To all my OpenSuse friends:
In the past, I’ve made fun of your distro while you where not around.
I’ve poked fun at your package management.
I’ve installed over OpenSuse with other distros.
I’ve blown away partitions reserved for OpenSuse.
I’ve ignored your releases.
But today, that all changes. Today, I give it a fair shake.
I’ll let you know what I think in a week.
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.
Here’s my first take on a Xen network that I’m putting together for work.
This all takes place in one physical box with 2 physical network interfaces. I’m still not sure this is path we’ll take, but it’s a start. Also, it might have been less complex if I did routing and NATing in Dom0, but for security reasons, I’ve opted to keep Dom0 very minimal. I’ve even considered leaving it off of the network (console only). Any thoughts/suggestions?
Update: As pointed by a confused (but observant) reader… There is no such thing as fif3.0. It should have been labeled vif3.0. Good eye. Guess I was a little sleepy when working on it :)
I’ve installed what I’m pretty sure will be the final version of FC6 (I checked the SHA1SUMs from a listing at an official mirror). Here are my first impressions:
Mono seems to be totally jacked:
[gabe@office ~]$ tomboy
Segmentation fault[gabe@office ~]$ mono -V
Segmentation fault[gabe@office ~]$ mcs
Segmentation fault[gabe@office ~]$ sqlsharp
Segmentation fault[gabe@office ~]$ gmcs
Segmentation fault[gabe@office ~]$ echo “Segmentation fault”
Segmentation fault
O.K. that last one isn’t that disturbing, but the others look pretty messed. I’m guessing they didn’t build it with a “–with-xen_opt=yes” flag. I’m running this box on Xen, but if you don’t, I’m guessing Mono would work just fine. That brings me to my next point…
When installing, it has an option for Xen related tools. I selected them to be installed. I assumed it would install a few userland tools for monitoring and creating Xen instances. I further assumed it would install an additional Xen kernel and add that option to GRUB. To my surprise, it only installed a Xen kernel. This would be the first time that any distro, that I’ve run, has done this out of the box. I’ve stated before that I thought this would eventually be the norm. Please note that this is not the default behavior.
One major plus is that the bubbles are gone. If you used FC5 and have good taste or a sense of style, you know what I’m talking about. The DNA strands are much, much better, but still, they are not great.
The new font (DejaVu) looks pretty good. Hinting is still a little off on some uppercase letters.
I was hoping Firefox 2 RC 3 would have been dropped in. I know, at some point you have to say “no” to new packages.
Evolution seems a little bit snappier. I don’t follow it’s development, so I have no idea what to attribute that to.
There are still 101 services that startup when you boot. Shutting half of them down is still the first thing I do after I install.
Clearlooks has nice controls but the icons and the window borders look average. I see icons from old GNOME, RH9, old Blue Curve, Tango, etc…
That’s the short list. Overall, I like it better then FC5 so far. I still think Ubuntu has done a better job pulling it all together, however I’m using FC because of it’s solid Xen support.
I’ll add to this list if anything interesting shows up in the next few days.
Reading this made me feel better about my goals that can seem a little ambitious at times:
My objective is to Re-master Fedora Core 5 into a single CD…. am pretty much new to Linux… I have about a weeks time to accomplish this…
Good luck my newbie brother. The command line is your friend. Let Google be your companion. Use the source. May your weeks be long.
The humble server that I use to host a few (11) web sites is getting updated. It’s not going to be that big of a deal (99% idle instead of 97% idle).
The big deal will be the addition of Xen, LVM and RAID. I’m thinking about setting up a small domU that will act as a firewall. It will also run Apache as a reverse proxy and Postfix as a transport relay to the domains that will get their own DomU (3 currently). Normally I would also have it run Asterisk to avoid NATing with SIP, but since I switched to IAX with my voice provider, I don’t think it will be necessary.
Anyway, the lights might go out for a little while. Don’t be alarmed.
I generally don’t do a “cut and paste” blog from other people’s blogs, but this is *really* cool.
And I will not arrive empty handed. Of late I have been playing with FUSE. For the kids, I wrote beaglefs:
$ ./beaglefs joey ./query
$ ls ./query 14-38-39.jpg 2005-02-25.191427.txt img_0931.jpg img_1789.jpg 2004-10-14.112903.txt 2005-02-28.114211.txt img_0983.jpg img_1818.jpg 2004-10-29.122217.txt 2005-03-07.114103.txt img_1358.jpg img_2506.jpg 2004-11-01.112509.txt 2005-03-08.115321.txt img_1359.jpg img_2507.jpg 2004-11-05.140919.txt 2005-03-11.140838.txt img_1360.jpg img_2518.jpg 2005-02-03.120233.txt img_0179.jpg img_1768.jpg wolf.txt
$ ls -la query/img_1358.jpg lrwxrwxrwx 1 rlove users 60 2006-06-23 17:50 query/img_1358.jpg -> /home/rlove/images/nyc_20041210/img_1358.jpg $ fusermount -u query/
Mount a Beagle query as a filesystem. The filesystem contents are symlinks to the hit results (if curious, the images match via F-Spot tags). Imagine the possibilities!
Very cool. Good work rlove!
I post this on my blog cause Peregrine doesn’t take comments unless I’m “logged on” and I had it all typed up.
1) I thought you got the wordpress/https/smiley bug fixed. :)
2) I think there is a better way to do this mailman setup…
a) Alias with Mailman:
################
The output of /usr/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases depends on the value of the `MTA’ variable in your mm_cfg.py. If you have Postfix there, it makes a file called /etc/mailmain/alias. I think it also runs postmap on it.
Then in your main.cf you would add “alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases, hash:/etc/mailman/aliases.” This way, Mailman takes care of its own aliases. Make a new list - it just works!
b) Going Virtual:
################
If they are virtual domains then you have to take the extra step of adding them to the mm_cfg.py as such:
“POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS = [’domain1.tld’, ‘domain2.tld’]”
“add_virtualhost(’domain1.tld’, ‘domain2.tld’)”
Then when you add new domains it will add them to a file with only mailman’s virtual settings. Let Postfix know about them by adding this to your main.cf:
“virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual, hash:/etc/mailman/virtual-mailman”
Let me know if that screws you up. It’s been a while since I’ve done it.
Later - Gabe
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