Open Source > Linux > LQ
The travel madness that was April is mostly behind me now and both blogging and podcasting should return to their previous frequencies. Thanks for the patience.
–jeremy
Sidenote: I think I liked the posting interface in WP pre-2.5 much better, but maybe I just need to get acclimated to the new look.
I’ve been traveling quite a bit recently so have not been able to blog nearly as much as I’d like. I expect that to continue through most of April, but I’ll do my best to blog more than I have been. Things should calm down a bit starting in May. If you’ll be attending Lug Radio Live in San Francisco or the MySQL Expo in Santa Clara next week and would like to connect, let me know. I had planned to attend the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit this week but had to change plans at the last minute. The event was great last year and I was really looking to attend it again. Hopefully next year. Lastly, quite a few people have pinged my about the podcast. I had planned to do one yesterday, but it didn’t happen. I now plan to do one on the 10th. Stay tuned… and thanks for the patience.
–jeremy
I’ll be in San Francisco for the next few days to attend the Open Source Business Conference. I was considering attending the Microsoft “Open Source ISV Forum”, but it seems they declined my application to attend 
If you’ll be in the area and would like to meet up, drop me a line.
–jeremy
I recently mentioned that LQ will be sponsoring a number of upcoming Linux and Open Source related conferences. I’m extremely happy to report that we are now able to give away a completely free conference pass to some of them. The first one is the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo, which is a $1,199.00 value. To be eligible, simply post in this thread explaining how you work with MySQL or how you’re involved in the MySQL community along with why you’d like to attend the event. We’ll randomly select a winner from the eligible entries. We only have a single pass to give away, so please make sure you are able to attend the event before entering. Thanks, and good luck.
Note: We also have some gratis LugRadio Live USA 2008 tickets available. See my previous post if you’re interested.
–jeremy
LinuxQuestions.org is proud to sponsor a variety of Linux and Open Source related conferences and expos. The list of events coming up over the next couple months is significant, so I wanted to post about a few of them here.
OSBC
Attend OSBC March 25-26, 2008 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco and connect with the best and brightest in the open source community, engage with your peers in thought-provoking sessions and networking functions, and see the latest vendors on display in the open source showcase.
You can register here. I attended this event last year and it was an interesting one. If you’re in the area and doing commercial Open Source, I’d recommend it. I will be attending the event again this year.
MySQL Conference & Expo
Fast-paced sessions, guru-programming advice, in-depth tutorials, late night hacking…the MySQL Conference & Expo packs a wealth of big ideas, know-how, and connections into 4 concentrated days and nights. Learn how to create the best database applications, tools, and software through expert instruction and hands-on learning at the MySQL Conference & Expo, April 14-17, Santa Clara, CA. Use code mys08linq to save 15% off registration fees.
I attended this event last year and had a great time. With the recent acquisition of MySQL AB by Sun, I am really looking forward to attending this year.
LugRadio Live USA 2008
LugRadio Live USA 2008 brings San Francisco the unique atmosphere of LugRadio Live UK, an event that has developed a strong reputation for providing a range of topics about free software, Open Source, digital rights, technology and more, a compelling list of speakers, exhibitors and birds of a feather sessions, and wrapping it all in a unique, fun, loose, social and inclusive event, which is often described as combining the atmosphere of a rock concert and a computer conference.
LugRadio Live USA 2008 brings this unique atmosphere to the USA, with around 30 speakers, over 20 exhibitors, an eclectic range of BOF sessions, and plenty of additional sessions such as our debate discussion panel, a showcase of five minute talks, tech demos, and of course a live recording of LugRadio in front of an audience.
This will be the first LRL I have attended and I’m really looking forward to it. Would you like to attend LugRadio Live USA 2008? I’m happy to announce that I’m able to give away a couple of tickets gratis. The first three people to contact me, confirming that they’d like to attend, will get a free ticket.
–jeremy
The polls are closed and the results are in. You can view the detailed results here, but I’ll include a list of winners at the end of this post for convenience. This was the seventh annual LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards and we’ve set a record for participation each and every year. We had some extremely close races this year (in fact just .41% separated first and second in one case). We also had a couple of multi-year winners unseated this year. The biggest surprise for me was probably how well VirtualBox did, but that may just be a result of how much marketing is behind some of the other virtualization players. Recent Sun acquisitions MySQL and VirtualBox were both winners. Congratulations to all nominees. Winners should expect an email from me over the next couple days.
| Desktop Distribution of the Year | Ubuntu (30.83%) |
| Server Distribution of the Year | Debian (30.30%) |
| Live Distribution of the Year | KNOPPIX (22.88%) |
| Database of the Year | MySQL (54.36%) |
| Office Suite of the Year | OpenOffice.org (89.50%) |
| Browser of the Year | Firefox (74.03%) |
| Desktop Environment of the Year | KDE (52.08%) |
| Window Manager of the Year | Compiz (33.65%) |
| Messaging App of the Year | Pidgin (53.90%) |
| Mail Client of the Year | Thunderbird (53.72%) |
| Virtualization Product of the Year | VirtualBox (41.58%) |
| Audio Media Player Application of the Year | Amarok (57.37%) |
| Audio Authoring Application of the Year | Audacity (68.24%) |
| Video Media Player Application of the Year | mplayer (41.78%) |
| Video Authoring Application of the Year | mencoder (24.21%) |
| Multimedia Utility of the Year | K3b (63.34%) |
| Graphics Application of the Year | GIMP (69.15%) |
| Network Security Application of the Year | nmap (24.95%) |
| Host Security Application of the Year | SELinux (30.69%) |
| Monitoring Application of the Year | Nagios (38.58%) |
| Windows on Linux App of the Year | Wine (84.76%) |
| IDE/Web Development Editor of the Year | Eclipse (22.29%) |
| Shell of the Year | bash (87.33%) |
| Text Editor of the Year | vi/vim (36.37%) |
| File Manager of the Year | Konqueror (38.00%) |
| Open Source Game of the Year | Battle for Wesnoth (21.74%) |
| Programming Language of the Year | Python (21.78%) |
–jeremy
As a follow up to this post, the main LQ site is now being served off the new infrastructure. The move was relatively painless and few people should have been impacted. The site should be a bit faster now as well as quite a bit more fault tolerant. If you notice any issues, please let me know ASAP.
–jeremy
(photos courtesy of John Stanforth via Flickr)
I’m back from SCALE 6X and finally just about caught up. SCALE was once again an outstanding time, Ilan and the entire crew put on a great expo. The speaking lineup was interesting/informative, the networking events were good, the network was stable, the expo floor was lively and I even made it out of the hotel this year. SCALE is definitely something I plan on making a year trip. Next year I may bring a recording device that Ted introduced me to, and put the content on LQ Radio. I ended up running the Open Source Jobs BOF on Saturday and was quite surprised to see that nearly the entire room was employers looking to hire. The few people who were looking for jobs had many to choose from. While there is a job slowdown right now in many markets, it doesn’t appear that Open Source is one of them. I was also able to participate in the “Weakest Geek” competition on Saturday night, along with Jono, Ken, Ted, Anthony and Don. The really smart people were the first to go, and in the end it came down to Jono and myself 
It was fun and hopefully the crowd enjoyed it.
Attending SCALE really makes me want to consider doing something similar here in New York, but I’m not sure that I have the time to do it right. There just aren’t enough quality shows here on the east coast. It’s an idea I’ll have to toss around a bit more.
–jeremy
As I previously mentioned, I’ve been working on moving LQ to an entirely new and updated infrastructure. Everything was going smooth and the project was actually ahead of schedule. The LQ Wiki, LQ ISO and LQ Radio are already being served by the new machines. I decided to implement Munin for performance monitoring. Like many related tools, it uses rrdtool for graphing. After a bit of debugging, it turns out that OCFS2 doesn’t support mmap yet, so all RRD writes are failing. In this particular case I can get around the problem easy enough, but I know applications (BDB comes to mind, but I am sure there are plenty of others) use mmap, so I’m wondering what else is going to fail. A post from an Oracle engineer on ocfs2-users from June 2007 said mmap support was coming soon, but I can’t find an ETA anywhere and am running the latest version. Aside from this snag, I’ve been really happy with OCFS2.
–jeremy
I am happy to report that LQ is getting a brand new infrastructure and moving to a new data center. This has been in the works for a while, but implementation is now well under way. The new site should be both faster and more reliable. LQ Radio has already been moved to the new platform and can be used for testing the new setup. If you have any issues with LQ Radio, please let me know ASAP.
For those interested in the technical details… We’re now using nginx to load balance multiple back end apache servers. All content is being served off of an OCFS2 iSCSI partition. We’re sticking with the same master/slave MySQL replication setup that has been in production for years, although we are moving to MySQL 5.0.x now. If there are any other specific questions people are interested in, I’d be happy to answer them.
–jeremy
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