tags/foss

News 2013-01-22

Tue, 22 Jan 2013 22:01:12 +0100

Dell sells notebook with Ubuntu on it

As all of you know, Ubuntu is the most promoted Linux distro currently being on the market. Dell, on the other hand, has trouble staying in the business and rumours say that Dell is even searching for some investors.

Thus it's interesting to hear that Dell is now selling the XPS 13" with Ubuntu on it

Linux is (becoming) a gaming plattform

Various different news show you an interesting movement for 2013: Android (and thus Linux) is becoming a gaming plattform:

Valve ported Steam to Linux and begins to promote Linux to Windows users. The Ouya console is successfully being developed and even they have a competitor, the GameStick, which is also based on Android.

Microsoft to die (finally)

Thanks to the decreasing PC market and people focussing on swiping around their tablets (instead of doing real work [tm]), Microsoft got a hard time.

It even got so worse that they are selling Windows 8 for almost nothing. But hey, who wants a disease for free anyway?

Seeing the Nokia/Microsoft deal in which Nokia agreed to build Windows phones is like seeing someone betting on a dying horse, but it is worse than that: Why would you get a Windows phone, if you can buy an Android or IOS based phone?

Reading about Microsoft probably selling the Xbox division gives another indicator for someone totally being frustrated - probably realising the good times are over.

This hasn't though changed the FUD approach of Microsoft, which is infamously known for their Anti-Campaings like the new scroogled one.

Cdist gets its own domain

Suggestions to FOSS I write or maintain is highly appreciated. Getting a domain for cdist was proposed and will soon be activated.

Moving on: Migrating from #cLinux to #cstar

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 00:01:21 +0200

There has been the IRC channel #cLinux, which I created for development on cLinux, a "better Linux distribution", which I'm not focussing anymore.

cLinux became more a "cunix" project or, well, not even limiting to Unix. Thus the idea of cstar was born and made reality.

Thus, if you've just joined #cLinux, please move on to #cstar, the home of c*.

Automated Unix Installations

Sat, 02 Apr 2011 00:57:06 +0200

From time to time I'm playing around with different Unices, mostly free ones like *BSD and Linux and wonder how easy it is to have an automatic installation.

Preample: There's only one way to do it

My expererience as a sysadmin is that the only way to scale out installations is via network install: USB sticks, cdroms or floppies just require too much manual work. As most installations need network connectivity anyway, there is no need to rely on these old fashioned, non scalable methods.

Network install

If an (unix) operating system supports network install, it should require only a TFTP server. The reason for this is that for network installations using PXE a TFTP server is required anyway.

After the installer is running, it can definitely use the usual methods to retrieve components like packages (i.e. HTTP, NFS, etc.), but this not require me, as a sysadmin, to setup any additional service.

The challenge

Now I'm sitting in front of some computers and I'm wondering how easy it can be to setup these boxes with different Unices automated.

Current status

I've started the cuni project some time ago to learn about the unix installers and I'm aware of at least Kickstart for Redhat/Fedora, Preseed for Debian/Ubuntu and Fai for Debian. I guess there are many other out there and I'm wondering how easy it is for every Unix to get into a complete unattendet, autoamated installation.

Help appreciated, comments and critics welcome

I'm aware that this is a bigger project, but at the end it would be very useful for sysadmins maintaining small and large infrastructures to be able to have one way to rule them all.

So if you are an expert of $Unix and know how to automate the installation of it via network, just drop me a mail.

I plan to extend cuni to be able to create automated installation environments, as soon as I've collected the necessary information on how to do so.

Searching for a maintainer for offlineimap and hpodder

Wed, 21 Apr 2010 09:17:20 +0200

As John Goerzen created at least one useful software, offlineimap, which I daily use, I think I owe him at least this article.

He describes an interesting problem, we FOSS developers have:

He is happy with his software, but others would like to see more features.

I know that situation very well, if you think you're done, somebody just pops up with a new situation or problem and I think:

Yeah, how to solve that?

Yes, if I think it's an interesting problem, I take the time to discuss it and maybe to develop a solution for it.

But sometimes I've other priorities (like family, studies or - believe it or not - to enjoy the fine weather outside) and then I reply:

Dear hacker, cool problem! Here are my quality requirements,
can you just send me a patch that applies cleanly against
current development code (prefarable a git source)?

I cannot implement every (sensible) feature in software I've written and I don't think it's my duty. That's what FOSS is all about:

If people care, they fork or create a patch.
If not, it's probably not worth implementing it anyway.

Regarding the ressources you're providing, John, I handle it that way: I always provide

the source within version control (so things don't get messed up) and
a public contact point with archives (i.e. a mailing list)

These two points ensure that everybody who wants to contribute, can so. I don't think a bugtracker, wiki, etc is worth it for most projects, (you don't have bugs in your software anyway, do you? ;-), but

If people care, they can setup a wiki, bugtracker, etc themselves.

Coming back to the title, as said John is searching for a maintainer for

offlineimap and
hpodder.

If you're reading this article, you may be interested in helping him ;-)

The terms FOSS and the relation to FS, OSS and FLOSS

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:58:07 +0200

Introduction

Today, there are different terms in use to describe free and open source software. This article gives you a short overview about those terms and a short reason why I prefer to use FOSS.

Free software

GNU prefers to use the term "Free software". The reason for me not to use this term are:

The abreviation is "FS", which is ambiguous. "FS" is often used as the abreviation for "filesystem".
The term does not tell you directly, that you also have access to the source (main reason one).
I think people can easily think free software is just free as in "nothing to pay for it" (main reason two).
I do not like to pronounce it. Think about "I've like effess." Nothing my tongue likes.

Open source software

I liked to use the term "Open source software" some time. Perhaps because it was used often to talk about what I associate with GPL'ed or BSD-licensed software. But then, one day, I found out about the above mentioned GNU free software definition and I began to think about both terms. In contrast to free software, open source software (OSS) is much more known, but my reasons not to use it are:

It lacks the "free as in copy it as you like" definition (main reason).
I think about the "Open sound system", if I read "OSS", which is not what I want to talk about.

Free and open source software (FOSS)

The simplest solution is to combine both terms and finish all problems. So using FOSS, I get the following advantages and disadvantages:

It is neither an abreviation for "filesystem" nor "open sound system".
I can pronounce it: "foss."
It is short and simple and contains everything I love about FOSS.
Other people may not like it, because I introduce yet another acronym.
It combines the two terms of both "worlds", so everyone can be happy.

Ikiwiki has been slow, but it is fast now!

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:58:07 +0200

As I reported before, ikiwiki is slow. That's not true anymore: I received an e-mail from Joey Hess that contained a patch to my website and an answer to my problem: He used a copy of the source of my website to reproduce the problems I had, which even took 68 minutes on his computer!

So I grabbed the latest version of ikiwiki from git today and found out:

ikiwiki exits with exit status 0, but does not produce a website!

I reported it to Joey on IRC, who fixed that some hours later in commit 587e0c3d21dfbde052e0fd71a7ed0e33e09e757f. Now comes the interesting part: I added some timing information to ikiwikitest.sh, which allows me to run the latest ikiwiki version, without installing it. And here are the results:

no-refresh, no changes: ~70 seconds
no-refresh, created one new file: ~70 seconds
--refresh, no changes: ~5 seconds
--refresh, changes to one file: ~10 seconds
--refresh, adding a new tag: ~10 seconds

The tests were done using ikiwiki 3.20091017-22-gba682e0 (from git describe). To summarise:

Updating my website using ikiwiki now takes less than 30 seconds.
Joey did a great job.
I owe him something.

I think I should send Joey some money.

I want to emphasise this very much, because he's a FOSS developer, like me. He has spent a lot of time developing and maintaining ikiwiki and will probably continue to do so. Besides that he does a great job in supporting his users.

Everything for free.

I think just writing here about him and telling everybody that he does a great job does not fill his stomach, nor gives him the ability to enjoy a coffee in the early afternoon.

When you read this article, Joey will already know about it and also knows, that I would like to have his IBAN, to submit him some money.

I encourage you to do the same when you realise that you enjoy using some software (or reading some documentation).

Nico Schottelius and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 18:58:07 +0200

Why did I become a FOSS developer?

In 1998 I was running Windows 95 on my brand new computer (Pentium 1, 166Mhz) and it randomly crashed. This was very frustrating. So I asked my father, whether there is something else available. And his father gave me a set of SCO Unixware floppys and cds and a packet labeled "Suse Linux 11/94". The SCO package had a blue/white cd box and looked nicer, so I began to install Unixware my computer. But it did not work, because SCO did not support IDE disks and the computer had only an IDE disk builtin.

After about two weeks trying around with SCO, I gave up. Frustrated I continued to use the old operating system.

About one week later he was again extremly frustrated, that this operating system was crashing so often and he remembered, that there was another cd set (one source code, one install cd) to try out. After about 4 hours I had Linux running. That was really really easy compared to SCO. It felt strange, so new, so fast. And it contains only text. Strange, like DOS before Windos, I thought.

On the next day I read in the book that there is something called "X11" available, which can destroy the display, when wrongly configured. I were shocked, but still tried to do it the correct. I searched for vertical and horizontal refresh rates and found them after some hours searching in the handbook (they were labeled differently compared to the SuSE Linux handbook). Created the configuration and typed in "X<enter>". Wow, it works. But why is it grey and black? Really gross. But after typing 'startx' it looked much better.

The next confusing thing was that there were no drivers for the cdrom. Nothing to load. After about two weeks I found out that they are already integrated into the kernel and that one simply needs to "mount" them. And after that experience, I was totally convinced by FOSS, because the FOSS people solved the driver issue much cleaner than the cdrom vendor or Windos itself. The whole system has been running very stable and it has been really easy to change things (like /etc/issues), it has been open.