You know, now that Novell has stopped developing Hula, Google should adopt it. A successful Hula would be a kick in the teeth to Microsoft and a great way to gain favor with the Open Source crowd. A few months of effort to get to Hula to a “1.0″, and Google would get all the love. Google, you know you want to.
I’ve been checking out rPath and Conary. I know rPath has ties to Red Hat, but let’s forget that for now. The technology is very, very cool. From what I can tell, it has serious advantages over rpm and yum|apt|up2date combo.
Besides local package management, it makes it easy to fork the distro. Why would anyone want that?! Well, people don’t really want to fork anything, they just want a few things that aren’t currently offered, so they take the distro they know (often RHEL or Debian) and start making changes. Usually it’s more work then they can keep up with and things fall apart. If they do “make it” the deltas get bigger and bigger until any benefit that comes from the fork is lost.
What if distros encouraged a community of hackers around their base distro? As long as they don’t steal customers, don’t burden the Upstream Providers (UP) with support and offer clean patches, wouldn’t that be welcome? Isn’t it a complement of sorts to be forked? And, what if the UP made it so easy to keep in sync that small projects could actually thrive and stick around long enough to give something back to the UP? At the very least, more and more people would learn how to run a system that’s like the UP, and those skills would port if they ever switched to the UP’s distro. I’m thinking more then just SRPMS, I’m thinking a Conary based distro and repos.
So really, we’re not talking about a “hostile fork” in the classic sense. We are talking about a “loving spoon.” It seems to me that once the sweetness that is Conary becomes more and more common place (and I believe it will), there will be great value in being the distro that people choose as the root of their distro. That sounds like a good fit for Fedora Core, or even better, RHEL or Debian. One would think that Red Hat and Debian would want to preempt each other with such a move.
As it stands, rPath is nicely positioned to lead out in this space. Currently their interests are focused on appliances, but what about general purpose distros? That can’t be that far behind. I for one, will be looking at rPath to use as a base for one of my projects. Plus, the guys over at rPath are super helpful. I wish them the best (if Red Hat and Debian sit on their hands in this regard, it looks like rPath just might get it).
Anyone see where I’m going with this? Does anyone agree? Anyone think I’m nuts?
I leave you with a bit this fitting 1966 classic by the LOVIN’ SPOONFUL:
Hot town, summer in the city
Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn’t it a pity
Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the cityAll around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head…
The new version of Asterisk (1.4) is getting a GUI. I’ve known that for a while. I didn’t know, however, that Digium has wrapped the whole thing up as a Distro based on what looks like Fedora Core or RHEL.
From the announcement:
Asterisk® can now be easily configured with a graphical interface. The new site, AsteriskNOW.org, which is still in development, hosts AsteriskNOW™ Beta. AsteriskNOW™ Beta is a Software Appliance; a GUI implementation with the open source Asterisk distribution. AsteriskNOW includes all the Linux components necessary to run, debug and build Asterisk, and only those components, so installation is easy. You no longer have to worry about kernel versions and package dependencies. Unlike other Linux distributions used to deploy Asterisk, no unnecessary components that might compromise security or performance are included.
I’m usually very suspicious of GUIs used to configure servers, but if Digium is behind it, I’ll at least give it a look. A “distro” based install of Asterisk sounds like a great trouble-free approach when installing for someone that doesn’t have full-time sysadmins.
I’m still going to be using CentOS or RHEL for my personal stuff and wondering about the real question… When will the Zaptel drivers make it into the kernel?
Update: Looks like the distro is rPath Linux.
I never thought I would see this day…
That’s how you know you’re following too many mailing lists.
Software Patents Are Broken!
Please echo this message on your blog if you agree. Let the message spread exponentially.
I’ve update the Utah Open Source Planet to the latest code and cleared all the caches. This will make things funky in the short term, but better in the long run. Happy blogging (and cooking?).
This is my son Jacob’s first crack at mastering the GIMP.
Jorkie the Robot
The pictured hard drive failed and left its owner in bad shape. If anyone has an old disk sitting around that’s the same make and model, it might help up in data recovery.
IBM Deskstar DTLA-307045
The missing text in the overexposed area says “Deskstar.”
If you have one of these, please let me know. We could give you 10X what ebay would give (for one found locally and know to work). Or you could donate it because you pity the guy and have been in this same predicament. :)
Vote because you can. Vote because you should. I don’t care who you vote for, but you have a civic duty to get yourself to the voting both and participate in your government.
Also, with voter turnout as low as it is, I figure there are about 60% of the people who have no business complaining about politics or government officials. More to the point… If you didn’t vote, then shut-up. I stopped caring about your opinion on our government just after you did.
But sadly, it’s unusable for me. It really, really bums me out.
The bugs responsible are here and here. There’s related reading in Google Groups and also a related ticket here.
I want to put out a bounty for this bug, but I don’t want to step on the toes of the developers. Any fix that would be worth paying for would have to be one that the developers would approve of. I don’t even know what work might already be done on it. I guess I haven’t browsed the source yet to see what’s happening lately. That will be the next step.
Does anyone know if any work is being done on this? I have a few projects that I want to get started using Django, but this has taken the wind out of my sails. :(
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