ken’s blog

It’s a journey

No, not Journey the hit band from the 80s… wow that takes me back to damn near (or not that near) the beginning of my journey!

I have spent a wonderful 3 years working at rPath, which ended in January. Having made some great friends at rPath, of which I am thankful, and having had some great experiences too. I will miss my rPath family, but will surely stay in touch. Tomorrow I start the next leg of my journey, with Canonical. I will be a Desktop Integration Engineer, working on the desktop team to integrate the fine work being done by the Desktop Experience team into Ubuntu. This is a very exciting opportunity for me, I have really been doing this for the past 4 years working on Foresight Linux. Taking cool stuff people have been working on and integrating it into a distro for broader consumption.

Over the years working on Foresight I have formed some great relationships with our Ubuntu brothers which has lead me to join their team. Joining the Ubuntu Desktop team will change my day job yes, but it won’t change my role or participation in the other work I do outside of that day job. I will still be maintaining Foresight Linux, the GNOME Developers Kit, PackageKit, and whatever other upstream projects I can cause trouble with.

Foresight Linux, Distro of the year!

Ars Technica awarded Foresight distro of the year alongside openSUSE.  Obviously I am very excited and proud that Foresight was recognized, but I have to send a big congrats out to the openSUSE guys too.  They have done some great stuff this year, keep it up!

Ars Technica review of rBuilder

Ars Technica just posted a review of rBuilder, check it out.

Appliance creation made easy

After my post the other about the recent addition of the ubuntu platform in rBuilder Online, I had a bunch of inquires asking “What is this appliance creator thing?”  Let me start out by explaining that Appliance Creator isn’t actually a product or service of it’s own, it is a feature of rBuilder.  The goal here is to make it as simple as possible to take your application and create an appliance with JeOS to get it running.  You can import your application from an rpm, deb, or a tar/zip archive (not source), and with a few clicks of the mouse have an appliance that can be downloaded or booted in the cloud.

I have put together a screenshot tour, taking you through the process.  Please note the captions along the bottom, they should help explain what each step is all about.  Another handy hint, you can use the “N” and “P” for next and previous to navigate (using lightbox).

Ubuntu, meet rBuilder

I’ll bet that sounds confusing! Well it’s true, the base Ubuntu server platform is now available for building application images on rBuilder Online. What does this really mean? The addition of the Ubuntu platform will allow the rBuilder community to build application images based on either rPath Linux or Ubuntu server. The rPath Appliance Platform Agent is also included in the Ubuntu platform.

With this addition, the Appliance Creator has been updated to import debian packages, just like you could already import rpm, tar, and zip binary archives.

To use the Ubuntu platform, you have to either edit an existing product version or create a new one.  There is a drop down for selecting platform:

rBuilder Online is beta, and rPath’s imported Ubuntu platform is currently alpha. Please use them both and help us improve by filing bug reports.