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

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:

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.

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.

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.

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 FOSS work. Which I probably shouldn’t call “work” but sometimes feels like it is – truth be told I feel like a walking, talking support centre some days. And I cut a lot less actual code 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 is 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.

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 is generally open source software – I sit on the executive council of Linux Australia – and I don’t see EE as truly FOSS. 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.