FUDCon Kuala Lumpur 2012

It is wonderful to see the Fedora Users and Developers Conference kick off in Kuala Lumpur today, May 18 2012. The plan was for me to attend, do a keynote and also pitch a talk for the barcamp. But, Murphy was watching how everything was coming together and pulled the rug from under me on Wednesday. I experienced what I found out later to be “tennis calf”

The symptoms were 100% spot on; felt something hit my calf followed by a pull. Quickly arranged to visit a sports doctor and he advised me about what needs to be done and recommended that perhaps I should not travel for the next two to three days. Bummer. I was so looking forward to being among the Fedora community flying in from Europe, Australia, Vietnam, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh etc.

Among the things I wanted to talk about at FUDCon KL was the following:

1. A demo of the plugable USB2.0 docking station that turns a Fedora 17 machine (server, desktop, laptop – does not matter) into a multi-seat Linux environment. I bought a pair from Amazon. I received it on Wednesday (shipped to Singapore via vpost.com.sg) and it worked exactly as stated – plug the USB to the laptop’s USB port, have a VGA monitor, USB keyboard and mouse plugged into the docking station, and viola, a fresh GNOME login screen. Amazing. You can even do an audio chat and watch streaming video via this setup. Really good stuff and kudos to the developers for main streaming the code into the Linux kernel and working with the Fedora devs to make this workable out of the box on Fedora 17.  What was really amazing from my point of view was the this works even when a machine is booted from a Fedora 17 LiveCD/USB. While this would suggest that the idea of the K12LTSP project is no longer needed, I think there are clear areas where they complement.
2. My journey in OpenShift.redhat.com. I wanted to share my learnings about OpenShift and Git and all the associated stuff. More importantly, the fact that OpenShift is a technology that is being used for a 24-hour programming contest in Singapore called code::XteremeApps was important to share as well to encourage international participation in the contest.  I am hopeful that this blog post will trigger interest.

I guess all is not lost. The show has to go on and I am glad to have facilitated a lot of it.  But the main kudos has to go to the Malaysian Fedora Ambassadors who managed to pull this off in the 8 weeks when they were awarded the hosting rights!

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 comes to the rescue of SCO Open Server in a VM!

After about two years ago to the day (plus or minus), I’ve finally gotten around to moving a friend’s ancient SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 to run on a modern operating system within a virtual machine.

My friend acquired a brand new Dell Xeon server with 8GB of memory and tonnes of disk space.  It came pre-installed with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. I got him to register with Red Hat Network and then set up the system and got it fully updated.  All’s well on that count.

Next was to take the experience from two years ago where I managed to install the SCO OpenServer 5.0.5 on a RHEL 5.4 system and make that happen in the latest and greatest of systems.

First was to create the ISOs of the CDs needed (dd if=/dev/cdrom of=NameOfCD.iso) and kept it in a directory for ISOs which I created in the /opt directory.

Second was to fire-up virt-manager (from the GUI so that my friend knows what is happening), and then go about creating a new VM. The virt-manager had problems to start up which puzzled me.  This is 2012 and this machine is a server class machine. It could not be that Dell shipped the machine with support for virtualization turned off in the BIOS, could it? Was I so wrong. For reasons I cannot explain, Dell chose to DISABLE support for virtualization in the BIOS even for this server class machine. I had to reboot the machine, go into the BIOS settings, enable the virtualization option and restart RHEL.

This time, firing up virt-manager worked like a charm and the proceeded to create a new VM.

The following screenshots are self-explanatory including the installation screens from SCO:

Giving the VM a name and setting the installation source as ISO

Choosing the ISO to install from

Setting the amount of memory and CPUs allocated

Setting the disk size. Max drive size is 2GB.

Check “configuration before install” and change the hypervisor to QEMU and architecture to 32bit.

Choose the NIC on the left and set the device model to pcnet

Choose the Video option and set the video to vga

this is the screen that comes up when the SCO installation process starts. It detemines the hardware that is known and shows it on the screen. Notice that there are no network cards in this. it has to be added later – post installation.

The key choices in the dialog boxes were as follows:

a) Check on the “Customize configuration before install”

b) Set Virt Type as qemu and Architecture to be i686

c) Change the NIC type to pcnet

d) Change the Video to vga

With those settings, the installation of the VM started.

The SCO installation is so archaic and ancient that it amazes me that I could still install it into a 21st century virtual machine! And kudos to the KVM and virt engineers!

As the SCO installation proceeds, there are few things that need to be chosen:

a) The installation device is an IDE CDROM on the secondary master.

b) When chosing the “Hard Disk Setup”, change the “Tracking” to “Bad Tracking Off”. This enormously speeds up the “formating” of the drive by SCO.

c) Change the “Network Card” to manual select and then chose “AMD PCNet-PCI Adapter”

d)And continue to the last screen and go ahead with installation.

So, a few minutes later, it is all installed and the system will shutdown.  You can then safely restart the VM and you should be in the default text console. Like any Linux machine, you do have alternate screens available by using the menu options of the VM window “Send Key” and send “Ctl-Alt-F1″ etc to the VM and it will switch to the various virtual consoles available.  

Once you are logged into the system, you can go ahead and use it.

I will follow-up with the installation of a product called “Throughbred 8.4.1″ in a subsequent post.

In the meantime, if you have additional SCO CDs such as:

a) SCO-Optional-Services.iso, or

b) SCO-RS-505A.iso, or

c) SCO-SkunkWare.iso, or

d) SCO-Vision-2K.iso, and

e) SCO-Voyager-5-JDK.iso,

You can use Virt-Manager’s interface for the VM-in-question’s “Details” menu option and chose the CDROM option to connect to the ISO that is needed. Once it is linked up, switch over to the VM’s console, and assuming you are logged in as root, type in “mount /dev/cd0 /mnt” to mount it. For some reason, the first time I type the command it throws an error, and have to do it a second time when it succeeds. Then you have access to the ISO as a local CD.

Managing open source skepticism

I had an opportunity to speak to a few people from a government tender drafting committee on Wednesday.  They are looking at solutions that will be essentially a cloud for a large number of users and have spoken to many vendors.

I was given an opportunity to pitch the use of open source technologies to build their cloud and I think I gave it my best shot. I had to use many keywords – automatic technology transfer (you have the source code), helps to maintain national sovereignty, learning to engage the right way with the FOSS community, enabling the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs and preventing vendor lock-in.

By and large, I think the audience agreed, except for one person who said “yeah, now it is open source, but it will become proprietary like the others”. Obviously this person has been fed FUD from the usual suspects and I had to take extra pains to explain that everything that we, Red Hat, ships is either under the GNU General Public License or GNU Lesser/Library General Public License.  The GPL means no one can ever close up the code for whatever reason. I am not entirely sure I managed to convince that member of the audience. In a lot of ways, this is the burden we carry as Red Hatters in explaining our business model and how we engage with the FOSS community etc.

Glad to have participated in the Cloud Workshop in Penang

I am pleased to have spent two days at the National Cloud Computing Workshop 2011 held in Penang, Malaysia April 11-12 2011. Targeted at the Malaysian academic community, it offered some insights to the initiatives that the various universities in Malaysia are undertaking on rolling out an academic cloud that is being set up with a fully accountable Malaysian identity and access framework.  I think this bodes well for their plans to push for a Malaysian Research Network (MyREN) Cloud that is hoped will be a way to encourage the collaboration of both faculty and students in sharing knowledge and learning. I was particularly pleased to have been invited to speak about cloud technologies from a Red Hat perspective as well as to introduce the audience to the various open source collaboration and empowerment work Red Hat is doing from the Community Architecture team. When I mentioned, during my talk, about POSSE and Red Hat Academy as well as “The Open Source Way” and “Teaching Open Source“, I could sense a level of interest from the audience in wanting to know more.  And true enough, the post-talk q&a focused a lot on “how can we take part in POSSE”.  Looks like it is going to be a few POSSEs in Malaysia this year! Let the POSSE bidding process begin!

On day two, I was invited to take part as a panelist with some of the other speakers to discuss the future of cloud in Malaysia and to throw up suggestions and ideas about what they could be targeting. One of my two suggestions was to first create a “researchpedia.my” as a definitive wiki-based resource that brings together the various research activities in Malaysia in the private and public universities as well as public-funded research institutions. The key is in a site that is wiki-based so that there are no unneeded bottlenecks in updates etc and helps with keeping the information current.  The second suggestion to the audience was to consider the various Grand Challenges and see if any of them are interesting to be picked upon. What is needed is to aim really high so that at least you will land on the moon if you miss. Aiming only to land on the moon may result in you landing in the ocean!

Overall, I think the organization was good. I am looking forward to the presentation materials of the speakers to be made online and to the next event!

True Leadership and The Open Source Way

I live in the Free and Open Source World. A lot of what the FOSS movement’s ethos and principles are quite core to me.  I think this webinar featuring Charlene Li is a required viewing.  Remember, this is not about technology.  It is about how you should do things, how you should be authentic and how you should consider the notion of leadership.

This is a model that applies very well in daily life, including politics. Yes, politics. If you want to gain trust of the population, openness, authenticity and honesty are very important.  Lessons from The Open Source Way are very useful and appropriate as my country prepares for the upcoming parliamentary elections (likely to be on April 30, 2011).

Setting up the standard Andriod marketplace on the Archos 10.1

I was not a very pleased user of the Archos 10.1 ever since I got it last December.  The issue centered on the Archos supplied “AppsLib” which was not all that efficient nor useful. It would startup slowly sometimes, crash at other times, and a lot of apps that I’ve got in my Nexus One was not even available (like ConnectBot for example).  Apart from these inconveniences, the tablet is really a nice device, quite responsive and despite it’s plasticky feel, it is robust and quite well built.

The lack of the standard Android marketplace was gnawing at me for the longest time and last night, I came across a post that suggested that the XDA developers forum has a specific hack to address this. So, 10 minutes after downloading and installing the gAppInstaller, and two reboots later, the Archos 10.1 now has a pride of place and has become a delightful device to be used well.

I am not entirely sure why Archos decided not to include the standard Andriod marketplace, but I reckon this has to do with them trying to differentiate.  I think it is a huge mistake to take a path of differentiated marketplace for it splinters the ecosystem and does not leave the user in a good place.

What I would like to complete the Archos next with is a decent jacket. That is elusive still!

At some point, I’d like to run Fedora on it as well.

Was I fair?

I read with amusement some of the comments that people made with regards to the chat I had with the Dell Rep about acquiring a N-series machine. The chat is posted here.

Most of the comments were about how they DID NOT KNOW of this option being available which was the intent of my post, but there was a subset of comments that were clearly annoyed with their perception that I was “rude”, “an ass”, “a douchebag”, makes “us computer scientists look bad” and so on.

Perhaps I am guilty of all of the above and I would apologize to both the Dell Rep and those who voiced their objections.

I bought my very first laptop from Dell in 1996. Although it came with Windows 95, I think, I loaded up either Slackware or Yggdrasil. That machine is long gone – the LCD started peeling off and the motherboard went bad.  But the harddisk (I think it was a 500MB drive) survived and I’ve long since given it away. I then went through about 6 more Dell laptops (and oodles and oodles of Dell tower and pizza-box servers) and my current pride of place is reserved for a N-series Dell Vostro V-13 running Fedora 14. I am, indeed, a long time loyal customer of Dell’s.

With that in mind, and the nature of that engagement with Dell was about a committed customer who wanted to continue to recommend yet another Dell but with Linux on it. Having being frustrated in not finding the N-series offerings on Dell’s site, I entered the chat with an annoyed frame of mind.  No, it is not an excuse for any perceived bad behaviour, but I am a knowledgeable customer who knows about the N-series offering and getting riled about not finding it.

In any case, the intent of my post has been achieved.  Now people are better aware that they can, if they want to, acquire a piece of hardware from a reputable vendor but with their choice of software.  When you empower and engage with your customers, both you and your customer win.  Doing business is not a zero-sum game. I would encourage those reading this post to listen to Prof Michael Porter’s interview on BBC that aired earlier this week on the nature of shared value/value shared.

How to buy a Dell WITHOUT windows

I was asked by a friend to get a Fedora CD to her and her friend so that their children can learn to use Linux.  I suggested that I will help by shipping the Live CDs as well as spending some time (along with my 2 sons) to teach their sons how to use Linux.

Then the request came back asking where can they get a new laptop without Windows and that prompted my revisiting the Dell.com website to see if I can get a machine without ‘oze.I have a Dell Vostro V13 N-series (which came with Ubuntu preinstalled, the “N” meaning “No Windows”). So, that was what I was looking out in the dell.com site.  Search as I might, nothing showed up.  It’s amazing how well hidden the n-series offerings are.  I am very sure Microsoft’s marketing muscle is squarely behind it. 

Now, since I know that there is such as thing as a N-series laptop, I clicked on Dell.com’s “Live Chat” button and the following is the transcript of what happened. I’ve replaced the Dell person’s name with “Dell Rep”.

16:35:51		harish pillay	Initial Question/Comment: h.pillay@Ieee.org
16:35:56		System	You are now being connected to an agent. Thank you for using Dell Chat
16:35:56		System	Connected with Dell Rep
16:36:01		Dell Rep	Welcome to Dell Sales Chat. My name is Dell Rep. I’ll be your personal sales agent. How may I assist you. If you proceed to place your order online, please indicate my name, Dell Rep, as your sales representative so that I’ll be able to track your order for you.
16:36:22		harish pillay	Hi, Dell Rep. Can you point me to where I can get the n-series vostro v13?
16:36:33		harish pillay	i do not want to buy windows for the machine.
16:37:01		Dell Rep	we do not offer n-series of the Dell system online
16:37:07		harish pillay	why?
16:37:24		harish pillay	does microsoft restrict sales of n-series online?
16:37:56		Dell Rep	i’m not too sure on that but V13 has being replaced by the V130
16:38:23		harish pillay	ok, so I would like to buy a v130 without an OS (I will settle for freedos).
16:38:36		harish pillay	i prefer the n-series v-130 then.
16:39:51		Dell Rep	the V130 is not offering any Free DOS version at the moment
16:40:01		Dell Rep	let me check on the availability of the V13
16:40:13		Dell Rep	we do offer Free DOS offline
16:40:50		harish pillay	it does not matter if it has freedos or fedora (or even ubuntu). i want to buy the machine without any microsoft os.
16:41:07		Dell Rep	any particular specifications on your mind?
16:41:47		harish pillay	i will be running Fedora and/or Red Hat Enterprise Linux on them. I have the apps taken care of already.
16:42:22		Dell Rep	any specific hardware requirement
16:42:51		harish pillay	Why don’t you focus on asking about the OS? the hardware is OK as it is.
16:43:25		harish pillay	64-bit, 8G would be nice, but 4G RAM is OK. USB (3.0 would be nice), bluetooth, wifi.
16:43:55		Dell Rep	please note that you may find difficulties for the correct drivers as we have not tested on the compatibility of the drivers with the OS you intend to install
16:44:13		harish pillay	not that you support windoze drivers anyway.
16:44:17		Dell Rep	any other hardware requirement
16:44:33		harish pillay	none
16:44:52		Dell Rep	also is this purchase are for your company or personal?
16:45:05		harish pillay	does it matter?
16:45:27		Dell Rep	i need to generate the quotation for you
16:45:51		harish pillay	Intel Corporation WiFi Link 5100, Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller,
16:46:19		harish pillay	is there a price difference if the quote was for corporate vs consumer?
16:47:02		Dell Rep	there’s no difference unless your company has a specific contract with Dell
16:47:40		harish pillay	fair enough. give me the consumer quote first.
16:48:32		Dell Rep	can i have your full legal name, address as well as your contact no
16:49:04		harish pillay	. harish pillay, address
16:50:27		Dell Rep	alright, let me work the quotation and emailed it to you?
16:50:40		harish pillay	ok. h.pillay@ieee.org
16:50:47		Dell Rep	noted
16:52:22		harish pillay	so are we done or what?
16:52:42		Dell Rep	unless you’ve others to add.
16:53:04		harish pillay	so the quote will be without windows?
16:53:12		Dell Rep	yes
16:55:26		harish pillay	that’s fine. can you provide me with the quote that shows with and without windows?
16:55:37		harish pillay	i want to know the difference.
16:55:42		Dell Rep	alright
16:55:46		harish pillay	not that i want windows.
16:56:50		harish pillay	are you mailing the quote now?
16:57:17		Dell Rep	give me about 5 mins and i shall be able to send it to you
16:57:56		harish pillay	ok thanks. i will be keeping this chat transcript and blanking out your name.
16:58:12		Dell Rep	thanks
16:58:57		harish pillay	the reason for keeping the chat transcript is so that I can post this to my blog stating that there is a way to buy non-windows Dell machines but one has to ask for it.
16:59:26		harish pillay	so, keeping your name off the transcript is key as it is not you but your organization that is at fault here.
16:59:32		Dell Rep	we do have regular request for n-series of system from time by time
17:00:20		Dell Rep	we do not offer is sometimes to avoid misunderstanding from certain customers where they look for the cheapest system and only to find out that no OS was installed
17:00:33		harish pillay	and I want to make it a permanent request and something that I can find from your online catalog. As long as it does not appear, I think Dell is doing the whole world a disservice and pandering to Microsoft’s monopolistic heavyhand.
17:00:33		Dell Rep	we had that quite a lot previously
17:00:56		Dell Rep	that’s the reason we choose to offer all with the OS preinstalled
17:01:00		harish pillay	and if you explain to people, they will understand.
17:01:26		Dell Rep	not all customer are as understanding as you
17:01:39		harish pillay	so long as dell hides the info (or makes it hard to find), these misunderstandings can happen.
17:02:07		Dell Rep	we have lots of customer who choose the cheapest and only to find out that no OS is installed
17:02:57		Dell Rep	we don’t really hide the info as long as a customer request for it, we’ll be able to offer
17:03:22		Dell Rep	we just limit them options online to avoid misunderstanding
17:03:37		Dell Rep	anyway perhaps we may work out something in future
17:17:37		Dell Rep	i’ve just emailed both quotation to you. could you please check and revert
17:23:28		Dell Rep	Is there anything else I may assist you? If there’s no further assistance required, you may email me at DELL REP @dell.com shall you need further assistance / clarifications.
17:32:49		System	The session has ended!

I have received a quotation for the Dell Vostro V13 and here are the numbers:

a) S$887.15 for the N-series

b) S$1045.79 for the same machine with ‘doze.

Hardware: Vostro V13 System Base (SU7300)Intel® Core?2 Duo Processor SU7300 (1.3GHz, 3M L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB) ULV, 13.3HDF Anti-glare LED LCD panel with camera, 4GB (1X4G) DDR3-1066MHz SDRAM, 1 DIMM500GB* Hard Drive, 7200 RPM, 6-cell Lithium Ion Sealed 30Whr Battery, Integrated Graphic CardIntel(R) Wireless Network Card 5100 (802.11a/g/n)Dell Wireless 365 Bluetooth ModuleInternal Dell(TM) Keyboard (English).

So, the Windows-tax is S$158.64. Now you know.

FOSS.in day 1 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 launch

FOSS.in in Bangalore (their Xth edition and allegedly their last), started off “in true FOSS.in style” – an hour late [this was what the MC said at the very beginning and is not an editorial comment from me.]

I listed to Danese Cooper, CTO of Wikimedia Foundation, deliver the openin keynote and I did learn a significant amount of details about Wikipedia.  Here are some nuggets:

• Wikipedia is the 5 largest site on the planet in terms of traffic
• They have about 450 servers serving out the Wikipedia pages
• The data center is Tampa, Florida and in Amsterday, Holland.
• They are looking for a 3rd data center somewhere in Asia – possibly in India or Singapore (any takers, National Library Board perhaps?)
• They have about US$20 in revenue mostly from sponsorship and donations 
• Are fiercely independent and are not looking for help or funds that can be construed as being biased
• Have optimized their MySQL instance as well as many other tweaks to make the site extremely responsive.  As an aside, I think they are not even using Akamai for content caching.
• When their site goes down for any reason, they will get calls from BBC, CNN etc as Wikipedia has become a key resource.

Danese’s talk lasted about 45 minutes followed by a lively Q&A session.  Watch the video when I get a chance to post it.

The FOSS.in day 1 was a good time to connect up with a whole lot of new folks.  OLPC’s Manusheel Gupta, an independent technologist, Arjuna Rao Chavala, Wikimedia’s Alolita Sharma and Eric and a whole slew of Fedora volunteers (for the Fedora Miniconference happening on Thursday).

The next talk I attended talk “Hardware Design for Software Hackers” by Anil Kumar Pugalia.  I thought it was a good talk focusing on using only open source tools (like avr, kicad etc) to create hardware that can then be fabricated and deployed.  It was a fun talk I felt.

 

Took a break from all of these talks and went over to Hotel Leela where Red Hat India was holding the launch event for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.  It was nice to see the RHI folks there. They had in excess of 1,100 registrations to attend the event and if we give a 50% attrition rate, that was still a number greater than the capacity of the ballroom.  So to a packed audience, Red Hat’s story was told in 4 parts and I think it was an overall success.

Looking forward to day two of FOSS.in