No, not Peter64, but our wonderful, fun loving rabbit Peter died last night. It was a sad evening, that it was. The girls and I buried him around 6:30 p.m. Paige was completely heart broken. I never thought a rabbit would be so fun and interesting as a pet. Godspeed Peter and enjoy your times in the fields of the afterlife!
In today's podcast, dave talks about the SouthEast LinuxFest, his recent network problems, zoho notebook, spideroak, kde, chromium, fedora 13, Novell, and some podcasts he has been enjoying.
Links:
lottalinuxlinks.com linux user podcast 125 ogg vorbis format;
chromium; and
Here is the full list of speakers:
Jono Bacon - KEYNOTE: Community Manager for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, Canonical employee, former co-host of the LUGradio podcast, and current co-host of the FLOSS Weekly podcast with Leo Laporte. Metal Rockstar!
Max Spevack - KEYNOTE: Manager of Red Hat's community architecture team, and former Fedora Project Leader, Max now defines and executes Red Hat's global community strategy.
Jon Maddog Hall: After forty years in the commercial computer industry, thirty years of that with Unix, and using Linux since he met Linus Torvalds in 1994, maddog has been a programmer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, educator, author and trouble-maker as both a supplier of software and a user of software.
Wietse Zweitze Venema: Author of the Postfix mail system and the TCP Wrapper, and co-author of the Coroner's Toolkit (TCT) for forensic analysis, the Satan network scanner, and a book on Forensic Discovery. Wietse is an IBM research staff member. He received awards from the Free Software Foundation, the System Administrator's Guild (SAGE), the Netherlands UNIX User Group (NLUUG), as well as a Sendmail innovation award.
Russ Woodman K5TUX: Senior systems and network administrator with more than 20 total years of experience in BSD UNIX, Solaris, Linux and Cisco networking devices. Russ is co-founder and co-host of the "Linux in the Ham Shack" podcast as well as an avid audio engineering hobbyist, amateur radio enthusiast and independent music promoter. He is also a Linux Journal contributor and guest on various well-known Linux- and FOSS-related podcasts.
Brian Smith: Brian Smith is CTO of DNS.com and a long-time FOSS supporter and group organizer in the Louisville, Kentucky area.
Daniel Chen: Dan Chen is an Ubuntu core developer who has lost many a grey hair on nontrivial portions of his spare time struggling with audio hardware enablement and integration issues across Ubuntu derivatives.
Andrew "Drew" Jensen: Six year OpenOffice.org (OO.o) community member, co-Founder OO.o User Services forums and current co-Lead of the Database (Base) QA team. Owner of BaseAnswers.com, offering FOSS based document automation services. 25+ years experience in commercial software development.
Pete Graner: Pete Graner is the Kernel & Hardware Enablement manager at Canonical, where he leads the Ubuntu Kernel team and is responsible for the hardware enablement of the x86 & ARM kernels for Ubuntu. Prior to working at Canonical Pete worked at Red Hat as the Base Operating Systems manger. Pete has been developing on Linux since the mid 90's.
Amber Graner: Amber Graner is an active Ubuntu community member and organizer who encourages everyone around her to participate, support, and learn about Ubuntu and Open Source. With a smile and a sense of humor, Amber reminds people that there is a place for everyone in the Ubuntu community ¿ regardless of technical skill level (or lack thereof). She is constantly looking for people, places, and events within the Ubuntu community that help inspire Ubuntu users to participate actively within the Ubuntu community. A few of the hats Amber wears are blogger and contributor to Ubuntu User Magazine, Ubuntu Women Project Team Leader, Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Editor-in-Chief, North Carolina LoCo Team Lead as well as wife and mom.
Vincent Batts: A recent addition to the Slackware development team, Vincent is an avid Open Source advocate in both the commercial arena as well as the community.
Rikki Kite: Rikki Kite is the Associate Publisher of Linux Pro Magazine and Ubuntu User, and she's the former Managing Editor of Sys Admin Magazine and UnixReview.com. Rikki blogs about women in open source at: linuxpromagazine.com/roseblog.
John Curran: John Curran is the President and CEO of the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), responsible for leading the organization in its mission of managing the distribution of Internet number resources in its geographic region. He was also a founder of ARIN and served as its Chairman from inception through early 2009. He has also been an active participant in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), having both co-chaired the IETF Operations and Network Management Area and served as a member of the IPng (IPv6) Directorate.
Keith Bergelt: Keith Bergelt is the chief executive officer of Open Invention Network (OIN), the collaborative enterprise that enables innovation in open source and an increasingly vibrant ecosystem around Linux. In this capacity, he is directly responsible for enabling, influencing and defending the integrity of the Linux ecosystem. Central to the achievement of his goals is the acquisition and transfer of patent rights designed to permit members of the Linux ecosystem to operate free of the threat of assertion and litigation from those whose business models are antithetical to innovation and global economic growth in information technology and computing.
Bryan Smith: Bryan A Smith is a Debian Gnu/Linux and BSD enthusiast, hardware hacker and Systems Engineer. Bryan has used Open Source Operating Systems since the days of Red Hat 5 Hurricane. He contributes to several Open Source projects and has helped launch several startup ISP¿s based in his area using Open Source software as a framework. Bryan is currently the Chief Technical Officer at Tacit Labs Inc and Lead Systems Administrator at Dreamfish.com Global Collaborative.
Tara Spalding: CMO at GroundWork Open Source and advisory chairperson at MonitoringForge.org, Tara brings attention to how community based innovation betters IT professional's lives.
Matt Ray: Community Manager for the open source network monitoring platform Zenoss, Matt is also one of the founders of the Texas Linux Fest.
David Mandala: Mobile Team Manager for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, Canonical employee, has been involved in Linux since 1994 and spends his day helping craft the Ubuntu Linux distribution releases for ARM. He has been working in the embedded space for more then 30 years starting as a hardware engineer and software developer.
Brandon Checketts: Has worked for several web hosting companies and has worked to develop, improve, and maintain hundreds of LAMP-based websites and applications.
Ian Weller: "Wiki Czar" of the Fedora Project, community statistics organizer, Red Hat intern and recent high school graduate, Ian is productively lost on a daily basis.
Celeste Lyn Paul: Celeste Lyn Paul is a designer, researcher, and computer geek, although not always in that order. She is an open source design advocate who aims at improving the quality of FLOSS software by educating developers about design and working with them on design challenges in their projects. She is involved in the greater FLOSS Human-Computer Interaction community, helps lead the KDE Usability Project, and serves on the KDE e.V. Board of Directors. More information about her may be found at www.celestelynpaul.com.
Steven Dake: Steven Dake has been involved in Open Source Linux for over 12 years professionally. Steven Dake was involved in the creation of the industry first Carrier Grade Linux software solution at MontaVista Software. While working at MontaVista Software, Mr. Dake initiated the openais project which has been used in thousands of designs worldwide for high availability since 2002. In 2008, Mr. Dake founded the Corosync Cluster Engine project to radically improve the performance and quality based upon real-world experiences of the openais project. He maintains this project full time with a small group of other high availability experts in the open source community.
Joshua Drake: Joshua D. Drake, commonly referred to as JD, is a Major PostgreSQL.Org Contributor, President of United States PostgreSQL, and ahich specialises in PostgreSQL work, and in 2009 he founded PostgreSQL Experts Inc, of which he is a director, along with a number of other PostgreSQL luminaries. Andrew has worked in IT, mainly on Linux and Unix platforms, for 25 years.
Scott Boss: Senior Storage Engineer at a Fortune 500 Financial company. Active speaker in the Atlanta open source community. And overall just a big geek.
Montario Fletcher: Montario Fletcher is currently a Mathematics teacher who helps make computing more accessible to high school students with Linux. He has a a B.A. in Computer Science from Mercer University and a Master of Information Systems degree from University of Phoenix. He is also pursuing a Ph.D in Educational Technology from Walden University. He hopes to provide freedom from school systems that cannot budget for proprietary software by showing them open source alternatives.
Nick Owen: Nick is the CEO & Co-founder of WiKID Systems, a dual-source two-factor authentication system. Nick has written about and spoken on the virtues of getting rid of static passwords since he was 3.
Doug Vann: Doug Vann has been called the Johnny Appleseed of Drupal. When he's not developing feature rich web applications in Drupal, he is traveling the globe training others to do the same.
James Schweitzer: James Schweitzer is an IT Specialist at IBM who has the privilege of deploying Linux and other Open Source solutions. He has performed large scale deployments in retail, education, medical, financial and entertainment fields.
Steven Edwards: Currently Systems Engineer at Windstream on the Systems Architecture Team. Former Senior Technical Support Engineer and later Software Quality Assurance Engineer at CodeWeavers, Inc. Developer and unofficial Project Liaison for the Wine and ReactOS projects.
Phillip Pfeiffer: Professor and associate graduate coordinator for East Tennessee State University's department of computer and information sciences, and principal architect of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Resource Allocation and Tracking System s been involved in some way.
Bradley Kuhn: Policy Analyst and Technology Director at the Software Freedom Law Center, as well as President of the Software Freedom Conservancy and Director of FSF. Bradley is dedicated to promoting the benefits of licensing that ensure software freedom, as well as defending it from potential threats and abuses from proprietary software.
Klaatu von Schlecten Apfel: Host of the Bad Apples and Fedora Reloaded podcasts and correspondent for Hacker Public Radio, Klaatu is a multimedia artist and maintainer of slackermedia.info and the SlackBuilds for LiVES, freetalk, and HandBrake. He has written articles for Linux Journal and Linux Identity magazines.
Dru Lavigne: Director at the FreeBSD Foundation, she has written several books on BSD.
Pat Davila: Co-host of both MythTVCast, and the The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS) podcasts.
C. Tyler McAdams: Project Architect at the LinuxDNA project, Tyler puts a whole new meaning to fast by having Linux kernels compiled under the Intel C/C++ Compiler (ICC).
Mackenzie Morgan: A developer and bug wrangler for the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution. When she is not quashing bugs with extreme prejudice, she's probably improving the end user experience in a variety of areas.
Alan Hicks: Slackware developer who also co-wrote SlackBook.
Dann Washko: Co-host of the The Linux Link Tech Show (TLLTS), Dann also is a wealth of practical knowledge in all areas of desktop Linux.
Stephen Spector: Community manager for Xen, which allows multiple operating systems to be run on the same computer through hardware supported virtualization.
Daniel Walsh: Daniel leads the Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) project and is also involved in secure virtualization.
Paul Frields: Fedora Project Leader and Chairman of the Fedora Project Board. Paul is involved in seemingly everything in Fedora from package maintenance to security to documentation.
Michael DeHaan: Michael currently works for Reductive Labs (now Puppet Labs), who develops puppet, a configuration mathe Asterisk open source PBX development team. He was Asterisk's first release maintainer when Asterisk 1.0 was released.
David Vossel: David joined the Asterisk development team at Digium in January of 2009 after graduating from Tennessee Tech University with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science. David has contributed to many important areas of the Asterisk code. Some of his most notable work includes the addition of a test framework and a major security update for the IAX2 protocol.
In addition, there will be 30 exhibitors on the expo floor (Saturday and Sunday), 2 parties (Friday and Saturday), 6 rooms dedicated for BoF sessions, as well as 4 concurrent events at the 2010 SouthEast LinuxFest including BSDA Certification (Sunday), UbuCon (Friday and Sunday), Fedora Activity Day (Sunday), and DrupalCamp (Sunday).
DrupalCamp will feature the following speakers: Doug Vann, Adam A. Gregory, Brent Ratliff, Isaac Sukin, Sheena Donnely, Steven Jackson, Tom Sliker, Ken Rickard, Mark Shropshire, Dante Taylor,and Roger Soper.
Ubucon will feature the following speakers: Jono Bacon, Rick Spencer, Jeremy Foshee, Pete Graner, and Amber Graner.
Unlike some people in the F/OSS community I was actually excited when I heard Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) was going to have an online music store. I love the Magnatune and Jamendo music stores but honestly sometimes I do want to purchase music from big name mainstream artists. Having more choice is a good thing. The more the merrier. I decided to try it out for the first time a couple weeks ago. In Rhythmbox you can browse and listen to music clips and then purchase them. What’s suppose to happen next is that the music will automatically get moved into your Ubuntu One shared folder and sych to your desktop folder. Well that did not happen. The only way to access my newly purchased music was to log into Ubuntu One via a web browser and download each track separately. Why did Canonical roll out this service with such a glaring bug was present? Were they so hard up for cash that they decided to start selling no matter what? This is a glaring failure in my opinion. Why not hold off for a month or two to work out all the bugs then roll out the service when it was 100% functional? A bad first experience like this will stay in people’s memories and possibly mean diminished sales in the future. Not smart. I became even more disappointed with Canonical when I learned that their first smartphone client for the Ubuntu One service was going to be for the iPhone. How can they justify catering to one of the most closed source products/companies in the world ahead of open source competitors? I’m very disappointed in you Canonical.
So I’ve had a couple days of using Android 2.2 and I’m still loving it. One of the most controversial technologies these days is Adobe’s Flash. Flash is very pervasive on the internet for both video content as well as casual gaming for both children and adults. I know about the children part as I’m the father of two young kids who love playing games on web sites geared towards them (Sesame Street, PBS kids, Nick Jr., Lego, etc.). Almost all of the games on said websites are flash based. A lot of people agree that Flash is a complete resource hog and should be purged out of existence. HTML5 shows a lot of promise but it still has some issues to work out. A bigger question is which video codec/framework will become the future defacto standard for the internet. Apple claims to be the champion for HTML5 but they want h264 to be the video codec of choice. Interestingly enough Apple has a vested interest in h264 so their motives are pretty clear. As part of this they’ve declared war on Adobe and vow to never allow flash on iPhones or iPads. As a result Adobe has allied itself with Google against Apple. A benefit of this alliance is that Flash 10.1 is now available on newer Android devices (Droid, Nexus One, Incredible, EVO) running Android 2.2. I’m pretty much in complete agreement with this article’s assessment of Flash 10.1 on Android. It’s a little slow to start up but works pretty well once it gets going. It doesn’t seem to suck the battery any worse than other applications playing video. It’s definitely a good initial release that should improve as time goes by. Being able to enjoy more video content on my mobile device is generally a good thing. I have to admit I felt pretty good after an iPhone owner I know said to me “is that flash video on Android?”. If it’s another thing to hold over the head of Apple Kool Aid drinkers than I’m all for it.
This past week at the Google IO conference the new version of Android 2.2 “Froyo” was introduced to the world for the first time. Lots of great new features were showed off: Massive speed boosts because of Dalvik JIT performance enhancements, wired & wireless tethering, flash 10.1, “update all” for package updates and APPS2SD (installing applications to the SDCard). The word was that Android 2.2 would be pushed out in the “coming weeks”. Well Saturday morning there were reports that Google was starting to push out the release to the Nexus One. Shortly thereafter on the XDA Developer forum people starting posting links to the new ROM image and how-to’s to manually upgrade. I downloaded the new ROM image (about 44 meg in size) and followed this simple How-To. About 5 minutes later Froyo was running on my Nexus One. The speed increase is very noticeable especially with games. Video with 3D acceleration seems much much smoother. The web browser seems quicker and more responsive. This enhancement alone makes upgrading worth it. Flash on Android works very well. I went to a bunch of different web sites with flash content and everything seemed to work without issue. Hulu was the lone exception but it has nothing to do with flash on Android. Appartently Hulu tries to block video streaming to any mobile device. This simple little hack tricks Hulu into thinking your phone is a desktop. You can now watch flash based videos on Hulu. In some perverse twist of fate I wound up watching a flash based video of the iPad on my Nexus One. I’m still trying out the new features and enhancements but it’s very obvious that Froyo is a very important update to Android. I can honestly say Android has now surpassed the OS used on the iPhone. I’ll be sure to follow up with my thoughts on some of the other new features in the coming days.
Linux Mint
http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=1403
Once again the Mint team has done well. On my test hardware, Isadora runs strikingly well. It’s fast, faster than 8, and of course, beautiful to look at. Read the release notes for updates and changes, there are some good ones in there. In the mean time, start your downloads. You are going to want this one!
This past weekend I saw two excellent movies. First up was Iron Man 2. The whole family went to see this. As a primer I had the kids watch Iron Man the week before and man were they loving it. Avery was pumped and cheering all throughout the first one. Page gave the sequel two thumbs up. It was a blast. It’s great seeing some of my favorite characters from comics on the big screen.
Nick Fury had more of a screen presence this time, not relegated to the post-credits clip. Speaking of that, make sure you stick around for the surprise clip to see the next big event. It’s probably no secret if you are a Marvel fan but it is cool as all get out. I cannot wait.
Yesterday I took in the 5:04 showing of Kickass by my lonesome. I don’t like going to the movies by myself but I wanted to make sure I voted for this movie by my dollars. I loved the comic and the movie was a very true adaption. I highly recommend this but not for the kids. It is extremely violent; you’ve been forwarned.
Next up I hope to get in Nightmare on Elm Street before it leaves the theaters.
CentOS
I am personally updating now but the mirrors are still a bit on the sluggish side.
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| QNAP NAS |
For the last several years I’ve been using my old workstation as a storage/web server. It was an Ubuntu server setup that had a RAID1 array with 2 500 gig hard drives mirroring each other. While the setup worked fine I was looking for something that was much more low powered and flexible from a storage standpoint. I know a lot of people like Drobo boxes but I researched them a bit and talked to some of my Linux friends and the overall the consensus seems to be they are very proprietary and not that Linux friendly. I did however find a NAS product sold by a company called QNAP. QNAP is pretty open of the fact that they use an embedded form of Linux to run on their hardware. They appear to be abiding by the GPL by printing the GPL in their user manual as well as making the source code available to their firmware. You can also find documentation on their wiki on how to build the firmware with the source code. Setting up the NAS was pretty easy and they even include Linux specific instructions in their manual and quick start guide. I wound up buying a third 500 gig HD and going to a RAID5 setup. Basically it combines 2 drives as 1 TB disk with the third drive acting as a backup if one of the other two fail. In the future I can replace each disk to a larger hard drive and the file system is seamlessly migrated to the new disk without any data loss. Pretty impressive stuff. I can also migrate to a RAID6 setup simply by adding a fourth hard drive. Besides basic storage you can even install a bunch of different applications such as Asterisk, home video monitoring, online backup, bitorrent and a media server. QNAP has put together a really slick web based interface for administering their NAS products. In about 2 minutes I was able to setup a backup job to copy my files on a monthly basis to my Amazon S3 account. So far I’m very happy with the device. It compares very well against the Drobo products and the fact that it’s all Linux based makes it even more sweeter.
