Scott Dowdle's blog

The Linuxfest Northwest 2008 show is quickly approaching - April 26 & 27 in Bellingham, Washington. It happens to be the closest Linux show to Montana that I'm aware of. Last year Warren, Donnie, Ken and I went. It was a blast. Check out my report from last year if you missed it.

Anyhoo... several of us are going and I've even signed up for a presentation entitled OS Virtualization vs. Hardware Virtualization. I haven't put together the presentation yet but I have done about a half dozen related presentations over the last two years. I think with this one though, I'm going to concentrate less on specific products and more on how OS Virtualization has been making its way into the mainline Linux kernel (called CGroups or control groups).

If anyone is interested in attending the conference, please let me know ASAP. We currently have one vehicle going and one room... but we could easily expand that if need be.

Warren and I have attended three different Linux conferences in the past: Linux World Conference and Expo (once last year), Colorado Linux User Expo (twice back in the 90s - now defunct), and the Linuxfest Northwest (last year). Of the three LFNW, is the only completely free one and as such it has the strongest community feel to it. The schedule has been finalized... so check it out to see just how many things interest you... and don't forget about the exhibits either. There is a LOT there!

My wife is sick and will probably be hospitalized for a few days... so I won't be able to make the meeting tonight... so it has to be canceled. Sorry about the last minute notice but it is the best I could do. See you next month.

What to know why FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) and open standards are important? South African Minister of Public Service and Administration Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi does a wonderful job explaining in her opening remarks for the Idlelo African Conference on FOSS and Digital Commons. A text version of her speech is also available.

Let's hope that more politicians and decision makers around the globe become as informed as those in South Africa.

The Objective Observer wrote an article entitled, "Penguin Suicide Bombers: The Terrorism of Open Source". The article is quite inflammatory although along the way the author tries to justify his handle. In any event, I thought it important to give the author the benefit of the doubt and to try my best to set the record straight... or my version of it anyway... in as positive a way as possible. What follows are the two, somewhat quick emails (please forgive any typos) I sent in response to the article... oh, and I'll be happy to include any responses I get back from him if any.

I saw this first mentioned on LWN... but an employee from Red Hat named Bryan Che... who just happens to be the Red Hat product manager for a new Red Hat product, Red Hat Enterprise MRG... has made a request to the Fedora Project Board. The proposal is quite interesting... and given the last couple of sentences, perhaps you have figured it out already.

I use the SystemRescueCD a lot at work. My work study scoffed at me for actually running it from CD rather than a USB stick... because the USB stick is much faster. I bought a three pack of SanDisk Cruzer Micro 2GB USB thumb drives from CostCo for about $50. I followed the SystemRescueCD instructions and bingo it worked. Ok, it boots up a lot faster now.

So, now to apply it to Fedora and CentOS. Luckily Fedora has instructions. Following those instructions, I could boot Fedora 8 from USB.

I applied the Fedora method to the recently released CentOS 5.1 LiveCD and that worked too. I guess the same principle would apply to any LiveCD .iso you'd want to throw at it... including regular distro install media. They even have a program for Windows users.

Trinity Audio Group seems to have a really neat product on their hands called Indamixx. The hardware appears to be built by Samsung. Indamixx is a fairly small, mobile device that runs Linux and includes a nice suite of free audio programs for mobile live audio streaming.

Rusty Conover volunteered to give a presentation this month.Here's the title and description he provided:

Using Linux-based Cloud Computing to achieve scalable web hosting

Web sites are becoming bigger users of bandwidth every day so its getting harder to build an infrastructure that is scalable enough to handle serving thousands of visitors in parallel, especially when they all want to stream your videos on their high-bandwidth cable modems.

To do this you're probably going to pay a lot of money for a large internet connection that will sit idle most of the time along with all of the servers you'll need to fill that pipe. It would sure be great to have that infrastructure without having to pay for it, physically build it and then run it. The great thing is you don't have to anymore.

I will explain how I have solved this scaling problem using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to allow InfoGears to have bandwidth on demand and achieve needed scalability for our applications and client websites without a large effort in a extremely cost effective manner.

I'll explain how to use Apache 2.2, BIND and some Perl to make everything work together and result in a solution that is simple to use, scalable and reliable. So if your interested in how to lower your hosting costs, decrease the load on your web servers or just how to prepare to handle things when your videos go viral this will be a presentation for you.

Wow, that sounds very interesting. Please pass this along to anyone outside of the BozemanLUG who you think might be interested.

Want to know why Dell is offering Linux on desktops and laptops for home and small business? They've made a video.

I like how they say that Linux is easier to use in some cases than MacOS and Windows... and in some cases not. They don't do too bad of a job.

I think Lawrence Lessing does a great job with his explanation of why he is for Senator Obama... so much so, I'm sharing it.