I’ve registered for the linux.conf.au conference being held 18-23 January in Wellington. This is also a test of my feed to Planet LCA2010.

I think it is excellent that as part of the terms and conditions Australians are required to note that “New Zealand is a country in its own right”.

So, who else is going? It’ll be great, I’m sure.

I’m also going to the Kiwi Py Con on in Christchurch, this weekend coming. I’ll write more about it soon.

I’ve been running Fedora 11 at home and work for a three days now, and I am very impressed. With Linux being a very mature product and Fedora releasing twice a year, an upgrade isn’t the radical experience it was nine or ten years ago, when Linux was raw and new. Nowadays each release is an incremental improvement.

There are new versions of the familiar apps: Open Office 3.1.0, Firefox 3.5, Gnome 2.26.1, GCC 4.4.0, Python 2.6, Gimp 2.6, Pidgin 2.5.5. Open Office can open those annoying .docx files. Gnome’s menus seem a bit tidier. PulseAudio is meant to be much better. Will hopefully solve my friends’ sound problems, but it was alright on my laptop before, so I haven’t noticed that difference.

Boot times are faster. The goal for Fedora 11 was to be at the login screen in 20 seconds. On my laptop it takes 30 seconds, but that’s still pretty good. My laptop is a Dell D620 with, I’m very happy to report, suspend and resume working perfectly on it. Also fixed on my laptop is an annoying problem Fedora 9 had with simulated middle mouse button clicks. Now either the top two or the bottom two touchpad buttons can be used. Power usage is meant to be optimised, haven’t tested if this means I get an extended battery life yet.

The kernel installed is 2.6.29.4. This is a bit of a problem at work, as VMware-Player can’t build modules to run against this version. Ubuntu, openSuse and Gentoo users have also hit this problem. There are long, complicated, discussion forum threads with different patches which claim to fix things, but don’t work for me. Eventually VMware will catch up and release a new version of VMware-Player which will work with the 2.6.29 kernel. It’s a pain to wait, but that’s what you get with kernel code which doesn’t live with the rest of code in the kernel source tree.

Fedora 11 has the new ext4 filesystem format as default. This should make file access faster. I was working on ext4 support at my previous job for their product. I’m a bit surprised the Fedora installer (Anaconda) won’t allow the root filesystem to be ext4. ext4 can support a mix of on-disk structures (pind/dind/tind blocks or extents) and I thought this allowed Grub to still boot from it. Oh well, ext3 will do for /boot until Grub2 is finished (or the world ends, whichever comes first).

Lastly the fonts look fantastic. I’m not sure exactly what has changed there. Fedora has had nice fonts for a while, but text is looking very smooth these days. Though I did have problems with DDD (the GDB debugger front end). The DDD user interface hasn’t changed much for many many years and obviously can’t use the new fonts. It was displaying very large ugly letters, so I installed a bunch of the old font packages like xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi. That’s fixed DDD so it is at least acceptable to work with.

I’m pretty pleased with how the upgrade has gone. All up Fedora 11 seems a bit faster, more polished and nice and stable. I recommend giving it a try.

Started a new job today. And as a bonus I’ve been given a Solaris/Linux project to work on. Now just waiting to get a Solaris/Linux box to do it on.

Yesterday I received an (automated) email from Enrique Salem the CEO congratulating me on my three year anniversary and saying how valued I was, etc. etc. Today I’m told the our unit is shutting down and we’re being made redundant.

So, I’m now looking for a new job. Looking for Linux development in C++/C/Python. So if you know of any company needing to hire developers please let me know. Here is my resumé as a PDF or online as HTML. Thanks.

A quick look at some popular distros and what they’re up to:

SLES

SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) is Novell’s enterprise Linux distribution targeted at the business market.

It is a common mistake (which I sometimes make myself) to refer to both SLES and openSUSE as just “SUSE”, but these are different distros.  See below for openSUSE.

There is also a SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED), based on the same codebase as SLES.

Current stable release: SLES 10 (SP2).  ReiserFS is the default file system. ext3, XFS and JFS are also available.

Next release: SLES 11 some time in 2009.  (March 2009 was mentioned but later deleted on one Novell webpage).   ReiserFS will be replaced by ext3 as the default filesystem in SLES 11.

openSUSE

The openSUSE project is a community program sponsored by Novell.

Current stable release: openSUSE 11.1.  Uses 256byte inodes.  ext3 has been the default filesystem since this was changed from ReiserFS for openSUSE 10.2.

Next release due: openSUSE 11.2 planned for September 2009.

RHEL

RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is Red Hat’s enterprise Linux distro.  It is the most common Linux distro used in business.

There are also several other distros which are rebadged versions of RHEL such as Oracle Enterprise Linux, CentOS (Community ENTerprise OS), and WBEL (White Box Enterprise Linux).

Current stable release: RHEL 5.3.  RHEL 5.3 includes GFS2 (Global File System) clustered file system for storage area networks.

Next release: RHEL 5.4 due in August 2009.  RHEL 5.4 will standardise on KVM for virtualization although Xen will still be supported.

Fedora

Fedora is Red Hat’s community Linux distro.  Originally Red Hat used to produce just the one distro “Red Hat Linux”, but they decided they needed to reserve their trademark for the enterprise market. So Fedora was split off for the community and RHEL for the enterprise.  A large number of businesses and many of our customers use Fedora not RHEL though.  New Linux features appear first on Fedora before being adopted by RHEL.

Current stable release: Fedora 10.  Fedora 10 defaults to creating 256byte inodes and using LVM. XFS and ext4 are available.

Next release: Fedora 11 due for 26 May 2009.  ext4 is the default file system for Fedora 11, Btrfs will be introduced as experimental, ext3 and XFS will still be available.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is a community distro, but Cannonical also sells Ubuntu support for business customers.  Ubuntu is a fork of Debian, but is much easier to use and administer.  Motto is “Linux for Human Beings”.

Current stable release: Ubuntu 8.10.  Ubuntu 8.10 defaults to creating 256byte inodes.

Next release: Ubuntu 9.04 due for 23 April 2009.  The default file system for Ubuntu 9.04 will still be ext3 with ext4 available at installation as an option.

Thinstation

Thinstation is a small, simple yet very powerful Open Source “thin client” operating system.  It was designed as a thin client Linux distribution turn a PC a full-featured thin client.

Although no one is employed to work on Thinstation it has reasonably active development.  There are currently three branches of Thinstation being worked on.

Thinstation 2.2.2 is the stable version and was a bug fix release to 2.2.1.

Thinstation 2.3 is Beta.  I tried this out , but didn’t have much luck with it (pcnet32 wouldn’t work), so instead I upgraded the kernel in 2.2.1.  Thinstation 2.3 will have kernel 2.6.24.7.

Thinstation 2.4 is in Alpha. With this branch Trevor has changed the build process from running jailed inside another Linux to running on a virtual machine.  Thinstation 2.4 works just fine for me, but Trevor hasn’t yet made the build VM available, he says it is a “little large at the moment (6Gb)”.  I’m eager to get a copy of this.

Mandriva

Mandriva Linux (formerly MandrakeLinux) was once the popular “Linux for the masses” distro.  (Mandrake Linux est un système d’exploitation convivial.)  Then came Knoppix, then Ubuntu.  It still has a loyal following though.  We have customers using Ghost with Mandriva so I have done support for it.

Current stable release: Mandriva 2009.  Mandriva has used 256byte inodes since 2008.1.

Next release due: Mandriva 2009.1 planned for 29 April 2009.  This release will have ext4 available, but not the default.  ext4 is not yet supported for /boot file system.

Debian

The Debian Project is an association of individuals who have made common cause to create a free operating system.

Current stable release: 5.0 lenny.

Next release due: testing squeeze.

Asianux

Asianux is an enterprise Linux distribution developed by the Asianux Consortium consisting of: Red Flag Linux from China, Miracle Linux from Japan, Haansoft from Korea, VietSoftware from Vietnam, and WTEC of Thailand.

Current stable release: Asianux 3.0.

Next release due: unknown.