ken’s blog

Everyones doing it… Hillary is going green, of course so is Obama, and you name your favorite politician, they are all vowing to go green too.

Foresight is the green distro… I say “Go Green!”

Well it is over, it was a great time. Here is a little recap of how Sunday went.

Had a very late night Saturday and just a couple hours sleep before heading back to the festivities. The turn out today wasn’t nearly as good as Saturday, but in true BarCamp style there was plenty of pizza and beer. I was a bit worried about my talks today because I started the day with next to no voice. I just spent so much time talking (in a rather loud environment) on Saturday, my voice was shot.

I did a demo of the MythTV Appliance, specifically highlighting the appliance model and talking about how it was produced with rBuilder. I didn’t really get into what MythTV was, everyone there really already knew.

A little later I did the Foresight Linux talk, which I think went very well. Had a packed room and the crowd was more interactive than I had expected. At the end of the talk, I started getting more rBuilder questions, how conary works, and why it makes sense for appliances. At this point there was even someone in the audience that had just started setting up wordpress-mu for his company shouted out that he was gonna rush out and download the wordpress-mu appliance instead of struggling with it.

We also had the first Chicago GNOME Users Group meeting, mostly discussing why there needs to be a group and how people can help give back to GNOME. There was some good suggetions made and some tenative plans to try to get a GNOME release party planned for 2.20.

Throughout the day I got a number of questions about conary, just like Saturday. So I did a little session talking more about conary, how to write conary packages, some release management concepts, shadows, etc. Even did a demo of rMake building both x86 and x86_64 versions of a package. People really seemed to get it, which of course makes me happy.

I am also pleased to report we have gained at least one more developer, and had some great ideas for things we can do with Foresight to make it really stand out. And another guy that might be able to help with creating the XFCE edition of Foresight.

I have to give a big thanks to all the people that pulled this event off. It was amazingly well organized and things really went off without a hitch. There was great sponsors that made sure we had everything we could want for a weekend geek get together. And of course a big thanks for the hospitality.

First day was amazing… this is such a cool crowd. I don’t have a count of how many people were here on day 1, but it was packed! This place was basically like a night club all day… and well into the night. I didn’t leave until 4am and there was still people hanging out. There was more beer than I could imagine, lots of liquor and snacks. And most of all… oh my they pizza…. you couldn’t imagine how much pizza there was

There was definately allot of people asking about conary, I spent the better part of the day answering all kinds of questions. Specifically how does conary differ from dpkg (apt). I am very pleased to report that everyone that asked, seemed impressed. I showed off conary rollbacks at least 10 times. It is amazing that something I have gotten so used to now as the “norm” really blows those ubuntu guys away.

Bottom line… conary was a big hit. I even spent 2:30am to 4am showing off conary and rbuilder to some guys while enjoying even more beer

I have my swag bag packed for BarCamp Chicago. If any can make it to Chicago this weekend, come and introduce yourself. And bring your computer… we will be having an installfest. I have lots of cool goodies to give away to folks that install Foresight or the MythTV Appliance

Just a reminder, the first ever meeting of the Chicago GNOME User Group will be this weekend at BarCampChicago 2007. Sunday at 3pm. I think this is actually the first GNOME User Group meeting in the US, but I could be wrong.

Come out and join us, it should be a blast. And while you are there, check out the Foresight Linux talk at 1pm and the Conary/rMake talk at 2pm including a demo of a MythTV appliance.

How Ashlyn (my 4 year old) sees me

BARcamp Chicago here I come. I am going to be giving two presentations at BARcamp Chicago the weekend of June 23-24. Topics will be:

• Foresight Linux, what is it and why you want it
• Conary packaging and building with rMake

I am very excited about this trip, not only about giving these talks but about getting a chance to meet up with some fellow Foresight developers. Kevin Harriss and Paul Cutler will be there. I look forward to enjoying some tasty (hopefully) home brewed beer, music, and Foresight/GNOME talk

Another exciting thing that will be happing at BARcamp Chicago, the first ever Chicago GNOME Users Group meeting. Kevin is driving this, and I will definately be participating in this meeting. Hopefully get to meet some more cool GNOME users and hopefully spark some participation.

Anyone else in the Chicago area that would be interested in hanging out, let me know!

A little story about my first x86_64 Foresight test box. We have been in the need for some test hardware and a very generous Foresight team member offered to donate almost an entire box, CPU, motherboard, RAM, Hard drive, and a video card. Just missing a case and power supply. He even shipped it to me (Thanks Paul).

After receiving the hardware, I rushed out to purchase the cheapest case and power supply combo I could fine and get started. After installing all the components, and getting it powered up, I ran into a problem getting it to boot. Upon further inspection, there was a bit of damage on the edge of the board… I assume shipping injury.

This damage was enough that it couldn’t detect the fan attached which was telling it to shutdown. Not desirable. The CPU was a socket 754, as I started to hunt for a cheap motherboard for the CPU, Michael Johnson piped up and offered a socket 939 motherboard he had laying around and Michael Tharp offerred a socket 939 CPU and compatible memory… oh the generousity…

We got it all assembled using the video card and disk that came with the board Paul donated. Seemed to work well… even got the first Foresight x86_64 install on it and left it to run over the weekend. Monday morning I can in and started to dive into testing things on it…. and got quite a surprise.

Let me start by explaining a little about the case I bought, it had a clear plastic side with a fan mounted in the middle of it. This both gave me a great view of the internals as well as venting right next to my chair.

Now for the surprise… I was suddenly surrounded with smoke, looked down and it was being blown right at me from that fan mounted on the side of the case. Behind that fancy clear plastic I saw flames! Yes… Foresight was so hot… it went up in smoke
Turns out the video card shorted which caused a small fire… below are some pictures.

For more good news… Michael Tharp might be donating a replacement socket 939 board… and someone else gave me a socket 754 board… so I almost have the makings for 2 x86_64 test boxes…. and even more great news… Brett Adam has ordered a brand new dell x86_64 test box as a donation to the Foresight Project… Thanks Brett!