The PUSK 0.9.7 is now available

What ? PUSK ? What’s that ? This is the ProLiant USB Setup Key

This is a USB key you can now use to capture a hardware configuration of your HP ProLiant server (tested with G7 and Gen8). For that you just have to boot on the USB key and type “capture” at the boot prompt. Configuration is stored on the key, with the operation logs.

Then you can modify the conf files, or just use the single one we provide for what is really specific in a server (iLO credentials and IP conf), and redeploy that hardware configuration on a new server. For that just boot the new server on the key, and voilà !!

More over to deploy, you don’t need a keyboard, mouse, screen attached to the server, so if you are working in a place where your server is just electrically and networkly connected, that sufficient, and at the end the server will shutdown once the gardware configuration is done. Just restart it, and start controlling it remotely from the iLO do perform whatever further installation/customization you need to do.

So this is an easy way to have an operator perform the operation, doesn’t need Linux knowledge, nor platform knowledge. He just has to send the logs back to the dev team in case a problem occurs so they can debug.

And more over, thanks to HP, this is all GPLv2 Free Software

Now the important part, where to download it ?

The full 0.9.7 key is available at ftp://ftp.project-builder.org/PUSK/pusk-0.9.7.img
Just use dd to burn it onto your key and boot with it (WARNING: default mode is to deploy !)

For those of you who want to hack on the code, the entry point is at http://pusk.project-builder.org/browser/trunk and the Wiki (Home page) at http://pusk.project-builder.org

Hope you’ll find it useful. Let us know what you think of it.

An intermediate 2.1.5 mindi version

It’s not very often that I separate mindi from mondo in the publication of releases. But this time it was needed as I had a customer who suffered from bugs that were only needing a mindi realease, and I thought it would help many other users ,so here you are !

Mindi 2.1.5 is there, and is principally solving kernel support detection for the type of initrd possible (solves an abort of mindi on RHEL3/4), and also reduces the number of error messages when dealing with links containing more than 2 references to .. Should help with some recent reports.

Also I had a report that the -H option and RESTORE keyword were not completely without interaction, so this is now solved as well.

Finally, this version supports better HP ProLiant Gen8 and future platforms by also using hp-rcu and hp-fm tools.

Now available on ftp://ftp.mondorescue.org for more than 120 distribution tuples ! And for those who ask why I do that: first because I like it, then because I have the tools to do it, and also because I do have users who are using Fedora 7, RHEL 3 or even Red Hat 6.2.

Distro Recipes 2013: Nice first !

As indicated, I had the opportunity to talk during the first Distro Recipes event organized in Paris last week, at the invitation of Hupstream. As Yoann Sculo posted, this was a very interesting day for me, and I really regret I was busy to also attend the first day and the opening.

After a nice welcome breakfast, Aurélien Bompard started by presenting the Fedora distribution.

He did a great job especially expalining how easy it was to become a Fedora maintainer, even if a comparison to Debian revealed that it’s much less different that what people may think (it also takes time to become a packager able to modify most distro packages) and I know by experience that the Fedora packagers are really picky (sometimes for not so good reasons) with new contributions.

After that I talked about HP and Linux distributions. I used in fact the standard HP marketing presentation of the company as a starter (modified of course to suit my needs and include more penguins !) in order to explain the span of our activities, our relationship with communities including distributions, announced that HP will even soon provide firmware for ProLiant servers under a package format (rpm and deb), the fact that HP doesn’t see Linux demand for desktop/laptop on the consumer market (no, it’s not just a price issue that would make Linux more appealing in that case as I justified) but that we do support Linux on some enterprise desktops/laptops. Hopefully this was useful and/or new to some of the audience.

Then Dodji Seketeli made the type of talk making you believe that you could contribute to gcc ! Of course, when he details how much time it took him to add some of the features of the next stable version, you know you can’t ! Well I at least Anyway lots of good news and features that make that future version 4.8 expected soon.

That conclude our morning sessions, and it was then time to eat !! Especially as we had a great buffet waiting for us as you can see:

In order to avoid a sleepy afternoon, we started right after by a round table with 7 people (!), that I had the pleasure to chair. With a representative of each distribution (Mageia, openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, Arch, Embedded) and a Microsoft representative, you could expect blood and swords fight ! Not at all, I was surprisingly happy that the elements were clearly exposed, each representative defending their own work rather than criticizing, and finding ways to propose more future joint work. Of course, some subjects such as LSB/FHS lead to more debate, but very constructive and I really enjoyed this time slot as a way to show that differences are an added value ! It was also the opportunity for me to meet with Colin Guthrie and Frédérc Crozat, which I had never met before. These distros should be happy to have such representatives defending them (and the others too of course ) Finally if you have ideas to share to improve cross-distribution work , consider joining the mailing listdedicated to his topic and start sharing your ideas.

Then it was time again for the remaining presentations. The first was Lucas Nussbaum. Long time Debian Developer, (he is even running for the Debian Project Leader now, vote for him !) he made a convincing picture of the Debian ecosystem, the numerous Web sites that contributors can create to enhance the distribution with stats, infos, Ubuntu correlations, … As usual, Debian appears as a very mature distribution, with a strong Governance, being perl friendly… If I had to change I may well become a debianers. But isn’t it because of the pres, as the morning I was a fedorian

The next speaker was a long time Linux enthousiast Pierre Ficheux. In fact back when it was Minitel time (not 2.0) I used his xtel program !! Pierre made a presentation (in english but with the accent ) around embedded Linux distributions, presenting various way to tailor one for your device (he was using a Raspberry Pi) depending whether you use an Ubuntu, a Yocto generated one or a pure OpenEmbedded linux one. Definitely a good idea to explore for my Pi !

And then we had the lightnings talks. Aurélien Bompard was there again for HyperKitty. Too bad it’s devoted to mailan, as I think Sympa would also benefit from such a work, as their archive management (at least on the latest versions I used) could be improved.

I came then again on stage for a project-builder.org presentation (building cross-distro packages for upstream projects) and made a short demo which I think is explaining much more than my slides, so I plan on using it more in the future !

After me, Eric Leblond explained how his upstream project (ulogd2) wasn’t picked up correclty by most distributions and asked for help to improce that.

And final speaker was Nicolas Vérité who made a panel on all mobile Linux distributions, recommending to follow closely Tizen for the future as the main force in this area.

Too bad it was already over. Anne closed the session and I’d like to thank her for the invitation and the perfect organization of this first cross-distributions vent as a real success. Well done and see you next year hopefully !

Meeting at the first Distro Recipes

I’ve been kindly invited for the first Distro Recipes event in Paris the 4th and 5th of April.

As I have an internal HP meeting on the 4th, I’ll be only available at the end of that day, but will present on the 5th how Hardware manufacturers work with Linux distributions, giving the example of HP. I’ll also monitor a round table aound “Linux distributions: differences and commonalities” where we will try to have polite discussions about what makes a distribution unique, and what is instead worth sharing by collaborating. Finally I’ll also present during the lightning talks “Project-Builder.org: packaging for multi-OS Open Source Projects“

So won’t have that too much time outside of presentations, as you can see, but would be happy anyway to meet with MondoRescue or Project-Builder.org or HP/Linux users and talk with them.

Anyway a great event to be in, as the list of speakers is really interesting, all majors distros being represented, and for sure very interesting new contacts to make, and hopefully the curiosity to discover these other distros that you don’t use Come for the same reasons, and see you there !

Meeting at Linux.conf.au in Canberra

I’ll soon be lucky to be able to be in a plane for some 20 hours in order to reach down under and be in Linux.conf.au in Canberra ! It will be my second time in Australia after my previous presentation on MondoRescue in Sydney in 2007. This time I’ll organize the cross-distributions MiniConf on Tuesday the 29th of January 2013.

And I’m so happy to have fantastic speakers such as Bdale Garbee or Monty Taylor among others ! I anticipate it will be a great Miniconf. So fell free to come and participate, you’ll have the best people to give you answers

And as usual, if you want to talk about packaging, disaster recovery, open source or early music, feel free to come by and talk with me. I look forward discovering another part of thies great country in two weeks.

Meet at HP Discover next week

Hello,

I’ll be at the major HP event (HP Discover) next week in Frankfurt, Germany from the 4th to the 6th of December, delivering 2 sessions, and attenting some others which look very promising.

You may find me on the Red Hat booth or the Intel booth, if you want to talk about code and projects (MondoRescue, Project-Builder.org, UUWL), Architecture, FLOSS Governance, FLOSS @ HP or in general. Will be happy to exchange with you around these topics.

You may find more details (in french) on the sessions I’ll be delivering on the event blog site.

See you there !

Presenting FOSSology at LinuxCon, San Diego next week

I always find strange to be accepted as a speaker to LinuxCon on a subject for which I’m much less an expert than the other ones I proposed for which I’m leading the projects ! It happened last year for the EMEA event, and same stuff again this year for the US one.

But I won’t be criticizing here, as it’s my first possibility to visit the US west coast, and also my first time as a speaker to LinuxCon US so Champagne !! So I’ll be talking about FOSSology, the HP sponsored GPL Licenses analyzer tool.

So if you happen to be around, and want to discuss abour FLOSS, MondoRescue, Project-Builder.org, HP and Open Source, or something else such as early music, then feel free to come and talk. Well I’m sure you won’t come to see me, won’t you, but once you’re there to see the stars, just come and say hello

UUWL aka the Unix to Unix Wrapper LIbrary is now available

I recently receive the approval from the HP OpenSource Review Board so that we can publish a new HP and Intel sponsored Open Source project called the UUWL aka the Unix to Unix Wrapper Library, now available at UUWL.project-builder.org.

The published code is a first version providing help to migrate C code from Solaris to Linux. That’s a first step in this project. The target is to augment that with more code porting helper functions, which have not yet being developed, and also to target next other Unices such as AIX. As well we think this library may well become a must have for Linux distributions, so they may integrate it as they do with the GNU LibC, so that Linux could become the most porting friendly platform.

For the moment, only the source code and build process is available. I’ve started to work on the packaging with project-builder.org, and soon multiple packages will be available for various Linux distributions in order to ease installation and usage. We also need to release more documentation, use autoconf/automake, … It’s just a start. But as such we thought it would be worth sharing and try to build a new community interested by this topic.

We are interested by getting first feedback around this project. And if you have porting experience, you’re also welcome to join and share it with us so we could improve the UUWL and make it more useful for everybody. It’s released under a dual license, both OSI approved, the LGPLv2 and the MIT license, so it could be used in multiple context.

Logiciel Libre et présidentielle

S’il est un domaine étrangement absent du débat public et des discours des présidentiables, c’est bien le domaine de l’informatique Et pourtant, c’est un domaine touchant de nombreux français, tant dans leur travail quotidien, de par l’utilisation toujours plus prégnante des technologies du numérique, que dans leurs activités privées (gestion de photos, de musiques, de films, d’associations, navigation Internet, courrier électronique, bureautique, gestion de comptes, …).

Et s’il est un domaine où des économies drastiques peuvent être effectuées, c’est bien celui du logiciel dans le secteur informatique. Bien sûr en tant qu’utilisateur de technologies libres, et de distributions Linux depuis 1993, je suis particulièrement conscient de ces aspects, et du reste, c’est un des facteurs, avec la maîtrise technologique, qui poussent les clients avec lesquels j’interagis pour HP à adopter de plus en plus massivement ces technologies (et de façon plus importante que ce que les chiffres ne montrent, en raison du mode de diffusion du logiciel libre).

De plus en plus de résultat montre également que le secteur public bénéficie fortement de son adoption: Notre gendarmerie nationale, comme la ville de Munich sont deux exemples chiffrés et parfaitement analysés.

Et cela n’est pas difficile, ni pour un politique, ni pour un citoyen de comprendre la raisonnement: la réduction des coûts importants sur les licences (réduits à 0), la mise en concurrence sur les aspects support et prestation intellectuelle (amenant un prix de marché raisonnable et une qualité obligatoire), la meilleure maîtrise de l’environnement informatique par les équipes en charge (ou en infogérance si préféré), la meilleure sécurité apportée par la transparence du code, l’interopératbilité par le respect des standards et normes, tout contribue naturellement à ce que tous les partis et citoyens analysant honnêtement la situation tirent la même conclusion: il faut adopter massivement ces technologies, pour améliorer tant notre indépendance nationale, produire localement en bénéficiant de la production des autres, créer des emplois à forte valeur ajoutée, réduire les bugdets de l’état comme celui des entreprises (même en comptant les investissement dûs à la formation complémentaire), remettre le facteur humain au coeur des choix et replacer les technologistes qui ont permis ces avancées à leur juste niveau dans les chaînes de décision.

Pourtant, personne n’en parle. Ou si peu. ni de l’importance des données et formats ouverts !

Avec le si faible nombre de réponses obtenues au texte de candidats.fr (et aucun des 6 candidats que les sondages annoncent comme majeurs), comment se déterminer ? J’engage donc les candidats à la présidentielle, mais aussi ceux pour les législatives qui suivront à faire non seulement part de leurs intentions dans l’adoption de standards ouverts et des logiciels libres, mais aussi à les promouvoir dans les discours, comme l’un des moyens de réduire la dette de notre pays, d’améliorer l’emploi ainsi que notre indépendance technologique.

En 2012, votez FLOSS !

Let’s meet at Fosdem 2012 in Brussels

I’ll attend Fosdem again this year next week-end in Brussels. I’ll deliver a talk on Project-Builder.org as a support for a Continuous Packaging cross Operating Systems development.

There are some news with the tool, and hopefully a new version, and some future evolution that I’d like to communicate. I also plan to present less slides, and have a more concrete demo to help people see the value of the approach.

While not presentting, I’ll probably be around near the Mageia booth or around my HP colleagues attending the event as well (Bdale Garbee, Martin Michlmayr, Hugo Roy). Don’t hesitate to come and chat !