Linux

Here's a video presentation by Greg Kroah Hartman on the development model of the Linux kernel. There are some interesting stats to be found.

I was in the middle of doing an rsync backup of the server when I lost communications with it. I did a few traceroutes and filed a trouble ticket with the colocation service. Follow along to see what happened.

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 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.

Here is a little MiniMe 2008 (296mb) you can play with and customize the way you want. Comes with 2.6.22.15 kernel, Alsa 1.0.15 and a very basic KDE 3.5.8 desktop. Also included on the livecd are ndiswrapper support files supporting various wireless network cards and more…
Announcement

FireHOL allows you to configure your firewall using a "high-level" language that anyone can read. Meanwhile, it allows all the power and flexibility you have come to expect from iptables.

I found this video on Google Video very interesting and decided to share it.

The State of the Linux Kernel by Andrew Morton
Google Tech Talks - May 1, 2007

Doc Searls is challenging the big OEMs to think outside the Microsoft PC box. It was three or four years ago that Searls observed that Linux is not a platform. Here he is back riffing on that theme...
Thinking Past Platforms: the Next Challenge for Linux

Towards the end of the article he challenges us in the FOSS community to stop thinking of and advocating Linux as an alternative to Windows/OS X. This is a very good point and one I, personally, should have thought of a long time ago.