Joshua Wulf

Last night on the way out to Larnach Castle one guy on the bus was, I kid you not, recording the waypoints on his GPS. Now when the guy next to you is recording the waypoints on his GPS you are either at a geek conference, or travelling with Mossad agents.

We started chatting, and he filled me in on the state of GPS, including DGPS, or distributed GPS. He also told me about another talk that I missed, about the fastest Debian computer in the world. I had read that title during the Debian mini-conf stream, but was in something else at the same time. There are so many great talks going on that it's impossible to catch all of them.

"The fastest Debian computer in the world" was a talk given by Keith Packard about his hobby of rocketry. I tried my hand in solid fuel rocket building while I was in high school, but this is of a whole different magnitude. From what I was told the rocket goes up to 75,000 feet, and it has two GPS units in it, one in the nose and one in the tail, and with these they can compute the bearing of the rocket as well as its position.

Anyway, now completely blown out at having missed all of Keith Packard's talks I scanned my timetable today and was instantly on a talk entitled: "A modest proposal to help speed up and scale the linux networking stack", by a guy called Van Jacobson. This one jumped out because it looked like another "Mouse Pointer Redirection in X". The title was completely non-descript, so it had to be the shizz.

I went along, and this time I scored! Apparently (as everyone else no doubt already knows) Van Jacobson is the man in networking - from the old, old school.

Like Keith Packard he was a very non-imposing personality, starting off in a soft voice that we had to strain to hear. I had to run out part way through to secure my flight for Sunday, but I caught the first half, and I can now say that I've seen Van Jacobson. Steve Hanley has the lowdown on the talk.

We did the Red Hat BOF tonight. Dave Woodhouse, Dave Howell, myself and Seth Vidal (disclaimer: who doesn't work for Red Hat!), and Menno Smits were there.

Before we went I got the low down on the Fedora distro upgrade situation from Jef Spaleta and Seth Vidal.

If you go here you can see that Fedora allows an anaconda upgrade of one version of Fedora to the next. Check out Jef's comments to find out about the current situation of this in FC5 testing.

Doing an upgrade of a live system without rebooting, which is actually what our friend was after, is not officially supported, or recommended. Seth explained that nasty things can happen if you try this. However, Seth himself does it, and has a page where he talks about it - here.

There were about fifteen people, and I introduced them to Seth, who then kept them entertained for about an hour, at which time I gave everyone a t-shirt and handed out some FC4 DVDs for the peeps who wanted them.

A number of the people who came are in an academic environment. There are a number of options for academic environments. I believe there is a special academic pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (I'll have to check on the details of that - I'm not in sales). Seth uses CentOS (he's a maintainer) at Duke, which is a rebuild of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux source packages. It costs $50 a year for a machine. You don't get technical support with that, or the centralized management of your machines that you get with Red Hat Network or Red Hat Satellite (all of which can save you a lot of time), and some third-party apps like Oracle that are only certified on RHEL won't run, but if you don't need those things, it can work for you.

If I had a business which had the skillset internally I'd probably run CentOS like Seth does. Otherwise I'd just pay for RHEL. Whatever the yearly subscription is it might seem like a lot for software, but you're not paying for that, you're paying for support staff, and for support staff that's pretty cheap. The guys that I work with are top notch and can fix all kinds of problems. A lot of the time I just help people to administer their machines. Sometimes we work to solve complex problems during implementations (they always ring just before their deadline!). Sometimes I connect people with engineers to get bug fixes done (people with subscriptions get priority on engineering resources). There are a lot of people whose work is something other than Linux, and they don't have time to spend on getting their system working, and they don't have the money to hire a consultant or a full-time Linux person. It's perfect for them.

The other night I was explaining the Red Hat business model to someone on the bus. The original idea? Give the Linux away for free, and make money selling the t-shirts. It actually hasn't changed much. We still give the software away for free. You can get it in binary form from CentOS, White box or Tao, or build it from source yourself, like they do. We make more money supporting it these days than from selling t-shirts, but t-shirts are still in the mix.

Have to get some more t-shirts. I gave away all the medium sized ones, and now there are only a few XL ones left. The new Fedora logo will look good on a t-shirt.

Tonight was the Linux Conf AU dinner at the Dunedin town hall. At the end there was an auction to raise money to donate to the John Lions chair that is to be established at the University of New South Wales ( which is incidentally where LCA 7 will be held next year).

Rusty Russell was the auctioneer. Now I didn't get to hear Rusty speak at this conference, but I definitely knew who he was. Back in the office in Brisbane we were discussing Australia's disproportionate contribution to open source globally and we were running through the hometown heroes. mkearey, who like a few others at Red Hat used to do networking in university dorms, and is my personal recourse for all things iptables related, gave props to Rusty Russell.

Rusty was amazing, a master of theatre - even managing a Shakespeare quote at one point of the show. The item being auctioned was a copy of John Lions' Guide to version 6 of Unix, with source code, signed by Linus Torvalds, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and a number of other open source superstars. The auction went for an hour, and by the end of it a cartel had bid $10,000 for the book, as well as:

• Jeff Waugh shaving off his hair


• A mention for whoever they nominate (Miguel de Icaza? <- joke!) in the About dialog of KDE 4


• Naming rights on the upcoming Planet 1.0 release


• Dave Miller shaving off his beard and moustache


• Russell Coker growing a beard for the next LCA


• Groggy Greg shaving off his beard


• A mention in the release notes of MySQL 5.1


• 8 bug fixes of their choice in KDE

Linux Australia is matching the $10,000 from the auction, and Usenix is matching that total - for a grand total of $40,000 raised toward the UNSW John Lions Chair.

Benno got up and explained that the cartel was formed of ex-UNSW students who studied in the culture established by John Lions in his 23 years as a professor there, and that they felt so strongly about it that they wanted to contribute back to that culture.

I left with a lot of the LCA massive just before midnight. The keynote tomorrow morning is Mark Shuttleworth speaking on "How to Improve Collaboration Between Open Source Projects". Mercifully it doesn't start until 10 am. I'm getting pretty worn out. I don't drink alcohol, and I can't understand how other people are managing with the late nights and the intense, action-packed days, and drinking at night. Amazing.

The guys running this event must be rushed off their feet. There is so much on. And it's just not possible to catch all of it. I missed Ajax's talk on X memory management, and Carl Worth's Cairo tutorial.

Hyperposting will stop tomorrow, the last day of LCA. On Sunday morning I'm on a 7.20 am flight to Christchurch, and thence to Taupo, and I'll be off-net for a week.