DevOnLinux

See you to Bruxelles!

A little howto dedicated to install IPKG on Synology DS209+II, a great Nas which has installed a custom GPL Operating System based on GNU/Linux.
IPKG is a lightweight package management system, similar to Debian DPKG.

Step below are based on this wiki page of synology.

1. Open an ssh connection to your nas, i.e. ssh root@your.local.ip
2. Check the cpu type of the nas. cat /proc/cpuinfo. In my case it was Freescale Semiconductor MPC8544 DS but as reported here it’s an error and the correct CPU model is the 8533.
3. Now go to this page and search for your cpu type (ARM, PPC or ATOM)
4. The bootstrap script for mpc8533 it’s the same of mpc8543. You can download it here, but I prefer to download by wget as described in the next step.
5. Go to tmp directory, cd /volume1/@tmp, and download it: wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/syno-e500/cross/unstable/syno-e500-bootstrap_1.2-7_powerpc.xsh
6. give it execution authorization, chmod +x syno-e500-bootstrap_1.2-7_powerpc.xsh
7. Ok, execute it with sh syno-e500-bootstrap_1.2-7_powerpc.xsh and let script make its work. After a while and many lines below the scripts will echo a “Setup complete”.
8. IPKG is installed so it’s time to reboot nas machine
9. When the system is restarted, connect back with ssh.
10. First time it’s a good thing to update ipkg package list: ipkg update
11. We have finished, it’s time to have fun with ipkg and install any package we desire. In our case we have installed rsnapshot, a great utility for backup automatization in the company lan.

I was looking for an explanation of ext4 main features when I found this great discussion on a launchpad bug report.
The most important explanations are said by Thedore T’so (#45, #60, #62,etc.) , a kernel hacker and actually maintainer of ext4 filesystem. Recently T’so (January 2010) is employed by Google just for work on kernel, filesystem and storage stuff.

It’s for reasons like these that I like Free Software and Open Source.
Only with this methodology of work is possible this tight collaboration and head to head for all developers around the word.

Just one click away! Amazing!

Yesterday evening in my free time I’ve made the beautiful paper Tux represented below, thanks to great guide posted on DigitalKamera.

Nerd is the way.
Another penguin is live.

Another great initiative from the Linux Foundation: free training webinars.
Just signup here and wait until first start date.
The first webinar will be dedicated to community collaboration: “How to Work with the Linux community“.
How suggested by this news it will be available on 1st of March, 2010.

Quite amazing…
35.000-core ubuntu server farm renders Avatar.

A little shell script that I’ve used to generate the list of page composing a given site

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$#" -eq 2 ]
then
wget -erobots=off --mirror --delete-after --reject .jpg,.png,.gif,.swf,.css,.js,.txt,.pdf,.rtf,.odt,.doc $1 2>&1 |grep $1 |cut -d " " -f 4 |cut -d "?" -f 1 | sort | uniq > $2
rm -rf ${1#http://}
else
echo "Usage: ./scriptname http://testsite outputfile"
fi

Save with a desired file name and give it a chmod +x and then just launch from shell:
./scriptname http://testsite outputfile

My first action of 2010 has been the subscription as associate member to Free Software Foundation.
Have a long life Free Software!

Great comparison between Nokia Maemo and Google Android from point of view of user rights: http://cool900.blogspot.com/2009/10/comparing-freedom-on-maemo-and-android.html.
I agree with writer of this post that the winner is without any doubt Maemo.
So, choose Nokia in your next mobile phone

As said here by Jeremy Allison, creator of SAMBA, also the mandrill of Devonlinux say no to Mono.

Software patents problem.

But the problem is that Mono is dangerous for Free Software. The heart of the matter is, as usual, software patents. Microsoft have patents on the technology inside .NET, and since the Tom Tom lawsuit, Microsoft have shown they are not averse to attacking Free Software using patent infringement claims.

Novell agreement with microsoft.

Miguel’s employer, Novell, has a patent agreement with Microsoft that exempts Mono users from Microsoft patent aggression, so long as you get Mono from Novell. Miguel takes pains to point this out. This is not a level playing field, or software freedom for all. This is a preferred supplier trying to pretend there is no problem. Sure there isn’t a problem, for them.

And all others?

It is vitally important to the continued success of the community development model that one part of the community does not enter into an agreement which gives some people patent protection while leaving other people out in the cold. That is why I was so opposed to the patent agreements recently entered into by Novell, Xandros and other companies.

This one is reported by Andrew Tridgell, negotiator with Microsoft for Samba.

Update 26-12-2009
Other valid reasons to say no to mono, moonlight, microsoft and the traitor de icaza.

developer Tom “spot” Callaway, Engineering Manager and Red Hat legal expert at Fedora, made it clear that the Fedora project, sponsored largely by Red Hat, will continue to leave the software out. One of the reasons was that the new promise does not protect Linux distributors any more than the old one did.