I wrote an article on Byobu for the Ubuntu 9.10 issue of Linux Identity Magazine.
The article is in full color, with lots of screenshots. If you're interested in Byobu, or generally in Ubuntu 9.10, I suggest you pick up a copy! There are several other interesting articles, and also comes with Ubuntu 9.10 DVDs. http://www.linuxidentity.com/us/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5038
Linux Identity Starter; Ubuntu 9.10; issue: 4; pages: 52; DVDs attached: 2; price (US): $14.99, table of contents
We finished UDS-Dallas last month in the usual way ... with an Ubuntu All Stars Jam.
Being in Texas, we had to play a Willie Nelson song. On the Road Again strikes a particular chord for me, as I think it perfectly applies to our life in the Ubuntu Community. Since I've joined Canonical I've traveled on business to: Boston (twice), Prague, London, Montreal, Paris, San Francisco (twice), Berlin, Barcelona, Santa Barbara, Dublin, Portland (twice), and Dallas.
You can check out our live jam here (mp3, ogg), with Tony Espy on guitar and vocals, Matthew Helmke on lead guitar, Jamu Kakar on drums, and your author here on bass. Our apologies, Willie, our hearts were in the right place ;-)
Lyrics:
On the road again - Just can't wait to get on the road again. The life I love is making Ubuntu with my friends And I can't wait to get on the road again.
On the road again - Goin' places that I've never been. Seein' things that I may never see again And I can't wait to get on the road again.
On the road again - Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway We're the best of friends. Insisting that the world keep turning our way And our way ... is
On the road again - Just can't wait to get on the road again. The life I love is makin' Kernels with my friends And I can't wait to get on the road again.
On the road again - Like a band of gypsies we go down the highway We're the best of friends Insisting that the world keep turning our way. And our way ... is
On the road again. Just can't wait to get on the road again. The life I love is makin' Ubuntu with my friends And I can't wait to get on the road again. And I can't wait to get on the road again.
-- Willie Nelson
P.S. While searching for a Willie Nelson image, I ran across Joey Stanford's blog post -- seems he had a similar idea:
My darling wife, Kim, hand crafted me my very own Tux :-) He's sitting quite prominently next to my monitor, keeping me company. I'm very proud of my crafty, crocheting wife. Thanks, Sweetheart! He's even cuter than our groom's cake...
You might notice in the background the leaves have finally changed colors here in Austin. It makes for a very beautiful view on the Canyon Edge.
My dad and I ran the Baton Rouge Turkey Trot 5K on Thanksgiving Day, benefiting the March of Dimes. I'm very proud of my dad, as it was his first race ever, and he beat his goal time.
Of course, we ran it in our I'm Running Ubuntu t-shirts, which was a lot of fun. We had a few conversations after the race with other curious Ubuntu users/runners. Ubuntu seems live and well in Louisiana!
I actually ran my personal-best in the 5K distance, finishing in 22:15, which is a 7:17 minutes/mi pace (4:27 minutes/km for my non-American readers), so I was quite excited, considering my Marathon Goal Pace is 9:00 minutes/mile (5:38 minutes/km).
A big thanks to my wife, Kim, and my Mom, Donna for being out there in the crowd on a chilly morning, cheering us on, and cooking that fine Thanksgiving feast we had right after the race ;-)
In preparation for that race, I ran Austin's Race for the Water 10 miler. I thought some of you might enjoy the custom tailored technical t-shirt, which proudly states:
i'm running ubuntu
The back of the shirt asks:
ARE YOU RUNNING UBUNTU?
If you're interested in the results, I completed the 10 miles in 01:28:40 (that's an 8:52/mi average). I was shooting for a 9:00/mi average, so clearly I was pleased with the result!
I will provide a few of my own observations, but we are very interested in your own conclusions!
There were a total of 354 responses -- excellent feedback!
Nearly 2/3 of all responders use virtualization on Ubuntu every day -- wow!
Over 3/4 of responders have VT acceleration -- that's overwhelming, I think, and it supports our focus on KVM.
Still, there's 21% of responders who cannot use KVM. kqemu has been deprecated by upstream QEMU, so I think VirtualBox represents the best option at this point for non-accelerated virtualization.
36.7% of responders most use VirtualBox, 22.6% most use KVM. VirtualBox is in Universe and essentially unmaintained by Canonical (though some community individuals are doing an excellent job maintaining it!). I don't know what the business opportunity is around VirtualBox. But it is clear that it's popular among Ubuntu users. People really like the interface and the usability. And we could probably really improve the experience for a large number of Ubuntu virtualization users with some dedicated Canonical effort to clean up the VirtualBox bug backlog.
My survey design was evidently flawed on Question #3, as a large number of people "wrote in" an "EC2" answer there. This is an interesting approach, as it diminishes the importances of having VT on the local system.
In terms of interfaces, virt-manager and virsh are both lagging behind kvm-from-the-command-line and VirtualBox. I don't know if this means that we should, or should not invest more in the libvirt-based tools. Is the lack of a good GUI for KVM hindering its adoption? I think this data says so...
Finally, the overwhelming majority suggests that better documentation is simply required for Ubuntu virtualization. I wonder how we should approach solving this? Is this something that we as engineers should be able to just crank out ourselves? Or should we tap into the Ubuntu-Documentation-Team, and attempt to rally a virt-documentation blitz from some more skilled tech writers?
In summary, I think the most important observations are that:
The overwhelming number of respondents have access to VT hardware.
VirtualBox is quite popular in the wild, despite a lack of Canonical investment.
The lack of a better user-interface is hindering KVM's adoption.
Better documentation is undoubtedly requested.
Are there other observations you'd like to share or conclusions you can draw?
We will be in Dallas next week for the Lucid Ubuntu Developer Summit, discussing the future of Virtualization on Ubuntu. Thank you so much for your feedback!
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:
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:
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 Kirkland (Twitter, LinkedIn) is an engineer at heart, with a penchant for reducing complexity and solving problems at the cross-sections of technology, business, and people.
With a degree in computer engineering from Texas A&M University (2001), his full-time career began as a software engineer at IBM in the Linux Technology Center working on the Linux kernel and security certifications, including a one-year stint as an dedicated engineer-in-residence at Red Hat in Boston (2005). Dustin was awarded the title Master Inventor at IBM, in recognition of his prolific patent work as an inventor and reviewer with IBM's intellectual property attorneys.
Dustin then first joined Canonical (2008) as an engineer (eventually, engineering manager), helping create the Ubuntu Server distribution and establishing Ubuntu as the overwhelming favorite Linux distribution in Amazon, Google, and Microsoft's cloud platforms, as well as authoring and maintaining dozens of new open source packages.
Dustin joined Gazzang (2011), a venture-backed start-up built around an open source project that he co-authored (eCryptFS), as Chief Technology Officer, and helped dozens of enterprise customers encrypt their data at rest and securely manage their keys. Gazzang was acquired by Cloudera (2014).
Having effectively monetized eCryptFS as an open source project at Gazzang, Dustin returned to Canonical (2013) as the VP of Product for Ubuntu and spent the next several years launching a portfolio of products and services (Ubuntu Advantage, Extended Security Maintenance, Canonical Livepatch, MAAS, OpenStack, Kubernetes) that continues to deliver considerable annual recurring revenue. With Canonical based in London, an 800+ work-from-home employee roster and customers spread across 40+ countries, Dustin traveled the world over, connecting with clients and colleagues steeped in rich cultural experiences.
Google Cloud (2018) recruited Dustin from Canonical to product manage Google's entrance into on-premises data centers with its GKE On-Prem (now, Anthos) offering, with a specific focus on the underlying operating system, hypervisor, and container security. This work afforded Dustin a view deep into the back end data center of many financial services companies, where he still sees tremendous opportunities for improvements in security, efficiencies, cost-reduction, and disruptive new technology adoption.
Seeking a growth-mode opportunity in the fintech sector, Dustin joined Apex Clearing (now, Apex Fintech Solutions) as the Chief Product Officer (2019), where he led several organizations including product management, field engineering, data science, and business partnerships. He drastically revamped Apex's product portfolio and product management processes, retooling away from a legacy "clearing house and custodian", and into a "software-as-a-service fintech" offering instant brokerage account opening, real-time fractional stock trading, a secure closed-network crypto solution, and led the acquisition and integration of Silver's tax and cost basis solution.
Drawn back into a large cap, Dustin joined Goldman Sachs (2021) as a Managing Director and Head of Platform Product Management, within the Consumer banking division, which included Marcus, and the Apple and GM credit cards. He built a cross-functional product management community and established numerous documented product management best practices, processes, and anti-patterns.
Dustin lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife Kim and their wonderful two daughters.
I wrote an article on Byobu for the Ubuntu 9.10 issue of Linux Identity Magazine.
