Entries Tagged 'GNU/Linux' ↓

Mark Shuttleworth names Ubuntu 11.04 (the April, 2011) scheduled release  of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution as “Natty Narwhal” in a pretty poetic piece, where he also passingly alludes to Russia having the only spaceship in service post the shuttle retirement.

And so, we come swiftly to a conclusion: allow me to introduce the Natty Narwhal, our mascot for development work that we expect to deliver as Ubuntu 11.04.

The Narwhal, as an Arctic (and somewhat endangered) animal, is a fitting reminder of the fact that we have only one spaceship that can host all of humanity (trust me, a Soyuz won’t do for the long haul to Alpha Centauri). And Ubuntu is all about bringing the generosity of all contributors in this functional commons of code to the widest possible audience, it’s about treating one another with respect, and it’s about being aware of the complexity and diversity of the ecosystems which feed us, clothe us and keep us healthy. Being a natty narwhal, of course, means we have some obligation to put our best foot forward. First impressions count, lasting impressions count more, so let’s make both and make them favourable.

via Mark Shuttleworth » Blog Archive » N-imal?.

Interestingly, Narhwal pictures seem to be pretty rare on the Internet. Here is a one hosted at National Geographic:

I was searching for some nice free (could be free as in beer or free as in freedom) fonts for my Ubuntu system.

Found a nice set of articles at: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/tag/typography/ and they pointed me to the awesome “The League of Moveable Type”

NavankurIT, a new age IT consulting organisation focused on Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for the Indian Micro, Small and Mediyum Enterprises is looking for young and dynamic students or fresh college graduates as interns for an in-house project. More details are available at http://www.navankurit.in/index.html#internship OR http://bit.ly/aUDIZh

Found a bunch of articles on C programming, especially about the standard library, linkers and loaders. These tell us about stuff that goes on under the hood and is generally glossed over, especially in formal BE courses, where one is supposed to learn and understand these things. We have an unfortunate situation that few people know how to use gcc from the command line and fewer still know how to use a command line debugger.

These articles that I got from a Slashdot article are:

• Hello from a libc-free world! (Part 1) from the ksplice blog. The article explains a lot that goes on under the hood.
• A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux

  “This document explores methods for squeezing excess bytes out of simple programs. (Of course, the more practical purpose of this document is to describe a few of the inner workings of the ELF file format and the Linux operating system. But hopefully you can also learn something about how to make really teensy ELF executables in the process.)”

These articles look to good, interesting and well written. For those interested more on this topic, do not miss Peter van der Linden's amazing book on C – “Expert C Programming”, now also available in an economical Indian edition. BTW, for anyone looking for technical books in Bangalore, your search stops at Tata Book House in the sprawling campus of the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. Another book for those interested in the esoteric topic of linkers and loaders is the 1999 book on the subject: “Linkers and Loaders” written by John R. Levine. The draft manuscript is available on the site, but the Indian edition (if you can find it) is surprising cheap.

P.S.: Sorry for a broken link earlier.

A challenge to create a low cost “distributed cluster storage system” described as:

• Data server: 2 units (appliances/servers) that each have a 4+ drives in a RAID5 disk set (3 active, 1 hot spare). These 2 units can be active/passive or active/active I don’t care. These two units should mirror each other in in real-time. If 1 unit fails for any reason the other picks up the load and carries on without any delay or hang time on the clients. If a unit fails, when it comes back up, I want the data to be re-synced automatically. Then the unit should “come back on-line” (assuming its normal state is active) after it is synced. It would be even more ideal if the data servers could be 1-N instead of just 1-2.
• Data clients: Each cluster node machine (the clients) in the server farm (CentOS 5.4 OS) will mount 1 or more data partitions (in read/write mode) provided by the data server(s). Multiple clients will mount the same partition at the same time in r/w, so network file locking is needed. If the a server goes down (multiple HD failure, network issue, power supply, etc) the other server takes over 100% of the traffic and the client machines never know.
• Linux CentOS will be used on the cluster nodes.

To re-cap:

• 2 data servers mirroring each other in real time.
• Auto fail over to the working server if one fails (without the clients needing to be restarted, or even being interrupted).
• Auto re-sync of the data if a failed unit comes back on-line, when the sync is done the unit goes active again (assuming its normal state is active).

Article continues to explain what has been tried and the results not achieved …

via Storage Cluster: A Challenge to LJ Staff and Readers | Linux Journal.

It has been a long time since I last posted – more than 3 months. In the interregnum, much water has flowed under the bridge – I have a new old job, having re-joined Yahoo! as a Service Engineering Architect at the Bangalore center, where I am involved with Yahoo!’s Search Advertising business. It is a real pleasure to be back amongst old friends with a lot of freedom to be who you are and do what you want. Being an architect allows one to play with systems and generally freak out.

Soon, after joining I got my MacBook pro replaced with a plain-jane HP laptop, promptly installing the 64-bit build of Karmic Koala and its a breeze. I recently sorted out a problem with  the default DHCP client – dhcp3, that is extremely well-integrated into the networking susbsystem and Network-Manager. I have realised that Network-Manager has come a long way with being able to connect to wireless on boot (without X) and it would be a shame to replace it with the old mechanisms to solve the simple issue of automatically setting the hostname to what DHCP gives out. A search for this turned up many forums which  suggested replacing dhcp3 with dhcpcd, but that might have meant forgoing Network-Manager, something I wasn’t really keen on. Some of these solutions are available at:  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=71587 , the last post of which pointed me to: http://lugwash.org/linux-users/200312/0127.html that I have used as a starting point. There is a bug open about this on Launchpad (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/dhcp3/+bug/90388)  which says the following:

This cannot be enabled by default in dhcp client. X becomes very angry if you change the hostname underneath it, so this should only be done at boot time, not when changing the lease at runtime.

Could someone point me to why X gets angry?

So, here is what I did to get the laptop to set the hostname to what the DHCP server provides. The solution is based on the fact that dhcp3 runs certain scripts in the /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/ directory and consists of writing a small script that resides in that directory. The script follows below. Note the “\]\]” on line 29 (highlighted) – it is to prevent one of the WP plugins from converting that to a Wiki link

#!/bin/bash

# Filename:     /etc/dhcp3/dhclient-exit-hooks.d/dhcp_set_hostname
# Purpose:      Used by dhclient-script to set the hostname of the system
#               to match the DNS information for the host as provided by
#               DHCP.
# Depends:      dhcp3-client (should be in the base install)
#               hostname (for hostname, again, should be in the base)
#               bind9-host (for host)
#               coreutils (for cut and echo)
#

# To enable this script set the following variable to "yes"
RUN="yes"

if [ "$reason" != BOUND ] && [ "$reason" != RENEW ] \
&& [ "$reason" != REBIND ] && [ "$reason" != REBOOT ]
then
 return
fi

# $new_host_name contains the FQDN. We are only interested in the hostname part. FQDN stuff will be taken care of in the resolv.conf section

if [ "$RUN" = "yes" ]
then
 new_hostname=$(echo $new_host_name | cut -d '.' -f 1 | sed -e 's/\.$//')
 if [ -s /etc/hostname ]
 then
   if \[\[ ${new_hostname} != ${old_hostname} ]]
   then
     hostname $new_hostname
     echo $new_hostname > /etc/hostname
   fi
   else
     hostname $new_hostname
     echo $new_hostname > /etc/hostname
   fi
fi

# And that _should_ just about do it...

Any comments to improve this are most welcome.

for the “Karmic Koala” to show its face.

InfoWorld’s Open Source Hall of Fame recognizes the 36 most useful and important free open source software projects in history (and today)

Every year InfoWorld painstakingly selects its Bossie Award winners — the best open source software for business — and every year we have shamefully neglected the very cream of the open source crop. While we’ve awarded the Dojos, Xens and SugarCRMs, we’ve ignored Linux, GNU and the *BSDs — because, well, don’t their excellence and importance go without saying? In other cases, where open source giants did receive our award (Snort and Wireshark come to mind), a “mere” Bossie almost seems like faint praise.

This year we strive to make amends. In advance of our 2009 Bossies (check InfoWorld.com on Monday, Aug. 31), we finally give the true legends of open source their just and overdue due. No longer will we neglect the superlative and truly essential for the sake of the merely excellent and highly valuable. In recognition of the greatest open source software projects of all time, we bring to you the InfoWorld Open Source Hall of Fame.

via The greatest open source software of all time – Network World.

Looks Interesting and has a cool logo too

The developers have released version 1.0 of the XtreemFS distributed file system. The result of a research project funded by the EU, XtreemFS is designed for distributed data management in grids, but is also meant to simplify accessing local files over the internet. It’s easy to set up, supports RAID-0 (striping) over different machines and file replication over the network, encrypts data, and provides security mechanisms to ensure only authorised users can access shared files.

Unlike sharing via NFS or SMB/CIFS, the file system can extend over several servers, provides security mechanisms, and is optimised for use over slow and not totally reliable internet connections. The file system runs in user space (via FUSE under Linux, via Dokan under Windows), so it can do without drivers or a kernel module. Linux and Windows are supported on the client side, and a Mac OS X client is under construction. The server runs under Linux and Solaris, and the software is licensed under the GPLv2.

via Distributed file system for the internet – News – The H Open Source: News and Features.

Videos from the Embedded Linux Conference 2009

… the 2009 edition of the Embedded Linux Conference, which took place in San Francisco, on April 6-8. In spite of the weak economy, this event was once again a success. It attracted major developers from the embedded Linux community, as well as participants from all over the word.

…

These videos were shot by Satoru Ueda and Tim Bird (Sony), and by Thomas Petazzoni and Michael Opdenacker (Free Electrons). … the videos are released with a Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 3.0 license.

via ELC 2009 videos – Free Electrons blog.