So there have been some issues with the CentOS team members needing to get in touch and accounting with another team. This post is not about that.
Instead its about the long threads of "THE CENTOS PROJECT IS DEAD", "We should build a new OS", etc. The amount of speculation of what has happened, what is happening, what should happen is quite bizarre based on the amount of information given. At this point, I am surprised that no one has gone with "CentOS moving to OpenSUSE" (though I did hear a "This is all Red Hat's lawyers fault.")
Anyway, people STOP LOOKING FOR DRAMA. This is not an episode of EastEnders. The pub isn't going to be sold to unscrupulous land developers or whatever. The CentOS team is doing what they think must be done to deal with a problem. CentOS will not be going away and worrying about it wouldn't help if it were.
2009-07-31
2009-07-28
Intel Virtualization: Ur Doing It Wrong :)
Ever have one of those days... you know like you research a chipset, find a deal and buy a computer.. and then spend a week trying to find out why virtualization is soooo slow. That would be me right now. I was trying to find a box to do installs at home and saw a deal at Dell for an Optiplex 360. Checked all the parts, saw that they were Linux compatible.. and chose a CPU that I was sure said was VMX compatible (Intel E5300). The chip originally didn't have it but was going to have it added soon...
Installed Fedora 11 x86_64 and tried various VM's and boy were they slow... qemu never seemed to go quick or anything. Finally I did a
cat /etc/cpuinfo
and found that the chip didn't have VMX set. Ok lets go and see if its a BIOS option... no doesn't seem to be. So what did I do wrong? I went back to the review and saw that I misread the year on the review. Instead of April 2008... it was April 2009 and the E5300 VT items were not added til this month. Sigh...
Installed Fedora 11 x86_64 and tried various VM's and boy were they slow... qemu never seemed to go quick or anything. Finally I did a
cat /etc/cpuinfo
and found that the chip didn't have VMX set. Ok lets go and see if its a BIOS option... no doesn't seem to be. So what did I do wrong? I went back to the review and saw that I misread the year on the review. Instead of April 2008... it was April 2009 and the E5300 VT items were not added til this month. Sigh...
2009-06-27
Stories and camels
On reading Michael Dehaan's post about Oasis's.. I realized that it answered my questions about Fedora in a very fundamental way. By story. Humans are not rational creatures.. we assume that we are but in the end we are driven by deep urges and feelings that make rational or logical decisions hard. As a friend of mine once said "The conscious is a tool to make stories about why the unconscious did things." or something like that...
Deep down inside most of us (I do not assume everyone is this way (not that will stop the 20 or so emails from people saying "I am not like that")) are driven by stories. We make our reality by the stories we tell ourselves and each other about what we have done and what we perceive the world to be acting. The better the story, the more we are driven by it. This can be for evil or good purposes.. but for the extent of this blog I will try to focus on the good.
If you look at distributions as caravans of people travelling through the wastes of the digital desert then you can see metaphors for each distribution (as mpdehaan says). This story is strong in that it says what kind of people we are looking for.
Fedora wants to be the explorer who is never happy to long at any oasis. We may linger at some, but not too many.. We are looking for new explorers but not just any 'newbie'. They have to be wanting to see new things, go over the next hill when the caravan leader calls out etc. On the other hand, we are not looking for barbarians or raiders. We want to set-up and trade at the next oasis or town.. not plunder and pillage... We do not poison the wells when we leave because we never know when we might come back in some form.. or when our elder Aunt's caravan (RHEL) might show up to set up a town. We are not thieves, if we find something stolen, we will endeavour to return it.
We have customs we follow and expect people visiting our camps to follow. If we share code with you, we expect it to be shared back. Things like that.
Deep down inside most of us (I do not assume everyone is this way (not that will stop the 20 or so emails from people saying "I am not like that")) are driven by stories. We make our reality by the stories we tell ourselves and each other about what we have done and what we perceive the world to be acting. The better the story, the more we are driven by it. This can be for evil or good purposes.. but for the extent of this blog I will try to focus on the good.
If you look at distributions as caravans of people travelling through the wastes of the digital desert then you can see metaphors for each distribution (as mpdehaan says). This story is strong in that it says what kind of people we are looking for.
Fedora wants to be the explorer who is never happy to long at any oasis. We may linger at some, but not too many.. We are looking for new explorers but not just any 'newbie'. They have to be wanting to see new things, go over the next hill when the caravan leader calls out etc. On the other hand, we are not looking for barbarians or raiders. We want to set-up and trade at the next oasis or town.. not plunder and pillage... We do not poison the wells when we leave because we never know when we might come back in some form.. or when our elder Aunt's caravan (RHEL) might show up to set up a town. We are not thieves, if we find something stolen, we will endeavour to return it.
We have customs we follow and expect people visiting our camps to follow. If we share code with you, we expect it to be shared back. Things like that.
2009-06-26
KDE vs GNOME arguments...
Computer Geeks get as attached to their brands of desktops as Car Geeks to their brands of cars. Reason goes out the window and people start hooting and hopping up and down like a scene from 2001. The arguments go on and on and on like a bad Air Supply cover band. At some point one side (say X) gets bigger than the other (say Y) and you end up with arguments of "Y is being discriminated against because it wasn't chosen." And then you get the arguments showing that Y is really a hidden majority put down in some sort of class warfare system.
It doesn't really matter if we are talking about (GNOME vs KDE) or (AfterStep vs E) or my first one.. tvtwm versus mwm. It seems to get the same arguments that the truck guys will go over engine builders or my uncles' favourite "Chevy versus Ford". Family dinners would go into the time out corners when one person or another went over some flaw or problem the other side in some model. I have seen other families get into fist fights over it.
A funny side story.. Ford versus Chevy debates were some of the biggest headaches of companies in the 50s onward. Arguments over whether one brand or another was the 'company car' would escalate to large shouting matches or threatened lawsuits. Some places would just buy enough of each brand to make sure they didn't end up with someone complaining. One uncle used to tell a story about how a Union strike fell apart because the company chose GM during the strike. The Ford people thought it was a deal to get them thrown out and the union was so much in turmoil they couldn't get anything done.
In the end, to most people, it is just a car. It gets you from one place to another.. and when it becomes anything more than that there is something you need to sit down and think "Why do I have to make this car my identity?" I say this as a guy who used to go on Emacs crusades. Why didn't Red Hat have emacs as a login shell? Why wasn't emacs the default editor when people opened up any document... etc etc.
I am not saying the KDE people should 'get over it' that GNOME is the preferred desktop or gets top billing. I am saying that they need to frame their arguments better about what they want and how they will accomplish it. Quit being passive aggressive. Quit taking any criticism of the proposal as an attack because it just makes people who might have been trying to help all the more to leave.
It doesn't really matter if we are talking about (GNOME vs KDE) or (AfterStep vs E) or my first one.. tvtwm versus mwm. It seems to get the same arguments that the truck guys will go over engine builders or my uncles' favourite "Chevy versus Ford". Family dinners would go into the time out corners when one person or another went over some flaw or problem the other side in some model. I have seen other families get into fist fights over it.
A funny side story.. Ford versus Chevy debates were some of the biggest headaches of companies in the 50s onward. Arguments over whether one brand or another was the 'company car' would escalate to large shouting matches or threatened lawsuits. Some places would just buy enough of each brand to make sure they didn't end up with someone complaining. One uncle used to tell a story about how a Union strike fell apart because the company chose GM during the strike. The Ford people thought it was a deal to get them thrown out and the union was so much in turmoil they couldn't get anything done.
In the end, to most people, it is just a car. It gets you from one place to another.. and when it becomes anything more than that there is something you need to sit down and think "Why do I have to make this car my identity?" I say this as a guy who used to go on Emacs crusades. Why didn't Red Hat have emacs as a login shell? Why wasn't emacs the default editor when people opened up any document... etc etc.
I am not saying the KDE people should 'get over it' that GNOME is the preferred desktop or gets top billing. I am saying that they need to frame their arguments better about what they want and how they will accomplish it. Quit being passive aggressive. Quit taking any criticism of the proposal as an attack because it just makes people who might have been trying to help all the more to leave.
2009-06-23
How to know you are being profiled :)
In coming back to Red Hat, I got a new account of ssmoogen and an email alias of my old one smooge. And I immediately got SPAM email to the old smooge account. Probably due to all the postings to Usenet and mailing lists from old. The interesting thing was that the content of the emails covered the following:
None of the other regular spams (dates with russian women, growth hormones/devices, etc). No it would seem that the SPAM engines have a good idea what the life of tech support person is... pain, sleep, pain, no-sleep, pain.. It was interesting that I haven't gotten any SPAM for crowbars, baseball bats, and rolls of carpet (cheap). I guess thats something to look forward to.
[PS I have never taken nor advocate taking any of the items listed above without a prescription/overview from a competent doctor.]
- Sleep aids
- Stay awake aids
- Pain killers
None of the other regular spams (dates with russian women, growth hormones/devices, etc). No it would seem that the SPAM engines have a good idea what the life of tech support person is... pain, sleep, pain, no-sleep, pain.. It was interesting that I haven't gotten any SPAM for crowbars, baseball bats, and rolls of carpet (cheap). I guess thats something to look forward to.
[PS I have never taken nor advocate taking any of the items listed above without a prescription/overview from a competent doctor.]
Voting in Fedora Elections
I voted, but I can say that once again I was underwhelmed by the voting method. I really think the method falls under the two much choice methods. I thought more about 'how to' vote than about the candidates. And again I just didn't feel that my choice of putting a 1 or 3 or a 5 was 'producing' an outcome. However I have railed about my lack of emotional connection to range voting in the past :).
In the end, I think that voting is a responsibility that people should exercise to be considered citizens of a community. When people do not vote even if its because they are content with who/how things are.. it removes a vitality that is needed to keep a community going.
In the end, I think that voting is a responsibility that people should exercise to be considered citizens of a community. When people do not vote even if its because they are content with who/how things are.. it removes a vitality that is needed to keep a community going.
2009-06-19
RIP: My Precision Workstation
Well it would seem that during my trip to NC/Mass.. my home server, an old Dell Precision 360, started making noises.. you know those kind of noises where a fan's bearings aren't always smooth.. that kind of painful ear noises that can be 'felt' across the house at 2am in the morning when it starts... so the system got turned off until I could get home.
I opened up the box and realized how much dust can accumulate in a year in NM. Two cans of air later you could see the motherboard again... turned on the box and the sound came back again. Looking at the various fans it was not one but two fans.. one was in the powersupply and the other near off the CPU. The box is 6 years old so getting replacement parts isn't as easy as one would hope :).
The only grumpy part for me is that I had just gotten the box fully outfitted with Spacewalk before I left. I was planning on using it to snapbuild virtual machines for testing local services etc. I had just gotten it to the point of updating boxes when I left on Sunday... Well it looks like I will be saving up for another box again. Could be worse.. I could have forgotten to do backups.
I opened up the box and realized how much dust can accumulate in a year in NM. Two cans of air later you could see the motherboard again... turned on the box and the sound came back again. Looking at the various fans it was not one but two fans.. one was in the powersupply and the other near off the CPU. The box is 6 years old so getting replacement parts isn't as easy as one would hope :).
The only grumpy part for me is that I had just gotten the box fully outfitted with Spacewalk before I left. I was planning on using it to snapbuild virtual machines for testing local services etc. I had just gotten it to the point of updating boxes when I left on Sunday... Well it looks like I will be saving up for another box again. Could be worse.. I could have forgotten to do backups.
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