jorge's stompbox

Outta here for a week

I'm on vacation for a week; moving to Royal Oak, MI. I'll be checking mail, but probably won't respond too early. :) See everyone at GUADEC!!!

The perfect thin client?

Surely everyone has heard of the "desktop Eee", the Eee box.

I've been wishing for an Intel-video powered thin client, but I've never seen one. A typical decent LTSP thin client will cost you about $300 bucks. The sell cheaper ones, but generally, $300 is the sweet spot. (By the way you can buy these from Diskless Workstations)

Having deployed thin clients at Oakland University, they're totally awesome. The big problem is that in our case there are plenty of CAD applications that make use of graphics. Typical thin clients come with VIA or similar video, which either are way too slow, or have terrible drivers. Netbooting a PC with an i965 however, yields impressive performance. Sure, you wouldn't want to design the next Corvette on it, but for mass student labs, it's more than enough horsepower.

I am willing to take a guess that the desktop Eee will be around the same cost as a thin client. (~$300) So is this new Eee the inadvertent thin client LTSP deployers have always wanted? I wonder what the video performance will be like, so I am chomping at the bit to get my hands on one. Of course, I am excited about playing with an Atom processor-based system. It would be interesting to see how responsive it is locally vs. in thin client mode.

On a related note, Dave Richards deploys thin clients in Largo, Florida, and his blog has detailed specifics on his deployment. (He's also written a book on the subject. Required reading for thin client folks. :D

Discuss below!

EDIT: I am assuming it will even be netbootable ... it better be!

How many hogheads does it take to make a gallon?

LWN covered Free Software Magazine's coverage of hotwire. One person on LWN commented "What a completely pointless exercise."

What I love about hotwire is it takes the old "unix model", spins it on it's head, and shoots for new ways for people to interact with a terminal. Apparently it also highly upsets UNIX greybeards; Colin Walters, I owe you a case of beer.

On phones....

It's no secret that I hate phones. With a vengeance.

I have a blackberry 8830. It's supposed to be one of the world's finest smartphones. I hate it. It's slow, the apps suck, the UI sucks, and mostly everything about it sucks. I hate using it. It hates me. When I bought it apparently it was like the world's best phone. Ok, fair enough, maybe I just don't grok it. Or maybe it's just a piece of crap.

The best thing about having it is when I go out with friends and I pull it out; someone always asks "How do you like your phone?"

I always say, "I hate it." Then for some reason they get all emotional about it.

"Well, have you tried the iphone?" they always say. First of all, in order to make the iphone useful, you have to jailbreak it. This is apparently ok, because if you don't know, iphones are apparently ok, and blackberries to a certain extent, but not windows phones, they're apparently more evil. Apprentley if you're into OSS, then the iphone is the place to be.

So I live with my blackberry with the google features; mail, calendar, etc. "Exchange for the rest of us".

I am waiting to see what android brings to the table, and as of today what symbian brings to the game as well. I think RIM is in trouble because they suck at UI and making an easy-to-use phone. I think apple sucks for the obvious reasons, though I suspect they'll get the typical get-out-of-jail free card that they seem to enjoy.

But "Wait Jorge, I saw 'David Garrett' and 'Matthew Zeuthen' using iPhones at FOSSCamp, FOSDEM and other open source conferences, surely how dare you lecture us on fucking cellular phones!" I can't speak for these mythological creatures, but I'm sure they'll be at guadec trying to justify how they sold us out. :)

What phone are you looking forward to? Is Android the long sought after solution to this problem? Will I finally get an easy to use phone that doesn't suck? And even if it does suck, will it being open source make it suck less?

Mango Lassi call for help

One of Lennart Poettering's lesser-known projects is Mango Lassi. To put it simply, Mango Lassi connects your PCs together to share screens. It's sort of like Synergy except that it uses Avahi to auto discover clients on your network, making it dead simple to set up, and the neat overlays make for a slicker user experience.

With Lennart's TODO list growing daily he's had less and less time to work on it, so I asked if I could blog about it to see if there's anyone interested in picking it up. Head to the Mango Lassi homepage for hacking details. I've also made a corresponding Launchpad page. If you want to hack on it and want ownership of the page, let me know! Lennart also mentioned some things about MPX:

I had some discussions with Peter Hutterer, who's doing MPX (Multi Pointer X). My plan was to make ML register and forward X input devices instead of the ugly core pointer magic it does right now. Would be much much cleaner, and way more sexy, because every networked machine would get its own mouse pointer instead of sharing just a single one among all screens. If we had this Mango Lassi would not just be a help for a single user using multiple machines, but also could be useful as a collaboration tool where every user controls his own machine and can control those of his friends nearby. MPX is hot anyway, and with this network sharing stuff it would be even hotter. ;-)

... and then my personal favorite ...

With MPX and window migration you can just click on a window on your screen and move it to the screen of a co-worker. And he might move it to the screen of another co-worker. And all three of you could control the app at the same time, with one mouse pointer for each [...] Take one part Avahi, one part D-Bus, one part MPX, one part window migration, shake well, and you'll have the sexiest input sharing system ever invented on this planet. This system would be even better then the real drink Mango Lassi! :-)

Terminator moves to beta

Chris Jones sends along that the terminator team has started uploading Terminator 0.9 Betas into their team PPA.

Terminator, in case you don't know, let's you put many terminals in one window. It's full of sysadminy goodness.

Global Bug Jam Preperation

Is your local team or LUG participating in a group effort during the Global Bug Jam? Have you thought about a location, power availability, network connectivity, and other logistical things?

Fret not! We've decided to run some sessions on #ubuntu-meeting for those of you out there planning on participating during the jam. We're going to be covering things like "best practices" and tips and tricks for running a smooth jam. PLEASE NOTE that these "How to run a Bug Jam" sessions are useful for people organizing and running the jams, if you're planning on just participating during the jam then these sessions probably won't be useful for you. :)

All sessions will be in #ubuntu-meeting on Freenode.

• Friday, June 20th 16:00 UTC with Caspar Clemens Mierau and Daniel Holbach
• Saturday, June 21st 19:00 UTC with Greg Grossmeier and Jorge Castro

• Friday, July 4th 16:00 UTC with Caspar Clemens Mierau and Daniel Holbach
• Saturday, July 5th 19:00 UTC with Wolfger and Greg Grossmeier

EDIT: The IRC room is #ubuntu-meeting, NOT -classroom, I have edited my post.

Awesome.

I think it's starting to sound good!! Anthony brings us more metallica pics.

Calm down ....

With this whole controversy about music and Metallica ... oh man, I had this like 10 page post on metal, copyright, freedom, and music and stuff ... but I deleted it in favor of this comment by Dave Camp:

"I don't care what happens, no one will take this album away from us, ever."

I have nothing to add .. other than "goddamn it isn't this the best thing you've ever listened to in your life."

I should get out more ...

I just spent 2 hours of my life arranging my Pieces of Flair. For some reason this picture seems like a good approximation of me as a person. This is scary.

This seems to be the only fun application on all of Facebook!