A UEC Beginner's Guide

Murthyraju Manthena dropped me an email last week, pointing me to some excellent documentation (including charts, diagrams, code snippets, and commands) that he and his company put together based on their experiences with the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud and Eucalyptus:

http://cssoss.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/eucalyptus-beginner%E2%80%99s-guide-%E2%80%93-uec%C2%A0edition/

You might find some benefit from their documentation, supplementing the wiki docs at:

http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEC

And the upstream documentation at:

http://eucalyptus.com/resources/overview


Cheers,
:-Dustin

Convert a Running Screen Session to Byobu

I've been asked this question several times, so I figured I'd create a little demo video...

Is it possible to convert a running GNU Screen session to a Byobu session?

Actually, it's quite easy (if you have Byobu installed already)! Just run:

ctrl-a :source /usr/share/byobu/profiles/byoburc

Enjoy,
:-Dustin

When was the last time your operating system released EARLY?

Seriously, when was the last time any software project used by millions of people released early? I simply can't think of a one...

If you haven't heard Robbie Williamson's announcement yet, Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) will be released on the 10th day of the 10th month of this year. That's 10.10.10 (in both European and US calendar notation). And what's a bit more fun for the well-read geeks among us, 101010 in binary is 42 in decimal -- yep, the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything!


Ubuntu's release schedules are extraordinary within the expansive landscape of software development. In reverse chronological order, have a look at each of our historical release schedules:

• Maverick, Lucid, Karmic, Jaunty, Intrepid, Hardy, Gutsy, Feisty, Edgy, Dapper, Breezy, Hoary, Warty

Not to pick on our friends too much at Microsoft, Fedora, or Debian, but delayed releases are simply the status quo in the software world. It was the same story with most software projects at my former employers as well. That's just the expectation in most project management circles, it seems. Pick a date, and start working on a contingency plan almost immediately.

But Ubuntu, I contend, has pioneered something special in world of software development processes. The only reason that we can even consider releasing Maverick 3 weeks early is that we have an outstanding track record, adhering to our time-based release schedules and releasing perfectly in cadence 11 out of the last 12 Ubuntu releases, over the past 6 years. The lone hiccup being 6.06 (Dapper Drake), which introduced a 6-week delay in establishing the first Ubuntu LTS release.

Ambitious? Perhaps a bit. Don't Panic. Share and Enjoy. I'm looking forward to it!



:-Dustin

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