Reminder: Austin's Lucid Release Party!

So the inevitable finally happened today... Ubuntu 10.04 LTS has released! Unleash the Lucid Lynx...

Here in Austin, Texas, we're celebrating tomorrow night, Friday, April 30, 2010, at the aptly named Mean Eyed Cat, on West 5th Street.

Come join us for a brewskie and meet some of your fellow Ubuntu and Free Software enthusiasts.

Full details at:
http://blog.dustinkirkland.com/2010/04/austins-lucid-release-party.html

See ya!

:-Dustin

Ubuntu Manpages Repository Updates

The rock stars here at Canonical IS have rolled out some recent changes I made to the Ubuntu Manpage Repository. Mostly, these changes involve a couple of bug fixes.

But perhaps more obviously, I've modified the header and footer to align with the new Lucid theme. Mmmm... Purple. Gimp lens flares. Oooh. Aaaah.

One functional change of note ... Check out the printer icon on the top right corner. Now, you can print (or generate a PDF of) your favorite manpages ;-) I basically did that with screen(1) when I was originally writing Byobu (so that you don't have to read all 80 pages of screen's manual)!

Happy RTFMing... That's "Reading the fun manuals" ;-)

:-Dustin

Pictor: A Photo Web App for your Cloud

So this post is long overdue... Several months back, I uploaded new package called Pictor to Ubuntu Lucid.

Now Pictor holds a special place in my heart as this was the first program I wrote that I freely shared with everyone I who asked for the source code. I didn't know much about free software at the time, but I was quite willing to share my code with anyone who asked for it. I actually wrote the heart of Pictor in 1997 when I created a website for some friends of mine in a jam band called Last Free Exit at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. I applied an Open Source license to it a few years later, and it's been in Launchpad/Bazaar for several years now, but I only recently got around to packaging it and adding it to Ubuntu.

Pictor is a pretty simple web interface for browsing and sharing pictures in a web interface. Now today, there's plenty of public ways to do this, such as Picasa, Flickr, Shutterbug, and countless others. But I don't think any of these existed in 1997 when I wrote Pictor.

And there is another key difference, though... Pictor is AGPL free software, and you can run it entirely on your own server or virtual machine in the cloud. No need to accept complicated license agreements or upload your photos to hosted services who might then own your content.

As such, Pictor is an excellent application for "the cloud". You can fire up an Ubuntu EC2 instance, that you own, sudo apt-get install pictor, and upload your pictures to share in EC2. When you're done sharing you kill the instance, and your pictures will disappear as well. All without turning over the rights to anyone.

Similarly, you can run your own permanent server, sharing your images with the world, or protecting them with an .htaccess authentication token.

If you're looking for a simple little application to try out cloud computing, take a look at Pictor in Ubuntu. It's a great way to put some content in private version of The Cloud, and see if the Cloud Computing model works for you!

Here's a few screenshots.

It recursively supports directory listing.


And dynamically creates thumbnail views.


And dynamically resizes each picture for viewing, extracts metadata and thumbnails from JPEG headers, and can run in a slideshow mode.



Or, if you'd like to peruse a simple album, you can click around this one. This is a single album I have temporarily published using Pictor to supplement my post on CraigsList (yeah, selling my boat...).

Publishing this album was as simple as:

1. Installing Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Server in a KVM virtual machine
2. Installing Pictor
   sudo apt-get install pictor
3. And creating a symbolic link to a directory that contained the pictures I wanted to publish
   sudo mkdir /usr/share/pictor/pictures
   sudo ln -s /srv/media/boat /usr/share/pictor/pictures

And you're up and running!

Cheers,
:-Dustin

TLF2010: Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud Audio

The good people at the Texas Linux Fest have published the audio from my Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud demo and presentation.

You can find the 29MB OGG file here:

• http://www.archive.org/details/Tlf-TheUbuntuEnterpriseCloud

I used an Ubuntu 10.04 (Beta2) Server ISO written to a bootable USB stick, two laptops, and a Linksys switch (running DD-WRT). I deployed a two-system Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), using Eucalyptus, an open source implementation of an Amazon EC2-compatible cloud that you can run locally, in your data center and on your own hardware. I demonstrated the installation and registration processes, and discussed a bit about the various UEC topologies. I also registered an image, ran an instance, and SSH'd into the instance. All within 45 minutes :-)

:-Dustin

Austin's Lucid Release Party

Our Ubuntu 10.04 LTS release is just around the corner, so it's time for another Austin Release Party...

We held the Jaunty release party at the Jackalope, and the Karmic release party at Aussie's (in honor of our favorite Koala)... Up next, The Mean Eyed Cat, paying our respects to the Lucid Lynx!

So join us on Friday, April 30th from 6pm at The Mean Eyed Cat, 1621 W Fifth St, Austin, TX 78703.

If you haven't been to the Mean Eyed Cat, you're in for a treat :-) This Johnny Cash-themed bar was actually the setting for a scene in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.

Bring a USB key if you'd like to get a copy of Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and leave a note in the comments below if you plan on joining us, or I'm going to send this guy after you if you don't...



Cheers,
:-Dustin

Texas Linux Fest 2010

Howdy all-

I attended the first ever Texas Linux Fest right here in Austin this past Saturday, April 10, 2010. My compliments go to the organizers of the event! They were able to pull off this excellent event in the face of many naysayers. Congratulations, guys, it was an outstanding Linux conference, and I'm looking forward to it again next year.



Canonical had ample representation, and the Ubuntu booths (one Canonical, one LoCo) were very heavily visited. Jeremy Foshee was the hero of the Canonical booth over the course of the day. JFo's mouth was running about Ubuntu for a solid 8 hours ;-) We gave away several boxes of 9.10 Desktop and Server CDs, and hundreds of stickers and pins.

Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier gave the opening keynote, "A Musical Guide to the Future of Linux: Reprise". Joe is an excellent speaker, and I saw this talk in September 2009 in Portland. It's an interesting, engaging talk, comparing various distros to bands. I love his comparison of Fedora to Frank Zappa. But I can't quite abide Ubuntu being likened to Duran Duran, while SuSE is The Who! UPDATE: Ubuntu is now U2 in Joe's talk, so it seems that we have established ourself with a bit more staying power than a bad 80's fad! :-)

Meanwhile, I was working on a dry run of my presentation slated for later in the day. I decided to use the Lucid daily server image, rather than the Beta2 image because there was a bugfix I wanted for the sake of my installation.

I attended a talk by Jeff Gehlbach on OpenNMS, a tool for monitoring Linux systems on a very large scale basis. Looks like a pretty interesting tool. We should perhaps package this for Debian and Ubuntu.

And then I listened to Chip Rosenthal's talk on hosting your own mail server (and "saying goodbye to Gmail"). This was a good talk. Chip started with his age-old mail solution (mutt running inside of a screen session on his server at home). And then showed his Palm Pre -- the first Linux smart phone he's ever owned (same phone I use). The Pre has terminal and ssh application, but the size and format of the interface just doesn't lend itself to mutt. So he built his own mailserver, using Ubuntu and dovecot. I didn't learn anything earthshattering here, but I thought his talk was an excellent showcase for the Ubuntu Server and dovecot.

After lunch, I attended a talk about Ubuntu on ARM, by Canonical's Pete Graner and David Mandala. I learned quite a bit, actually. The ARM space is quite challenging, giving the fragmentation of the architecture, with each vendor making their own strange customizations to the design. The revisions are happening quite fast, which makes it very challenging for Ubuntu, as a distro, to keep up.

Next I learned about Drizzle from Monty Taylor. Drizzle is a fork of MySQL by a number of former MySQL developers (who appear to be fairly frustrated with Sun and now Oracle's handling of MySQL). From Monty's talk, Drizzle is by design quite pluggable and extensible. I noticed that we have several Drizzle libraries in Ubuntu already. I'm going to take a closer look at these at some point.

I think the most interesting talk of the day was by Bradley Kuhn, about the lack of Software Freedom in the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. He spoke extensively from the Free Software Foundation's point of view on Cloud Computing, SaaS, and the Affero GPL (AGPL). I really like the AGPL, and have used it for several of my projects, including Musica and Pictor. Bradly has a number of excellent points, and some very poignant concerns. I don't necessary agree with all of his platforms, but fully support his efforts to ensure that software freedom is not simply sliced out of SaaS offerings. Personally, I try to support and prefer free offerings (Identica over Twitter, Launchpad over SourceForge and GitHub) where possible, though not yet universally (I still use both Blogger and Wordpress). Unfortunately, questions from the audience ran about 10 minutes over time which, cut into my presentation a bit...


So my presentation was next, on the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. In 40 minutes, I was able to:

• introduce Cloud Computing, Amazon EC2, Canonical, Eucalyptus, and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (components and topologies)
  
• boot a DD-WRT router, setup and install 2 Dell Vostro 1220 laptops with Lucid Beta2, with one machine serving as the Cloud Controller and the other a Node Controller, reboot them both, register an image, run an instance, and SSH'd into it
• show a bit of the UEC administrative web interface, the euca2ools euca-* commands, and how byobu can be used to monitor the UEC services running and estimate the EC2 cost of an instance
  

All in all, I was pleased. It all worked ;-) I think I successfully moved the VGA cable 7 times among 3 laptops during the course of the presentation (thanks Bryce!). And a big thanks to my wife, Kim, who came and sat in the back row. She initially called it Nerdapalooza :-) but she said she had a good time and gained new appreciation for the importance of the work that we do in the Free Software world.

Jon "maddog" Hall followed my presentation, talking about Project Caua -- an interesting idea about bringing the Internet to masses of poor people in densely populated urban settings such as Sao Paulo, Brazil, using Linux servers, thin clients, and desktop virtualization. I think Ubuntu has all the tools that Maddog needs to make this work. I really hope it takes off.

Randal Schwartz delivered the closing keynote. His talk was highly entertaining, and shared many interesting anecdotes about his experiences with Larry Wall, Linus Torvalds, and Richard Stallman. It was a good "motivational" talk, in that he encouraged many of the non-technical attendees to get involved in Open Source through non-traditional means. He also distanced himself from (his words...) "FSF Hard Liners", claiming to be a more practical guy. When talking about making money off of open source, he said something that really hit home for me...he said that even if he were filthy rich, he'd probably wake up and do the same thing everyday -- answer a bunch of emails and questions on mailing lists, maybe hack a little, etc. I was disappointed that he claimed to actually not even run Linux at all (his slides were on a Mac, running OSX). I guess I could have done without that detail about the Texas Linux Fest's closing keynote speaker. Oh well. Other than that, it was a great day.

Again, thanks to the sponsors and organizers of the TLF. Here's to doing it again next year!

:-Dustin

UEC Demo in Austin Tomorrow

I will be giving a preview demo of the 10.04 LTS release of the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, tomorrow, Saturday, April 10, 2010 at 4pm in Austin at the Texas Linux Fest.

In my presentation, I will use:

• One free Ubuntu Server ISO (10.04 Beta2 64-bit) burned to a USB stick
  
• Two laptops, and
  
• Twenty Minutes
  

And you will witness the ease of deploying an Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), Canonical's open source implementation of an Amazon EC2-compatible cloud that you can run locally, in your own data center and on your own hardware.

In this presentation, you will learn about the UEC, Eucalyptus, Cloud topologies, the installation process, registering nodes, running and terminating instances in the Cloud, and the UEC Image Store.

Bring a blank 1GB+ USB key and I'll even burn you a copy of the same ISO I use in my presentation (time permitting).

Cloud Computing is here, and Ubuntu is a phenomenal platform on which you can construct your private Cloud today. Since 2004, Ubuntu has revolutionized the Linux desktop. Attend this session and learn how Ubuntu is changing the landscape of the Linux server.

:-Dustin