GNOME and The Cloud

Recently I've read some thoughts on GNOME and its (no) integration with the Internet. Let me throw my 2 cents here:

Please allow user to fill its accounts in 'About Me' dialog. Distros (like Ubuntu) can make a nice wizard. possibly the first time GNOME starts (is installed). It can even simplify the install process a lot. User would fill Name, Password (also default from gnome-keyring) and was allowed to add its on-line accounts (possibly with templates for well known, reccomended and new online services out there).

First time user can benefit in following ways:

• It is logical to edit this kind of information in one place. It will not have to be entered multiple times in various applications. User will be happy.
  

• Gnome can automatically start Piding, Empathy or other IM if user has pre-configured at least one IM account.

• Other applications can pull for this information (Ekiga, DropBox, Firefox Plugins?, Banshee-Last.Fm) and use it whenever appropriate.

• The first time application wants to know about specific account, confirmation dialog for access gnome-keyring data is raised.

I am not a GNOME hacker but is this feasible? I guess store it in the gnome-keyring and write a DBUS service Accounts?

Dealing with bugs in Linux and Windows

This afternoon Eva told me her Firefox crashes about 10 times a day on just bought Lenovo IdeaPad S10. We've checked that updates are enabled and that she is using latest version 3.0.6 and no extra add-ons are installed but nothing helped. In the end we installed a Chrome for a while. Now what to blame? Old Windows Xp running on netbook, mozilla, antivirus? No clue where to start or what to do next.

Contrary, on my Linux machine one super application stopped working. It is called gnome-do and it is unbeliable productivity booster. I worked for about two days without it and my work flow was seriously disrupted. Today I created bug in ubuntu and joined #gnome-do IRC channel on freenode server and got an answer which has solved my problem within few minutes.

You decide which system works better.

1234567890 is here, heureka

Time on UNIX like machines (including Linux) is counted in seconds since midnight January 1st 1970, the moment when time began on the Unix operating system (aka the Unix Epoch).

Today at 00:31:30 CET (23:31:30 UTC) counter showed magnificent number 1234567890 (that happens once in an epoch !) and many hearts of the right geeks have been pleased ;) Congratulations.

Celebrations have taken on many places around the world. Sometimes its the little things I enjoy.

Sunday Linux adventures

Sometimes it does not help how much you prepare ... the system is mighty.

To keep practicing and learning Linux with my friend we are running small business including hosting couple of websites and running about a dozen of virtualized machines. We are actually proud of our solution as we have managed to build kinda interesting infrastructure that runs for years.

If we have any problem with it, the it is usually with hard drives. We now have achieved 222 days without a downtime (I guess our SLA is now much better then London Stock Exchange powered by Microsoft). With this gained confidentiality we decided to upgrade whole SW stack on our infrastructure including major changes (XEN core, Linux Kernels and up-to-date to all services / packages). We decided to clean up everything for the next big thing.

We spent whole Friday and Saturday preparing all the packages and the process for smooth upgrade. On Sunday before lunch, we were ready just for the reboot. I asked my friend to get to site just in case anything goes wrong. In short we ended up at 1:00am on Monday morning. But we learned a lot, all the services have been restored and machines are ready to rock again.

Now follows Linux rant about the problem:

13:00 - Hypervizor complains about being compiled against wrong kernel headers. Solution was to recompile against latest xen headers. That means boot into usable environment using rescue CD. Our system has not CDROM, create usb stick and boot from that.

14:30 - Root partition is not detected. We use otherwise excellent Enterpise Volume Management System ( EVMS ) stack to manage our disks/partitions. But for some reason the root (main) partition was not detected. Too bad, after some help from IRC we reenabled EVMS flag on the partition and it was back online. Ok we can access everything to recompile the XEN.

15:30 - Hypervizor recompiled and is booting but now complains about mismatch with kernel. It turns out, kernel for some reason was compiled without PAE extension. XEN has dropped support for non-pae kernel in 3.1+ series. Took a while to figure out, but we recompiled the kernel with High Memory Support.

16:30 - Hypervisor boots, kernel boots but now init complains it can't switch root partition from RAM to EVMS partition. After some investigation it turns out something is worng with BusyBox (missing switch_root function). Edited initrd manually and used busybox from working initrd.

18:30 - System boots. We now have our main domain ready.

19:00 - 01:00am we spent in an effort to bring the rest of our services back on line. We allso had to recompile kernel for domU machines, modules for our FireWall to include support for iptables and TUN/TAP interface for VPN services, modify udev rules to create persistent rules for network interfaces.

What a learning experience. Anytime I hear a PM saying upgrade process has to be smooth, there has to be 0 downtime I have to laugh. World is not static, so is not development of the packages. The longer you do not touch your system, the more interesting things appears when you try to get it up-2-date. Linux is great.

UPDATE: One day later we probably could avoid the hypervisor booting and save about 5 hours! Everybody is a general after a battle :)

Virge - high level goals

There has been a lot of changes to my life recently, however there is one thing still in my mind. And it has been there for a while, but I never got any time to sit down, write a summary and start doing that. I use the blog mainly to create my opinion on various topics so I've decided to brainstorm it here.

With my friend we like technology, free technology. I always get quite quickly excited about what is possible to achieve with it. Gentoo, Ubuntu, GNOME, Apache foundation just to name a few. And I like to play with that. For a year or two we've been playing with gentoo Linux and Xen and we had a great time. Now there is one physical box running dozen of virtual boxes separated into various network silos, backuped, each with different functionality, monitored and there are several scripts that makes deployment of new machines quite easy. I take it as a proof of concept.

Idea is to have a Linux box where one can deploy virtual appliances with ease in a secure environment with advanced features for network, file systems, software packages and easy to use admin console. We would like to use Gentoo as (despite its recent problems) it is one of most advanced distributions of Linux out there, EVMS (for reliable data storage with possibility to do cluster EVMS), XEN to power virtualization and possibly www console for managing the machines, machines should use binary packages for quick setup. Usage? Home appliances, ISP machines, Datacenter in just one box. I short: the ultimate linux machine ;).

I'm aware of others doing the same (rPath,Redhat,VMware), but as I said, I like the technology so this is our try. Virge is simply Virtualized Gentoo.

Steps:

• create LiveUSB with latest Gentoo2007.0 (updated), that would install Virge on the new box (including the Xen enabled kernel, EVMS setup, some appliances)
• create admin console using Django+Python+libvirt for managing boxes
• merge this application into portage

During the POF we've ran into some issues with portage, for example we are aware that it is not easy to do binary packages with different USE flags (gentoo feature). But I'll leave those to be solved during the FUN.

Any help is welcomed of course.

Gentoo two cents

So after about a minute I replied to this post and suggested Daniel to return back to Gentoo I read his second post where he explains in details why he does not want to (or can't).

However I still have a feeling there is a lack of leadership in the Gentoo community. Community needs individuals with ideas, and because the way communities work at the moment I mean individuals who have ideas and make them reality. This is how I think of Gentoo, vision of technically advanced Linux distribution with features not seen anywhere else that became true.

Whether lack of leadership is the source of small innovation in gentoo recently I do not know. But as long as I know Gentoo it did not changed very much (that is not necessarily anything wrong). There is excellent idea of ports (borrowed from other OS), super package manager "emerge", technically one of the best distros out there. One would say THE distro.

But others have their point as well, Fedora being sandbox for RedHat (in good way of course), Ubuntu focusing on end users and laptops, Novell playing corporate games and many others.

As a user I feel there is no clear vision of where is Gentoo going to. "Meta" does not tell me much.

My two cents here would be:
Make servers the prime arena for Gentoo and get in touch with some big company. Aim for Google for example. This would bring commercial support. Many times I see enthusiastic admins running gentoo on a spare desktop box, leaving the big and interesting hardware for RedHat, Novell, and other players with "support" sticker included. I'm not aware of any commercial company providing large scale support for Gentoo linuxes. I wish LSB was more widely supported by every player in the field. Now we have every other Linux company tinkering with MS instead of pulling one string!

To do that several things need to be done

1. create package format specification (yet keep emerge as a reference implementation), this will lead to faster development of other packaging systems (faster, with better features) that can eventually replace emerge in some time
2. finish support for handling binary packages and different USE flags. as far as I know currently broken
   
3. create tools for managing vast amount of servers (different profiles compiled on one box,...), as Jonathan Shwartz says "The Network is the Computer"
   
4. support virtualization
5. perhaps run emerge as a daemon, machineXX will ask builder machine (emerge daemon running there) : "hey I'm using this profile and I would like to install Apache with those USE flags" and get the binary packages from the builder. But I think there is a long way to get there.
   

Just my two cents.

Ubuntu lovely, Gentoo cool

Since last month I'm using Ubuntu on my laptop. Beautiful distro. Fast boot, working sleep mode and a solid desktop experience. Reasonable amount of packages, yet installing some newer applications might get bit tricky as only security and update patches are back ported. Support is on very good level and it has good momentum. Compared to Vista and Xp is offers simple but very intuitive user experience across the whole desktop. Personally all I had to do to was to enable activation of windows by moving mouse button over them. You just then hover your mouse over you music player and scroll the middle mouse button to raise/lower the volume. Use same technique for seeking movies and it works in many other areas as well. I do not know if there is any real reason why this is not default. Put it in one sentece I would say Ubuntu is just great for end users.
But I miss Gentoo. Gentoo offers unmatchable flexibility in configuration and system maintenance (at least as far as I know). Powerful tools and a large catalog of applications ready just to be plugged into the system. Yet, still very clean design and philosophy. Ideal distribution for developers, advanced system administrators and those willing to try. Unfortunately Daniel Robbins has left Gentoo a while ago and it seems, although there are many great people involved in the project, not many new great features came out of it then. Still it is one of the best advanced Linux distros out there.

Positive review of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04

The latest reincarnation of popular distribution is out for a while and I decided to share my own experience here. Recently there were two machines available for testing. My Mums desktop which we have at home and is used mainly for surfing the web and is Linux powered already for some time and keeps its users happy. As the amount of data is minimal (photos, few documents, settings) complete re-installation is done and user usually wont notice new version of Ubuntu as long as the Firefox icon is at its place. The other machine is company provided new toy (ehm production laptop of course), small, light and beautiful Dell D420.

Installation on both machines went without any problems, wouldn't we have non-standard disk layout setup I believe everybody can install that on empty box. Just few clicks and there you go. Boot process is fast and nice and animated logo is presented. In about 30seconds I was logged into the desktop.

Networking part is done right, there is NetworkManager which works perfectly for both setups. I've managed to connect to several WPA protected networks without any hitch, wired connection is perfect as well. Only problem with NetworkManager I ran into so far is asking for gnome-keyring password to access stored WPA keys. There are few posts on the internet on how to change it, but simple check box to allow NetworkManager to access some parts of Gnome Keyring (password storage) without further user involvement is something that is missing at the moment.

Graphic drivers, for some reasons there is Nvidia graphics card installed on the dekstop machine. After install I was presented with restricted manager pop-up telling me that Nvidia didn't have open sourced its drivers yet (so far only Intel did which I'm so thankful for) and binary drivers might be necessary to install before I'm allowed to take full potential of the system. But the nice thing ends here. I clicked to use proprietary driver and ubuntu installed that and restart was required. After restart I still had open source implementation of the driver in use instead of Nvidia one. This means no 3D Desktop effects and likely show stopper for and unexperienced user. Well few searches on the Internet and manual change of used driver in configuration file and it is working now. I assume this is because the first incarnation of such a manager and things will likely get better with future versions. On laptop I had to install i915resultion to get 1280x800 working by default, another thing if detected automatically would boost the "Wow it really works" effect. In 7.04 there are now Desktop Effects available. By default it provides wobbly windows (really Wow... for few hours), nice Alt-Tab switcher between applications and and quite usable 3D cube with mapped workspaces to each side. Unfortunately after using it, metacity window manager is not used anymore and many of the keyboard shortcuts do not work, so I reverted back to 2D desktop.

Now few things I miss. Ubuntu doesn't come with some nice sets of predefined applications or any other content. There is Examples folder but that is. How about to preload some bookmarks, add more of quality wallpapers, more icons for users so we can have graphical login manager by default. Install some templates for OpenOffice by default (even simple ones like CD covers would make difference). Give users a bunch of internet radios right into the Rhythmbox (which in this version works very well by the way). And I miss Java, it has been open sourced recently so why we do not have it installed by default? Firefox didn't come with any Java plug-in on my machine, the very same for Flash. First thing users usually checks is connection to popular sites like YouTube. How about get democracy on our desktops by default?

Final verdict: Clean, fast and one of the best Linux distributions out there getting better with every release. I think Gutsy Gibon (the next incarnation of Ubuntu) can be a perfect choice for many end users. A I also should not forget about great forums that helps users with almost any problem there. Well done guys.

RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 - pushing forward

I took the chance and visited Red Hat 5 technology demonstration today. It was called Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 - Dynamic Infrastructure spoke by mr. Stanislav Polášek fro linWorx.
Firstly new features were introduced and among those:

• Virtualization is now default
• New and simplified licensing model (no restrictions based on RAM,CPU,...)
• Only 2 versions (bye bye AS,ES,WS,...) Advanced Server and Desktop
• Kernel 2.6.18, better SELinux and many smaller updates to about 1200+ packages

Well most important feature is virtualization and I have to say I'm impressed the way they did it. Such a complicated task of virtualization (and I know what that means, we've spent month before we got it right) is now simplified into well defined processes and controlled by various tools that could have some functionality lift up but works very ok for the basic purpose.
In the end there was real demo of starting of installation of RHEL5 on one machine, then in the middle of the process, migrate the machine to another physical host and finish the installation. Machine didn't have a clue what is going on.
Downtime? 2seconds!

Unfortunately it seems there are no pre-build predefined profiles of various types of machines (i.e. Intranet Server, WWW server, FW appliance,...) yet, but recently announced RedHat Exchange seems to fill the gap here. One can find pre-build images from SugarCRM (CRM), OpenFire (IM) , Zimbra (Messaging and Collaboration) and more. Very exciting, now all you need to do is to install this core Linux in your enterprise and then install those binary, instant on systems to add new features for you company.

It seems that Enterprise Linux could be the MS Small Business Server killer! Well done.

slashtime - handy and powerful

Due to nature of my work, time to time I need to know the current time in different timezones. I was scared when I saw various applications on my colleagues desktops consuming megabytes of memory, slowing down startup of laptops and the money its costs. Luckily for Unix likers there is simple perl script called slashtime. Get it here, save it to /usr/local/bin and make it executable. Then edit ~/.tzlist (sample file is on the webpage as well) to suit your needs and then anytime you need to know:Small but handy and powerful.

more on gentoo

This is reply to this post by Alexandre Buisse.

Hi, this is really good piece of vision. You are right that there is lack of direction. I have to say I agree to most of what you've written, let me get through a bit other point of view on gentoo.

I love gentoo, but I spend to much of my time just building it. What I miss is some rapid deployment of gentoo. Not everybody enjoys compiling from source especially when you have multiple gentoo boxes deployed and mostly you compile the same stuff all the time. Hence focus on binary packages is important. At the moment with my friend we built some scripts and processes around gentoo that allows us to have two compiling machines and many binary-only deployed machines. But it is not polished and cumbersome in many ways (and I'm sure others have done it better). For example we hit hard problems when we needed different flags per machine. No fun there.

This problem led me back to gentoo mailing lists and the discovery of paludis and all the not so cool status of current gentoo development at the moment. From my point of view, there are some devs that are not behaving accordingly to others view of nice a polite behavior. Ok. But I see they are also trying to do some nice things like write alternative to portage and fix current issues gentoo have. Btw complete rewrite of apps from zero once in a time is a good practice. I couldn't even finish reading the thread based on which Daniel decided to leave again, to me that thread was about arguing about small things. But lets skip this my incomplete picture of things.

Another thing I miss is virtualization in gentoo. Would it be possible to somehow project gentoo that some core system (lets say XEN or KVM enabled) exits and then there are binary stage4s (again XEN or KVM enabled) ready to be deployed with customized setup? This means webserver, intranet server ( apache+wiki+ldap ready), backend server (samba+printing+LDAP+MAIL......), you name it. I guess here it is almost perfectly aligned with overlays.

3D desktop management, not ready yet

Three months ago, when I decided to give those 3D eye candy stuff a try, I couldn't work out Compiz so Beryl was installed and since that it occupies my desktop. Well occupied, I've just turned it off today. After some hype period when I enjoyed those 3D effects I've started to turn them off. I like the 3D cube, but the overall number of effects turned on by default kills the experience. For example those wobbly windows are really nice to see but not so cool to have it on all the time. There are still some features that actually makes the work-flow a bit harder compared to classical 2D management (I'm referring to semi transparent windows when they lose focus). I know these can be turned off, but this makes you go through huge list in Beryl menu (now I have to admit this seems to be easier with each release of Beryl).

On the bright side, the performance is great. On my Intel915 integrated VGA everything runs smooth up to 1024x768 and is still usable in 1280x1024. I was really surprised in a nice way, specially when a friend of mine told that Vista has those "wow" features as well but requires way more power to do that. Btw anybody running Vista? It has been out for few months and I still haven't seen it. Perhaps there is something true about Paul Graham's statement Microsoft is dead.

Anyway, 3D management is coming, no doubt about it. All is needed is better selection of default plugins turned on by default and it is back on my laptop for sure. Lets wait and see what brings recent announcement of merge between Compiz and Beryl projects. And why not give Metisse a try? It comes with latest Mandriva which can be obtained as a flash memory disk. True Plug and Play.

going loud

Many times I wanted to contribute to community by any means. Recently I spent two days by installing Joomla! and VirtueMart as an multilingual eShop for a friend of mine. By exactly following manuals and guides posted on the internet I only got a mixed results that site had two languages, but switching to eShop component has crippled everything. Then I found this bug and things started to work as expected. So I took the opportunity and shouted loud into Czech Joomla! forum. Now I just hope I didn't make too many grammar typos/mistakes to ashame me.

I'm still playing with N800, it is cool device. Battery life is excellent, much more of what I would expect to get from such a device running full Linux system under hood. For a first day I was having very bad experience with my 2GB mini SD card, uploads to device were constantly failing. Next day I got another one just for 600Czk (30$) and since that everything is smooth. Installing new application is just a breeze, integrated web browser renders most of the web-pages correctly and the screen is brilliant, Canola is looking to be good companion, especially when mixed with UPNP somwhere on the LAN. I was unable to play my locally streamed mp3 and DivX avi files though, but I guess this is just a matter of time until this is fixed.

Eva likes it even more, when I see her quietly surfing the web from sofa, listening to mp3 songs stored on the internal card, listening to radio, I think I'm not going to be the owner anymore pretty soon.

N800 is on the way

and while it is, I browsed the web to see how to utilize this gadget to the max. N800 is an internet tablet from Nokia equipped with WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, crisp, clear and wide display (800x250) bringing the surfing and staying on-line to another level. Power of laptop without the weight of laptop. Small compact device is all you need. While at home, connected to wifi, check you your TV guide or stream a multimedia content from your UPNP enabled server. Make video calls, download music to device and surf the web.
It is nice to find out that Nokia provides official navigation kit for it. I can't understand why does Škoda Car provide navigational kit for 50 000,- when all you need is an integrated bluetooth enabled GPS device. Dear Škoda, we already have a PDAs, Smartphones and many other devices capable of running latest versions of TomTom, iGo or any other navigation SW out there. What is better, sell 100 kits per 50 000,- or 10 000 kits for 5000,- ? Anyway this Nokia navigation kit includes some really cool things like downloading POI (points of interests like hotels, police radars,...) automatically as you need them, or possibility to surf the web when you are on the highway (ok not driver, but co-pilot can). Only issue here seems there is no buy button on the Nokia site.
And it runs on Linux! Sweet.

gentoo domination postponed

Gentoo has been my favorite distribution for some time (found my first post on gentoo forums around 18th March 2002). Before that I was switching between RedHat, Suse and Mandrake based on the current level of applications that came with it. Later, I started to compile packages from source (because the most recent version was not in the repository yet). This had led me to the LFS (Linux From Scratch) and I learned a lot there. I'm not sure about current status of LFS, but it was sometimes pain to have it up to date and not break when something basic needed update. Then I saw post from Daniel Robbins (the father of gentoo) and quickly realized Gentoo is all I need.
Great support, innovative, excellent documentation and perfect source of skills and knowledge for all Unix admins. Gentoo brings some BSD ideas (ports) to Linux. User compiles the whole system from scratch with possibility to customize the system on a level that I didn't see in any other distribution yet all that in fully automated form.
Gentoo is great for servers. Through past few years I've learned how to maintain Linux Desktop as well, but there are other distributions that focus on End user and they do their work much better (e.g. Ubuntu Linux). One thing I think is not finished in Gentoo is the handling of binary packages. Binary packages becomes handy when one have to maintain multiple servers. Why to compile the same package on all servers and waste CPU time (lets cool the planet!) on this redundant task? Sometimes (mainly when we talk about security) it is desired to have gcc removed and perform update of machine via pre-compiled packages. Emerge can handle this (sharing the PKGDIR over network) but with flaws.

• metada - when central machine creates new package and store it on the shared drive, there is no way to notify slave machines to update its metada file about packages. I believe we solved this by also installing http server on the core machine and using PORTAGE_BINHOST variable on the slave machines. We still utilize shared drive for /usr/portage and /srv/packages as PKGDIR (eliminating the download of binary packages).
  
• USE flags - this seems to be bigger issue we haven't find solution yet. Generally, packages can use this variable to determine additional functionality provided by the package (i.e. linking to Qt, Kde and not GNOME and vice versa). Sometimes it is handy to compile apache with LDAP USE flag and sometimes not. However both binary packages have very same name (e.g. apache-2.0.58-r2.tbz2) and what USE flags were used is determined after the package was downloaded and unpacked (too late) and then update is failing on machines based on their package.use settings.

I haven't found any clever idea how to solve the issue yet. Perhaps different naming convention for use flags in binary packages is needed and server daemon running on core machine. Client machine would then ask the Core machine for binary package with specific USE flags and Core would either look it up in its repository or compile. This would rock, really. Gentoo domination would be unstoppable, until then it is postponed.

Today when I was surfing the web to see whether paludis (C++ replacement for emerge) is handling things differently I discovered that Daniel Robbins is coming back to gentoo. Congratulations and welcome back, you've made my life a lot easier (maybe not easier, but definitely more enjoyable ). Rock on!

ntfs drives in Linux

To be able to share data with my friends I used to have my external hard drive split in two. One FAT32 and one EXT3 partition. Fat32 so my friends can see data from their windows machines and ext3 due to speed. For still unknown reason any time I have disk connected to windows, speed about 10Mb/s is achieved only for some time (i.e. 10 secs) then the speed is degraded to about 3-4Mb/s. Under Linux I was not able to reproduce this scenario, constantly reading/writing at 10Mb/s all the time.
Anyway, Linux kernel is still missing proper write support for NTSF (Windows XP) formated drives. Luckily due to support of FUSE (Filesystem in userspace) available in kernel since 2.6.14 and ntfs-3g this is not true anymore. Albeit the ntfs3g is still marked as beta, many are using it now without any problems. Installation is smooth on gentoo by allowing FUSE in kernel and running:

#emerge -av ntfs3g

Then edit /etc/fstab and mount the drive:

/dev/sda1 /mnt/puppy ntfs-3g locale=cs_CZ.utf8,rw,uid=1000 0 0
#mount /mnt/puppy

I'm still struggling to have udev and hal to play nicely here and when you move the directories, they are copied instead of quick move but besides this the file system works fine.