Category Archives: Fedora

More git support for fedorapeople

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One of the things provided for Fedora contributors is access to fedorapeople.org for hosting various web content. One thing that has become somewhat common there is hosting a git repository for someone to take a look from time to time. And since its inception, making this a little bit nicer has been one of the things I've hoped to be able to do.

Now that we have some time from observing the load and feel that the box isn't terribly loaded, I spent some time this afternoon making things a bit nicer for users who want to have a small git repository hosted there. As of right now, this should be considered beta (at best) and it may go away based on some trial time. Also, if you are hosting something more substantial with a number of contributors, I strongly suggest using fedorahosted instead. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's the basics for using it.

  • Create a public_git directory in your home directory

  • Put your git repository under this directory. Common methods for initially doing this would be rsync or scp of a repository you already have.
  • Touch the git-daemon-export-ok file in the repository. This makes it so that others have access to the repository
  • You can also set a description for the project by editing the description file in the repository
  • Users can clone your repository via something like git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~katzj/isomd5sum.git
  • You can see your project listed in gitweb once the project list updates (hourly). Note that this URL may change

And that's all there is to it. The documentation for fedorapeople has been updated with this information as well. Let me know if you run into any problems.

FUDCon Wrapup

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Today was the last day of FUDCon and as opposed to the past two days of hackfests, today was instead set up as a bar camp style unconference and held at the BU Photonics Center. This was our fourth time at BU, third at the Photonics Center, and as always, the accomodations were perfect for what we needed.

The morning started off with me swinging by to meet up with so that we could bike down to BU. Had a nice relatively leisurely ride down and then helped make sure that things were set to begin. As is usual for a barcamp, the number of people interested in pitching a session was high and most of them had high amounts of interest. I pitched both a reprise of my LiveCD talk from the summit as well as a talk to help people get started with git.

After the pitching and arranging of talks, I ended up going to a number over the course of the day. In the first slot, I switched a bit between the Java/Eclipse talks and mmcgrath's talk on a Community Services Infrastructure. Then, it was on to do my git talk. This went pretty well, although I could have easily filled up more time. I tried to get a screencast of it, but was unsuccessful. But I might try to turn some of it into a series of posts for posterity sake. After sandwiches for lunch, I headed to the discussion of requirements for a new SCM system. This is something that I need to try to carve some more time out for as it probably is something that can get us big wins. But I'm not really sure where that time can come from at the moment :-/ In the next slot, I ended up going to the Upstart talk over the TurboGears 2.0 talk and in retrospect, probably should have gone the other way. But so it goes. And finally, I gave my livecd talk quickly and then went to heckle davej a bit :-)

Finally, stickster gave a State of Fedora talk and then it was on to FUDPub where I spent the evening (and longer than I originally intended) hanging out and chatting with folks. Finally, I'm home and pretty much beat. It's been an extremely full 5-ish days and I'm definitely feeling it, both from a lack of sleep as well as the “oh, so much information exchange” perspective. But, it's also been a good few days.

But now, it's time to try to get a little bit of homework done before bed so that hopefully I can get out on a ride in the morning and maybe make substantial progress on finishing up the homework tomorrow. Because Monday brings the beginning of another full week…

Jim Whitehurst at FUDCon

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Jim Whitehurst took some time out of his almost certainly busy Summit schedule of talking with press, analysts and customers to actually come and talk with attendees of FUDCon for an hour or so. I took some notes about what he said. Any mistakes are mine and probably don't represent what he said :-)

He started off with some big points.

  • Red Hat is following the spirit of GPL and open source, not just the letter of them. This was a reiteration of what he had said in his keynote yesterday.
  • An example of this is the recent patent settlement; the settlement protects open source overall
  • ODF work over OOXML is pretty public; the Liberation fonts (announced last year) are metric compatible with “other common models”
  • Red Hat has built a business model to build a community and work with them and then make the software Enterprise Ready ™. This is very consistent with open source
    • Take Fedora every two years or so and freeze it

    • Test it, tune it, performance testing, etc
    • Then tell enterprises that Red Hat will support that for 7 years
  • Currently, about 15-20% of the value of open source is gotten by the customer
    • Iterative innovation

    • But the bits are being used in a traditional way. We need to work more to help merge customers into the community. There are some examples where this already has occurred
      • NSA work on SELinux

      • JP Morgan work on on the M part of MRG
  • Anecdote: RHEL has the highest security clearance of any OS by the Russian Defense. Due to SELinux, written by the NSA, … But since they can see the source, they can audit it and feel comfortable with the code.
  • As leaders of open source, Red Hat needs to recognize the power of the community and bringing the rest of Red Hat and the customers into Fedora
  • You can't continue to apply old world economics of property to abundance of knowledge and information.

After that, things were opened up to questions and there were plenty :-)

Q: What can we do to improve the experience for new people wanting to come into the community? (quaid)
A: Need to invest real dollars and work hard to make the lives of developers easier, turn it into a place that developers want to be. Michael Tiemann is talking to customers to try to figure out how to get customers involved in open source more directly. One thing is to evangelize open source principles vs just open source software

  • Open source is as much about interactions with community as much as just opening the source. (side note — this is a huge and key point that I've been picking up based on reading various blogs and also from some of the stuff that was talked about in my Tech Strategy class)

Q: Are you talking with C-level execs at companies that are customers to try to help them understand some of the value of open source and helping to get internal innovations to be opened (stahnma)
A: Take case studies that we have (M of MRG by JPMC, Electronic Service Bus (ESB) for JBoss written by a Canadian insurance company) and showing the benefits that they gained by actually open sourcing — lower maintenance costs, improved rate of innovation and improvement. Support is provided by community. Big wins for them.

Don't get too transactional during the sales process; we have to make the message clear and convince customers to be a part of the community if we're really going to get things to thrive. Have to get out and help the smaller companies who don't employ a lot of Comp Sci PhDs to get it. C-level execs don't even necessarily know about the RHEL usage within a company, have to raise the awareness.

Q: How does Fedora fit into Red Hat's desktop strategy? (notting)
A: Red Hat's desktop strategy is horribly misunderstood. Red Hat is, will be, and should be a provider in the Enterprise desktop space. As a business, we make open source accessible to the Enterprise. We need to invest more heavily in the desktop to improve the Enterprise desktop space. We've underinvested to avoid being in the consumer space

As for the consumer space and why it doesn't make sense — there are very few companies successfully sell to both enterprises and consumers. Even Microsoft is just getting into the Enterprise. And for 95% of the world, there is little reason to be paying for a consumer desktop. Average person doesn't really have a need for paying for support. We don't want to exploit open source or our brand — we could sell lots of copies at $5 a pop. But we're not set up to do support, etc.

As a consumer desktop, Fedora is incredible. “Fedora is so much better than RHEL”. Fedora has newer hardware support, faster, newer stuff. It's a phenomenal desktop. The ecosystem is important — you get used to what you're using. Fedora therefore plays a key role in keeping us on desktop for non-enterprises. And the components then flow back into Enterprise desktop and people are comfortable with it.

Q: What about OEMs wanting to do Fedora preloads? (jkeating)
A: Good idea, the more people we can get using Fedora, the better. But there are questions around what the right place to draw the line for the brand is good. If you have to add a proprietary driver, should they be able to use the Fedora brand?

Q: What is RHT doing to get commercial open source companies more involved? (dgilmore) Eg, zimbra won't let people from the outside contribute to it; if you're going to install it, you have to follow guidelines; etc.
A: A lot of companies see open source as “cool” right now. Two different versions offered, etc. Not meeting the spirit of open source. When meeting with the CEOs of these companies, advise them as to the spirit and try to help educate.

Q: How much do you meet with Shuttleworth or worry about Ubuntu? (wwoods)
A: They're big players. Has real issues with their model — it's self-promoting and the question of meeting the letter vs the spirit of the GPL and open source. We work hard to match the spirit of open source, not just the letter. Would like to meet Mark because he's an interesting character.

Q: What's Red Hat and Fedora's role in Free Media? (mizmo)
A: We have a limited amount of time for our influence and have things closer to home. But we are supportive of it in general, just limited resources for it.
Q: Brought up by press release about Spacewalk being WMV or Realmedia only.
A: We should look into that and fix it. Will look into it.

Q: Much of open source is individuals scratching an itch. What about patterns of growth for corporations contributing to open source? (sadmac)
A: Condor (G in MRG), oVirt, are projects which are things that an individual doesn't generally need.
A: (skvidal) Look at moodle, universities working on PeopleSoft replacement, … So there's some success, but it's a little slow.
Q: Are there efforts to find things like that to be replaced? (wwoods)
A: No. We don't do a good enough job there. And we're hoping to do better. Factoid: Looking at Enterprise IT spending on software — it's $200 billion. Of that, $130 billion is not spent on apps or databases. Its spent on infrastructure stuff.

Q: Mobile device space. Should Red Hat be doing something in that space? (skvidal)
A: Would love to see Fedora targeting the space. Us being involved from community is easy and obvious, but harder to figure out commercial aspect

Q: Should we be paying attention to user side of web application development in Fedora? We have lots of TurboGears people. (skvidal)
A: Send mail and talk about it more.

Q: As a follow-up to trying to get more customers as a part of the community. Are there fears of hijacking if community gets larger?
A: You have to have faith in the model. No protection around that explicitly through licensing, etc. Continuing to have real leadership across key areas/projects is one aspect that helps. And really, if you think about it, this would be a great problem to have to worry about.
A: (jkeating) Have to provide strong leadership and not leave a vacuum when building a community

Q: Any fixes to prioritize during the hackfest? (sadmac)
A: Wireless for the eeepc required a binary blob. Can't really think of anything specific otherwise. Sprint wireless card just worked in Fedora 9 with NetworkManager.

Q: So you feel the pain of open drives not being available. What do you think of our strategy of not compromising and not shipping the non-open drivers? (warren)
A: It's a pain, but our strategy of not compromising has helped to drive change. Need to get nVidia onboard. AMD (ATI) changed because of us. “Stay the course”. One of the big differences between us vs Canonical. We're true to open source. Sure, you can make it easy, but you won't change the world just by taking the easy path.

Thanks to Jim for taking the time to talk with us and also for being so candid and open on a variety of topics!

Red Hat Summit Day 1

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Yesterday was the official beginning of the Summit and, per usual, things started off with a few keynotes. Jim Whitehurst, the new CEO of Red Hat, started things off with a bit of affirmation of the Red Hat strategy and the value of open source. The second keynote was by Dr John Halamka about the role of openness within health care which was pretty interesting. After the keynotes, I headed back to the Fedora table to hang out and get ready to do my presentation which had the second slot of the day.

For my presentation, I talked a bit about the work on and with Live CDs within Fedora — everything from the history to how they work to where things are going. The talk went pretty well, although the room was less full than I thought. If you're going to be at FUDCon, though, I'll probably reprise most of the talk. And I'll be putting up the slides later today once I've fixed a couple of bugs I found in them.

The rest of the day was basically spent at the Fedora table and talking with lots of people about various things. Then, headed over to Fenway for the party there. Where I had basically the same plan which was to talk with lots of people. Finally, headed home and crashed so that I could get more sleep for today and the start of FUDcon proper. But I could still have done with a little bit more …

Summit Campground Sessions Available

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At FUDCon or the Summit and want to try out a talk? There are “Campground Sessions” available for people to give talks and demos as part of the Red Hat Summit. Note that this would be great for doing a first run of a FUDcon presentation you're looking at doing on Saturday. If you're interested, go to the back of the Exhibit Hall and sign up on the whiteboard there. And apparently, if you sign up to do a session tomorrow before 1 PM it will get listed in the little “newspaper” type thing that gets printed.

Red Hat Summit, Day 0 Wrapup

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After class yesterday, I headed over to the convention center to register for the Summit and see who else was around. Ran into a few people from the Westford office and we went past security to get a jump on registering. Then, I headed over to man the Fedora table until some other folks showed up to help. The table is outside the exhibit hall area right next to the Red Hat Cool Stuff store and we should have someone manning it consistently to put Fedora 9 (with updates as of Monday) onto a USB stick for you. Conveniently all Summit attendees get a 1 gig usb stick when they check-in :)

Anyway, hung out at the table for a while as various Fedora folk started to show up. Also ended up helping the IT guys to get some of the laptops to work better. Then a bunch of us eventually headed to dinner around 9 or 9:30. As has become some sort of sick Fedora in Boston related tradition we ended up eating at the Uno's on Boylston. We left just before the streets exploded with honking horns and many drunk people (the Boston Celtics won the NBA championship last night). Biked home and made it home just before 1.

And now I'm back at the convention center and I made sure things look good with the IT guys. Then breakfast and it's time for day 1's keynotes to begin….

Tell me why I don’t like Mondays…

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Had a nice and overall relaxing weekend. Got in a nice ride on Saturday where we went out towards Westford and Groton and did Lost Lake Rd again. And this time, we didn't get lost on the way back which made it a perfect metric century. And a very very nice one at that… Lost Lake Rd is a lot of fun to bike with some off-camber road surface, lots of little rollers and some turns. I think that route is going to become a pretty common part of my routine as it really is incredibly nice and manages to incorporate some different things. I think I've also figured out a good way to have two stops that can hopefully be short to keep the total ride time down. Then Saturday evening, had a couple of friends over for takeout Thai food and board games. A good time was had by all.

Woke up yesterday morning to a fair bit of rain and so decided to wait until the afternoon to get out and ride. Ended up catching up a bit with mail, etc in the morning as well as doing my reading for Tuesday's class. Then, went out with Kate, Jon and Jim around 2. Kate and I both decided to take our fixed gears out to avoid having to clean them after the ride. We ended up doing 33 miles or so and also got to figure out how to change a flat on the rear wheel of a fixie which was fun. Good ride, though. Then spent a little bit of time yesterday evening playing the new Civilization game on the PS3 as they released a demo — good fun, I had forgotten just how much fun the Civ titles are.

Today, I have a few little things that are non-work related to accomplish during the day since I'll be at FUDCon and the Red Hat Summit starting basically tomorrow after class and all the way through Saturday. But I'm also hoping today to get a few packages put together so that garmin-sync can be available in Fedora and I might also do the bits so that pytrainer can work with Firefox 3 (and thus Fedora 9) to help move that package review along. Then it's just a matter of combining the two :-) I've also been considering seeing how painful firefox/mozilla plugins are to write and then try to implement the upload plugin as used by Garmin's motionbased site as it's pretty handy for uploading rides. The manual upload at least works now with the garmin-sync created files, though, so it's not too bad. Also, I think it's about time that I sit down and play with TurboGears a bit. But that's a pretty long list, so we'll see what I get to today. For now, it's lunch time!

Fedora Board Elections Underway

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The elections for the Fedora board begin today and lasts for a week and a half. And while I would encourage all Fedora contributors to have their voice heard by voting anyway, this is perhaps a more significant election than normal. For one thing, there are substantially more seats up for election this time around than there ever really are — four. This is due to two big reasons: 1) resetting what has become an off-kilter election cycle (there was only one seat up last time) and 2) adding an additional elected seat. After this election, the Fedora board will be majority elected rather than appointed by Red Hat. This is something which I think is important to keep in mind as you choose whom you vote for both in the sense of “who” as well as the “what does this mean that the Board looks like post-election”

Now I'd like to draw some attention to a couple of candidates in particular. I had considered running for the Board again (I filled an appointed seat for the first year-ish but have not been on the board for the past year), but decided against running so that some of the newer faces and names in the Fedora world that are on the candidate list could have a chance of not being drowned out. So rather than running myself, I figure I'll highlight some of those people.

First up is Jon Stanley. I haven't actually met Jon in person yet as I wasn't able to make it to FUDCon in Raleigh in January, but I'm very much looking forward to doing so at next week's FUDCon. Jon is someone who just kind of popped up out of nowhere and said “I'm going to make bug triaging happen”. And that's exactly what he's done. Including recruiting a few other people to help out. This has been invaluable in a few areas and it really shows what just one person can do in Fedora. Therefore, I really look forward to seeing what initiatives he'd drive forward if elected to the Board. He says he has no notable superpowers, but I don't believe it.

Next up on my list is Jonathan Roberts. He's been around the Fedora project for a while, largely in the docs area like our fearless leader as well as the Fedora Marketing work but has been branching out into more areas recently and helping again to just drive things to happening. And it's not the flashy things necessarily, but just the things that need to be done like helping to get the websites team organized and moving. And that's leading to some real progress in making our web presence more consistent as well as more focused on the right audience. Best of all, it's not that he's doing all the work himself — instead, he's doing things to enable others to do work… just the sort of leadership that is positive and I think what we want from those on the Board.

I suspect that the rest of the names on the candidate list are pretty familiar to most, if not all, of the Fedora audience. The only other thing that I'll note is that the makeup of the Board will strongly influence the direction of the Board's tasks. Especially true in light of recent discussions about what is the role of FESCo and how does that relate to the Board's role. If we want the Board to be taking less of a technical role, then one component of that has to be not filling the Board with the highly technical people. Because people will gravitate to the things which they are familiar and comfortable with.

Okay, enough talking. On with the voting!

Update: One other thing to note — be sure to hit Submit the second time to actually ensure that your vote is submitted!

All things in moderation

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The temperatures in the Boston area have returned to a much more normal (and thus, moderate) level which has been kind of nice. The rides into campus in the morning have even almost had a little bit of a chill to them. But not enough to matter once I get moving. It's also been impressive the number of people I've seen commuting via bike. This has been touched on in a couple of the biking blogs that I read, but the effects of the gas prices really does seem to be getting more people out on bikes. Especially in this area, that's a very reasonable thing to do. The weather tends to be pretty reasonable from mid-spring to fall (at least) and there's a pretty good amount of bike lanes as well as dedicated bike paths. And even where there's not either of those, drivers here are somewhat conditioned to be used to people on bikes — I actually think that drivers are more considerate to people on bikes in the Boston area than they are to other cars.

But, that said, it's still worth being careful. Just because you're on a dedicated bike path or in a bike lane doesn't mean that there aren't things to watch out for. On a bike path, watch the crossings of roadways and be sure to observe stop signs and traffic signals. In a bike lane, also watch (and obey) stop signs and traffic signals. And in addition, watch out for people getting out of cars. If you can stay out of the door zone, you're better off, but the bike lane is likely to put you right there. So get used to looking through the rear windows or mirrors of cars to see if someone looks like they're going to get out.

</public-service-announcement>

The week has continued to be pretty good. I had System Dynamics yesterday which continued to be interesting and engaging. I picked up the book today and started reading some of it and it does seem like a good text on the subject. Hopefully my opinion will hold, especially given the cost of it. Systems Engineering was this morning and seemed a bit repetitive between the last class and the reading. I should have a pretty good group for the project, though, so that should be good.

I've also managed to get in some riding the past couple of days. Yesterday, I went out with Kate and joined the NEBC folks on their Wednesday night hill ride. And they weren't kidding about the hills. Was fun, though, and I want to try to incorporate some of the route into my routine as getting some more climbing practice can't possibly hurt. Today, I joined the MIT cycling team on the ICIC (Intercollegiate Ice Cream) ride — they go out with some of the Harvard folks to an ice cream store at a very moderate and social pace. Nice people on both rides, drastically different types of rides, though :)

Also been trying to clean up some yum bugs and finish getting my way to Bugzilla Zero. Down to one bug, but unfortunately, it's a bit of a doozie. But, will keep trying and hopefully come up with something effective. But now, I think it's time to do some reading and then head to bed.

A week of livecd-tools hacking

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In addition to spending a bit of time on my presentation for the Red Hat Summit on the state of the livecd tools and some of the surround stuff, I've also taken the time to go through and take care of some outstanding bugs and feature requests. Some of them were boring things for corner cases, but there are a couple of them that are a bit more interesting

The first is an addition to the persistence support which we added in Fedora 9. Instead of just keeping a snapshot (via dm-snapshot) of the changes to your filesystem in an overlay, you can now also set up something to be used as /home. By default, this will be a file on the same USB key that you put the Live OS on, but you can also specify to use a partition by uuid, label or device name. So you could potentially even have the /home located on a hard drive in your system and just always boot the OS off of USB. Also, due to a lot of the concerns around security and losing laptops or hard drives, etc, I've made it so that the default for the persistent /home is that it be encrypted with dm-crypt. This way, if you lose your USB key, your data at least won't be compromised. Watch for this as we start to do Fedora 10 images

The second is more targeted at a specific class of hardware. As you might have noticed, there are a growing number of Linux users who are choosing to run Linux on top of the current Intel-based Apple hardware. One of the features in Fedora 9 is native support for booting these machines directly from EFI rather than going through the “legacy” BIOS mode. (Side note — this is often referred to as Boot Camp, but while the BIOS mode was added at the same time as Boot Camp's release, the BIOS mode was purely made possible by firmware changes and Boot Camp is the OS X app used for resizing your OS X install partition). The second piece is that these Intel based Macs do actually have support in their firmware for booting off of USB… the trick is that they can only do so via EFI and not via the legacy BIOS. So, I decided to make the changes necessary so that you can create a Live USB stick which boots on the Intel Macs. Unfortunately, it has a couple of limitations that aren't present in the general case.

  1. If you have one of the newer 64-bit capable Macs, you must use the 64-bit OS. We don't currently support booting the 32-bit OS from the 64-bit EFI
  2. Creating the USB key is currently a destructive process. One of the things about EFI is that it mandates the use of GPT for your partition table. And your USB key certainly came with an msdos partition table. I want to try to see if there's anything clever I can do, but I suspect this is just the way it rolls.
  3. Right now, you'll have to use a livecd created with git livecd-tools and it won't work with the Fedora 9 live images. But I should be able to put something into the livecd-iso-to-disk script to at least make this okay, I just haven't had the time today