Workspace Upgraded!

First up in this post. Workspace v0.1.



This was my workspace since I started my internship with Inigo. Small, compact, with only my 1024x768 resolution of my loyal companion Thinkpad R51.

After 4 months with Inigo, 1024x768 started to feel too small to work with. So, on the last PIKOM PC Fair, I decided to grab one external monitor to plug to this laptop for extra screen real-estate. Kaeru recommended me to grab one very big screen - 22inch - and I went for it.

Lucky for me, Dell was having a promotion for their E228WFP Entry Level monitor. For only 849 MYR (approx 265 USD), I'll get a 22inch TFT monitor with 5 years warranty. Tempted, I bought it. Its not cash-n-carry, so I had to wait a week for the monitor.

A week after

The monitor arrived!!!



Setting up for dual display is a little bit tricky with my laptop's i855gm. First, Xrandr couldnt detect all of the resolutions of my 22inch screen. After some tweaking with Xorg.conf and guessing config entries, I got it working at last.

Second tricky part was setting the dual screen layout for left-right position. Sadly I discovered that for i855gm, maximum virtual space is only 2048x2048. So, I had to instead use top-bottom layout to get dualhead working.

Once I understood and accepted the two limitation above, the new gnome-display-properties rocks!!!. It make it easier to configure dual display screen locations and enabling/disabling displays using Xrandr.

And .... Workspace v0.2 is released!!!!





Now, If only I can put that 22inch monitor higher so that i don't need to strain my neck typing on the left, with the display on the right.

yay~~~

Zope/Plone on Fedora

My industrial internship with Inigo Technologies requires me to run a distro which have python2.4. Being someone who prefer to stick on RPMS rather than source-based installation, I ran CentOS on Xen of my home fileserver for Zope/Plone support.

While wasting my time browsing through pirut a few days ago, I noticed compat-python/compat-zope/compat-plone on Livna repository. I know those packages exist by Jonathan Stefan, but didn't know that its on Livna. Anyway, cool, now I can play with zope on my laptop directly :D.

Automated tar and dump incremental backup script for FBSD

The recent gmirror failure on Gambit caused us to switch to automated dump and tar instead.

Our requirement was like this: Full backup on Mondays (around 3-5am) with daily incremental backups relative to the Monday backup. Whenever a full backup is being performed, the previous backups must not be overwritten until the full backup is done.

And the results::

inigo-tarball-backups.sh - an incremental tar backup script using FreeBSD's Tar

inigo-disk-dumps.sh - an incremental live dump script using FreeBSD's Dump - now, I wish Linux's Dump have live dump support.

gnu-tar-incremental-backup.sh - an incremental tar backup script using GNU's Tar - I wrote this before the FreeBSD's Tar script on my Fedora laptop, but was surprised that FreeBSD's Tar doesn't have --listed-incremental option (-_-)".

For the scheduling, I just use cron.

Do inform me if you have suggestions to improve the scripts or if you found any risky bug it in.

update: Anybody knows how to properly tar a live directory? (eg: /var/log/).

Hello Planet Fedora!!

My blog just included in Planet Fedora. Yay! (/me jumping with joy). Thanks Seth Vidal!!.

A little introduction about myself and Linux.

I started with computers on early age. My first encounter with computers was @ my mom's office (she's working @ NEC that time) about I'm 3 years old. When my mom stopped working to be a full-time housewife, my dad started working @ IBM and I've been living with IBM PC-DOS on the company-provided PC. I lived with it and having fun with DOS for quite a long time. Then, on 1997, my dad bought an IBM Aptiva with Win95 on it, during that time, Windows doesnt feel that sux too me, as its still something on top of DOS (guess what, it took me some time to get use to the mouse and I still reboot to DOS when I want to play Command and Conquer). But after winME, I got frustrated due to no longer able to troubleshoot my computer through DOS, and thats when I started considering for another OS. I have no access to the Internet until 1999, so I have no idea about open source, internet community and stuff back then. Software to me that time was only those that can be found from shops.

Around 2002, I heard about Linux and started by trying out Red Hat 9 (Shrike), it was a tough ride at first, especially due to Winmodem sucks big time. On 2003, I stopped trying for a while due to I was accepted to a boarding school. But I didnt stop fully, there, I familiarize myself with OpenOffice (secretly installed on the school's computer). And on end of 2004, after I finished the final exam of high school, I forces myself to fully migrate to Linux.

I was looking for RH that time but couldn't found any later release after Shrike (I didn't know about FedoraProject yet). Then I found Mandriva and sticks with it & KDE for almost year before I decided to jump distros again. Then I used SuSE for few months , then I found out that RH is now Fedora Core. I started using Fedora Core 3 and have fell in love with it ever since.

Around 2005, I got to know a group of OSS oriented people in Malaysia @ #myoss of Freenode and around that time too I started trying to contribute back something upstream. I joined Fedora Project early 2007 as an Ambassador, mostly advocating Linux to students and lecturers my university - PETRONAS University of Technology. But lately theres not many ideas for me to do there as Ambassador so I started contributing to Packaging and packaged some unofficial compiz fusion packages. Now I'm officially maintaining ccsm and libcompizconfig packages in Fedora.

Right now I'm a SysAdmin intern at a startup company that focuses on Zope and Plone called Inigo-Tech and having some fun with FreeBSD there.

Looking forward for great development on Fedora and I hope I can found something more to contribute back to Fedora Project.

A month with FreeBSD, Zope and Plone

For the past month, I have been working as an intern at Inigo Tech. The company focuses on Zope and Plone deployment and customization and I'm the sysadmin of the company server.

FreeBSD

The company server uses FreeBSD as the OS with several BSD Jails on top of it. BSD Jails is one of the virtualization technology on the OS level. Unlike Xen, Qemu and VirtualBox, Jails is a very lightweight virtualization where the Guest environment does not run any kernel on it. While Xen, Qemu and VirtualBox allows different OSes running as Guest, Jails can only support another BSD installations.

I found that Jails is very useful for those who only needs better process and environment separation and doesn't need another full blown OS features. Interested to know what available on the Linux world for this, I went googling and found the Linux-Vserver Project and the OpenVZ Project. However, the RPM packages provided by both of them (especially the kernel) are quite not in sync with the current Fedora repositories. So, if anybody thinking of trying them out, I would recommend installing on CentOS or a Debian derivative instead as the packages does not being updated as fast as Fedora. Btw, if anybody successfully deployed a OpenVZ guest, can you post me an easy to follow guide??. As I'm quite confused with the OpenVZ documentations (the templates etc).

But so far, I think thats the only thing I liked from the BSD world. Everything else, are kindof PITA and not elegant in my point of view. Perhaps because I have been pampered by RPM way too much. Ports, while have quite a large collection of packages, is not as elegant as RPM or DEB in package management. If only for installation and removal of packages, Ports works quite well, but if I want to do extra stuff to the installed files, everything went messy. Dependency hell, I dont know how many times i've faced that in Ports. Updating and removing packages feels quite scary when it might causes another app, hidden somewhere, to have a library problem. For the filesystem hierarchy and file placements, is another messy thing as trying to separate stuff that maintained by package manager and stuff that are done by local user is not as clear as in RPM distros. But for this, I might be biased as I come from the Red Hat Linux / Fedora Linux origins and still not that experienced in BSD. Perhaps after exploring and learning more about the BSD way of doing stuff, I might change my opinion on this.

Zope and Plone

In Inigo Tech, I was introduced for the first time to Zope and Plone. I have heard about it before, and followed the debate on Fedora mailing list about why Fedora 7 could not support Zope and Plone due to Python2.5, but I had never tried using it firsthand. What I know about during that time Zope was that its something like Tomcat but in Python, with Plone as one of the most popular app running on Zope.

After this whole month of using Zope and Plone, I grown to like it and the ideas it brought together. I have been a fan of proper separation of services and environments since I learned about virtualization. So, I feel Zope is a great platform. A virtual filesystem on an ORDB? Cool!. Full separation of the web environment and the host server? Great!. Using Instances instead of a full copy of files? Yay!. Plugins architechture, of which different instances can have different set of Plugins? Superb!. All in all, I love Zope, except for maybe, the ZMI which looks kind of cluttered, but looks good or not is a matter of who looking at it :).

As for Plone, Inigo sees it as an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint. As I had never tried out SharePoint, I couldn't comment much about their differences/similarities. But one thing I know, Plone offers more features that SharePoint in term of document management and sharing, Plone is easier to use than SharePoint, Plone can work nicely with commodity softwares while SharePoint requires you to upgrade to IE7, Vista, Office 2007 etc, and best of all, Plone is Free! and SharePoint is dictated by Microsoft (>.<) . So, that makes it Plone is better than SharePoint right? So if your company want to buy SharePoint, how about you look at Plone first before deciding ;).

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All in all, working with Inigo is fun with all these. I'm glad I took Kaeru's offer and not other internship offers with other companies. Plus, I got to telecommute. Saved some hassle of transportation, food, etc :D

Working from home

Shamelessly modified from Tom "Spot" Callaway post : http://spot.livejournal.com/279249.html

Waking up on 6am to catch the bus: Lame
Getting a ride from a colleague to the office: Awesome
Staying back at the office till late night due to unfinished task: Lame
Working from home: Priceless

There are somethings that money cannot buy, for everything else, there's Inigo Tech

(^o^) (^.^) (^-^)

HOWTO: Making VIM in FreeBSD, Linux-user friendly

The hellish semester have ended, and I just started my 8 month internship with Inigo-Tech. I've also got an access to the company's FreeBSD server. However, one thing annoys me - the VIM acts in a way i'm not familiar with.

A quick hack to resolve this annoyance.

from the linux box
scp /etc/vimrc server.host.com:/path/to/homefolder/.vimrc

done~