Home » Monthly archive

August 2009

Moved away from the Trac frontpage

puppetmanaged.org is no longer using Trac as it's front page. We're looking into options to manage all modules using one issue tracker. Meanwhile, the site has moved to Drupal as you can see.

Tomorrow's event: Open Source 101

This night, I'm preparing the slidedeck for an Open Source 101 course; a course for Account Managers and junior System Administrators that do get the occasional "Open Source?" question (they get that a lot BTW), or have to deal with Debian Sarge systems that run that one piece of core infrastructure (such as anti-spam and anti-virus for the entire mail environment, or routers, or proxy servers, or web servers, or ... you name it... :P)

On tonights agenda, also;

  • Building a stack on top of Ruby 1.9.1-p243
  • Getting my own Koji back up and running (it used dist-f7-updates to build for dist-f11-rebuild-ruby_1.9.1, and no reference to dist-f7-updates anywhere in the database or on the filesystem)
  • Working through the humongous list of bugs assigned to me on Red Hat's Bugzilla

Good night everyone!

#needcoffee, #needsleep, #needbeer, #needraise

The LiveCD and it's space constraints

I don't have to tell you about Fedora's LiveCDs... you know what they are and where to get them ;-)

However, the original thought of a Fedora LiveCD was to be a perfect show-case of what Fedora could do. We would have different types of LiveCDs to show off Linux in general and Fedora specifically to people with different interests.

It was supposed to be a perfect show-case no  matter how you looked at it. Then came Spins, the concept that anyone could create his/her own version of Fedora by making it appeal to a certain type of audience. We've seen many, many great successes in that area (Electronic Lab Spin, AOS Spin, Education Spin, XFCE Spin, KDE Spin, GNOME (or "Desktop") Spin), and we're getting even more specific Spins requests (Haskell Spin entirely focussed on Haskell, Security Spin with audit tools).

The idea of perfect show-case live media for users to try and experience has really lifted off, and ever since the "Install to hard-drive" option was implemented we (the Fedora Project) have often recommended using a LiveCD or LiveDVD to install Fedora with (though I don't necessarily agree with that).

Either way though, back to the original point of this blog post, the Live CD version comes with a few constraints; such as space. There's a limited amount of space available on a CD. Even though the actual ext3/ext4 filesystem is being squashed, I feel like all LiveCD Spins have been struggling to fit on a CD ever since the thought of a particular type of spin was conceived.

As such, I wanted to appeal to the original thought of the live media; it is supposed to be a perfect show-case. Does that mean we can strip off documentation (--excludedocs)? It might. Does that mean we can strip off locales (*.mo)? It might.

It seems much more valuable to have live media for every type of Spin for every locale someone is willing to put an effort in than it is to remove applications we think are valuable to the perfect show-case usecase of live media. This however is a very large investment in composing, storing and distributing the live media. Luckily, you can easily spin and remix your own version.

But also, does that mean we can drop CD versions and go full-sized DVDs for all Spins? It might, but I don't think that we should. I think it's much more valuable to strip off the things we don't need (additional documentation, additional locales), and have people opt-in to get their own locale or DVD sized live media by creating their own, then it is to exclude the CD live media audience.

That being said, I don't know what the gain is of excluding documentation and/or excluding additional locales. I guess that depends on various factors. I guess I would need to come up with some numbers. Let's see what I can do there...

I now have a colocated box of my own

I now have a colocated box of my own. Well, not entirely my own, but the account is registered in my name and my good friend Stefan Hartsuiker has been kind enough to provide the hardware. We're both paying half of the costs but I'll most likely be the one using the colocation the most ;-)

So, over the next few days (weeks?) I'll be moving stuff around, such as the anaconda repositories, my GIT repositories, puppetmanaged.org, etc, etc, etc, and maybe finally I can shut down one or two of the 13 boxes I have running at home.

I'll be as careful as humanly possible with redirecting stuff from one location to the other but keep your eyes out for anything weird and let me know if something ends up broken.