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 pandoc site has instructions for installing on a bunch of operating systems but none RHEL/CentOS/Fedora-like.

This is 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 pandoc requires, utf8-string and zip-archive.

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

Now you can either use Cabal to install pandoc itself:

$ sudo cabal install pandoc

Or you can download the source and compile it yourself.

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

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

Executable hsmarkdown
Hs-Source-Dirs: src
Main-Is: 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 pandoc.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 is now open! Woot! Woot! etc, etc.

Next year’s LCA is 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 is the best Linux/FOSS 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 is always well organised and friendly.

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


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

The core of your paper must relate to open source in some way, i.e., if it’s a paper about software then the software has to be licensed under an Open Source 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 is 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 fork.  I also mentioned that there might be dirty deeds linked to the rationale of the fork. Ethan Galstad, Nagios’ 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 fork as a sign that the community is alive and well.  On the other hand, he then links it to some potential changes in the way Nagios is developed – basically more openness and communications.  I was left feeling a little like “well a fork 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 Nagios development.  Perhaps, albeit a little presumptive, the answer to that question is  “they didn’t ask because they didn’t think they’d get an answer”.

The ICINGA project, however, hasn’t really launched yet – no code 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 fork.

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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. Nagios has always been a one man show – Ethan Galstad tightly controls its development and lifecycle. Whilst licensed as open source the project (outside of the Nagios 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 Nagios 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 Nagios community.

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

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