Simon Lyall's Blog

Yesterday I installed EeeXubuntu on my Asus Eee PC. Xubuntu is a version of Ubuntu designed for low-specification computers while EeeXubuntu is a slightly tweaked version of that that installs some drivers and such for the Eee.

I was pretty impressed with EeeXubuntu ( probably pronounced “Easy-buntu” ), I followed the instructions and burned the ISO image on a flash drive. Then it was just a matter of pressing escape on boot up to make it boot from the drive instead of the normal internal drive. The EeeXubuntu install is also a live boot disk so I played around with it first to make sure I like it before I installed it over the top of the Xandros install my Eee came with.

The default desktop now looks like this (click to go to larger image):

and is pretty similar to a normal desktop install. The Xfce desktop doesn’t seem to be missing many features that I got with my normal Gnome desktop on Ubuntu so I am pretty happy so far. All the hardware (except the camera which I have not tested) works okay and both Suspend-to-RAM and Suspend-to-disk work. Boot times are a little slower but I am happy otherwise.

I partitioned the 4G disk with 500MB of Swap (very low priority) and the Operating System uses just over half of what is left. Even better I can use the normal Ubuntu software repositories so new software is easy to install

On the subject of my Eee I haven’t posted before about my “Eee Kit” which I carry around.

The kit comes in thick plastic bag with a zip (not zip-lock) to seal it and consists of the Eee power supply, a small mouse ($20) and a tin containing some headphones and a 4G flash drive. It all seals up nicely and takes about as much space in my bag as the Eee itself. About the only thing I miss would be a short piece of cat5 cable.

Other Items.

• I am currently reading The discovery of France by Graham Robb which is a fascinating book on how pre-WW1 “France was a land of ancient tribal divisions, prehistoric communication networks, and pre-Christian beliefs. French itself was a minority language.”
• A torrent of all Linux.conf.au 2008 talks and slides is available here (12GB).
• NZNOG 2008 has posted conference slides for Wednesday and Thursday/Friday along with videos (still being updated).
• The Sysadmin Miniconf slides are now up for Linux.conf.au 2008 and NZNOG 2008
• I recently got involved with the Mailop group, which is a list for Email Administrators.
• I’m currently working out my notice at my current job and going to start a new one in a weeks time. More details later. END

The last real day of Linux.conf.au 2008 was Friday. I had signed up to do a a lightning talk in the last session (see more below) so I ended up spending various breaks, writing and rehearsing that rather than the other stuff.

The Keynote today was about Python and Python 3000 by Anthony Baxter. While there have been a couple of complaints that the talk wasn’t good enough to be a keynote I was very please with it. It was of medium but accessible technical level about a major open source project which is used by many others. It was by a local who is a senior person in the project and it was well presented. It was also good to have something a bit more technical that the previous two keynotes. Interesting thing I learnt about was the Low Level Virtual Machine or LLVM

The prize draw had a weird/stage/disturbing moment when the organisers took back a prize from someone who had won it in the draw. I can see thinking but I am not sure if the right result was achieved.

First session was one of those nice ones where there were four talks I would like to have attended (I’ll download an watch later I guess) but I ended up going to Dave Airlie on Open Source Graphics Drivers. I went to this last year and he is a pretty good speaker. This year it was a pretty good survey of the current state of things and quite interesting and to a good extent very positive.

One thing I’d really like to see would be a site with a nice summary of the current support of various video cards in Linux. This might be good for people looking to buy new cards so they could know which ones have closed drivers, which open, which are shipping in distributions and how well they work.

Session two again had a few options but I went to see the talk on Suspend to Disk, quite good again although a little over my head. The problem really seems to be at the unsolved stage right now with kexec as a possible option but that still only solves half the problem.

After lunch I went to Keith Packard’s X driver talk. Once again it was a bit of a survey of current status (with a bit about Intel releasing docs at the start) which is good for people like me who aren’t seriously into this but like a survey of where things are currently up to.

The last main talk I saw was from Luke Kanies about Puppet and resource abstract in System management. Nice talk on an area I am especially interested in these days although I guess I don’t need as much convincing as some people.

One thing I took back from this year’s LCA is that running servers like people did 15 years ago doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s not just the big boys but just about everyone with more than half a dozen (and perhaps less) servers should be using config mngt to administer them. No less than 3 speakers at the Sysadmin Miniconf said that if they have a server to install or re-install they jump jumpstart it to a simple install and use their Config Mngt programs (Puppet in 2 cases) to install the reset of the software and config. 15 Minutes from bare metal is all it should take.

On the other hand where I work I’d be lucky to open the ticket to have a box restored in 15 minutes. It could take hours (or more) for it to actually happen. While Luke (and others) have done a lot of work convincing many that this sort of thing is now “best practice” there are still many places prefer to run things the way they always have. I suspect a few of those places are going to have a lot of trouble competing with those that do keep up.

I can’t find the quote but (from memory) one of the speakers said that ten percent of the total global IT spending in 2008 was going to be made by the top 20 providers ( Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc) on Data centers and computers to fill them. These companies, the people they sell to and their imitators are the ones are going to deliver IT infrastructure so quickly and cheaply that traditional IT depts (and companies that depend on them) won’t be able to keep up.

After the last of the talks there was a lightning talk session in the main hall. This was quite well attended ( at least 350 people) and featured some pretty good talks.

My talk was on a protocol that could be used by speech recognition programs to talk to each other. It is about 32 minutes into the video just after the talk by Pia Waugh. Looking at it I didn’t do too bad but obviously wasn’t anywhere near as good as some of the speakers.

It was a little disappointing to see that many of the Lightning talk speakers were quite experienced speakers like Pia and Jeff Waugh, Rusty Russell etc rather than people we don’t normally see. However some of the speakers were new and also the regulars delivered some very good talks.

The evening event was the “Google Party” which was a BBQ and drinks in a covered area of the University. Reasonable nice I guess although I found it hard to mix and ended up going back to Trinity fairly early. Talking to people there was good although the Sept 11th Conspiracy Theory guy was creepy and got on my nerves. I really have no time for kooks and nutters and it is a shame that even LCA has it’s share of them

I started out Thursday by going to the keynote by Stormy Peters. It was a little less crowded getting seated this time around. A good keynote overall on what motivates people to participate in open source projects and how that interacts with companies paying them.

First main talk I went to was about “Memory-Efficient and Fast Websites — Pick Two!” which by Malcolm Tredinnick was a very interesting talk although I did know a good percentage of what he said already. However I picked up some links to tools I didn’t know about already and some good tips on best practice.

One big problem was that the talk was very crowded, part of the problem with this was that LCA this year didn’t have enough large rooms to go around. So while the main Copland theatre could hold 493 people the others maxed out at 100-150 each. This meant that it took less than 25 percent of the attendees to fill up one of these rooms ( from just 5 streams ). I guess that the organisers just have to go with what rooms they have but future organisers should probably try to have at least 3 rooms holding 200-250 people for a 600 person conference (with one of these holding 400 plus ).

The other part of the problem was that Rusty got the largest room and then spent 3 days scaring away as many attendees as possible by telling them how much expertise was required. I suspect the organisers had a “deer in headlights” moment or two with room allocations for this section and decided that Rusty would probably be the most popular. However as I stated above the big disparity in room sizes put them in this tough position.

The other thing I got slightly annoyed about in the talk was the couple who re-arranged several other people in order to sit next to each other during the talk. I really think that you could have survived being a couple of metres apart from an hour or two ( especially since you didn’t talk or touch during the talk except during the break ) rather than shuffling other people ( not me ) around. You really should remember that you are ( I hope ) independent thinking entities not some creepy hive mind.

Anyway enough blog bitchiness. Next I went to a talk about Speech and Braille computer outputs by Jason White. A pretty good talk with some interesting bits, in a survey of the current state of the technology. I think many people were surprised that a Refreshable Braille display costs some $8000 dollars. I think there are a couple of efforts starting to happen to produce lower cost alternatives.

Val Henson next did a talk on chunkfs which I liked. Not too technical for me to follow ( Everything I know about the Kernel is from the Linux Weekly News ) but it seemed to cover the details in the serious Kernel people were interested in.

Afterwards I went to a talk about netconf by Martin Krafft . The netconf project is intended to replace ifupdown with something more event driven to handle the more dynamic environment systems (especially laptops) live in these days with networks coming and going dynamically and everything being auto-configured.

While most people at the talk seemed to agree that something had to be done there seemed to be many that felt that NetworkManager might be a better tool rather than Debian developing one of their own. Personally I said that creating a whole event-driven system seemed to be a duplication of what upstart is doing. Martin replied that he didn’t think upstart was getting into Debian any time soon which I assume is some heavy political issue since Martin maintains the package for Debian.

Last up was David Jones talking about maintaining the fedora kernel. Generally quite interesting and entertaining with minimal flashes of nudity.

For dinner I went to the Professional Delegates Networking Session ( confusing referred to as the PDNS ) at the Melbourne Museum‘s CSIRAC exhibition. We got buses there but it turned out that the Museum is right next to Lygon Street it it wasn’t really that far away. The sessions was the usual sort of thing with nibble and drinks ( not much coke though ) and finished around 9:30 or 10 (forget which). There was a bit of confusion with some people waiting for buses back ( there were none but nobody had been told ) before everybody either walked back of to the Google Student party. I ended up walking back ( ice cream on the way ) with a couple of others

Wednesday is the first day of the main conference with the main speakers and five parallel tracks. First up was Bruce Schneier doing a talk on security theatre, security reality etc. The talk was without slides which is fairly unusual and I found it a little hard to concentrate ( I tried shutting my eyes even) but good and interesting content.

After that was the first of the giveaways. It has been traditional for the last few LCA’s for prizes ( usually laptops or gadgets) to be given away to people who are at the keynotes in order to encourage people to attend, if you are not there when you name is called out then then next person is called.

This morning (and later in the morning) several OLPC’s were handed out to various mostly excited people. Later several several of the winners gave them away to people they thought could better use them which I think is a very good spirit.

For the first session I ended up going to a the GTK/Gnome programming tutorial which was interesting and helpful to novice programmers such as myself. Then after dithering between a talk on the XFS File system ( I had talking to the presenter, Dave Chinner the previous night and it sounded interesting) and a NSS speedup talk I ended going to the Kernel Report by Jonathan Corbet of Linux Weekly News , interesting but probably not as good as the first session since I read his column every week already.

For the next session there were several good talks listed and I went to one by Dirk Hohndel of Intel which was advising people on how to work with hardware vendors and giving a bit of an insiders view from hardware vendors of open source. Interest again and he definitely indicated that some of the vendors (especially video cards and wireless) had a lot of IP tied up in drivers which they would not be going away while most others could probably be worked with.

The last talk was a little disappointing, I went to Carl Worth’s talk on X acceleration but found there wasn’t a lot of content. It was sort of a rundown of 5 years or so of history followed by a summary of where their effort was up to. Probably could have been compressed to about 5 minutes.

As a sidenote I found that I was getting quite a few questions about my Eee at the conference so I got to practice my tour. There were at least 20 other people with one and many of them had install alternative desktops on them already. Asking around I’ll probably install the eeexubuntu version of the the xubuntu desktop.

The Penguin dinner this year was a little different in that it was held at Melbourne Night Market which is a big outdoor food hall (Which slightly reminded my of the Hawker centres I saw in Malaysia). There was a bit of confusion with the organisation at the start with a giant line forming to one of the bars when there were 3 others just around the corner along with all the food. However once that was sorted out people seemed happy. The arrangement was that were were given 8 $5 tickets to buy food and drink with at the stalls inside.

I picked a German hot dog, some vegetarian Indian and a middle eastern meat sandwich which all tasted pretty good and left me full. However as Mary Gardiner mentioned there wasn’t as much mixing as previously and I ended up leaving a little early. All wasn’t lost however since I had a very interesting conversation with a Sysadmin from Wollongong about jobs, technology, etc.

I forgot to mention that on Tuesday night I ended up sitting near Andrew Tridgell who had a Sony Reader that he was showing people. It looked quite cool and apparently has a bit less DRM than usual with Sony. I try and avoid buying Sony where possible though due to their bad reputation