The Musings of Chris Samuel

If you were fretting about the Ubuntu mirrors being so slow, remember that the installer defaults to using HTTP, rather than FTP.

• Download speed of KDE4.0.4 in hardy-backports from http://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ - 20KB/s.
• Download speed of KDE4.0.4 in hardy-backports from ftp://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ - 150KB/s
• Happiness at remembering old, forgotten protocols - priceless

Warning: download speeds can go down as well as up..

So, I thought, I’ll test out the latest shinyness in btrfs on my old test box (an Olivetti Netstrada 7000) with 5 SCSI drives. But first, I’ll quickly upgrade to the latest development release of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron, to get the latest goodness of compilers, etc.

Except now my box won’t boot..

initrd extends beyond end of memory (0x0ffef173 > x01000000)

It looks like the kernel is getting the memory size wrong, but sadly even forcing it with the boot option mem=256M doesn’t do anything to fix it. Fortunately the kernel that comes with Gutsy still works on it..

Logged as bug #219868, but no response yet.

Update: This appears to be a bug from the mainline kernel, I’ve reproduced it with 2.6.25 and am in contact with the i386 boot code maintainer about it.

The OpenMoko Project has announced the pricing for their GTA02 FreeRunner phone that is designed to run Linux:

The FreeRunner will ship from Openmoko.com at $399. For early customers
I’m looking at throwing in a few free things. More details later. [...] The debug board will be available as a separate product for $99 USD.

There will be a 10 pack for bulk orders (some people locally are already soliciting for people to muck in on one):

For these people we created a 10Pack. instead of 399 per phone, we will
charge 369 per phone.

It’s not 3G (but then again, neither is the iPhone, unless the rumours about the Aussie version are right)..

Westall Secondary School in Clayton South, Melbourne, has started using KDE under KUbuntu Linux to allow them to replace the 3.0GHz Intel PC’s they were using with older 2.1GHz PC’s, extending their lives and avoiding landfill. The systems use KDE’s Kiosk framework to let the staff lock down the systems for their library system. The 3.0GHz machines released from this role will be going back into the main school for teaching duties there.

In explaining why the school went for Kubuntu, Stefyn said the students responded well to CDs put out by the Ubuntu project. Many had tried Ubuntu at home, which led to a decision to provide a familiar working environment at the school as well.

They got help both directly from Peter Lieverdink and also from the Linux Users of Victoria. They are also encouraging students to experiment with Linux, with old PC’s as a prize:

During our last hardware cleanout, we challenged the students to create the best Linux install and customization, and the winners would get to keep the hardware once it was decommissioned.

and all that apparently unnecessary desktop bling helps to get attention, according to the schools IT manager and teacher:

The kids were rapt with Compiz Fusion and this scored magic brownie points, because even the magical Vista couldn’t compete with the graphics. This was a great step into having them explore the other functionalities of Linux

Great stuff!

So Jeff Waugh has announced the “Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report” has been published as a PDF¹, hopefully the first of many.

Come and see what Open Source really does for Australia!

Our conservative projection of earnings suggests that the Open Source industry generates $500 million in revenue each year, with over 50% of that being directly related to Open Source.

The report is covered by a CC license:

The Australian Open Source Industry & Community Report is published as a freely downloadable PDF on the Census project website and is redistributable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives license.

1. or you can buy a hardcopy version [back]

Back in February Chris Mason announced btrfs 0.13, so I thought I’d give it a quick go as I’d not touched it since testing btrfs 0.5 back in August. Back then, on some pretty meaty hardware, there was a considerable difference between XFS and btrfs and I was curious as to how they’d compare now.

The test hardware this time is a quad core Intel box with 8GB RAM and a pair of 750GB SATA drives in a RAID-1 mirror. It is running Kubuntu Hardy Heron (now in beta) with a 2.6.25-rc6 kernel.

A quick blast with Bonnie++ surprised me, btrfs matched XFS for read, writes and rewrites (though with higher CPU usage, presumably due to the fact that it’s checksuming all the data) and then blew XFS away for meta-data operations.

Here are the full results:

Continue Reading »

A nice find by Andy..

From a bottle of Carlton Draught (hat tip to Kevin for asking).

A wonderful poster by Alec Muffett..

I can’t wait till I get back to Australia and can print a colour A3 version of this for my office door..

For those who haven’t seen, there is a local root exploit in what appears to be every Linux kernel from 2.6.1 through to 2.6.24, the bug is fixed in 2.6.24.1 which is out now.

I have uploaded my photos from Thursday (Day 4) of Linux.Conf.Au 2008 at Melbourne University. They are exclusively of the RepRap that was being shown off today and a gathering of people experimenting with the wireless mesh and collaborative capabilities of the OLPC XO’s that were distributed yesterday. I’ve already heard of at least 2 bugs being found through this release of machines to developers (one by Jason White).

I’ve just rearranged & geocoded all my LCA 2008 photos on Flickr into a set per day, gathered together into a single collection, which makes life easier for people who just want to see what happened on what day! I’ve updated the links on previous blog entries to point to the right set for the day in question too.