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Gallery Migration

elliot — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 04:24:39 +0000

This past weekend I completed the migration of my gallery from a custom install to a proper appliance. In the progress of doing so upgrading to the latest release. This meant migrating a database and several gigs of images. I was amazed at how easy it was to pickup and move just the database, image data, and config file and have everything just work.

Appliance Installer and IMAP on Gmail

elliot — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 02:50:09 +0000

I did some testing with the Appliance Installer with Foresight Linux 2 today. Turns out that end to end time to install for a complete GNOME based Linux desktop is 7 minutes. That’s right 7 minutes. That includes user interaction and everything.

Looks like anaconda is shaping up for an alpha release of Foresight Linux 2. Ken is making good progress trying to get anaconda-templates built so that we should be able to get some sample ISOs out later this week or early next week.

Also, gmail has imap support….finally http://digg.com/software/Gmail_gets_IMAP

rPath Linux 2 Alpha 4 Released

elliot — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:49:47 +0000

Today we released rPL 2 Alpha 4. This has been a long time coming. It involved a few rebuilds of the distro from scratch and switching away from our old internal build mechanism to rMake. Hopefully now that we have alpha 4 out the door beta 1 will be coming down the pipe soon.

One of the major changes in Alpha 4 is the addition of splashy for graphical boot. With splashy you get a splash screen and progress bar at boot and shutdown instead of the normal initscripts output. (Don’t worry for those of you who like to watch initscripts run, you can disable splashy by removing the “splash” and “vga=” kernel options from your grub.conf.) We are still working out some of the kinks, but don’t let this stop you from testing out splashy and remeber to file an issues that you happen to run across in rITS.

Another major addition in the alpha 4 release is the support in anaconda for the “Appliance Installer”. The Appliance Installer is significantly faster and has a smaller memory footprint than the “Installable ISO” that we normally use. How do we do that? We first let rBuilder generate a tarball of the group, split the tarball into chunks, and then add the chunks to the ISO. On the install side of things we feed the tarball chunks to tar over a pipe until the tarball is complete and then let anaconda write out some of the hardware specific configuration. This makes the Appliance Installer faster than *any* anaconda base that I have ever seen. Unfortunately there is no way for rBO projects to consume the Appliance Installer at this time, however there are some rBuilder features in the works to make it easier.

PackageKit 0.1.0 Released

elliot — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 23:49:02 +0000

Over the past couple of months I have been working on the conary backend to PackageKit, a dbus abstraction for package management. Today the first version was released for public consumption. PackageKit is now shipping as part of Foresight Linux if anyone wants to try it out.

What this means for users:

This gives users a generic interface for managing software on their system. Makes it easier for users to install applications because they can be sorted by the same topics that exist in menus. Provides an abstraction layer for requesting software by generic names.

What this means for developers:

Application developers now have a generic interface for requesting package installs. This could be useful for applications that use plugins like firefox, mplayer, and totem.

For more information see the packagekit.org.

Web Design

admin — Mon, 01 Oct 2007 03:39:36 +0000

It seems like being an open source developer these days requires knowing something about web development and design. I am trying to setup some personal bits like a blog, wiki, gallery, and planet and I would like them all to have something of a similar theme. Everyone out there seems to have themes for each, but I can’t seem to find any cross project themes.

If only there were a good way to have a similar look and feel across web applications without spending lots of time tweaking css here and there and checking for browser compatibility. Anyone know of any cross application themes or an easier way of pulling this off?