Robert Marcano's blog

Everyone against Red Hat

robert — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 22:33:20 -0400

The later announcement of the Novell/Microsoft partnership is another example of the attacks that Red Hat is facing, the previous one was from Oracle.

Red Hat is the current leader in the commercial Linux server market, and Novell is a very distant second. This is just Novell trying to join forces to attack a common enemy. I never trusted them as a real Open Source business, they only bought Suse because their proprietary OS was dying, in order to be able to continue selling their other proprietary offerings. In contrast Red Hat buys closed source applications and make all the changes needed to open source them, for example Fedora/Red Hat Directory Server based on its powerful predecessor, Netscape Directory Server; meanwhile Novell do not open source their core business. Novell buys Ximian for their .Net clone Mono, a dangerous proposition because MS will always be there as the only director of .Net future; Red Hat instead invest in a free Java implementation (GCJ/GNU Classpath). I hadn't bought any Linux product from Novell, and now it seems more improbable.

Finally I don't want to forget to talk about the crazy Oracle idea, do they really think that I will pay for support for a Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone to someone that has no expertize on OS development, that will give me security updates after Red Hat has done the job (with a delay), and that is not able to implement a decent JEE application server and that their support service recommends temporal hacks and do not solve the real issues on the application server... Yes Suuuuuure.

Update: Red Hat responds

Openly defined standards create interoperability everyone can implement. That's the real solution. It doesn't require a deal between two companies.

Dirvish on Fedora Extras

robert — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 23:02:28 -0300

Dirvish package has been approved and is now part of Fedora Extras.

dirvish submitted to Fedora Extras

robert — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 00:22:33 -0300

Now is the Dirvish turn to be packaged. Dirvish is a relly easy to use tool to create disk based rotating network backups.

perl-Time-Period submitted to Fedora Extras

robert — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:48:58 -0300

I submitted for review the perl-Time-Period package to Fedora Extras, it is a small Perl module used by Dirvish, that I want to submit too.

Update: Accepted and added to the extras repository

NetworkManager-openvpn

robert — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 16:14:30 -0300

The NetworkManager OpenVPN plugin is really good, that means no more configuration file editing and no more sudo.

RubyGems packager

robert — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 13:20:19 -0300

I am begining to experiment with Ruby on Rails, until now I found the first thing I dislike about it, the RubyGems packaging system. I do not want to use another packaging system different that the one provided by the OS, be it RPM or Debian packages, or any other option; I do not want to have files on the /usr filesystem that are not managed by the OS packager tool, I want to be sure that running the OS update tool is enough to have my system up-to-date (yum update). So the only solution I have is to build RPM packages for the ruby libraries I need and submit them to Fedora Extras.

Temporally I have created the ruby-gems RPM package, and I am using the environment variables GEM_HOME and GEM_PATH to install ruby packages on my home directory.

I found a Debian Extras position document about RubyGems, and I agree with that position.

Subclipse added to Fedora Extras

robert — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 22:14:26 -0300

After approval I added Subclipse (Subversion Eclipse plugin) to the Fedora Extras repository. The news reached Fedora People and Planet GCC.

Linux based PS3

robert — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 09:41:59 -0300

I have no doubt now that the PlayStation 3 is entirely Linux based, and not will be an optional feature only like with the PS2, just read the Crytek job offer.

Gdb debugging knowledge
Linux toolchain experience

those two requirements are the key.

Elephants Dream released to the public

robert — Fri, 19 May 2006 11:51:58 -0300

Elephants Dream is a 3D movie made with Open Source software, even the movie is open content so you can download the rendered video and also the production files splitted across two DVDs. I ocassionaly do small things on Blender as a hobby, but I am downloading these movie source files in order to know how the professionals do their work

To follow the development of this movie was very entertaining, because it was a good stress test for Blender; many optimizations to the software where made in the process, for example when they were having memory related problems on Mac OS X that were more noticeable than when they were using Blender on Linux. WARNING: you will need a good computer if you want to render the video yourself, a lot of memory and patience is needed, unless you have a 64bits Linux render farm .

Fedora Core 5 released

robert — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 14:22:45 -0400

Fedora Core 5 has been released, use the mirrors or the torrents in order to no overload the main servers.