlets so, bring your laptops.  I’ll hopefully have some RC1 images if anyone needs a disk.

Here are the details (there is also a calendar):

Utah OpenSUSE user group wiki page

Just a quick note 7pm at applebees off 123rd exit (map/detail on the link above)

This post is my 200th post, so I thought I would focus on traffic for my blog.  Since I moved my blog to my own server using WordPress, I’ve noticed that I don’t have nearly as much traffic as I did with Blogger.  At first I thought that it may be a simple case of people not following my link to the new site, or people just not interested in my posts.  Both is quite likely.  

So, I thought I would check out my Google Analytics for both sites and compare the data, just to see what I may be doing wrong in regards to my WordPress site vs. the original Blogger site.  The numbers are really interesting: 

 
As you can see, the numbers are quite different, equaling out in weight.  While the Blogger site still gets more hits over the period of a year, the WordPress site keeps visitors longer, provides a higher likelihood of additional page views, and has a lower bounce rate.  

For me, while I may have lost a lot of visitors, I have gained readership.  How?  By keeping more people on the site and reading my posts.  For me, that is far more valuable and flattering than thousands of people visiting over a month, but no one reading anything I post.  It’s actually pretty exciting!  Now I wonder how the readership will evolve over time.  Will I gain more readers while keeping the bounce rate the same?  Perhaps I will increase the average time on the site with more interesting content.  

I’m glad I moved from Blogger, if for nothing else than having a control specimen to compare my new site against.  Now I can more objectively determine how well my blog is doing, and in what areas.  

Here are the details (there is also a calendar):

Utah OpenSUSE user group wiki page

The packaging presentation this morning really got me excited about getting involved in that area of Ubuntu so I put a few things together in order to try and keep me on this road.

1. I took a lot of notes and have a lot of links for reference and study.
2. I’m putting together a schedule to try and keep me on track.
3. I put together a new blog to document my progress and pitfalls.

If you’re interested in following my journey toward MOTU add http://blog.zelut.org/feed/ to your Feed Reader.

I’d love to get other people interested and educated about packaging by way of that blog.  If you are MOTU and want to help keep me on track please stop by.  If you’re a casual user that would like to start participating please also stop by.  Remember, the more skilled people we have handling and improving packages the better Ubuntu will be!

Related

• Packaging 101 A Success At Ubuntu OpenWeek

I can’t wait for beta 1 in a few days to try this out, but here are some lose numbers from coolo

http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3385

Alpha 3 is out!!!  Time to test this alpha out.  Here are some changes to this release.

• Linux 2.6.25-rc5
• gcc 4.3 final
• updated binutils 2.18.50 SVN
• updated gdb 6.7.50 SVN
• continued work on the installation work flow
• libzypp uses a new much faster solver
• CUPS 1.3.6
• D-Bus 1.1.20
• updated NetworkManager 0.7 SVN
• PackageKit 0.1.9.1
• PolicyKit 0.7
• PulseAudio 0.9.9  

Ok. Here are the link to isos, deltas, and torrents.

http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/11.0-Alpha3/iso/

 I have the torrent up, but nothings coming down the pipe yet.  So we’ll have to wait and see about that.

So I attempted to migrate my blog from Wordpress to Movable Type Open Source. I’ll go into specifics later, but suffice to say that it was a miserable failure. Problems with planets, constant admin interface crashes, extremely spamable, and most of all, just unusable.

As a result of my reversion back to Wordpress, I have lost a few posts, I will try to migrate them back, but its possible I’ll just do a major ‘things that we have missed’ post in a bit. Anyway, more updates coming soon.

I finally decided, during my physics class , that I should create a twitter account and figure out what its all about.  Even though I have an account now, I still don’t know what its all about .  Maybe with some time.

 So, here it is.

I just found this on google’s blog.  Its a new blog that is dedicated to sharing about open source happenings at Google.

My request for an opensuse email account was accepted!!!  I am now the new proud owner of decriptor at opensuse dot org.  That’s not all!  I’m on the opensuse members page

ZDnet  had an article on Citrix and their position/dedication to XEN.  For those that weren’t aware, Citrix bought XEN for $500 million last year.  I had one thought about this article until I read one of the comments.  So if you read it, beware maybe don’t jump to conclusions at first.  Here is the comment from Citrix’s CTO VMD Simon Crosby:

I hope this is ok.  If not please let me know and I apologize ahead of time.

Citrix is committed to Xen

It appears that somehow when we briefed Paula, we managed to confuse her. I accept full responsibility for this, but think it is important to state the facts:

1. The Xen project is in great shape, superbly funded by Citrix and the community, and is operated independently from Citrix, by the Xen project Advisory Board. Citrix has more than doubled XenSource’s open source team size already, and is continuing to develop new initiatives for Xen. At the most recent Xen developer summit in December, we had over 200 attendees, and there was fantastic participation from across the industry. Our own open source team operates independently from the product groups and has a blank check for headcount and resource. As I said previously, I’d be happy to fill you in on this.

2. XenServer is a core foundational product to Citrix. Specifically, XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) and XenDesktop (formerly Desktop Server, addressing the VDI use case) will both include XenServer in all future releases. Why? Because XenServer has been optimized to run the XenApp and XenDesktop workloads, and provides a fantastic set of manageability, availability, scalability, and flexibility options to the XenApp/XenDesktop administrator, with incredible performance (very significantly better than VMware’s, for those same workloads). Today our customers tell us that they hate to use VMware for virtualizing Presentation Server, because of the performance issues, but they need to do so for various reasons: test & dev flexibility, consistency of image management, DR, ease of provisioning etc. XenServer offers them all they need, at much better price/performance than VMware.

3. XenServer itself continues to go from strength to strength. The new release 4.1 boasts over 50 new features and performance optimizations, and a profound and strategic tight coupling between the virtual infrastructure platform and smart virtualization aware storage, such as the NetApp devices. Expect a range of exciting announcements as we move down this path.

In a nutshell: Xen is profoundly important to Citrix, is changing everything about the way that Citrix develops and delivers its products. Citrix is fully supportive of open source and the community, and you will see much more than just Xen as a core community focus from Citrix in the not too distant future.

Simon Crosby, CTO VMD, Citrix.

The lastest alpha of openSUSE 11 is out.  Here is the link to the iso images.

Updated:

A link to the official announcement.

Go check it out.  Nothing more to say.

Just a quick blog post, THE NEW YORK GIANTS WIN.

For the longest time I had problems with everything being included in my opensuse label. Since its a heavy lists at times, I lose email every once in a while. Well that will change. With their new, filter messages like this, I found out about ‘listid:’.

The way to implement this is to select some emails from a list and use that option in the top right drop down in the email or to create a filter in the settings option. If you choice to set it up in the filter window, add text like this: listid:opensuse. Replacing the list name obviously. You want to place it in the ‘Has the words’ box. Make sure you test it first though.

Note:
This might not work well with mailing lists on the same domain. Doesn’t seem to be working out very well

Yes, that’s the url!( or at least just wua.la) I was at the UTOSF hack night and got my invite from kkubasik. So thanks to him for the hook up. I haven’t done much with it yet, but it looks really cool. It’s still in alpha so be patient.

Cool YouTube video about wuala.

Oh and I have a hand full of invites to throw out there. If you want one just shoot me an email sshaw at decriptor dot com or try and grab me on irc.freenode.org in #utos or #opensuse (if you see me in any others then asked there too).

By the way, a link to Conman. Its done in django, and needs the added help. So if you can program or are good at django, go help out!

Ooops! Forgot the cool screenshot

I was sent this link to a tribute from Glenn Beck to Gordon B. Hinckley.

Update:
Sorry the embedded youtube stuff was just messing things up

I’m running OpenSUSE 10.3 on my macbook pro that I picked up last semester. I had some problems getting my audio working for one reason or another, but finally got it. The easiest way I found was to grab the next release of alsa. By default opensuse 10.3 ships with version 1.0.14. Updating it to alsa 1.0.15 did the trick.

No guarantee that this will work, just that it did for me.

Some Details:

lspci output
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)

Yast:
82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller

My new current driver:
rpm -qa alsa
alsa-1.0.15.hg20080116-1.1

Here is the 1-click to add the repo and install the latest alsa.

Big Thanks to James Ogley, Now that I have a fish I just need to learn to fish

I’ll leave the details to the link I’ll provide, but The President, Gordon B. Hinckley of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints passed away this evening at the age of 97.  He was a remarkable person.  Here is the link.

It’s that time of the year when you need to get over to Linux Journal’s 2008 Readers’ Choice survey.  So if your favorite distro isn’t opensuse, well just leave that question blank.

Well another alpha release is out and I’m behind on getting my screen shots out.  This time I’m ahead of last time.  There have already been a few articles out there already about this release with plenty of screen shots and will include links to them.  This way you get twice as much.  For those that don’t want to click on the links, I’ve setup a page with all of the screen shots.

To start this off, as many of you probably know already, there is a new looking installer (Though my favorite part comes at the end).  They have combined a few things onto one page which is really nice.  We didn’t need 5 pages to get 5 small details.  Ok…  In this example its 3 items in one, but still.

This is the first screen.  And there you have it, the new looking installer.

Screen 2 and Screen 3

of the installer is checking the hardware and setting up the repositories.  In a way this is nice because it just takes care of it for you.  These moved fast for me.  Note:  I didn’t have an internet connection so I don’t know if the outcome would have changed or not.

Screen 4

The usual, what would you like me to install, upgrade, repair, and addons.

Screen 5 and Screen 6

This is the new  time zone selector.  Its much nicer.  I can now just click on what I want to go to.  So the first one is the whole world and the second is my time zone.

Screen 7  Screen 8  Screen 9  Screen 10

These are the option selection and partitioning pages.  Mostly just to show off the new installer.

Screen 11  Screen 12  Screen 13

Installing packages

Screen 14  Screen 15  Screen 16

Root, Host Name, apply settings pages.  Nothing too exciting here.

Screen 17  Screen 18  Screen 19

Network Settings and Applying them.  Notice in the top left that you can op to skip these settings.  This is a great feature in my option.  Sometime I just don’t want to worry about these settings for right now.  Though this isn’t very often.

Screen 20  Screen 21  Screen 24

Pick your auth type.  I didn’t notice the windows auth this time though.  I am using the gnome install CD, but don’t know if that should change things.  Also adding a user.  Other than the spacing being off a little, nothing really new that I noticed.  Note Screen 24 though, new or not.  I’ve never noticed that it tells you that the caps lock is on before.  Great to have that change.  Sometimes I notice that the texts changes before I realize that I have the caps on.

Screen 22

Release notes, nothing new

Screen 23

It’s Alive.  Or at least grub comes up.  Note that for me the first boot after stage 2 thought my install failed at some point.  I didn’t see the monitor, graphics, and some other hardware configs.  They could be missing.

Now for my favorite part other than the new installer.  This makes my day.  I don’t think anything annoyed me more than the stupid, stupid, unusable, waste of time gtk software selector.  Luckily they have made a big change to it.  THANK YOU!!!

PackageSelector 1

PackageSelector 2

PackageSelector 3

PackageSelector 4

SO MUCH BETTER!  It might now work a 100%, but at least I don’t hate it just by looking at it.

So thank you opensuse and community for another alpha release.  If only I could find time to mess with this!

Some links of interest with alpha 1

phoronix

Sadly, my wifes computer has to have windows on it.  However, it has tons of open source software.  This way eventually I can ripe Windows out and replace it with something useful like Linux :).  Now that we got the disclaimer out of the way…

I was using Internet Explorer to check something and came across an interesting limitation.  Only a picture can describe this one.

 As it states at the bottom…  Don’t mind if I do

Trying to download it anyways just causes a melt down.

I can honestly say that I would have never guessed that a website in Indonesia would have ever linked to one of my posts.  I have google analytics running on my website and noticed a hugh spike in hits for Indonesia (watch out german, your about to bumped to third if the hits keep coming).  So in an attempt to figure out what was going on I track it back to an OpenSuSE Indonesian website.  I thought this was pretty cool.  I also noticed that on their blogroll list was my friend Scott’s website OpenSuSE Linux Rants.  I’ll have to let him know about this, unless he reads planetsuse.org or openclue.org (Utah Open Source Bloggers).  Anyways, time to head to bed and see if my head is going to fit through the door.

Ok.  Sorry it took so long to get these out.  Hopefully it won’t take this long for alpha 1.  I really only have screenshots for the install of the gnome cd since for one reason or another the display stuff wasn’t working very well with vmware.  So, without too much talking here are the screenshots.

The first one is the License Agreement (Proof of version)

Next is the Install Mode. A little change here, but that’s about it.

Nothing really new here, but the Install Settings.

The list of patterns on the gnome CD Software Selection.

In the Expert Partitioner I noticed something different.  I don’t know if I just have never noticed this before it or not, but its pretty cool anyways.

Installing the packages - Package Installation.

I’ve skipped a few screens at this point.  Mainly because it didn’t seem like anything had changed.

Up next are a couple from user authentication.  The various User Auth Method. And since I have a PDC provided by samba I decided to try and join the domain during the install. Windows Domain Membership.  This didn’t seem to go over so well.  I’m can’t remember why, but this has worked in the past.  Not usually the option I took other than for curiosity sake.

Now for the proof of my X problems under vmware - VMWare Display Problem.  Maybe better luck next time.

There are a few things that I wish they would change.  The biggest would be a new installer.  I think its more out of “the old one is old and boring now”

Though there is a section on opensuse.org called Pimp My Installer that has a cool mockup.  So, if you feel like a new install is in order.  Get your ideas on that page.  If their not heard, their useless.

The other day I had my bandwidth upgraded.  I started out with 15/15 mbit speeds and well they handled everything I needed it to.  But the nerd/geek in me didn’t feel this way.  My awesome and amazing ISP Xmission started offering highly speeds as if 15/15 mb wasn’t enough.  As is I’m paying $50 a month.  $40 for the connection and $10 for a subnet of 16 public IP addresses.  Yeah the ip address are more because I can than anything else (I do use enough to not move back to a subnet of 8).  So, back to my bandwidth.  I’m now paying an extra $10 now $60 a month.  My new bandwidth is 50/50 mb.  For those that don’t believe I have a picture.

Just want to wish a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

On Linuxtoday.com, there is an article with an OpenSuSE 10.3 review.  Out of interest I clicked on the link and started looking at the article.  From the article:

“in the latest 10.3 release, specific support for a Linux/Windows dual-boot setup, enabling both operating systems to be installed on the same PC.”

Unless I missed something, didn’t know we didn’t have specific support for dual-boot setups :)  Good thing it was added it in this release

Other than that it seems to be a decent simple review.  But the thing that jumped out the most was the listed Con.

“Cons It’s not Windows”

Call me crazy, but I list this as a pro

So the other day I got home really late and as I was backing up into my parking spot I noticed something a little off about my other car.  Instead of trying to describe what was “off”, I’ve got pictures (Found out later that this was my neighbor).

For those that can’t tell, on my window it says happy holidays.  You might notice that one of the eyes is off.  Yeah its the head of a sprinkler that I broke early this year doing something stupid.   No need for details.

Here are a couple more:

While I’m in the posting mood… As of a month ago I have a shiny new Atom feed. (that my previous post broke momentarily ): Update your aggregates, or not, the RSS version still works.

Here’s the beautiful haml that made it

Ok, as many of you may have heard, Movable Type just recently announced an open source edition. After playing around with it for a few hours, I was already sold. The templating system is just awesome, and while being forced to rebuild the blog to publish is a pain, the performance tradeoff is incredible.

Anyways, after getting about half of my stuff migrated successfully, I made the switch just a little bit ago. If there are issues on the planets or readers (or broken links) please let me know, I'll try to fix it ASAP.

A successful (so far) Wordpress upgrade. Version 2.3 seems cool enough, If you spot a problem, please let me know!

Edit: It appears that I may have spoken too soon… Some fickle behavior from plugins that used to like categories,  but I guess that was to be expected. =/

Not sure what the changes are but I figured I would at least put a link up to the release.  This is probably not a release for most people, but maybe a small insight into what is coming.

Just the gnome and kde cds  for both 32 and 64 archs.

alpha 0

Sorry, there is more, but through torrent.

I’m sitting in the Open Source Technology Center  at the kick off of the Home Runs in IT conference.  The turn out  has been excellent.  The main conference room is full!  For right now we have the “Got Game? - What fuels the fire of an entrepreneur”.  Go check out www.homerunsinit.com for the agenda and see what else is happening.  So far there has been some great comments.  Its never too late to head on over.

The OSTC is putting on a conference next week to help out software engineers and developers “seeking new job opportunities, considering new ventures, and open for new ideas in IT.”  A big thanks to Shauna for putting this together.  There are going to be several great presenters at this event.  I was going to name some of the, but figured it would be easier to send you over to the website Home Runs in IT to check out the agenda.

The event is on December 6th, so hurry up and signing on the website. This will also be a great networking event.  So for a low $35, or free for user groups, ex/Novell employees, and local schools this is a great deal!  If you below to one of these groups,

please contact me at sshaw at decriptor dot com

To register, click on the Home Runs in IT link above.

As I was typing this I thought about the title. It could be taken several different ways, but in this case, its just their timing getting back to me…

So, on my first day of work at my new job, Novell emailed me to offer me a job. This job was with the super lab guys working on their software. It would have been some good experience, but I think I’ll end up being much happier where I am now. Plus Novell has the policy of lay off interns first. Not a place that will attract tons of students. I’m not sure how many from UVSC there were, but there were several.

The word has gone around that Novell isn’t the place to work as an intern. Not that I or other have spread the word or made negative comments towards Novell, but that tons of CS students saw their friends all get laid off at once. Just about the time that they were planning on laying all of us off, they were talking with schools in the area to improve their intern program??? Doesn’t make sense to me, but whatever. It would be different if you aren’t told that in order to get the internship that you have to work through the semester.

Anyways, I’m not bitter or even upset at all. In my case, my boss had to make a really tough, yet easy decision. A decision that I agree with and will ultimately help out the XEN a bunch. This also gave me a chance to move onto a new company that seems really cool and where I could work for a long time.

I just found out that UEN (Utah Education Network) was doing an update or some maintenance. The end result was the lose of all my work. :/ For one reason or another they had to roll back to last Tuesday’s data. This just isn’t a good thing for the end of the semester. This means that I can’t download a test that I have to do by Monday and I’ve lost the last 6 chapter quizzes and tests that I took this week. :/

Now this might not seem that bad, although how’s going to cover me for my lost time, but there are a lot of schools on the system and it nearing the end of the semester. It affects 15 different groups of which just about all, but maybe 1 or 2 are colleges. So no thanks to blackboard vista and Oracle.

And if anyone want to read the explanation, read on.
(more…)

Yesterday was my first day at Vantage Controls. I enjoyed my break from work and the time that I had to work more on my school work. Between family, school, and work there just isn’t a ton of time left over. So its been great catching up. Anyways, back to the topic at hand. I started my new job. I’m really excited about this job as I will be able to work on things that interest me a lot.

At vantage controls I will be working on writing device drivers for the various audio/visual equipment so that we can interface with these devices. If you are interested in looking at the controller that I’m working with, here it is. As I learn more about what I’m doing I’ll post about it.

I’m at the Linux Distro Release party right now and testing out the new ubuntu 7.10. Don’t worry fellow opensuse users, just because Novell laid me off doesn’t mean I’m going to move to ubuntu. So far we’ve had a great turn out and we’re still installing. We have had everything from opensuse to ubuntu to fedora to mac osx 10.5 to openbsd. That’s what we have had people bring.

So with my attempt to install ubuntu 7.10 on my mac book pro I ended up killing my boot information. For some reason refit didn’t work right (or more likely I didn’t know what I was doing) and now I need to go back and try and fix that. Back to the install fest. Hopefully pictures to follow.

A thanks to Herlo for helping put this together and Open Source Technology Center @ Novell for providing space.

Today I finally bought some new head phones.  This is probably the first pair in maybe 10 years.  The thing that probably pushed me into buying a pair was school.  There are some that feel it necessary to be loud and share their conversation with everyone.  The pair that I bought were made by skull candy and no I didn’t just buy them for the name, although they do have a really cool name.  One of my friends recommended them, so I bought a pair.  They work really well so far.  They also are rumored to be a local company and their products are good and look good, so they get my money.

Well… I finally received notice of my final day. I was one of the many laid off from Novell last Tuesday. What kind of surprised me was that most of the interns, at least all of the interns that I know, were laid off. In a way it doesn’t make sense to lay off all of the cheap labor unless its a head count issue. Luckily, my manager fought to keep another intern and myself until October 31. Hopefully I will be able to find a new job in the meantime. I will miss Novell and testing XEN as well as the people I was able to work with. Even though I won’t be an employee, I’m still part of the community and will continue to contribute to opensuse and most likely XEN (due to hardware limitations). Another change is that I will no longer appear on bugzilla as stshaw, but will be decriptor.

As I’m doing more XEN stuff, I just want to post quickly about #opensuse-xen on irc (freenode). We are few in numbers, but would love to see more people in there helping and sharing ideas.

I started to mention this in my xen networking page and figured since I’ve had a chance to look at the script a little that I’ll blog about it. This is an all-in-one script written by Ron Terry from pronetworkconsulting. The script is called network-multinet. I haven’t looked at his dhcp addition, so I’ll leave that for another post.

First, I’ll show you how to change over to this new script:

Warnings: This is changing and restarts your networking.

1. Download the script from the link above and copy it to:

/etc/xen/scripts

if you are using opensuse 10.3, then just check the version (in the file)

2. Edit /etc/xen/xend-config.sxp around line 128:

change from

(network-script network-bridge)

to

(network-script network-multinet)

3. Depending on your distro you might have to add or edit:

/etc/sysconfig/xend

4. Now to switch over to the new script:

/etc/xen/scripts/network-bridge stop

/etc/xen/scripts/network-multinet start

5. Check to make sure everything came back up:

/etc/xen/scripts/network-multinet status

and check your VMs.

That should do it. You are now switched over to a much newer and cooler script with more features. One of the things that I really like is the fact that you can now start, stop, restart, and status instead of just start and stop.

Running ‘/etc/xen/scripts/network-multinet status’ gives you a lot of information which is very useful.

I recommend looking around at the other scripts. There are some useful ones around the site.

This was originally going to be an article on networking in XEN, however I just couldn’t find the time to finish it or work on it. Hopefully there is some useful information there as it stands. Even more hopeful that I might be able to finish it one of these days. Until then, my XEN networking page

Or you can also click on the link on my page.

glTail.rb is a really cool app for displaying your log files graphically using opengl. I finally decided to download it this evening and give it a try. Its really easy to setup, so minimal effort required. All you have to do is install a couple common packages, mod the script just a little, and run it.  This project was started only 4 days ago and has had several new things added.

I have it running against two of my web sites and it looks really cool. I don’t get tons of traffic so mine isn’t as cool as the video clip on the website, but cool none the less. The one thing that I wish it had was a the ability to parse mysql log files. I don’t know ruby, but might look at it anyways.