Planet TLLTS

I upgraded the System76 to Karmic tonight. It was a bit of a long upgrade having to download about 1.7gb worth of files and then install them. I must admit, this has been the easiest Ubuntu upgrade I have ever done. Now most of you will probably recall that I don’t wipe my system out when upgrading. This time I followed the more traditional Ubuntu upgrade and ran do-release-upgrade with the -d option for developmental version. This was after a standard update of course. About 2 hours later I was up and in Karmic.

I must say, the look of Karmic is beautiful. Gnome was nicely laid out and the whole feel was crisp and fresh. GDM has an interesting look and I noticed they went back to displaying the user accounts on the system. So now you don’t have to type in your name, just select it. The remaining optons are drop down menus at the bottom (i.e.; picking your desktop environment/window manager, language, etc) and stay at what your last picks were. I like that as opposed to having to click the options button and all.

For some reason, regardless the the fact that I always use Fluxbox, the first time I logged in it threw me to gnome. When I logged out I noticed that my session was set back to fluxbox and the second login had me in my preferred window manager. I then decided to check out KDE and wow, that was beautiful. The desktop photo background ran through my pictures directory for the random pic shots to show and promptly put up the picture of a toilet. What a contrast, because Karmic does not at all look like crap!

I look forward to exploring Karmic in more detail and I am excited to put it on my workstation at work!

For those of you looking for my presentation on the Linux Boot Process, look no further. Here is the presentation in a handy tarball containing the odp presentation along with pdf, flash, and html files and the wonderful video at the end. Enjoy!

The link is http://tinyurl.com/dannolfpres

Hooho!

OLF 2009 was a blast! The drive to and from was viscious. While I broke it up with some napping in a rest area going up, coming home was straight through and boy did it wipe me out!

Day one: It was great getting together with Allan, Dave, Joel and Linc again. Great hosts, even greater guys! Shoprat was there which is always a hoot. We ran to Max and Ermas for lunch then went to the pre-show stuff. The Podcasters BOF was a bit low key and was followed by the wedding of Randy and Janet officiated by Lord D. What an event! I truly wish Randy and Janet a wonderful life together!

Dinner was a BD Mongolians. Afterwards I had to head back to the convention center to make sure all was good to go for my presentation. This was a damn good idea because my laptop video card would not pick up the projection system. About an hour later and some manual configuration on my part and I was good to go. I made it to the pre-party at Barley’s almost 2 hours late. Had a few beers then headed back for some sleep. No hard partying this year! I told you guys!

The convention was a blast. We got see a lot of old listeners and meet new ones. My presentation on the Linux Boot Process went a lot better than I expected. I had standing room only (although I did see some empty seats). I ran too close to the wire and had to rush the ending a bit. I expected this and should better prepare next time.

The rest of the day was spent hanging out at the booth. I did manage to catch a talk on the Legalities of FOSS from a Hacker’s Perspective by Tom “Spot” Callaway of RedHat. This was a fabulous talk and I highly recommend listening to it when the audio files are released.

I must say, where the heck was Shaun Powers? I caught some of his opening Keynote but after that, I never saw him again. Nor did I see him at any of the pre-show events. Wonder why he did not hang around?

The post party was nice. I only stayed for about 15 minutes and then I took Joel home. On the way back to the party I got sidetracked by following Dave Yates into the Hyatt bar and hanging out with him and a bunch of other people not limited to Susan (notKlaatu’s significant other), notKlaatu, MonsterB, JLindsay and many more. (Yeah, I am getting lazy now). I was there until after 2:00 when I finally called it a night and went to bed.

Saturday was saying goodbye to the tllts crew and heading home. What a dreadful ride.

Wow! What a weekend!

We had a great time again this year, no surprise. It’s always great to be able to hang out with all your friends and all you linux folk and TechShow listeners are my friends!

My thoughts are still a bit disjointed from the weekend so here are some random notes about OLF this year:

Special thanks to Richard Querin and Mordancy for the new logo and t-shirts. They were fan-freaking-tastic! We took small donations in exchange for a TLLTS t-shirt this year and that provided us with enough money to pay some of the booth and bandwidth fees and get a good head start on getting some more shirts for next year’s festivities.

Prentice Hall, Neuros Tech, Oreilly and APress deserve BIG thank you’s for once again sponsoring us with some excellent giveaways for our free raffle this year.

This weekend was the start if our 7th broadcast year on the TechShow and I am still consistently amazed when someone walks up to me, recognizes me and tells me they listen to the show!

I saw Ubuntu’s netbook remix v 9.10 boot from bios to full desktop in 4 seconds while I was there. Astounding!

Oracle has this python sql interface that they are working on that is probably one of the coolest things, as a developer, that I have seen in a long time. It’s like stuffing bash into the sql command line. Nifty things like colored columned table listings, easy piping from sql command line to bash commands and files. This was some seriously cool stuff. I can’t wait for them to get it working with not only orcacle but mysql and postgres too!

This year was definitely the year of the netbook. It seems like everyone had one, they were all constantly using them, they all loved their netbook and anyone who didn’t yet have one was dying to get one. I must have seen hundreds of them this weekend and they were all running Linux except one.

The one netbook that wasn’t running Linux was at the booth right next to ours. They were the guys from Haiku, the new BeOS implementation. This is some seriously neat stuff and these guys are to be commended. While not ready for primetime just yet, they are going that direction full force and have some really slick stuff going in their favor. This OS is FAST man. I saw an average netbook doing some AMAZING video rendering feats like playing high def movies while running 3D video demos at 700fps and the thing wasn’t even breaking a sweat. There was another old thinkpad laptop playing 5 different videos at the same time with no lag whatsoever. I Bet it won’t Be long Before this OS has the full attention of, at least, some video processing nuts! You can bet I’ll be keeping an eye on this one.

There are a few things I will do differently next year, mostly with my time management, like getting there a day earlier, but I had a great time. If you haven’t been to one yet, make sure you go because you are missing out. Put it on your calendar for next year. I’ll see ya there!

9.5x hour drive, 4 hours sleeping in a rest area, rain off and on, I’m finally in Columbus, Ohio. It’s a bit grey and dismal here, but what can you say? It’s Ohio.

Having lived in the flatlands of Hampton Roads I must say the whole back to the mountains driving was unsettling. Good thing it’s not winter and icy.

The West Viriginia senic views were beautiful. When I pulled into the rest area around 4 a.m. I could see nothing. In the morning the landscape opened up into a beautifully, foggy valley; lush folliage rolling up the mountain side. Except for the highway it was so pretty!

For the longest time I’ve been using the CiscoVPN client for Linux to connect to my job’s vpn when working from home. It functions o.k. but there are some annoyances. Every time a new Linux kernel came down the pipe you had to rerun the installer script. It basically creates new kernel modules compiled with the newly installed Linux kernel. Also Cisco doesn’t seem to update the Linux version of their client very often and there are some issues on newer kernels. People in the community have provided patches that generally work. It’s just a hassle that Cisco doesn’t seem to care about it’s users who happen to run Linux. One other annoyance is that once the vpn is running you can’t even access your home directory through your file manager. VPNC runs in user space so no new kernel modules are required every time you upgrade your kernel. Also I can still access my home folder without a problem. The only issue I’ve encountered is this known bug where you get a resolv.conf error after using vpnc the first time. Simply following this workaround fixed the issue.This is a huge win.
Bye bye Ciscovpn!

The feet are taking on a nice hobo sheen these days. Thursday I went for my longest barefoot run yet, 1.5 hours around the Foxhill area. I don’t know how far I went but I did get lost, ran in a circle and finally ended up home before it was completely dark. I do not like running in the dark, especially barefoot; it is very hard to see what is before you.

Today, Saturday, I went for my first run off road: Nolan Park. It’s a 5.3 mile run and I did it all barefoot. Running on sand, gravel, and oyster shells is a bit different. On top of that, Nolan has a lot of small hills which is very different from the flat lands over here. All-in-all it was a great run. I am not sure how long it took me, but it was fun.

I noticed that when running on the road people are always offerring me a ride, like my car broke down or give me that what the heck look. Running on the trail, with other people I got a lot of “Hey, doesn’t that hurt your feet?” Queries, but a lot of thumbs up and alrights! One guy, while passing me, asked if I read Born To Run, which of course I did. We got to talking about the book and barefoot running for a bit; which was cool.

Well, here is to a relaxing recovery for the rest of the night.