Why Open Standards and Open Source Matters in Government

I have offered to the powers that be (TPTB) running the various Town Councils in Singapore an opportunity for the open source community to help build an application to manage their respective towns following the unfolding fiasco around their current software solution which is nearing end of life.

I am not surprised to hear comments and even SMS texts from friends who say that I am silly to want to offer to create a solution using open source tools. I can only attribute that to their relative lack of understanding of how this whole thing works and how we can collectively build fantastic solutions for the common good of society not only in Singapore but around the world.

I work for a company called Red Hat. Red Hat is a publicly traded company (RHT on NYSE) and is a 100% pure play open source company. What Red Hat does is to bring together open source software and make it consumable for enterprises. Doing that is not an easy thing. A lot of additional engineering and qualifications have to go into it before corporates and enterprises feel confident to deploy it. Red Hat has been successful in doing all of that because of the ethos of the company in engaging with open source developers (and hiring them as full time employees where appropriate) so that we can help the world gain and use better and higher quality software for everything.

That means that in taking open source software, Red Hat has to ensure that improvements and enhancements done are put back out as well to benefit everyone else and at the same time, at a price, provide a service to enterprises that want to use these tools but also want accountability, support, continued innovation etc. That is the Red Hat business model. We are the corporate entity that enterprises deploying open source tools look to for sanity.

Naturally, everything we create is available to anyone else, including our competition, and, yes, we can be beaten at our own game. That’s the best part. The fact that we can be challenged by others with what we helped create is a fantastic situation to be in as it forces us to constantly innovate (and in the open) and show how we are a responsible open source community member while giving tremendous value to enterprises.

It is in that spirit that I made the offer to help form a team of open source developers in Singapore to create the management system software for the town councils.  Certainly, when the software is built and deployed, the town councils would need to have competent support and there is nothing stopping any of the IT SMEs in Singapore picking up that opportunity. This gives the Town Councils significant advantage in choosing vendors to support their needs while keeping the innovation forthcoming because the code is open.

Here’s an article in an IT publication which I was interviewed about open source and CIOs – yeah, self promotion . But, here’s a better article about how open source is so prevalent in the US  government as well (yes, Gunnar is a colleague of mine).

So, the offer to build an open source solution is genuine and sincere. It is not for me to make money out of it per se, but to foster a situation that will create even more opportunities for others to actively participate in create fantastic open source solutions for us not only for the Singapore public sector, but the world.

I hope this offer is taken up seriously by TPTB including parts of IDA and MND. And for the record, this offer has nothing to do with Red Hat.

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!

And it’s live now – SCO Open Server 5.0.5 running in a RHEL 6 KVM

As promised earlier, the final bits of getting an application that runs on the old hardware on to the VM is now all done.  I tried to install the app but, I really did not want to spend too much time trying to figure out all the nuances about it.  Since this is really an effort that would eventually see the app being replaced at some future date, I wanted to get it done easily.

So, over the last long weekend, I did the following:

a) Created a brand new VM running SCO Open Server 5.0.5 on the RHEL 6.2 machine. The specs of the VM are: 2GB RAM, 8GB disk, qemu (not kvm), i686, set the network card to be PC-Net and Video as VGA. This is the best settings to complete the installation of SCO in the VM.

b) Meanwhile on the old machine, I did a tar of the whole system – “tar cvf wholesystem.tar /”. This is probably not the best way to do it, but hey, I did not want to spend time just picking what I wanted and what I did not need from the old machine. The resulting “wholesystem.tar” file was about 2G in size.

c) Ftp’ed the wholesystem.tar file to the VM and did an untar of it on to the VM – “cd /; tar xvf /tmp/wholesystem.tar “. This resulted in a VM that could boot, but needed some tweaks.

d) The tweaks were:

1. Changing the network card to reflect the VM’s settings
2. Changing the IP#
3. Disabling the mouse on the VM

d) SCO is msft-ish (or may be msft learned it from SCO) in that the tool that is used to do the changes “scoadmin” will, after changes are done, need the kernel be rebuilt which then necessitates the rebooting of the VM to pick up the new values

e) Edited the /etc/hosts file to reflect the new IPs and added in /etc/rc.d/8/userdef file a line to set the default route on the VM: route add default 192.1.2.5

The VM’s IP is 192.1.2.100 and in the /etc/resolv.conf file, the nameserver was set to 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (Google’s public DNS)

Printing:

a) The old machine had two printers – an 80 column and a 132-column dot matrix printer – connected to its serial and parallel ports.  I did not want to deal with this issue for the VM and got hold of two TP Link PS110P print servers. What’s nice about these are that they are trivial to work with (they are running Linux anyway) and by plugging them to the printers (even the serial printer had a parallel port), both printers were on the network and so printing from the SCO VM was now trivial.

b) Configuring the SCO VM to print to the network printer was using the rlpconf command. The TP Link print server has an amazing array of options and I picked the LPR option and the LPT0 and LPT1 device queue on the two TP Link print server. While the scoadmin has a printer settings section, for some reason the remote printers set up by it never quite worked.  In any case, the rlpconf edits the /etc/printcap file to reflect the remote printers and that is all that is needed.  Here’s what the /etc/printcap looked after the rplconf command was run:

cat /etc/printcap
# Remote Line Printer (BSD format)
#rhel6-pdf:\
#       :lp=:rm=rhel6:rp=rhel6-pdf:sd=/usr/spool/lpd/rhel6-pdf:
LPT0:\
:lp=:rm=192.1.2.51:rp=LPT0:sd=/usr/spool/lpd/LPT0:
LPT1:\
:lp=:rm=192.1.2.52:rp=LPT1:sd=/usr/spool/lpd/LPT1:

the IP #s were set in the TP Link print servers and their respective print spools.

c) so, once that was done, running lpstat -o all on the VM shows the remote printer status:

#lpstat -o all
LPT0:
lp1 is available ! (06,05,02,000000|01|448044|443364|04,02,02|8.2,8.3)
LPT1:
lp1 is available ! (03,02,03,000000|01|450384|445932|04,02,01|8.2,8.3)

Networking issues:

Initially, I had set up the VMs using the default networking setting for KVM.  The standard networking in KVM assumes that the VM is going to go out to the network and not running as a server per se. But this VM was going to be accessed by other machines (not the RHEL6 host) on the office LAN, so the right thing to do is to set up the a Bridging network instead of a NATed network. RHEL 6.2 does not, by default, have bridging set up and I think that need to change. NATing is fine, but in order for the VM to be accessed from systems other than the host, there has to be additional firewall rules set up if it is to be NATed, but a one liner iptables rule: “iptables -I FORWARD -m physdev –physdev-is-bridged -j ACCEPT” if it was on a Bridge.

I think the dialog box that sets up the VM via virt-manager should add an option to ask if a you need a bridged network. The option is there, but not obvious. So following these instructions carefully – they work.

Well, that was it. The SCO Open Server 5.0.5 with the application that was needed is now running happily in a VM on a RHEL 6.2 machine and the printing is via the network to a couple of print server.

I must, once again, take my hats off to the awesome open source developers of KVM, QEMU, BOCHS etc for the wonderful way all the technologies have some together in a Linux kernel as fully supported by Red Hat in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There is an enormous amount of value in all of this, that even a premium subscription of this RHEL installation is a fraction of the true value derived. The mere fact that a 20th century SCO Open Server can now be made to run in perpetuity on a KVM instance is mind-boggling (even if Red Hat does not officially support this particular setup).

QED.

Fedora 17 before it is released

I decided to take the plunge and run Fedora 17 before it’s officially launched in May.  My system has been running Fedora 16 x86-64 since the launch last November and I must say that it has been solid – including the GNOME 3.x stuff.

What I did was the following:

a) Updated the system fully – “yum update -y”

b) Ensure that “preupgrade” is installed – “yum install preupgrade -y”

c) Run the “preupgrade” command and let it set the system up.  This last step could take a few hours depending on your Internet speed. This was exactly what I did in November as well when I went from Fedora 15 to Fedora 16.

When it finally completed the preupgrade, I rebooted the machine, then it went through the final install and, viola, all was good. The key apps I need to use on a daily basis – mutt, msmtp, Firefox, Chromium, x-chat, Thunderbird, vlc, twinkle, calibre, virt-manager all worked as before. Or so I thought.

For what it’s worth, all of them work with the exception of vlc which will play ogg, mp3 but fails to play flv and mp4 (complains that it needs h264 codecs). I thought it should be there, but I guess something might not have been properly updated.  Oh well. Not the end of the world really. Everything else works.

The version of the kernel right now is:

[harish@vostro ~]$ uname -a
Linux vostro.sin.redhat.com 3.3.4-1.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Fri Apr 27 18:39:03 UTC 2012 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

I did, however, encounter an interesting problem when I rebooted the machine to the newest kernel – my wifi did not come on. For a moment I thought something broke. I rebooted the machine from a liveUSB running Fedora 16 and the wifi worked so it is not hardware issue.  What I had to do was to use the “Fn + F7″ key combination (to turn on and off the wireless in the machine) and bingo, the wifi came back on.  My machine is a Dell Vostro v13.

[harish@vostro ~]$ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Memory Controller Hub (rev 07)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:1a.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 03)
00:1a.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #5 (rev 03)
00:1a.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #6 (rev 03)
00:1a.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 1 (rev 03)
00:1c.2 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 3 (rev 03)
00:1c.3 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 4 (rev 03)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) PCI Express Port 5 (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 03)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 03)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) USB2 EHCI Controller #1 (rev 03)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 Mobile PCI Bridge (rev 93)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation ICH9M-E LPC Interface Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation ICH9M/M-E SATA AHCI Controller (rev 03)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) SMBus Controller (rev 03)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller (rev 03)
07:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation WiFi Link 5100

and

[harish@vostro ~]$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 10f1:1a1e Importek Laptop Integrated Webcam 1.3M
Bus 003 Device 006: ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp. BCM2046B1 USB 2.0 Hub (part of BCM2046 Bluetooth)
Bus 003 Device 007: ID 413c:8161 Dell Computer Corp. Integrated Keyboard
Bus 003 Device 008: ID 413c:8162 Dell Computer Corp. Integrated Touchpad [Synaptics]
Bus 003 Device 009: ID 413c:8160 Dell Computer Corp. Wireless 365 Bluetooth

Let’s hope that by the time Fedora 17 is Generally Available, this little toggle is long gone.

Microsoft’s “open technology” spinoff

While I would like to stand up and cheer Microsoft on them setting up the “Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc”, I am not convinced that they are doing this in good faith.

Microsoft’s founder, Bill Gates, said in 1991 – 21 years ago – that

“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”

only to have all of that conveniently forgotten years later when they themselves started patenting software and suing people all over. These are the kinds of actions taken by a company who cannot innovate or create anything that is new and valuable.  It is also the same company whose CE goes around saying things like:

“Linux violates over 228 patents, and somebody will come and look for money owing to the rights for that intellectual property,”

Too many of these statements and blatant lies from a company that has lost its ethical compass. This is the same company that is now pro-CISPA even after backing down from being pro-SOPA. Do read this statement from EFF about what’s wrong with CISPA.

Never mind all that. Clearly, Microsoft sees money in FOSS. It is business as usual for them in creating their new subsidiary.

If they are really serious about FOSS being part of their long-term future, I am sure they will be reaching out to many people in the FOSS world to join them. Thus far, all I have seen is a redeployment of their internal, dyed-in-the-wool MSFTies.

I think Simon’s commentary on the plausible reasons for Microsoft setting this new entity up is a good set of conspiracy theories, but I think Simon gives Microsoft too much credit.

Exposing localhost via a tunnel

I came across this tool, localtunnel, that offers a way to expose a localhost based webserver (for example) to the internet. It is a reverse proxy that brings you to your machine way behind a firewall by bouncing off of a externally reachable host running localtunnel.

I tested it out on my Fedora 16 laptop (all I had to do was to run “gem install localtunnel” as I had ruby already installed).

I like the idea, but am not entirely convinced about the security exposure.

The Value of being Heard and Consulted

Some of you would know that I am employed by a company called Red Hat since September 2003, it will be nine years with the organization. That’s longer than I have been with any of my startups (Inquisitive Mind and Maringo Tree Technologies) combined. In many ways it is not about Red Hat per se, but about Free Software (and Open Source for that matter) and how the culture of Red Hat very much reflects the ethics and ethos of the Free Software movement.

Yes, Red Hat has to earn its keep by generating revenues (now trending past US$1 billion) and the magic of subscriptions which pegged the transfer of significant value to the customers by way of high quality and reliable software and services, ensures that Free Software will continue to drive the user/customer driven innovation.

All of this is not easy to do. When I joined Red Hat from Maringo Tree Technologies, I went from being my own boss, to working for a corporation. But the transition was made relatively easy because the cultural value within Red Hat resonated with me in that Red Hat places a very high premium on hearing and engaging with the associates. I was employee #1 in Singapore for Red Hat and my lifeline to the corporation was two things: memo-list and internal IRC channels. Later as the Singapore office took on the role of being the Asia Pacific headquarters, we hired more people and it is really nice to see the operation here employing over 90 people.

But inspite of the growth in terms of people, the culture of being heard and consulted is still alive and thriving. It is a radically different organization which will challenge those joining us from traditionally run corporations where little or no questions or consulting is done and all decisions are top down.  I am not saying that every Red Hat decision is 100% consulted, but at least it gets aired and debated. Sometimes your argument is heard, sometimes it is accepted and morphed, sometimes it is rejected.  I think this interview of Jim Whitehurst that ran in the New York Times is a good summary.

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.

Change and Opportunity

Change and evolution are hallmarks of any open source project. Ideas form, code gets cut, repurposed, refined and released (and sometimes thrashed).

Much the same thing happens with teams of people.  In the True Spirit of The Open Source Way, people in teams will see individuals come in, contribute, leave. Sometimes, they return. Sometimes, they contribute from afar.

Change has come to Red Hat’s Community Architecture and Leadership (CommArch) team.  Max has written about his decision to move on from Red Hat, and Red Hat has asked me to take on the leadership of the group.  We have all (Max, myself, Jared, Robyn, and the entire CommArch team) been working hard over the past few weeks to make sure that transition is smooth, in particular as it relates to the Fedora Project.

I have been with Red Hat, working out of the Asia Pacific headquarters based in Singapore, for the last 8 years or so. I have had the good fortune to be able to work in very different areas of the business and it continues to be exciting, thrilling and fulfilling.

The business ethics and model of Red Hat resonates very much with me. Red Hat harvests from the open source commons and makes it available as enterprise quality software that organizations, business big and small can run confidently and reliably. That entire value chain is a two way chain, in that the work Red Hat does to make open source enterprise deployable, gets funnelled back to the open source commons to benefit everyone. This process ensures that the Tragedy of the Commons is avoided.

This need to Do The Right Thing was one of the tenets behind the establishment of the Community Architecture and Leadership team within Red Hat. Since its inception, I have had been an honorary member of the team, complementing its core group.  About a year ago, I moved from honorary member to being a full-timer in the group.

The team’s charter is to ensure that the practises and learnings that have helped Red Hat to harness open source for the enterprise continues to be refined and reinforced within Red Hat.  The team has always focused on Fedora in this regard, and will continue to do so. We’ve been lucky to have team members who have had leadership positions within different parts of the Fedora Project over the years, and this has given us an opportunity to sharpen and hone what it means to run, maintain, manage, and nurture a community.

The group also drives educational activities through the Teaching Open Source (TOS) community, such as the amazingly useful and strategic “Professors Open Source Summer Experience” (POSSE) event.  If the ideas of open source collaboration and the creation of open source software is to continue and flourish, we have to reach out to the next generation of developers who are in schools around the world. To do that, if faculty members can be shown the tools for open source collaboration, the knock-on effect of students picking it up and adopting is much higher. That can only be a good thing for the global
open source movement.

This opportunity for me to lead CommArch does mean that, with the team, I can help drive a wider and more embracing scope of work that also includes the JBoss.org community and the newly forming Cloud-related communities.

The work ahead is exciting and has enormous knock-on effects within Red Hat as well as the wider IT industry.  Red Hat’s mission statement states: “To be the catalyst in communities of customers, contributors, and partners creating better technology the open source way.”

In many ways, CommArch is one of the catalysts. I intend to keep it that way.

Now all machines at home are on Fedora 15!

I spent 30 minutes this morning upgrading my sons’ laptops to Fedora 15. I used a Fedora 15 LiveDVD (installed on a USB) that I had created that included stuff that the standard Fedora 15 LiveCD does not because of space. Tools like LibreOffice, Scribus, Xournal, Inkscape, Thunderbird, mutt, msmtp, wget, arduino, R, lyx, dia, and filezilla. I’ve thrown in blender and some games into the mix as well.

The updates of the systems went super quick (20 minutes to first boot) and then on to Spot’s Chromium repo:

1. su -
2. cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
3. wget 
   http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/spot/chromium/fedora-chromium.repo
   
4. yum install chromium

Following that, on to rpmfusion.org to get the free and non-free setup RPMs to get to the tools that are patent encumbered and otherwise forbidden to be included in a standard Fedora distribution.

1. yum install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm
2. yum install http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm
3. yum install vlc
4. yum install thunderbird-enigmail

[Update, June 19, 2011 0050 SGT] Based on the comment from Jeremy to this post, I’m updating the instructions]

The last bit is flash from Adobe – the 64-bit version:

1. wget 
   http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz
   .
2. tar xvfz flashplayer10_2_p3_64bit_linux_111710.tar.gz
3. cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/
4. chmod +x /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so

Installing a 32-bit version of Adobe Flash for a 64-bit Fedora installation:

1. Go to
   http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Flash#Enabling_Flash_plugin
   
2. Installing a 32-bit wrapped into a 64-bit version
3. ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so /usr/lib64/chromium-browser/plugins
4. These steps should be sufficient for flash to be enabled for both Firefox and Chromium

Once done, restart your browser and you will have flash enabled.

Yes, I am aware that I’ve had to compromise and load up non-free software. It is less than ideal and I am looking forward to GNU Flash maturing as well as MP3 and related codec getting out of patent.