The Ubuntu Login Sound in 5.1 Channel Glory

It was way too hot here in Austin, Texas this weekend, as it hit 110F on Sunday!  So I spent most of the heat of the day inside, toying with something that I think is pretty cool :-)  I couldn't find any OS today (Mac, Windows, or Linux) that has a 5.1 channel login sound...  I'm hoping that Ubuntu might be the first!

I have 7.1 channel surround sound in my home theater, which is great for watching movies.  Hooked up to my projector is (of course) an Ubuntu nettop, which I use to stream and serve most of my media content.

I thought it would be neat to remix the Ubuntu login sound in 5.1 channels, to exercise my theater's surround sound at boot.

So I grabbed the familiar "drums and crickets" OGG file, which you can find at /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/stereo/desktop-login.ogg, and opened it in audacity, a phenomenal open source mixer.  I split that stereo track into two mono tracks, and then added four more blank tracks.

The first two tracks are the Left and Right channels, respectively, followed by the Center channel, the Sub woofer channel, and then the Surround Left and Surround Right channels.  I copied the Left and Right channels to the Surround Left and Surround Right channels.

Then, I opened the original desktop-login.ogg again, and mixed that stereo track to a single mono track.  I took that mono track and copied it to the Center and Sub woofer channels.

Okay, now I had 6 tracks ... time to start playing with them!

I decided that I wanted the "crickets and wind" at the end of the clip to be exclusively in my rear, surround channels.  So I silenced the Surround Left and Surround Right tracks until about the 3.85 second mark, and then faded in from 3.85 seconds to 5.43 seconds, and faded out from 5.43 seconds until the end of the clip.  Since I wanted that sound exclusively in the rear channels, I silenced each of the Left, Right, Center, and Sub woofer channels from the 5.0 second mark, until the end of the clip.  Next, I smoothly faded out the Left and Right channels from about 2.21 until the 4.54 second marks.

For the intro, I wanted the first few drum beats to emanate from the center channel, and then spread wide to the Left and Right channels, right up to the big cymbal crash and the crescendo of the clip.  So I took the Center channel and added a very long fade, from the 0.30 second mark until about 3.97 seconds.  And then I set the Left and Right channels to slowly fade in, from 0 seconds to about 1.48 seconds.

Finally, I took the bass track and de-amplified it way down.  And then I applied a low-pass bass boost filter several times, until the lowest hits of the bass drum are the only audible parts of the track.

Want to hear it for yourself?  Well, you'll have to have 5.1 speakers in a true Surround Sound setup...  If so, grab the [flac, ogg, or wav] file, and open it in smplayer, ensuring that you have 5.1 channel sound enabled in smplayer.

With the right equipment, you should be in for a treat!  The first few drum beats you'll hear in your Center channel along with some solid, thumping bass hits.  The sound should spread quickly from the Center, fanning outward toward your Right and Left channels right up to the big crashing cymbal!  And with that crescendo, the Left, Right, Center, and Sub should all gracefully fall silent, while the crickets and the wooshing wind sweep back to your Rear Left and Rear Right channels!

Don't have 5.1 sound?  Well, you can still listen to each track individually.  Grab the [flac, ogg, or wav] file, and open it in audacity.  You should see 6 channels vertically down your screen.  You can click the Solo button next to each track, and listen to each track one-by-one.  Make sure you un-click the Solo button between plays.  This might give you a decent idea of how each of the channels come together.

Fancy yourself a sound producer?  Remix it again and share :-)  I have the wav sources up at lp:~kirkland/ubuntu-sounds/834802. Better yet, how about creating a whole new Ubuntu login sound?  :-)  Maybe one day....

From the right side of my brain,
:-Dustin

Distro Breakdown in the Netflix/Linux Petition

I was pretty stoked to read earlier this month that ChromeOS and Chrome/Chromium was getting a Netflix app in the Chrome Webstore.  I installed it earlier tonight, but sadly it's not working on Chrome or Chromium on Ubuntu.  I installed it on my Cr-48, and it worked there.  Reports on the page indicate that it's working on Chrome/Windows.  But Chrome/Chromium on Linux -- no dice :-(

So the Netflix-on-Linux blues continue, unfortunately :-(

In looking for workarounds, I came across this web petition for Netflix-on-Linux support:

• http://www.petitiononline.com/Linflix/ 

So I signed the petition and was impressed to see 16,518 other signatures!

In fact, I downloaded all of the signatures and did a little (far from scientific) grepping of my own to see where Ubuntu stood among the other desktops in the signature list.  Ubuntu lands at nearly 70%.  Impressive!

Ubuntu 11433 69.2% Fedora/RH/CentOS 1600 9.7% Mint 1092 6.6% Arch 891 5.4% Debian 856 5.2% SuSE 596 3.6% Other 50 0.3% 16518

:-Dustin

Ubuntu ARM Servers -- At last!!!

for Ubuntu Servers

I've long had a personal interest in the energy efficiency of the Ubuntu Server.  This interest has manifested in several ways.  From founding the PowerNap Project to using tiny netbooks and notebooks as servers, I'm just fascinated with the idea of making computing more energy efficient.

It wasn't so long ago, in December 2008 at UDS-Jaunty in Mountain View that I proposed just such a concept, and was nearly ridiculed out of the room.  (Surely no admin in his right mind would want enterprise infrastructure running on ARM processors!!! ...  Um, well, yeah, I do, actually....)  Just a little over two years ago, in July 2009, I longed for the day when Ubuntu ARM Servers might actually be a reality...

My friends, that day is here at last!  Ubuntu ARM Servers are now quite real!


The affable Chris Kenyon first introduced the world to Canonical's efforts in this space with his blog post, Ubuntu Server for ARM Processors a little over a week ago.  El Reg picked up the story quickly, and broke the news in Canonical ARMs Ubuntu for microserver wars.   And ZDNet wasn't far behind, running an article this week, Ubuntu Linux bets on the ARM server.  So the cat is now officially out of the bag -- Ubuntu Servers on ARM are here :-)

Looking for one?  This Geek.com article covers David Mandala's 42-core ARM cluster, based around TI Panda boards.  I also recently came across the ZT Systems R1801e Server, boasting 8 x Dual ARM Cortex A9 processors.  The most exciting part is that this is just the tip of the iceberg.  We've partnered with companies like Calxeda (here in Austin) and others to ensure that the ARM port of the Ubuntu Server will be the most attractive OS option for quite some time.

A huge round of kudos goes to the team of outstanding engineers at Canonical (and elsewhere) doing this work.  I'm sure I'm leaving off a ton of people (feel free to leave comments about who I've missed), but the work that's been most visible to me has been by:

• Michael Casadevall, Oliver Grawert, and David Mandala (leading and manning the ARM/Server/Toolchain bits)
• Serge Hallyn (hacking on LXC as a container solution on the virt-less platform)
• Chuck Short and Dave Walker (OpenStack, libvirt, qemu ARM support)
• Ben Howard (Cloud images for Ubuntu ARM)

So I'm looking forward to reducing my servers' energy footprint...are you?

:-Dustin

Ensemble: the Service Orchestration framework for hard core DevOps

I've seen Ensemble evolve from a series of design-level conversations (Brussels May 2010), through a year of fast-paced Canonical-style development, and participated in Ensemble sprints (Cape Town March 2011, and Dublin June 2011).  I've observed Ensemble at first as an outsider, then provided feedback as a stake-holder, and have now contributed code as a developer to Ensemble and authored Formulas.


Think about bzr or git circa 2004/2005, or apt circa 1998/1999, or even dpkg circa 1993/1994...  That's where we are today with Ensemble circa 2011. 

Ensemble is a radical, outside-of-the-box approach to a problem that the Cloud ecosystem is just starting to grok: Service Orchestration.  I'm quite confident that in a few years, we're going to look back at 2011 and the work we're doing with Ensemble and Ubuntu and see an clear inflection point in the efficiency of workload management in The Cloud.

From my perspective as the leader of Canonical's Systems Integration Team, Ensemble is now the most important tool in our software tool belt when building complex cloud solutions.

Period.

Juan, Marc, Brian, and I are using Ensemble to generate modern solutions around new service deployments to the cloud.  We have contributed many formulas already to Ensemble's collection, and continue to do so every day.

There's a number of novel ideas and unique approaches in Ensemble.  You can deep dive into the technical details here.  For me, there's one broad concept in Ensemble that just rocks my world...  Ensemble deals in individual service units, with the ability to replicate, associate, and scale those units quite dynamically.  Service units in practice are cloud instances (or if you're using Orchestra + Ensemble, bare metal systems!).  Service units are federated together to deliver a (perhaps large and complicated) user facing service.

Okay, that's a lot of words, and at a very high level.  Let to me try to break that down into something a bit more digestable...

I've been around Red Hat and Debian packaging for many years now.  Debian packaging is particularly amazing at defining prerequisites packages, pre- and post- installation procedures, and are just phenomenal at rolling upgrades.  I've worked with hundreds (thousands?) of packages at this point, including some mind bogglingly complex ones!

It's truly impressive how much can be accomplished within traditional Debian packaging.  But it has its limits.  These limits really start to bare their teeth when you need to install packages on multiple separate systems, and then federate those services together.  It's one thing if you need to install a web application on a single, local system:  depend on Apache, depend on MySQL, install, configure, restart the services...

sudo apt-get install your-web-app
...

Profit!

That's great.  But what if you need to install MySQL on two different nodes, set them up in a replicating configuration, install your web app and Apache on a third node, and put a caching reverse proxy on a fourth?  Oh, and maybe you want to do that a few times over.  And then scale them out.  Ummmm.....

sudo apt-get errrrrrr....yeah, not gonna work :-(

But these are exactly the type(s) of problems that Ensemble solves!  And quite elegantly in fact.

Once you've written your Formula, you'd simply:

ensemble bootstrap
ensemble deploy your-web-app
... 

Profit!

Stay tuned here and I'll actually show some real Ensemble examples in a series of upcoming posts.  I'll also write a bit about how Ensemble and Orchestra work together.

In the mean time, get primed on the Ensemble design and usage details here, and definitely check out some of Juan's awesome Ensemble how-to posts!

After that, grab the nearest terminal and come help out!

We are quite literally at the edge of something amazing here, and we welcome your contributions!  All of Ensemble and our Formula Repository are entirely free software, building on years of best practice open source development on Ubuntu at Canonical.  Drop into the #ubuntu-ensemble channel in irc.freenode.net, introduce yourself, and catch one of the earliest waves of something big.  Really, really big.

:-Dustin

PowerNap Your Data Center! (LinuxCon 2011 Vancouver)

I was honored to speak at LinuxCon North America in beautiful Vancouver yesterday, about one of my favorite topics -- energy efficiency opportunities using Ubuntu Servers in the data center (something I've blogged before).

I'm pleased to share those slides with you today!  The talk is entitled PowerNap Your Data Center, and focused on Ubuntu's innovative PowerNap suite, from the system administrator's or data center manager's perspective.

We discussed the original, Cloud motivations for PowerNap, its evolution from the basic process monitoring and suspend/hibernate methods of PowerNap1, to our complete rewrite of PowerNap2 (thanks, Andres!) which added nearly a dozen monitors and the ubiquitously useful PowerSave mode.  PowerNap is now more useful and configurable than ever!

Flip through the presentation below, or download the PDF here.





Stay tuned for another PowerNap presentation I'm giving at Linux Plumbers next month in California.  That one should be a bit deeper dive into the technical implementation, and hopefully generate some plumbing layer discussion and improvement suggestions.

:-Dustin

Howto: Install the CloudFoundry Server PaaS on Ubuntu 11.10

(the server!)

I recently gave an introduction to the CloudFoundry Client application (vmc),  which is already in Ubuntu 11.10's Universe archive.

Here, I'd like to introduce the far more interesting server piece -- how to run the CloudFoundry Server, on top of Ubuntu 11.10!  As far as I'm aware, this is the most complete PaaS solution we've made available on top of Ubuntu Servers, to date.

A big thanks to the VMWare CloudFoundry Team who has been helping us along with the deployment instructions.  Also, all of the packaging credit goes straight to Brian Thomason, Juan Negron, and Marc Cluet.

For testing purposes, I'm going to run this in Amazon's EC2 Cloud.  I'll need a somewhat larger instance to handle all the services and dependencies (ie, Java) required by the platform.  I find an m1.large seems to work pretty well, for $0.34/hour.  I'm using the Oneiric (Ubuntu 11.10) AMI's listed at http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/oneiric/current/.

Installation

To install CloudFoundry Server, add the PPA, update, and install:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:cloudfoundry/ppa
sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install cloudfoundry-server

During the installation, there are a couple of debconf prompts, including:

• a mysql password
• required for configuration of the MySQL database (enter twice)

All in all, the install took me less than 7 minutes!

Next, install the client tools, either on your local system, or even on the server, so that we can test our server:

sudo apt-get install cloudfoundry-client

Configuration

Now, you'll need to target your vmc client against your installed server, rather than CloudFoundry.com, as I demonstrated in my last post.

In production, you're going to need access to a wildcard based DNS server, either your own, or a DynDNS service.  If you have a DynDNS.com standard account ($30/year), CloudFoundry actually supports dynamically adding DNS entries for your applications.  We've added debconf hooks in the cloudfoundry-server Ubuntu packaging to set this up for you.  So if you have a paid DynDNS account, just sudo dpkg-reconfigure cloudfoundry-server.

For this example, though, we're going to take the poor man's approach, and just edit our /etc/hosts file, BOTH locally on our laptop and on our CloudFoundry server.

First, look up your server's external IP address.  If you're running Byobu in EC2, it'll be the lower right corner.

Otherwise, grab your IPv4 address from the metadata service.

$ wget -q -O- http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4
174.129.119.101

And you'll need to add an entry to your /etc/hosts for api.vcap.me, AND every application name you deploy.  Make sure you do this both on your laptop, and the server!  Our test application here will be called testing123. Don't forget to change my IP address to yours ;-)

echo "174.129.119.101  api.vcap.me testing123.vcap.me" | sudo tee -a /etc/hosts

Target

Now, let's target our vmc client at our vcap (CloudFoundry) server:

$ vmc target api.vcap.me
Succesfully targeted to [http://api.vcap.me]

Adding Users

And add a user.

$ vmc add-user 
Email: kirkland@example.com
Password: ********
Verify Password: ********
Creating New User: OK
Successfully logged into [http://api.vcap.me]

Logging In

Now we can login.

$ vmc login 
Email: kirkland@example.com
Password: ********
Successfully logged into [http://api.vcap.me]

Deploying an Application


At this point, you can jump over to my last post in the vmc client tool for a more comprehensive set of examples.  I'll just give one very simple one here, the Ruby/Sinatra helloworld + environment example.

Go to the examples directory, find an example, and push!

$ cd /usr/share/doc/ruby-vmc/examples/ruby/hello_env
$ vmc push
Would you like to deploy from the current directory? [Yn]: y
Application Name: testing123
Application Deployed URL: 'testing123.vcap.me'? 
Detected a Sinatra Application, is this correct? [Yn]: y
Memory Reservation [Default:128M] (64M, 128M, 256M, 512M, 1G or 2G) 
Creating Application: OK
Would you like to bind any services to 'testing123'? [yN]: n
Uploading Application:
  Checking for available resources: OK
  Packing application: OK
  Uploading (0K): OK 
Push Status: OK
Staging Application: OK
Starting Application: OK

Again, make absolutely sure that you edit your local /etc/hosts and add the testing123.vcap.me to the right IP address, and then just point a browser to http://testing123.vcap.me/

And there you have it!  An application pushed, and running on your CloudFoundry Server  -- Ubuntu's first packaged PaaS!

What's Next?

So the above setup is a package-based, all-in-one PaaS.  That's perhaps useful for your first CloudFoundry Server, and your initial experimentation.  But a production PaaS will probably involve multiple, decoupled servers, with clustered databases, highly available storage, and enterprise grade networking.

The Team is hard at work breaking CloudFoundry down to its fundamental components and creating a set of Ensemble formulas for deploying CloudFoundry itself as a scalable service.  Look for more news on that front very soon!

In the meantime, try the packages at ppa:cloudfoundry/ppa (or even the daily builds at ppa:cloudfoundry/daily) and let us know what you think!

:-Dustin

With Open Arms

Jonathan Carter has admirably brought the topic of "Defining what upstream contributions are in terms of membership" to the Ubuntu Community Council meeting agenda.

Hats off, Jonathan, for taking a lead on this important question!

It's my sincere hope that the Ubuntu community continues to be one of the most open and accepting open source organizations in the world.

The current one-line description of Ubuntu membership is:

Membership of the Ubuntu community means recognition of a significant and sustained contribution to Ubuntu and the Ubuntu community.

I, personally, wholeheartedly welcome any and all who have contributed to Ubuntu in any way, even if indirectly, to the Ubuntu community.  (The words "significant" and "sustained", I think are too subjective for my tastes.)

Without question, to me that includes any Debian Developers, Maintainers, and countless Open Source Upstream Developers (even where those upstreams are employed by Ubuntu's competitors).

If such a person is willing to sign and abide by the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, they're an Ubuntu Member, in my book.

The more people in this (free software) world who abide by the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, the better place it will be for all!

An oldie, but goodie...




:-Dustin