Utah Open Source Planet

Its official!  For those of you who have always wanted to know how to hack a project together, this is a great opportunity.

We at the Utah Open Source Foundation learned a few weeks ago that Novell’s ‘Hack Week‘ will be occuring the same week as UTOSC 2008.  We also learned UTOSC 2008 will have these awesome hackers come out to the Salt Lake Community College Thursday and Friday to finish off some of their cool applications.  This is the third Hack Week from Novell.

On Saturday, we’re offering these hackers an opportunity to come down to UTOSC and give a few short presentations on what was finished and how they work.  Let’s hope they accept.

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.

The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is coming up fast (August 28-30). We are going to continue to give you reasons to be very excited (as we are) to attend UTOSC 2008 until the very end.

We are very pleased to announce one of the keynote speakers at this year’s conference will be none other than Joe “Zonker” Brockmeir of Novell and the openSUSE project.

Joe’s keynote presentation, titled “How to bootstrap a community,”  is sure to be interesting considering his background. What started with purchasing a copy of Slackware in 1996 turned into nearly a decade-long career writing about Linux and the open source community and industry for a variety of high-profile tech publications. Prior to being hired as openSUSE Community Manager for Novell early this year, Zonker spent time as Editor-In-Chief for Linux Magazine and as editorial director of Linux.com. His writing background also include contribution to many books, HOWTOs and other technical documents.

While his job at Novell is primarily centered around supporting and promoting the use of the openSUSE Linux distribution, Joe’s been quoted in a few recent interviews saying he’s committed to advocating the use of all forms of Linux and open source software.

Joe Brockmeier’s keynote presentation will undoubtably hold special value for users of the openSUSE and SUSE distributions, but considering Joe’s experience and knowledge about the Linux and open source industries over the last decade or so, this presentation offers great potential value for any UTOSC attendee.

A blurb about the conference

The 2008 Utah Open Source Conference is the second annual gathering of open source enthusiasts in Utah. Following the amazingly successful first conference held in 2007 at Novell’s Open Source Technology Center in Provo, UT, this year’s conference is being held on the Redwood campus of Salt Lake Community College near Salt Lake City.

For more information about this conference, to register to attend, or to see a really neat website driven by open source software, go over to <http://2008.utosc.com/>.

Well, you know it’s a great day when we’re planning an OpenSUSE 11.0 Release Party. Yeah, that’s going to be pretty exciting.

If you are anywhere close to Provo, Utah on June 19, 2008, we’d love to see you at the Open Source Technology Center (building A). It will be at 6:00 PM. If you have friends who are interested in checking out which Linux they should use, have them come by.

According to The Official OpenSUSE 11.0 Release Party Locations page, pizza will be provided. So RSVP to Stephen Shaw, at the email address listed on the party locations page.

Stephen, I’m going to be there, man.

For people seeking directions, I’ll just grab them and the map from our OpenSUSE 10.3 Release Party last October:

Click image for larger version

Image legend:
1. North-bounders coming in on I-15 take this exit (exit number 263, I believe).
2. South-bounders coming in on I-15 take this exit (exit number 263).
3. This is building A where the Open Source Technology Center (OSTC) is.

For those using Google Maps or Google Earth, the address is:

Novell
1800 Novell Pl
Provo, UT 84606

Everyone come.

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.

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

Alright! Some cool news! The Mono Hackfest at the Novell OSTC in Provo, Utah was a success ( I would say, people showed up and we talked about features )  And while I took several photos in the hope that I might have another photo-riffic blog post, but alas, my flash wasn’t on, and they are all pretty much worthless.  That aside, it was pretty cool to root around more of the Novell OSTC campus.

As a by-product of the ‘Hack’ing portion of the hackfest, I am happy to report the enabling of tagging in Tomboy, while we are still working out the specifics of the tagging interface, a super-experimental version of our newest iteration (based somewhat strongly on the Blogger.com tagging interface which we all agreed was somewhat well designed). While this is mostly implemented, there are a few issues (mostly based on my lack of Gtk knowledge/experience) with some of the autocomplete logic. I basically created a new Gtk Window which is composed of a ListView and hovers over the entry area (actually a GtkTextView, as a GtkEntry wouldn’t handle text markup). There are 2 real problems at the moment.

1. I need to handle keyboard input intelligently enough to allow selection of an autocomplete option, I just need someone more familiar with how keypress events are handled to take a look at my code and figure out what widgets I should listen to the keypress events on etc.
2. I need to get the autocomplete popup widget to show in the right place (should be easy enough to get, again I just need someone a little more familiar with the Gtk API so I don’t spend another hour looking for the window positioning information.) and the widget needs to close when a note is closed. (Right now the autocomplete box hangs around, should again just be subscribing to a window destroy event, but my previous attempts have resulted in some messes.)

Anyways, if anyone has the time to offer a hand/check any of this out, just drop by #tomboy (I’ll be in and out due to exams, but I’ll do my best to answer any questions) or feel free to just fix it right off the bat Here’s a quick and dirty screenshot of the problem as it exists (you can see the autocomplete dropdown isn’t quite right).

In addition to traditional tags, we have added a new little tidbit for Addin Developers, the concept of System Tags. In short, any tag added to a Tomboy note with the system: prefix will not be displayed. While this seems a little stupid at first glance, this allows us to easily implement things like Tasks, and allow Addins to associate their own data with tags while not implementing their own data store, and still maintaining backwards compatibility. For example if I wanted to implement ‘Contacts’ in Tomboy (NOT A FEATURE THAT SHOULD BE IMPLEMENTED IMHO)  I could simply add the following tags to store all the information I needed for my Addin:

• system:Contact
• system:FirstName:Kevin
• system:LastName:Kubasik
• system:EMail:KevinAtKubasikDotNet

And so on, anything with the ’system:’ prefix will be hidden from the user, but still stored with each note.

Ok, so some of you may have noticed I’ve been a little quiet lately, over this time of non-blogging I built up a dozen great ideas for entries, and collected the photos to flesh them out. However, I am far to lazy, so you all get this little summary post instead. Let me apologize upfront, these were all taken with a cruddy phone. I’ll have another post with my technical musings later this week.

1. Who knew Utah was so cool! After attending the Ubuntu-Utah group meeting, I was floored at how active the area was! Not only was the user group active, social and plenty fun, but I quickly learned about the Utah Open Source Foundation, which is (for lack of something more elegant) just plain awesome, the guys that run it could not be doing a better job. It was at a Multi-Distro Release Party (graciously hosted by Novell at their Open Source Technologies Center) that I caught this amusing moment, after Ubuntu is Linux for Human Beings, there aren’t age limits

   

2. Some (hopefully legal) shots of the Novell Provo campus, its quite nice:

   

   

3. Another fun tidbit about Salt Lake City, they have not only the best burrito joint on earth, but random neon orange flags at street crossings…

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.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls. We here at the Utah Open Source Foundation would like to announce that we’ve recently been able to acquire and test the video from the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC).

We’re proud to announce our first video. Tons of work went into getting this live. Including streaming bandwidth provided by TierFour and video editing done by KnowledgeBlue and Open Source TV. We’d like to thank all of those who made this possible and look forward to providing you with additional videos as they arrive. Please feel free to download them or watch the stream.

In the future, we’ll work on making them downloadable from this site as well. Oh, and we’re working on part 1, it will be out soon.

Podcast currently unavailable due to a bug in the PodPress software. Currently looking for a new plugin or an alternate way to release the videos.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Foundation (http://www.utosf.org)

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.

Aaron Toponce has posted up a poll on his blog here and I wanted to cover some of the hypocrisies in the post and express my own feelings.

I think Novell has done nothing but good things for the open source community by employing some of the best and brightest developers around the world to help develop some of the most innovative applications on the Linux desktop (Tomboy, Banshee, F-Spot, Open Office, Evolution, Compiz, AppArmor, and GNOME) and have even more great products coming down the line like Giver and Banter. They also provide us with a great distribution in openSUSE with features that no other distribution has, such as the SLAB menu, openSUSE build service, 1-Click Install and the codecs installer.

They also employ the kernel hacker Greg Kroah-Hartman (the maintainer of PCI, USB, I²C, driver core and the sysfs kernel) and are allowing him to improve hardware compatibility in Linux by running the Linux Driver Project.

So, to cast my vote, It would be a dream come true to work for such a great company like Novell.

And in response to his poll:

1. Novell has made a reputation for itself by laying off employees at a whim, with the AppArmor devs being the most recent example.
   1. Sun does the same thing, its part of owning a large corporation. And there are many reasons for layoffs, it doesn’t make anyone evil.
2. Sun has opened up nearly all of it’s Solaris operating system. Coming from a Solaris background in the early days, this is cool.
   1. How is “nearly” open source better than being completely open source like Novell is with SUSE?
3. Even though Novell apologized to the community for its agreement with Microsoft, knowing that they could be swallowed up any day now by the Redmond giant makes me nervous.
   1. Sun made a deal with Microsoft years ago:
      http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/media/features/sun_microsoft.html
      http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2004/apr04/04-02SunAgreementPR.mspx
4. Sun seems to have a promising future, where Novell seems to be riding the razors edge. I guess time will only tell there, however.
   1. This is just FUD/speculation, but I would have to disagree, openSUSE is looking better than ever and same goes with the rest of the products developed at Novell, I think nothing but great things are to come from them.
5. Sun has said, that if Microsoft goes on a patent litigation rampage, Sun will pull out it’s portfolio protecting Linux users.
   1. Novell has a policy for this http://www.novell.com/company/policies/patent/ and since a majority of their business is invested in Linux and Open Source, why should we doubt them? Especially when they haven’t done anything to make us doubt them.

I would also recommend reading this article which describes the SuSE take over by Novell and how they have helped the open source community.

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.

Well, the party is over and hope that everyone enjoyed it. There are several that walked away with some cool swag. If I remember right, there were a few blankets, a backpack, stuffed geckos, 5 ipod nanos, a watch, and a digital camera. So a special thanks to Novell for providing the swag, pizza, and food. Also the OSTC (Open Source Technology Center) was nice to let us use their building.

Here are some photos too:

Photos

YOU CANNOT MISS THIS PARTY!

We are having an OpenSUSE 10.3 RELEASE PARTY on the Novell campus. It will be in the Open Source Technology Center (building A) on Thursday at 6:00 PM. Alrighty, you have been tasked with spreading the word and bringing all your i-would-use-linux-but-i-only-know-windows-and-dont-know-how-to-learn-linux-unless-you-teach-me friends! We will have install servers available, and you may even get an earful of what’s new in OpenSUSE 10.3 from yours truly.

UPDATE: According to my sources, “Novell is going to cover pizza and soda.”

Click image for larger version

Image legend:
1. North-bounders coming in on I-15 take this exit (exit number 263, I believe).
2. South-bounders coming in on I-15 take this exit (exit number 263).
3. This is building A where the Open Source Technology Center (OSTC) is.

For those using Google Maps or Google Earth, the address is:

Novell
1800 Novell Pl
Provo, UT 84606

Everyone come.

We have a great opensuse 10.3 launch party planned for this Thursday at 18:00 at the provo, UT Novell buildings. Anyone and everyone in the area are welcome to come hang out and enjoy pizza, soda, and installing. We already have a server for network installs, and hopefully some Novell employees to talk about 10.3.

I added a page to opensuse.org for people to list and find other release parties.

OpenSUSE-Community page

OpenSUSE Launch Party Locations

Again:
October 4 @ 18:00

1800 Novell Pl, Provo, UT
Building A (Open Source Technology Center)

I posted a short piece at BTL about the Bandit project's InfoCard selector for the Mac. There have been some solutions in the past, but they were hard to install or flaky. This one is solid and the install is a breeze.

Tags: osx identity cardspace novell

SCO has filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy. I really hope that this is the early stages of decomposition for this company. Yes, there will likely be parties all over the world in celebration of this event. My guess, based on the history of this trainwreck involving SCO, is that Daryl McBride won’t give it up until the power to continue is removed from him. Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows the SCO Group to reorganize their company and have their assets protected. Did you see all of their creditors? Here:

* Amici LLC ($500,650.73),
* Boies Schiller (287,256.39),
* Canopy Group ($139,895.00),
* Gre Mountain Heights Property ($132,502.00),
* Microsoft Licensing, Inc. ($125,575.00),
* Sun Microsystems, Inc. ($50,000.00),
* Veritas Software ($37,881.33),
* Intel ($23,302.11),
* Fujitsu Services ($25,302.11),
* HP-Nonstop Royalty Accounting ($25,302.11…hmm. exactly the same amount for three entities),
* Unisys ($25,302.11 - a fourth),
* KSJ Consulting ($21,781.25),
* 4Front Technologies ($10,417.50),
* Silverman Heller Associates ($10,352.35),
* Madson & Austin ($8,478.32),
* Randd Strategic ($7,026.79),
* Sage Forensic Accounting ($6,221.00),
* Profile Consulting ($5,450.00),
* Sun Microsystems Inc. Software Royalty Accounting Group ($5,414.40) and
* AmLaw Discovery ($5,399.57).

Who’s not on there? *NOVELL*! Well, I guess the final amount owed to Novell by SCO has not been officially determined, but my guess it will eclipse any other amount found on this list of creditors.

Whatever happens, I cannot possibly see how this will turn out well for SCO. This then makes it apparent that this is a fight based off principles. They are doing it for the principle of the thing, not because they are actually going to win. Seriously Daryl, give it up, bro.

SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Files for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy - Slashdot
SCO Files For Chapter 11 Bankruptcy - Updated <= Lots of great info
The SCO Group Files Chapter 11 to Protect Assets as It Addresses Potential Financial and Legal Challenges

In a ruling today, Novell is the official owner of Unix!

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20070810165237718#comments

http://www.groklaw.net/pdf/Novell-377.pdf

This is something that I was able to help test for a little bit. The idea behind these drivers is to make certain devices in a fully virtualized guest “xen aware”. Since the heaviest used parts of a hosted operating system are networking and disk access, they focused on improving them. For right now the supported operating systems are RHEL 4 and 5, and windows 2000, 2003, and XP. Without sounding like a sales person, I thought this was a really cool idea. Those that have run fully virtualized guests, you can understand why this would be welcome. Anyways, here is a link that you can read.

Novell Ships SLE 10 SP 1 and New VMDP

I just read Jeff Jaffe’s thoughts on hack week. For those of you that don’t know who Jeff is, he is the CTO of Novell. He offers some insight into “What is it, why did we do it, what was the reason for the timing, and what did we learn?” on his blog.

Jeff Jaffe’s hackweek blog entry

This is a really cool idea that Nat came up with. The idea is that all the Linux engineers in the company stop what they are doing for a week and get to work on whatever they want. Kind of like a google thing but for a whole week. Unfortunately, there a some big things that have to get taken care of otherwise I would be joining them this week even though I don’t have those mad elite hacking skillz. Hopefully the next time around I’ll be able to participate. In the announcement there is the link to the website which has pictures and videos already. Hopefully some really cool stuff comes out of this. You can also add your ideas and contribute from your own desk from the website.

Here is the announcement for the event from Nat on the openSuSE announce list:

Hi everyone,

At Novell we’ve been planning a special internal event that will run
this week, from June 25th to 29th. We’re calling it Hack Week.

During Hack Week, our entire Linux engineering team — hundreds of
people — will be working on whatever Linux or open source projects
interest them. Everyone will work alone or in teams, on existing open
source projects or new ideas of their own. No one will tell them what
or what not to do — it’s a free week for free hacking, driven by
individual passion.

To make it easier for our hackers to find and publicize their projects,
we’ve created an Idea Pool web site where we’ve all spent the last
couple of weeks sharing ideas and finding collaborators. This web site
is open to the public here:

http://idea.opensuse.org/

Although this is a Novell event, we’re running it with full
transparency. You’ll be able to follow our progress and projects on the
Idea Pool web site, either with the blog on the front page where we’ll
post videos from our seven main engineering sites[1], or by watching
individual project pages.

We invite you to participate where you can. If you’d like to help with
a project, feel free to add a comment to the discussion section of the
page and volunteer your support.

We hope that you’ll at least enjoy watching Hack Week progress. If it
is successful, we hope to run it again sometime soon, with even more
participation from the community.

If you’re interested in following along, you might check the following
sites first:

-Hack Week Overview: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/hackweek

-Tags: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/blog/welcome-to-the-idea-pool

-Idea Pool code of conduct: http://idea.opensuse.org/content/etiquette

-Flickr pool: http://www.flickr.com/groups/hackweek/pool/

During the week, we’ll use the channel #opensuse-hackweek on
irc.freenode.net for general discussion (project-specific discussion
will find its own venue). Hope to see you there!

Happy hacking,
Nat

[1] Beijing, Bangalore, Prague, Nuernberg, Boston, Provo, Portland are
the main sites

At the end of last week we had a meeting that everyone from a couple groups had to attend. The main purpose of this meeting was to meet some of the upper management that is traveling from building to building within the company throughout the world. Didn’t expect it, but Andreas Jaeger is part of that upper management, not that he shouldn’t be. After the meeting, I decided that I had to go up and at least say hi(that and for the bragging rights ). So, I went up and was able to meet and shake hands with him for a couple minutes. For those of you that do not know who Andreas is, he is the head guy over the openSuSE distribution. His is one of the blogs that I follow on and off (http://andreasjaeger.blogspot.com/). You can always catch him in the openSuSE irc meetings and on the openSuSE mailing lists. From the few times that I’ve read the meeting transcripts and his blog, he seems like a really cool and down to earth kind of guy. I was also impressed when talking to him in person. Thinking about it, I’m just some peon intern and he didn’t really have to take a couple minutes to talk to me. None the less he did.

Given that MS is cracking down on poor Russians (which is weird since rampant piracy of their products only serves to promote their monopoly), I would've thought that some open source vendor would jump in to rescue Mr. Ponosov (head of school mas