General Ramblings

On Friday and Saturday I was lucky enough to have gone to Linux Live in Olympia London UK and work the stand with Alex. As Alex has blogged the show was very quiet and it seems the .org village was an afterthought to the organisers.

I think that there was not enough advertising and the show we were paired with was the wrong one as the two user groups had completely different interests and priorities. I saw many a creative user swagger confidently into the area and you can see how his facial expression changes from complete confidence to utter fear step by step as he walks further. When he can’t take it anymore a swift about turn on the heel and almost sprinting he leaves and sighs a huge sigh of relief when he finds himself amongst the apple logos.

This scenario was played out over and over again for the two days I was there. Many of the other OSS people I spoke to were also under the impression that this would be their last excursion into London. This is a great shame as I think LinuxWorld and LinuxLive could have been a great way to bring the communities together.

Now that my rant is over I would like to mention the positive things that I and I think Bongo took from this expo.

I learned that I am actually not petrified of people and talking to them, I actually started enjoying the challenge of finding the expertise level for a interested party and then tailoring the pitch to their level, but when they started talking arrays and memory management etc… I just passed them on to Alex.

Not having a working Web interface was a big stumbling block in the demo stakes as many people were keen to see what it looked like and you can only do so much with the admin interface. J

I learned about the freebie hunter and their mating habits.

Bongo made some great contacts regarding potential collaboration with some big projects out their.

I learned about how great a database postgresql is (it helped that their stand was next to ours)

I also found the angels pleasant to watch as their small hands worked the kinks out of the shoulders of many a client (I still wish I had gathered the courage to book myself a session)

As this was my first outing as an exhibitor I believe I will have much more fun now I know how the other side feels when I go to more of them.

I think the biggest benefit was that Alex and I had many hours in the day to chat about Bongo and just plain shoot ideas at each other (the be honest it was more Alex shooting ideas and me looking stunned or lost), which is invaluable to a project like ours where brainstorming is a key player in what we do.

All in All I was impressed and disappointed at the same time. We need marketing material to hand out we need business cards and we need to have a working solution that we can show people.

Andy it might be time that we resurrect the Bugle again.

This evening Stu Gott dropped a bombshell on me, not literally but it had a similar impact. The guys at rPath have run a report on our little project and I was shocked to say the least when I found out that the Bongo appliance has been downloaded 0ver 7000 times. I seem to remember thinking this is a nice small project for me to help the Bongo-Project with, it will never take off as much as the packages that Andrew and the others are creating but will allow me to do my part.

Well to say the least I was sceptical as you can guess but then he pasted these stats for me to look at.

+——————+
| ReportforProject |
+——————+
| Bongo            |
+——————+
+———–+—————–+
| Downloads | ImageType       |
+———–+—————–+
|   2917    | INSTALLABLE_ISO |
|      4    | LIVE_ISO        |
|   1002    | MICROSOFT_VHD   |
|      1    | RAW_HD_IMAGE    |
|   1090    | VMWARE_ESX      |
|   1891    | VMWARE_PLAYER   |
|   1040    | XEN_IMAGE       |
|      1    | XEN_OVA         |
|   7946    | NULL            |
+———–+—————–+
+———–+——-+——+
| Downloads | Month | Year |
+———–+——-+——+
|     15    | 08    | 2007 |
|      4    | 09    | 2007 |
|     40    | 10    | 2007 |
|    384    | 01    | 2008 |
|    821    | 02    | 2008 |
|    732    | 03    | 2008 |
|   1048    | 04    | 2008 |
|   1249    | 05    | 2008 |
|    938    | 06    | 2008 |
|    961    | 07    | 2008 |
|    812    | 08    | 2008 |
|    634    | 09    | 2008 |
|    308    | 10    | 2008 |
+———–+——-+——+

I had to add up the totals myself as I could not believe it was that much. But true to form the total was 7000 which is a great achievement.

I cannot continue on without mentioning the guys who keep this project going I am not going to mention names as I my memory is so bad that I would forget someone. THANKS GUYS!!!!!!!

I feel like I have won and Oscar or something like that.

This has not been a chore to do as I have been learning as we have gone along and without Stu Gott’s help I am sure I would still be pulling my hair out. What shocks me more is that people are downloading us even though we say that it is not quite ready for use yet.

I am sure we will break all types of records when we release version 1.0 and it is something I look forward to. There is still many hours of programming and packaging ahead of us and we will continue doing what we do best looking after our baby as it were.

I almost forgot to add that I want to that all the people who have downloaded The Bongo appliance and also the other packages for being interested and also for trying us out. We are getting better and better.

I have run out of words to say………

Thanks

I have been running the release version of VMware Server 2 and I must say I am impressed. the only problems I had were with existing VM’s and upgrading the tools on them. And also VM’s that have open-vm-tools installed.

After updating the tools the systems all have been functioning just fine over the last few weeks and the host system has been under less load with more vm’s installed.

I might create a post on how I did it , but work is taking a load of my time and so that will have to be later.

I did try the new ESXi server but my hardware is not supported and I don’t have the cash to buy new stuff.

http://www.novell.com/communities/node/6070

Seems like everyone is loving linux

Ever since vmware made ESXi a free download I have wanted to install and run it at home so I can P to V my systems at home. And save money on electricity. And before you ask I have looked at the Xen and Virtualbox and Kvm solutions but have found them not quite ready fro my prime time.

I had been running vmware server in the past with reasonable success.

I downloaded an iso of the ESXi installer and dutifully copied all my VM’s to an external disk. When I tried to install esx it complained about not finding a device to install the image on-to.

I initially thought it was the SATA problem so installed an IDE drive to see if that would help but it did not.

I even tried a full ESX3.5 install CD but that also did not work.

So I downloaded Opensuse 11 mini and installed that and vmware server 2 which is actually quite decent and the new web based management is actually quite usable.

I will continue my quest however. But it looks like I will have to get some new hardware. The prerequisites for this is that it must be quiet as the machine stands in out lounge next to the TV and the missus does not want to hear it. I also need 64bit support as I do some dev work for foresight and need that for packaging.

We will see how it goes.

The links below are the ones I currently have looked at. And will add more to the post as I find them or they are suggested.

http://vinf.net/2008/01/14/vmware-esx-v35-on-cheap-pc-hardware/

http://www.theinquisitivegeek.com/2006/11/esx-on-whitebox-as-many-of-you-know-i.html

http://www.techhead.co.uk/building-a-low-cost-cheap-vmware-esx-test-server

Well I knew it would happen and it eventually did.

I was going to work this morning and I had to swerve for a black porche and my bike dropped.

I landed on my right hand side and slid down the road. I have a few bruises and bumps and will be seeing the doctor tomorrow morning. The bike is in the shop at the momentg I will find out what the damage is later.

I am just greatful I am alive and nothing is broken.

I have been scarce lately as I have been working down in Plymouth on a short contract for a Art school.

it was fun and I did more that I anticipated doing which is good.

Hopefully I will be able to get back to my Opensource stuff soon.

trying to find firebird db for a package

that is why I wear dark clothes

Well it has been a while since the Bongo team has released a version and there is good reason for this.

Over the last few months since the release of 0.3.0 the developers have been rewriting a large proportion of the store code. Alex realised that the old one was not as efficient as it could be when there were large volumes of mail stored in the system. This actually started when it was discovered that when using IMAP and connecting to your mail account if you tried to move large volumes of mail around it would error out or worse. The store is now almost done and the branch and trunk should be merged soon.

The other Alex has been bevering away at a new web front end for Bongo. After we had tried to fix what was broken in the old one we decided that the best way forward was to completely rewrite the whole thing. Now I don’t profess to know a whole lot about the subject but I know that it will be much easier to manage and work with which will make it easier for other people to contribute to the project.

I have probably summarised this far to much but I thought it best to let people know what we are doing.

As far as the Bongo appliance goes Stu and I have been working on a new incarnation of the appliance based on rPath Linux 2. This new version will allow us to utilise the newest version of rPath for the creation of the appliance. I have been working on other projects that have allowed me to gain valuable experience in the rPath packaging method and this will make it easier for me to administer and add features to the appliance.

Andy has been working on getting the Opensuse Builder to build a larger number of packages for different distributions and he has also packaged an experimental version of Bongo from svn. I hope to have that done soon for the appliance as well.

Lin has been busy bevering away at fixing and adding documentation to the wiki and I would like to say THANK YOU to him for all the work he has put in.

I hope I have not missed anything and if I have please let me know so I can add it to this post.