GoOSe Linux – Rebuilding Enterprise Linux the Community Way

Yes, GoOSe Linux is almost here and we’re ready to discuss the process and the goals of our little community. If you have been hearing me rant about GoOSe on the Utah Open Source Planet, Google Plus or Facebook and want to hear more. Or if you are just plain bored tomorrow night with nothing better to do, come down to the Provo Linux User Group. Learn more about how the Enterprise Linux Rebuild community is working together to make a better ecosystem.

If you can’t make it, or want to preview the slides, you can get them on my speakerdeck.com page. I look forward to seeing you all there.

For more information, check out the PLUG announcement.

Cheers,

herlo

As of this morning, it appears we only have around 40 failed builds! We’re getting very close! I think we could make an alpha by the end of next week with a good bit of sprinting! As I understand it, one is planned for next week, maybe we should sit down and figure out those details?

Cheers,

Clint

The project I’ve been working on does require a bit of thought around enterprise Linux versions run by a community. There is the ever amazing CentOS, Scientific Linux and a few others who have been around the block a time or two. The work that they have done has been immense and very helpful to many, including me.

For my project, the work was about building a fully binary compatible, enterprise-ready, community version of Linux, very similar to what CentOS and others have done. The question always comes ‘why?’ which will be addressed later on in future posts. Suffice it to say, the work we’ve been doing has paid off in both a individual and community sense.

In the beginning of this project, it was clear that we needed some tools to make things work the way we wanted. Luckily, there were tools out there to do a good portion of our work. Tools like koji, mock and of course Linux to bring it all together. But other tools seemed to be missing and I went on a quest…

The first tool that seemed to be missing was a way to import src.rpms from the most popular upstream vendor. These packages needed to be rebuilt by koji in some fashion, but just taking the srpms and rebuilding them had been done before, and seems to be the preferred way to date. In my mind however, it seemed that we were missing a step. Enter skein.

While skein is still very green and will need quite a bit more work, it accomplishes the goal of extracting the srpms into two parts. This tool basically sets up two things; a git repository on github.com (for now) along with a location and verifiable way to store the archive stored inside the srpm, called a lookaside cache. If one looks at the way the Fedora Project maintains their source, this process is very similar.

Once the srpm is imported with skein, it can be built with koji. At the moment, this process is fairly manual, but the plan is to improve skein to also allow building from the repositories. However, another bit more automatic way to build would be to use a git hook. Luckily, github provides several ways to accomplish this, including a custom URL to which an HTTP POST can be sent. At which time, koji would download the spec file and source from the appropriate locations and build a srpm.

Koji completes its task by building the binary RPM(s) and appropriately tagging the successful builds. Once complete, mash can be used to generate custom repositories to prepare for composing actual iso images. Mash is a command-line tool, again used by Fedora.

Once the repositories are generated by mash, pungi takes over. The process of building an iso is actually very simple, just a kickstart file, some repositories and pungi are used to create a fully installable DVD or multi-CD iso image.

Here’s a bit of my excellent artwork to better describe the process.

A couple things to note about this process is that while it is starting to become clear how to build an OS from an upstream vendor, there are parts that still haven’t been addressed. Currently, we can import with skein and rebuild the SRPM and build the binary RPMs with koji. We yet to have enough binary RPMs to actually construct a buildroot, but we are getting very close.

Automating the builds with git hooks and a skein build process is a nice big step toward making our own Operating System possible.

The other big piece of the puzzle is dependency resolution. Now this has been mostly resolved by tools and apis like Yum and RPM, but I still feel very much like a n00b when working with them. My hope is to figure out that process in the next week or so, and update skein to make building faster and easier overall.

Cheers,

herlo

Wedding on Friday the Thirteenth

On May 13, Jennifer and I were wed at a wonderfully pretty chapel downtown in Salt Lake City. The Holy Cross Historic Chapel, inside the Salt Lake Regional Medical Center is very pretty. Although a bit hot in the chapel that day, it was a beautiful ceremony. I was very excited when Jennifer walked down the aisle. So beautiful! And when she said ‘heck yes’ to the question of marriage, I was very excited.

The reception was even more awesome and the best part of the whole day. All of our good friends and family came and enjoyed some of the most awesome food at the Wild Rose in South Jordan. If you have not been to this restaurant, I suggest you check it out. Awesome food, awesome environment and Ken Rose, the owner-chef extraordinaire went above and beyond on everything!

The Honeymoon

On Sunday, May 16, we flew to Miami. As we left the Salt Lake airport, Jennifer was a bit misty-eyed as we left AJ behind. Monday, we boarded the Norwegian Sky and enjoyed a 4-day cruise to the Bahamas. This being the first cruise for Jennifer and I, it was a ton of fun, but definitely not the culture we were expecting. Again, amazing food and great sites every day.

On Tuesday, we spent a good day out and about on Grand Bahama Island. Snorkeling and a deserted island with lots of good drinks and new friends. I really enjoyed the conch demonstration and later on, conch fritters at a little bar at Port Lucaya. Almost missed the last bus, but such a fun time.

Overall, quite an enjoyable time.

UTOS Project Day

Today was the UTOS Project Day. We’ve been planning on having a few more of these and today’s was no different. Quite an excellent event for those who made it out. Tons of hacking, snacking and collaborating. I had to run out to my niece Tanja’s 1st birthday part, which was excellent and tons of fun, for part of the day. Overall, lots of good geeking out was had today!

We’re planning another Project Day for August 27. Make plans now to come out and hack. More details to come very soon!

South East Linux Fest (SELF)

If you are going to SELF this year, or have heard about it just here, I recommend you all try to get out to this amazing event. It’s a great weekend conference in Spartanburg, South Carolina, June 10-12.

Unfortunately, I was trying to work out attending this event, but will not be able to make it due to many reasons. I went to the first SELF, and am sad that I haven’t been able to make it sense. It’s on my list for 2012 again, so here’s hoping.

The Future

Well, as you might be able to see, plenty of good things have been happening. Wedding, Honeymoon, Project Day and more work than I can handle is coming right along.

Recently, I announced the Silver project, an easy-to-use development environment for web development. I’ve been busy improving and should be able to release v0.3 by the end of June. Several good bug fixes and new features should bring more and more functionality, making it easier to do QA and deploy to live environments using Silver.

In the near future, another project I’ve been working on will be announced. I’m hoping it will happen in the next month or two. It’s the project that has been filling in the gaps while I wasn’t busy with the wedding, honeymoon or working. I am very excited to announce this project soon, so keep an eye out in the next little while!

Cheers,

Herlo

# ls -l /root
total 88
-rw-------. 1 root root  1176 2008-11-23 17:22 anaconda-ks.cfg
drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root  4096 2008-12-14 18:37 bin

See the . ? Where you ask?  Look closer!

drwxr-xr-x. <– look, there it is!!  At first, I thought it was just one file, but then I noticed it other places, then I looked further, and it seems to be everywhere.

What is up with that? Where does this come from?  What is it for?  LazyWeb, can you help me?

Cheers,

Herlo

Cooking with PAM

Thad Van Ry will cover the basics of Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM). If you’re a Sys Admin who wants to know how PAM can help you or hurt you, this meeting is for you. Thad will go over the different stacks available as well as how to call modules and their control flags.

Thad is a Linux System Administrator for the LDS Church. He has been using Linux in his work life for the past 12+ years.

We meet in conference room A on the lower level of the Salt Lake Library.  Head down the stairs, make a left turn.  The conference room is directly under the foyer area (the area with all the shops on the 1st level)  If you aren’t clear, ask the information desk.  A map is available of all floor plans of the library.

Also, our meetings should be posted on the Electric Signs by the entrance to the library on the first floor.

The course is 15 weeks long, 3 hours per night and will be held in the Warnock Engineering Building (WEB) room 208 on Wednesdays from 6-9pm.  Basically, that means I’ll be teaching Linux once a week and keeping up my training skillz.

The only real drawback is that I’ll be missing the PLUG and SLLUG meetings for the better part of four months.

Cheers,

Herlo

What? A little early, you say? Sure is, but I thought I’d get an entire week’s head start and help out the crew with preparations.

Okay… That’s not really true, but I am in Raleigh already. Because of my employment at Guru Labs, I asked if I could fly into Raleigh after my classes on Friday. Instead, Dax, my boss made the deal even sweeter. He sent me to Raleigh to teach two Red Hat classes at Red Hat! Because of this, I’m currently teaching a RH133 this week, and a RH300 next week downstairs at the Red Hat home office.

On Thursday, my good friend Jared Smith, of Asterisk fame (and a good boardgame buddy) will be arriving just prior to FUDCon. I’m guessing he’ll be there to help F9 do more with Asterisk. Maybe we’ll have time for a quick game of Settlers or something, if he brings it – hint, hint Jared.

Over the weekend, I’ll be hacking away (or maybe just testing the eeepc) on the F9 release with the likes of Max Spevack and Greg De Koenigsberg. And since I’m already on Red Hat’s campus, I’m prepping my trip by making sure I know where all of the locations are for the events.

So, if you are at Red Hat this week and want to burn some time, come on by and say hi to me and my class. We’ll be learning about installation, filesystems, RAID and LVM, and much, much more.

I’m so stoked for this weekend! Its going to be an awesome FUDCon. Hopefully, I’ll be able to convince the boss to send me to the next FUDCon as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

The point of this post is to ask a simple question, however.  During the promotion of this event, I’ve received suggestions beyond the three big versions of Linux that are being released close to one month from each other.  For example, OpenBSD will be release soon, and Apple released Leopard for Mac OSX, among others.  And while every operating system is welcome to participate in the MDRP, I can’t help but wonder about certain definitions.

My question is what counts as a distro?.  I mean how do you classify yourself as a distro?  Is it a Linux only thing?  Or, is it just Open Source OSes?  Maybe its nothing, and I’m just bringing this up for no good reason.

Your comments are appreciated and encouraged.

Cheers,

Herlo