According to an interview with Karanbir Singh – a major contributor to the project – it is just a question of a few weeks until we can expect CentOS6 to be released.
CentOS is extremely important for the RHEL community, it is a playground for trying out new stuff before getting into an engineering phase with the Red Hat supported RHEL.
Lets have fun with it…
Today Red Hat has released RHEL5.6 after a beta period of ~2 months. There is no official announcement (yet), so the release highlights are unknown. Probably they are the same like the beta version.
Have fun!
I’ve got a Epson Perfection 1260 Photo scanner.
Fedora like other distributions such as OpenSuse are recognizing the device since a long long time. The back end chosen for the device is plustek.
Unfortunately when using the default configuration one experience very strange effects with colours. The left and the right 50% of the picture have a colored background, even when scanning a empty page.
I had this problem with OpenSUSE since years and still got it with Fedora 1x. Since I only need the scanner for my yearly income tax declaration, I always forget about what I needed to change.
That’s what is needed to change:
Solution
[root@bond ~]# diff /etc/sane.d/plustek.conf.orig /etc/sane.d/plustek.conf 100c100 < option altCalibration 0 --- > option altCalibration 1 [root@bond ~]#
Since I do not have any other scanners I do not know if this is a bug specifically to this type of scanners, or if it is a general bug.
Using different search engines, the web does not disclose some solutions. That is one of the reasons why I’m blogging about it. The other reason is to find other people with the same problem.
At the end of the day, I’ll try to find out if this is a general bug of the Sane back end, or just specific to some Epson scanners. If it is specific to some Epson scanners, it may be worth to create a new specific back end for those scanners affected.
Having fun? Now I have, my stuff is successfully scanned.
I’m currently working in a project which includes some virtual Linux desktops. The desktop of choice is RHEL6.
How to bring a Linux desktop via WAN to a thin client? VNC -> are you nuts? Remote X11 over SSH -> WAN = no go. NX -> another vendor involved. SPICE -> Spicy! But: Spice over WAN? To be tested…
SPICE is the protocol used by RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization). Some time ago I had the chance to test this stuff @Red Hat in Munich. The experience was nice, it is comparable to vSphere, but it only works with MS Internet explorer due to ActiveX and .Net stuff.
The management software needs to be installed on a Windows 2008R2 server. The database to be used is – you guess it – MS SQL. Users are authenticated either by Active Directory (Not generic LDAP!) or local Windows Users. Holy cow!
At first, when I got this product presented by Red Hat I was LOL. Now, it seems that I need to refresh my Windows knowledge because it seems to be the only product capable to provide enterprise ready Linux desktop virtualization. I’m crying 
At least the hypervisor used is not MS HyperV, it is KVM based on RHEL5, to replaced with RHEL6 in the future.
There is some light at the end of the tunnel: Red Hat is working on a replacement of the Windows-bound stuff. It will be replaced with some JBOSS and Java stuff. The database will probably be PostgreSQL. It will take some time to develop it before it will be ready for production.
Since Red Hat is opensourcing all (or most) of its products, it would be great to get in touch with the upstream project (release early, release often).
In meantime I need to build up knowledge about Windows Server 2008R2, Active Directory, MS SQL Server and DotNet.
Having fun?
Today, I saw a interessing post on the spacewalk-devel mailing list.
Lines of code
Spacewalk has 2,908,841 lines of code, created in estimated 843 person years. This means 843 developers are needed to rewrite Spacewalk from scratch in one year! That’s amazing.
Number of bugs fixed
As stated in the post, the Spacewalk-team fixed 1012 bugs in the year 2010. Some 1061 bugs are still due to be solved, the Spacewalk-team will not running out of work in 2011. See RHN Satellite bugs and Spacewalk bugs.
Contributions from outside Red Hat
96% of the contributions are from Red Hat people. Looks like my small contribution to the German translation is just about 0.0000001% 
. Seriously: This should be improved. More people outside of Red Hat should contribute. How? A good way can be a better support for Debian based distributions as well as for SLES/OpenSUSE and other distributions. I think this would attracting more Red Hat outsiders.
Another important thing: Instead of mailing list posts, Fedora should release its advisories similar to Red Hat. This would enable people to have the errata in its Spacewalk servers. This would lead into more people interested in Spacewalk in the Fedora community.
Communications
The IRC communication stats can somehow be a bit problematic. Is it really needed to log all IRC traffic? Its was stated that 24.1% have been questions, the mail list post also disclosed which are the most aggressive persons and so on. Privacy? For myself: I’m probably going to change my real name nick to something else…
Missing numbers
It would be interesting how many people are subscribed to the spacewalk and spacewalk-devel mailing lists and the number of posts to these lists.
Major achievements in 2010
This is just my point of view…
- PostgreSQL support reached a point where it is ready for broad testing.
- spacewalk-repo-sync allows to directly sync with yum repos.
- Staging of content
- Support for eliminating duplicate system profiles
- Performance improvements (felt, not measured)
Did I had fun this year?
I had a lot of fun with Spacewalk, for sure. I did not challenged Spacewalk with all the stuff that I need @work with the RHN Satellite.
Will I have fun in 2011?
With Spacewalk of course, it is a cool project. If the Fedora project decides to publish Spacewalk-like erratas I’m pretty sure that France will have a problem to produce the amount of Champagne needed. If it comes down to the RHN Satellite: Due to severe bugs, I only can manage RHEL6 systems with some workarounds but I am confident that this will change soon.
In short: Yes I’ll having fun 
Red Hat recently released some bugfixes for the RHN-Satellite version 5.4. They needed approx. one month to develop a fix for those serious bugs.
If you upgraded to sat540 before those bugsfixes have been released you will have a crippled database. The errata provides a way how to fix it. It needs some time, but it works perfectly. For “my” satellites it was taking about 48h for both satellites, about 12h for the master and 36h for the slave satellite.
This time, Red Hat’s QA also made a good job, it is now working like expected. The developers had a hard time too, according to the git log they worked on weekends too.
If you are new to sat540 or upgrading to it, please ensure that you do NOT take any action before applying the errara!
Have fun! (This time REALLY for sure)
Thanks to Máirín’s posting I got aware of the Pulp project.
What is it? I had a brief look at it, it is a Red Hat sponsored project with a similar functionality like Spacewalk and RHN Satellite.
This brings me to the question: Is Pulp is intended to be a replacement of Spacewalk? It can make sense, it is written in Python as Cobbler is. Cobbler and Spacewalk are not really playing nice together. Spacewalk used Java, Perl and Python.
Anyway, Pulp seems to be in its early childhood, but it seems to be a really interesting project. What are the plans for the future? And what are the plans for Spacewalk and thus RHN Satellite?
Having fun? As soon as I get the time to install it and give Pulp a closer look….
I’m writing this post sitting in a train, connected to the internet via UMTS. The device is a Huawai E220 HSDPA modem connected via USB. Guess who is the winner?
Procedure to get the device running on Fedora (first time usage):
Steps: 3
Time: approx. 5sec.
Procedure on Windows XP (first time usage):
Steps: 8
Time: approx 10min
[update]
Procedure on Windows 7 (first time usage):
Steps: 7
Time: Between 5min and 30min (depending on your Windows 7 knowledge)
[/update]
For the subsequent usage on Fedora proceed as it is the first time usage.
On Windows (XP and 7) you need to remember which port you plugged in the device when you installed it. Otherwise you need to uninstall the drivers, reboot and install the drivers again and reboot again. [update]On Windows 7 you do not need a reboot.[/update]
Having fun? With Fedora yes With Windows? Not really…
Today, Spacewalk – the upstream project of the RHN satellite – released version 1.2. One of the promises the developers made was better support of PostgreSQL. It seems that lot of stuff is now working. As I promised, I’m going to examine whats working and whats not. I’ll file every single bug I’ll find, please do the same in a polite manner.
First impression
Installation and first sync of yum channels works like PostgreSQL support was there from the first second. Nevertheless, there is still a lot to test.
How to install Spacewalk with PostgreSQL?
It is straight forward:
And enjoy your newly installed Spacewalk server w/o Oracle!
What I proofed working so far:
Conclusion so far
More things to test
Since syncing repos is a time consuming task (seems to be much less time consuming with PostgreSQL), some tests are still pending. There is no single System yet subscribed, no deployment tests etc. I’ll test them later and let you know.
Some more words to say
The RHN Satellite and Spacewalk developer crew (once again) made an outstanding good job (I wish I could say the same on QA). At FUDCon 2010 in Zurich, Miroslav stated that nobody is willing to test the PostgreSQL support. No wonder it was not yet ready to test it at that time. Now, PostgreSQL enabled Spacewalk is ready for being tested by broad public , do it as I do it!
Having fun? Yes sure, I’m going to do some more intensive tests on the PostgreSQL support.
Cheers,
Luc
RHEL6 @rhn.redhat.com
RHEL6 was just released at 2010-11-10 20:09:50 CET. Quoting Red Hat press relase: Today, we delivered Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to the market. @Red Hat: you are so mean! Next time inform your fellows one day in advance to give your fellows the chance to fill the fridges with champagne!
I did not checked (yet) the differences between beta 2.1 and GA. I guess the differences are at a minimum.
The odd thing is: It seems not be available via satellite-sync yet (yes, sat540 is in place).
[update]You need to get a new certificate from Red Hat support to get access to the rhel6 channels, regardless if you got one a few days ago to install sat540.[/update]
Having fun? No, I do not have any champagne in my fridge