Posts Tagged ‘FOSS’

Installing pandoc on Fedora 10

July 2nd, 2009

I’ve been using pandoc to convert stuff – mostly Restructured Text – to Markdown as part of a wiki migration. The site has instructions for installing on a bunch of operating systems but none RHEL/CentOS/Fedora-like.

This a quick set of instructions for Fedora that should work for similar distros.

First, install the Haskell compiler and Cabal (yet another pear/cpan/rubygems like plug-in loader/manager).

$ sudo yum install ghc cabal-install

Update the Cabal data store and install the plug-ins requires, utf8-string and zip-archive.

$ sudo cabal update
$ sudo cabal install zip-archive utf8-string

Now you can either use Cabal to install itself:

$ sudo cabal install

Or you can download the source and compile it yourself.

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://.googlecode.com/files/-1.2.tar.gz
$ tar -zxf -1.2.tar.gz
$ cd -1.2

Now you need to edit the .cabal file and remove:

Executable hsmarkdown
Hs-Source-Dirs: src
Main-: hsmarkdown.hs
Ghc-Options: -Wall -threaded
Ghc-Prof-Options: -auto-all
Extensions: CPP, TemplateHaskell
if flag(wrappers)
Buildable: True
else
Buildable: False

From the bottom of the .cabal file.

Next, run make.

$ CABALOPTS=--user make

And finally, if the make works, install the tool:

$ sudo make install

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Linux.conf.au 2010 – Call for Papers opens

June 29th, 2009

The linux.conf.au (LCA) 2010 call for papers now open! Woot! Woot! etc, etc.

Next year’s LCA on from Monday 18 January 2010 to Saturday 23 January 2010 in sunny downtown Wellington, New Zealand.

Speaking as a former organiser (AKA LCA Ghost) I think, in an entirely unbiased way, that it the best Linux/ conference in the world. It covers everything from hardcore kernel hacking to community discussions and legal issues. The best people come, the social events rock and the event always well organised and friendly.

The CFP has opened today and closes on the 24th of July, 2009 and its general blurb :


The LCA2010 Papers Committee looking for a broad range of papers spanning everything from programming and software to desktop and userspace to community, government and education but there one essential:

The core of your paper must relate to in some way, i.e., if it’s a paper about software then the software has to be licensed under an license.

The LCA2010 Papers Committee welcome proposals for Papers on the following topics:

* Kernel and system topics such as filesystems and embedded devices
* Networking topics such as peer to peer networking, or tuning a TCP/IP stack
* Desktop topics such as office and productivity applications, mobile devices, peripherals, crypto & security and viruses and other malware
* Server topics such as clusters and other supercomputers, databases and grid computing
* Systems administration topics such as maintaining large numbers of machines and disaster recovery
* Programming topics such as software engineering practices and test driven development
* Free Software and Free Culture topics, including licencing and Free and Open approaches outside software
* Free Software usage topics, including home, IT, education, manufacturing, research and government usage.

Most presentations and tutorials will be technical in nature, but proposals for presentations on other aspects of Free Software and Free Culture, such as educational and cultural aspects are welcome.

LCA2010 pleased to invite proposals for three types of papers:

* Presentation – 45 minutes
* Tutorials – 1 hour and 45 minutes (short)
* Tutorials – 3 hours and 30 minutes (long)

Presentations are 45 minute slots (including questions) that are typically a one-way lecture from you to the audience – the typical conference presentation. These form the bulk of the available conference slots.

Tutorials are either 1 hour and 45 minutes, or 3 hours and 30 minutes in length, and work best when they are interactive or hands-on in nature. Tutorials are expected to have a specific learning outcome for attendees.

To increase the number of people that can view your talk, LCA2010 may video the talks and make them publicly available after LCA2010. When submitting your proposal you will be asked whether materials relating to your paper can be released under a Creative Commons ShareALike License.

In conclusion – submit a paper – you won’t regret it.

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The Nagios fork – responses

May 14th, 2009

In a previous post I mentioned that the Nagios project had grown a .  I also mentioned that there might be dirty deeds linked to the rationale of the . Ethan Galstad, ’ developer, has responded to events with a post on the Nagios blog.  It’s a bit of a mixed bag of a response and it left me a little underwhelmed and a little confused.

On one hand, Galstad welcomes the as a sign that the community alive and well.  On the other hand, he then links it to some potential changes in the way developed – basically more openness and communications.  I was left feeling a little like “well a shouldn’t have made you notice this – the communtity has been telling you this for years”.

He also posed the question, one I have seen quite a bit during the evolution of forks, “But… if you wanted to be different/new things/forks/change why didn’t you ask?”  To my mind they did ask – as did other members of the community – when they and others sought a more open and collaborative approach to development.  Perhaps, albeit a little presumptive, the answer to that question   “they didn’t ask because they didn’t think they’d get an answer”.

The ICINGA project, however, hasn’t really launched yet – no has been released.  So we”ll have to wait and see how the new project evolves from here and whether changes occur to the parent project as a result of the .

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Nagios project is forked… Hello ICINGA

May 7th, 2009

The Nagios project has been forked. This will probably come as a surprise to a lot of people but I wasn’t overly shocked. To be honest I am surprised it took this long to happen. has always been a one man show – Ethan Galstad tightly controls its development and lifecycle. Whilst licensed as the project (outside of the Plugins) was largely architected, coded and run by Ethan with only a small number of user-contributed patches being applied. In fact I am not even sure anyone other than Ethan has commit rights to the core.

I’ll be interested to see how the ICINGA (a Zulu word meaning ‘it looks for’, ‘it browses’, ‘it examines’) expands and grows and whether it does attract members of the community.

P.S. Apparently there drama around the – j’accuse stuff around a commercial company that uses – so it may be that the isn’t altruistic. Time will tell.

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On Posting

June 10th, 2008

I haven’t really done more than lurked in the blogsphere for the last 6-12 months. I don’t think I’ve commented more than a dozen times (excluding today where I went nuts – the recent tit-for-tat bullying revenge movie extravaganza has prompted some comments) on anyone’s blog. Ruth the same – she has been a infrequent poster of late also – though she has less excuse than me – she camps with laptop on lap on my couch and should post every night. Unless of course she’s not funny anymore. Yep. That’ll be it. Not funny anymore. *Note to self – be on guard for retaliation tonight*.

Instead I do a lot of Twittering and IRC. Oh and work. Work has left little time to blog too. Some paid work but mostly work. Which I probably shouldn’t call “work” but sometimes feels like it – truth be told I feel like a walking, talking support centre some days. And I cut a lot less actual than I’d like but rather shuffle tickets and triage things. But I have recently migrated a ticketing system for Puppet from Trac to Redmine – which I am fairly chuffed about and that already making life much easier.

All in all I find the Twitter system of 140 characters updates a much smaller morsel to swallow rather than epic blog posts. Not that I wrote an awful lot of those. But I have decided to make some effort and try to blog at least once or twice a week. I don’t particularly care about readership – that was never this blog’s intent – but I do feel like the journaling/diary element of it has been lost lately as I meander along doing other things. A lot of things in my life I’d like to be taking note of for future posterity (my own future posterity – I am sure no one else cares :) ) have been happening.

So first piece of news – another book in the offing/maybe/possibly – lots of issues around it and not feeling overly motivated but it’s a distinct possibility. A more Linux focussed title this time around – or perhaps more accurately back to my roots. :)

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Posted in Books, puppet, twitter

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Hello Drupal

April 15th, 2008

So after many, many years (5 at least!) my blog moving away from Expression Engine to Drupal. There are a number of reasons for this but briefly they are:

1. The “Book” content type. I am a writer and I am thinking my next book will be authored between a bunch of us online. Drupal offers the ability to do that and export the resulting content as DocBook. I had a look to see if EE could do this but I don’t have the time to develop something.

2. My preference generally software – I sit on the executive council of Linux Australia – and I don’t see EE as truly . Drupal makes me feel intellectually more comfortable.

3. The ease of theme application – I don’t have to design or tweak HTML/CSS anymore. (well only a little)

Now I get the annoying feeling though that I will end up tweaking PHP in a few places but *shrugs* it’s all good learning. :)

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