Technology, Open Source and Shiny Things

So I have upgraded my Kubuntu 9.04 box to the KDE 4.3 Beta and RCs and am really impressed with the progress that they are making.

Add: deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main to your /etc/apt/sources.list or even within KPackageKit and do an sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade.

They have made some awesome improvements to the System Settings control panel. They have made some awesome improvements to the information area of the kicker and changes the Wifi plasmoid that I don’t totally understand. The system tray is now collapsible. There is a new feature that allows you to peek into folders and displays some of the contents of the folder on the icon. There are now a lot of options for your desktop including using marble to display the moon as your desktop and stuff like that. I am glad to see that there is a constant improvement of KDE.

I worked late into the morning hours on this mock-up for a Kubuntu bootable USB Creator. There currently is one for regular Ubuntu, written mostly in python and of course in GTK+. I am gonna try to port it to Qt. Let me know if you would like to help out as my c++ is sort of like my French i.e. not good.

I run an installation of VMWare ESXi which is really a great product for server based virtualization. My only complaint is that there is no Linux admin client.  So I have to keep an XP VM around all the time to administer it.  The only reason that I bring this up is that ESXi needs a good chunk of space for its datastore.  Well you can certainly hook up a whole bunch of physical drives.  You can also set up an expensive fibre channel SAN.  Well, both solutions will work, but obviously have drawbacks.

Enter Openfiler.  Openfiler is a Linux distro based off of rPath Linux.  It offers an awesome web-front-end and supports: rsync, smb/cifs, NFS, WebDAV, FTP and iSCSI protocols.  So as we can see, this is a great way to easily set up a NAS for a media box or for your network based backup solution.  You can also tie it into directory services like Active Directory or LDAP, but I haven’t tried this.  It also has some of the easiest software RAID setup I have used.

So these sreenshots are showing some of the steps in setting up an iSCSI volume from 2 virtual hard disks on a VM and two of the partitions are in RAID-1.  This of course is not really a realistic setup and is for illustration purposes only

Openfiler is available as an ISO for installing on a beige box, as a VMWare VM as well as many other kinds of VMS

I have been running the beta and alpha of the latest release of Kubuntu for a while now, but yesterday I went scorched earth. I backed up all of my data and wiped my drive and reinstalled with the latest version.

The first thing that I noticed was that the live cd booted very quickly. My favorite addition to the installer was the new map for the time zone setting. It is a lot easier to use and better looking than the old one.

After the install, once again, faster boot times. I went all EXT4 for this install.  I am loving it so far.  Most of the improvements are to KDE 4 generally.  Things like easier installation of themes, my favourite feature missing from GNOME.  Kubuntu has also included a new package manager, KPackageKit which is much better than Adept.  At first I thought it was too simple, but it has definitely grown on me.  The most unexpected aspect of the new release is that suspend and resume work flawlessly on my Toshiba Tecra A9 laptop.  The last feature that does not work is using an external monitor.

All in all the Kubuntu and KDE team are to be commended for there work.  Awesome job guys!!!

So I use VMWare workstation almost on a daily basis. Over the Christmas break I aquired 6.5 and it is pretty awesome so far. It makes windows installs a lot more automated. It also has a feature that is available in fusion called Unity. Unity allows you to merge the windows from your virtual machine with the ones on your host machine. Definately a cool technology.

So in my quest to find an Ubuntu based backtrack I stumbled across Nubuntu. I tried it out on my Eee PC and once I got wifi working it seemed to show promise. Based on FluxBox and with the first implementation of Cairo that I have seen. It seems to have most of the features of backtrack but it’s hard to tell with FluxBox. I have been thinking of contributing to a project like this and depending on how busy I am this semester I just might get involved.

So I have been looking around at starting to package with Ubuntu. I have been going back and forth as to whether to try to submit packages to Ubuntu directly or setup my own repository. As the packages will likely be security related I am leaning towards submitting to Ubuntu. I don’t know why the metasploit packages are not in Ubuntu. Part of me says that it is lack of interest and they just need someone to step up and make the packages and part of me says it may be for political/legal reasons. I can’t even find deb packages for most of the stuff or an external repository. I haven’t been able to contact anyone on IRC either.

So I have been reading up on packaging. It seems like there are like 8 different ways of making packages. I guess I’m just gonna have to try them all.

So I love Ubuntu Linux. I love Backtrack. I especially love some of the additions made to it recently. But the lack of apt makes it hard for me to use it to the full extent that I can. I understand that there are things like fasttrack but imagine if you could have access to the ubuntu repository.

I have made minor remixes of Ubuntu before but I haven’t done a lot of major work. Things that come to mind are adding things for which there aren’t deb packages, ripping out things that are not needed and making it boot faster. If I even get something running how would I share it and set up repositories.

I guess my question is how does one start a distribution?