I've Joined the Gazzang Team!

A few weeks ago, I joined a fun, new start-up company here in Austin called Gazzang.  I was a little surprised that this was published in the form of a rather flattering press release :-)  Let's just say that my Mom was very proud!

I know that some of you in the Ubuntu community are wondering how that career change will affect my responsibilities and contributions to Ubuntu.  I'm delighted to say that I'll most certainly continue to contribute to Ubuntu and many of my upstream projects.  Gazzang is quite supportive of my work in both Ubuntu and open source.

Most directly, you should see me being far more active in my regular maintenance, development, bug triage, and support of eCryptfs.  Gazzang's core business is in building information privacy and data security solutions for the Cloud.  eCryptfs is at the heart of their current products, and in my new role as Gazzang's Chief Architect, we're working on some interesting innovations in and around eCryptfs.  A healthy, high-quality, feature-filled, high-performance eCryptfs is essential to Gazzang's objectives, and I'm looking forward to working on one of my real passions in eCryptfs!

More specifically, looking at the projects I maintain, I expect to continue to be very active in:

• eCryptfs (essential to my new job)
• byobu (mostly around tmux, and because hacking on byobu is fun and awesome :-)
• manpages.ubuntu.com and manpg.es (because that's how I read manpages)
• musica (because that's how I've streamed music since 1998)
• pictor (because that's how I've managed and shared pictures since 1998)

You'll probably see opportunistic development (nothing active, but when an opportunity or bugs spring up), including the usual bzr/launchpad dance, developing, testing, upstream releasing, packaging, and uploading to Ubuntu, of:

• bikeshed (apply-patch, bch, bzrp, col*, dman, pbget, pbput, pbputs, release, release-build, what-provides, what-repo, what-source, wifi-status)
• bogosec
• bootmail, rootsign
• cloud-utils (along with smoser)
• dotdee
• errno
• kvm-ok
• run-one, run-this-one, keep-one-running
• service
• ssh-import-id
• ... (plus some new stuff I haven't released yet!)

And finally, as prescribed by the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, I'm gracefully stepping away from a few other projects I've founded or maintained in the past.  I'll help out if and when I can, but for now I've transferred all of the necessary rights, responsibilities and ownership of:

• awstrial (to Canonical ISD)
• cloud-live (to Ante Karamatic)
• cloudfoundry (to the Canonical SI Team)
• orchestra (to the Ubuntu Platform Server Team)
• powernap (to Andres Rodriguez)
• testdrive (to Andres Rodriguez)

Finally, I must say that the last 4 years have been the most amazing 4 years of my entire 12 year professional career.  It's been quite rewarding to witness the fledgling Ubuntu Server of February 2008 (when I joined Canonical), and the tiny team of 5 grow and evolve to the 20+ amazing people now working directly on the Ubuntu Server.  And that list doesn't even remotely cover the dozens (if not hundreds!) of others around Canonical and the Ubuntu Community who contribute and depend on the amazing Server and Cloud distribution that is Ubuntu.

I'm really looking forward to my new opportunities around Gazzang and eCryptfs, but you'll still most certainly see me around Ubuntu too :-)  As crooned by The Beatles...

You say "Yes", I say "No". \\ You say "Stop" and I say "Go, go, go". \\ Oh no. \\ You say "Goodbye" and I say "Hello, hello, hello". \\ I don't know why you say "Goodbye", I say "Hello, hello, hello". \\ I don't know why you say goodbye, I say hello!

 Cheers,
:-Dustinhttp://www.gazzang.com

Ubuntu Cloud Live

This morning, Canonical's CEO Jane Silber is delivering the first keynote address at the incredible OpenStack Conference in Boston, MA.  I've spent the entire week here in Boston -- Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were dedicated to an Ubuntu-style developer summit, focusing on the next OpenStack release (code named Essex), set for release in early April.  This version of OpenStack will form the IaaS basis for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server in April 2012.

I saw a preview of Jane's slides yesterday evening, and I'm quite sad that I'm missing her talk (I'm writing this from the Boston/Logan airport on my way back to Austin, TX).  Jorge Castro will be posting a video of her talk as soon as he can.  I think you'll hear about Jane's vision of a Ubuntu's history of leadership as the best Host and Guest OS in the Cloud, and our revolutionary approach Service Orchestration in the Cloud.

I've also seen a sneak preview of a demo given at the end of the talk.  Clint Byrum and Adam Gandelman have worked around the clock producing a spectacular visualization of an Ubuntu Cloud at work.  In the front of the stage, we have a portable rack of servers (a 40-core Intel Emerald Ridge, a 24-core HP Proliant, a 16-core Dell Precision, with a System76 local Ubuntu mirror, and Cisco networking hardware).  We've used Ubuntu Orchestra to remotely install the systems, and we've deployed OpenStack to the rack.  Once OpenStack is running, Clint has a series of Hadoop jobs that he spins up and runs against dozens of instances on the local Nova compute node.  And for the real whiz-bang, Clint uses gource for dynamic visualization of the Hadoop cluster, the various nodes, and their relationships.  It is absolutely stunning to behold!

We are also giving away a few hundred top notch USB sticks, rubber coated with the Ubuntu brandmark.  Ask Robbie Williamson how much he enjoyed dd'ing several hundred ISO images :-)  What was he loading onto the stick, you ask?

Rewind back to May 2010, in a 5-minute lightning talk at UDS-Brussels, I demonstrated an Ubuntu LiveISO running the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and called it Cloud in your Pocket.  A bit later, I reworked that image to support OpenStack too and showed that at the OpenStack Design Summit in San Antonio.  I was delighted when a couple of the Canonical OEM Server developers (Ante Karamatic, Dave Medberry, and Al Stone) have picked that work up, and ported it forward to Ubuntu 11.10, Unity, and OpenStack Diablo.

So this morning's OpenStack Conference attendees are walking away with the Ubuntu Cloud Live USB experience!  For the rest of you, you can freely download the image yourself, and write that to your own USB stick, or even run it in a virtual machine!

To get started download the image from:

• http://people.canonical.com/~akarama/binary.img

We're going to re-roll that image for the 11.10 official GA release.  Next, write that image to a USB stick (assuming that USB drive is sdb):

sudo dd if=binary.img of=/dev/sdb

Or just run that image in a virtual machine using TestDrive:

testdrive -u ./binary.img

The image should boot much like an Ubuntu Desktop Live, and you should end up in a very minimal Unity environment, with a command line and a web browser, and not much else.  On the desktop, there's a text document with instructions for getting started.  We could have automated all of the cloud creation, but we figured it would be educational to leave a few steps for you (key generation, image registration, instance running).

You can watch it here:

• http://people.canonical.com/~kirkland/cloud-live.mpg

I'm hoping we contribute Ubuntu Cloud Live to the OpenStack Satellite projects (akin to Ubuntu Universe -- it's not part of Core OpenStack, but it's related and useful to some OpenStack users).

It's quite easy for you to modify and rebuild the Ubuntu Cloud Live image to your uses!  That looks something like this...

Install the live-build tools and grab the source code from launchpad.net/cloud-live.

sudo apt-get install live-build
bzr branch lp:cloud-live

Make your changes, if any.  And then build.

lb clean
lb build

You'll wait a while.  Internet connection speed and CPU/Memory will determine how long the build takes.  Eventually, you'll see a file called binary.img.  And there you go!  You have just re-built the Ubuntu Cloud Live image.

Enjoy!
:-Dustin

TestDrive, then and now

Less than a year ago, I introduced TestDrive, a convenient way of incrementally syncing ISOs from ubuntu.com, and running them in KVM, VirtualBox, or Parallels. It's a great way to do your ISO-testing, or just keep up with the Ubuntu release under development. I created the project for a couple of reasons:

1. To make it even easier to run Ubuntu in a virtual machine
2. To show off KVM (without the overhead of libvirt or virt-manager)
3. To make the daily development releases of Ubuntu safely usable by non-technical Ubuntu enthusiasts (who inevitably show up the week before release saying that they just tried the Beta or RC for the first time, and "by golly -- stop the release -- it's not ready!!!"

Well, TestDrive has come a long way -- mostly thanks to Andres Rodriguez, my Google Summer of Code student who has put a nifty GTK front end on TestDrive!

If you haven't tried the TestDrive GUI yet, please check it out. You should be able to install it directly from Maverick, or using the backported packages for Lucid from the PPA. With one command (or, now, one graphical button click), you can have any Ubuntu ISO up and running in a virtual machine!

Please let us know what you think! You can leave opinions here in the blog comments, but please file bugs against the project in Launchpad.

Also, I'd like to add a "file handler" in Gnome, such that you can right-click on an ISO, and select "Open with TestDrive". Can anyone tell me how to do this?

Cheers!

:-Dustin

TestDrive GTK Frontend Underway

I'm mentoring Andres Rodriguez for his Google Summer of Code project, for which he's putting a GTK graphical frontend on TestDrive.

It's coming along quite well. Check out the screenshots at Andres' blog, and follow its development at:

http://www.roaksoax.com/2010/06/gsoc-update-of-the-week-testdrive-pygtk-front-end-3

:-Dustin

ArsTechnica and LifeHacker Articles on TestDrive this Week!

Jorge Castro just pointed out that TestDrive was covered in both ArsTechnica and LifeHacker this week :-)

Check these out:

• http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/03/ubuntu-prerelease-testing-made-easy-with-testdrive.ars
• http://lifehacker.com/5496679/testdrive-virtualizes-brand+new-ubuntu-builds-for-easy-testing

Ubuntu Lucid Beta 1 releases today, and now is a great time to take it for a TestDrive and let us know what you think ;-)

:-Dustin

Have you taken Lucid for a testdrive yet?

Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is in Feature Freeze, and Alpha3 is right around the corner, releasing next week.

If you're running Ubuntu 9.04, 9.10, or 10.04, it's trivial to testdrive Lucid in a virtual machine, without modifying your current installation!

If you're already running Lucid, congrads! All you need to do is add the testdrive ppa, and install testdrive, and either kvm or virtualbox-ose.

Just pop open a terminal and run:

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:testdrive/ppa && \
sudo apt-get update && \
sudo apt-get install testdrive

Then you can either run testdrive from the command line, or use the menu, Applications -> System Tools -> Testdrive.


Then, a menu will pop up, with a menu of Lucid daily images. If you have previously downloaded any of these, you should see a timestamp of the cached file. If you run testdrive everyday, your cache will stay up-to-date, and the incremental download will be much faster!


Select one of the offered ISOs, or enter a URL to another one of your choosing, and you should be off and running. Help us make Lucid Lynx the best Ubuntu to date!

:-Dustin

Introducing Testdrive!

I'm pleased to introduce a new package I have created for Ubuntu called testdrive!

Testdrive makes it simple to run any Ubuntu release in a virtual machine, safely, and without affecting your current Ubuntu installation.

This is a great way to "try out" the Ubuntu release beyond your current version, before upgrading. For example, if you're still running Ubuntu 9.04, you could testdrive Ubuntu 9.10 before committing to the upgrade.

You could also testdrive a different flavor of Ubuntu, such as Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Netbook Remix, or the Ubuntu Server. This is great way of learning more about the Ubuntu galaxy, as well as introducing yourself, to the wide world of virtualization in Ubuntu.

I expect that testdrive will be very useful to Ubuntu developers, testers, and bug triagers during the Lucid development cycle, as these people will be able to test Lucid's daily ISOs throughout the cycle, and in particular at the release milestones for ISO-acceptance-testing.

Prerequisites

Testdrive can use either KVM or VirtualBox to host the virtual machine. You should have either one of these installed on your system. If you're using KVM, you need to have at least kvm-84, which is available in hardy-backports, intrepid-backports, jaunty, and karmic.

You should also have enough disk space available in your home directory to store one or more ISOs, roughly a 1 GB or so.

Installing Testdrive

To install testdrive:

• On Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10, just enable the testdrive PPA and install:
  
  https://launchpad.net/~testdrive/+archive/ppa
  sudo apt-get install testdrive
  
  
• On Ubuntu 8.04 and Ubuntu 8.10, you need to enable the backports archive so that you can install kvm-84, and then install testdrive from the PPA,
  https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuBackports
  https://launchpad.net/~testdrive/+archive/ppa
  sudo apt-get install testdrive
  

Running Testdrive

To run testdrive from the command line, you just need to provide the URL to an ISO that you want to test. This can be an http, ftp, rsync, or file style URL. The ISO itself will be cached in your ~/.cache/testdrive directory, such that subsequent runs will only need to perform incremental downloads.

From the command line you could do something like the following:

testdrive -u rsync://cdimage.ubuntu.com/cdimage/daily-live/current/karmic-desktop-i386.iso
testdrive -u http://mirrors.kernel.org/ubuntu-releases/9.10/ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso

You can also add some other configuration details in your own ~/.testdriverc file. Simply copy /etc/testdriverc to ~/.testdriverc and edit as you like. Once you have done so, you can simply launch testdrive from the menu, with:

• Applications -> System Tools -> Test Drive and Ubuntu ISO
  

Testdrive-GTK

Rick Spencer, Manager of the Ubuntu Desktop Team, has used quickly to draft a GTK front-end for testdrive. Hopefully, testdrive-gtk will make it into the archive for Lucid soon, and provide a nice, pointy/clicky way of choosing the Ubuntu release you'd like to testdrive.

UDS

I'm giving a plenary talk at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Dallas, Texas next week, where I plan to demo testdrive, as one example of what we can do with KVM and Virtualization in Ubuntu. If you have been reluctant to try Ubuntu Virtualization, testdrive is a really easy way to get started!

:-Dustin