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.

TimeOut 2007

Ok, this years vacation is now over. We arrived safely home and just made it to sort the photos and put them online.

Vacation2007

In short we had a great time doing many things visiting many places. Weather was superior (except for the needed wind) and we've met a lot of nice people on our trip Czech->France->Spain->Portugal and finally to Tarifa (Spain).

CSS teasing

Recently I realized that I need to jump back on web development wagon. I played bit with JBoss Seam and it seems like it is great Java framework to do things. However the learning curve is too high for me (it builds on JSF when it comes to html pages). Then I found Django, django is really one of the most exciting frameworks for building webapps I've met so far. Built on top of Python, great support and rapid development cycle suits me a lot. Check Django philosophy for more.

So I have written two simple apps for testing:

• a syslogviewer used in our company
• web presentation for one of our customers

Both works quite well and I did most of the work in a reasonable time. What is taking now most of the time is the desing of the pages them selfs (and make them look same in Safari, Firefox and damn you Internet Explorer with your weird understanding of CSS box model!!!). I've never pretended to be a great artist (or medium, or ..), although if the time spent on tweaking my desktop theme would count than I would be a star for sure. Anyway, these days CSS is what drives the look of the websites. In short: in HTML one describes the content and associated CSS describes the way the contents looks.

When dealing with CSS I ran into following issues:

• box model a.k.a. the basics
  
• floating of boxes a.k.a. how to position the boxes
  
• selectors a.k.a. how to apply styling to correct elements
  

There are many tutorials on the net for CSS, this one I found particularly interesting :

• http://css.maxdesign.com.au/
  

I've also learned some tricks:

1. To make submit buttons a bit nicer, give it a class and style the class:
   submit-button{
   border:1px solid #CECECE;
   }
   
   
2. To avoid positioning problems put any dimensions in outter element. For example to center one element inside another:
   #outter{ width: 80px; height: 50px; }
   #inner { margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding-bottom: 20px;}
   
   
3. When two columns with different height need to look the same size, use the container with background set to image with "1px height repeat-y" atribute. With this technique one can create table looking layout. Nicely described at http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fauxcolumns/
   
   #container {
   background:transparent url('/images/background.gif') repeat-y;
   }

Although learning CSS right takes a long time (and even more to practice) it pays off. Result is highly skin able pages with one place to modify the look and reduced amount of data required to load each page. It also separates the code from presentation which both developer and page designer will appreciate.

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.

random life ranting

...only for interested. Everything is ok, lot of things happening all the time. We moved again. This time to our new flat at Malešice. We changed the view of Prague 4 for a view of football playground and surrounding green area, yet still close to Prague city center. I started to like to going to OBI for all kinds of nifty things we need at the house at the moment. Learned something about house works. One of the things I failed to manage was Internet connection so far. I was blaming provider for not being able to deliver on time just to find out few days later that my name is not on the mailbox, stupid me. My side money for a decent digital camera has slowly but for sure dissolved into things like mattress, furniture,jalousie and many other small things. Anyway anyone coming to Prague for a sofa surfing, just let me know.
Our dvd player is down for repair so we can't watch Heroes at the moment. But that is fine as I finally managed to read a couple of books (IT related to be precise). I'm getting really interested in python+django at the moment so let's wait and see if something good comes out of it.

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.

Ireland ..reloaded

Well I do not know why but it seems I have developed some kind of an addiction to Ireland, very interesting island. Rough country but kind people and a lot of friends. So while the "review money" were hot I bought a cheap flight to see them all. Leaving all "the stress" (no not really as I didn't have stress for a while) behind and went last Thursday right from the work to the airport. Two planes of Aer Lingus and ČSA were heading to Dublin, one flew on time, I was in the other one. Well Laďa and Michal were kind enough and both waited for me patiently, chewing their time in one of Dublin's casinos ;)

We got to Carlow and I tried to do my best and stayed up to 4 am. Time schedule was pretty tough and this was just really the start of it. My friends in Carlow are all croupiers, pretty good one. So there they were Poli, Gabča,Meggie, Michal and Laďa ... time to drink. I got up at nine and others around 4pm. The very same thing happened on Friday's night, tried to stay up as much as I could and managed to get to bed around 5. During the day I spent most of the time fixing Michals computer and talking that nice and crazy stuff about Global warming and so on and yes in the free afternoon I sent couple of CV's just to see my chances. And I even got one call and scheduled meeting on Monday, what a productive day.

On Saturday we had a trip to Dublin to buy Poli new computer, unfortunately one do not see any kind of DatArt or Electro World in Dublin's major shopping center DunDrum's. Well we still managed to get HP Pavilion with Core 2 Duo and Nvidia Go7400 chipset. Vista included. I have to say right now, VISTA IS SLOW and SLOW. We spent like at least 40 minutes in the shop before the "first time" process was over and I do not want to go through it again. But is has Aero, the real reason why Poli bought it. Later the night I felt really tired and yawned all the time. But Poli and about 6-to-8 vodkas (sometimes double) helped me to stay up through the night again.

Sunday I was bit clever and got up about 1 pm, my friends are even smarter and got up about 5pm. Except for Gabca, lovely girl, she got up quite early, she rules the house. House is still clean and everything is in its place. Without her I probable would ended up in a place where people and bugs (all kind of them) tries to live in a synergy, just like the old times from the college. During this day I started to feel a bit dizzy, likely all the sleep lag I acquired during last few days. All I ate the day was veggie soup, but good one. Finished setup of Vista (it does not come with DivX codecs preinstalled and is still far from ideal user experience, mixing things from Apple and previous versions of Windows, sometimes it is better, sometimes not) and now I really feel confident telling people to try Ubuntu as it provides user with nice, coherent and intuitive interface to work with.

Monday was quick, I got up, said goodbye and got on bus to Dublin. Bruno was there, managed me a place to put my bags. Met friend of him Katerina, which is great companion and was about to see what is on the market. But the day was cursed and about 1 pm I realized my CV contact is partially wrong. What the heck. After four there was another beer with other Czechs in Blue Goose. As far as I remember Bruno,Babu,Petr,Katerina,Tomas(perhaps twice) were all there and then another couple of drinks at Bruno's house. Battery depleted...completely.. for sure

Don't know how, but got up at 4:50, and then it was quick ride to home... 12:00 lunch with Eva.

Love you, glad to be home....