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Hello, world

August 1st, 2010 lxnay Comments off
Why this name?
Because there’s always another hand. Or I can say, there’s always another way to do something and it’s sometimes hard to realize what’s the best approach. Most of the discussions I had in my life were just about that. “Why don’t you do X this way instead?”, “Why is X working like that?”, and so on.
Of course, welcome to my blog, hoping that my tweets won’t kill it.

Java:
System.out.println(“Hello, world”);

Python (using sys module):
>>> import sys
>>> sys.stdout.write(“Hello, world\n”)

C++ (without main() etc):
#include
using namespace std;
cout << “Hello, world” << endl;

Bash:
echo “Hello, world”

Enough!

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:

HOWTO: OpenVZ and Sabayon, a perfect match

July 15th, 2010 lxnay No comments

Sabayon OpenVZ templates are being added to our build server and will be generated nightly based on DAILY SpinBase ISO images.

But what is OpenVZ?

“In short, OpenVZ is the only highly scalable virtualization technology with near-zero overhead, strong isolation and rapid customer provisioning that’s ready for production use right now. Deployment of OpenVZ improves efficiency, flexibility and quality of service in the enterprise environment.” [from: http://wiki.openvz.org/FAQ]
In other words, it’s a cheap way to setup virtual machines in NO time!
Parts of our (Sabayon) infrastructure is using OpenVZ, too.

How does it work?

OpenVZ “images” are called templates, and are just a .tar.gz of a chroot. Molecule just unpacks the livecd.squashfs file contained inside Sabayon ISO images and converts it into .tar.gz format.

How do I install all the fancy stuff on Sabayon?

First of all you need a working Sabayon installation, any flavour is fine.
You need to replace your running kernel with sys-kernel/linux-openvz, but in general, just follow these steps:
equo install sys-kernel/linux-openvz vzctl vzquota vzdump
rc-update add vz default

You may want to turn NetworkManager off and switch to plain /etc/conf.d/net configuration (replace net.eth0 with your NIC id)

rc-update del NetworkManager default && rc-update add net.eth0 default
nano -w /etc/sysctl.conf # and set net.ipv4.ip_forward=1
reboot

Remove the Sabayon standard kernel and drop all the proprietary/external_driver stuff

equo remove sys-kernel/linux-sabayon

OpenVZ will read configuration defaults from /etc/vz/conf/*-sample files [ve-light.conf.sample, ve-unlimited.conf-sample, ve-vps.basic.conf-sample], make sure to edit the desired file and tweak DISKSPACE and DISKINODES parameters to make your Sabayon OpenVZ template to fit (I advice to set DISKSPACE to at least 4194304:4612096 and DISKINODES to 800000:880000).
Now download, for example, the amd64 OpenVZ template from our mirrors: Sabayon_Linux_SpinBase_DAILY_amd64_openvz.tar.gz and place it into /vz/template/cache.
Now you’re ready to install the template!

vzctl create 101 --ostemplate Sabayon_Linux_SpinBase_DAILY_amd64_openvz \
  --config vps.basic

NOTE: 101 is the so called “veid” that will be used to identify your virtual machine (it’s a virtual machine ID). You can omit the –config parameter or set it to “unlimited” (for unlimited virtual machine resources) or to “light“.  But really make sure that the disk quota assigned to the veid is enough to make the .tar.gz content to fit.

You’re done! Just start the virtual machine with: “vzctl start 101” and enter it with “vzctl enter 101“. The newly created virtual machine will start at boot. If you want to change its settings (adding more RAM or disk space), you can either use “vzctl” or edit /etc/vz/conf/101.conf.

Have fun!

Categories: Development Tags:

Anaconda, job hunting and studies (pt. 2)

April 10th, 2010 lxnay No comments

Beside my finances aren’t so good (hey reader, hire me!), I decided to dedicate this whole month to two main tasks;

1. Porting a new Anaconda (the RedHat installer) snapshot to Gentoo-land (and Sabayon in particular). After spending a whole week catching, one by one (and with the help of anaconda.spec.in) all the build, runtime dependencies the installer requires; and after having cooked every single missing ebuild in Portage to make the magic happen; and after having written (and ported from the old codebase) most of the backend code required to implement a “LiveCD” install, I can say I’m almost done. This time, I took the cleanest path possible in order to be able to keep our Anaconda port aligned with upstream.

You can find my git repo here, and gentoo-dev ML discussion (for reviewing and merging my ebuilds into the Portage tree). Maybe it’s time for Gentoo, to have a good LiveDVD installer?

2. Studies. My University studies are going well, this semester I’m digging into Computer Architecture, Functional Programming (using OCAML) and Java. Beside I always get bored when getting down to Java (maybe because I do like it too much? :P ), I find writing OCAML code really fun (and funny too?). So, my plans are, passing all these 3 exams in a row. Eheh…

Categories: Development Tags:

Looking for a new job soon

March 24th, 2010 lxnay No comments

Starting from April 1st, I will have to find new ways to make a living (other projects I’m currently working on are ending), that’s the good part of being a freelance IT software programmer and researcher. If there’s somebody interested in hiring me, drop me an email ;)

Categories: Life !, lxnaytoo Tags:

pkg.sabayon.org on a new server

March 15th, 2010 lxnay No comments

Thanks to donations coming in, we’ve been able to deploy a new VPS hosting pkg.sabayon.org Entropy fallback mirror+rsync service to cope with growing bandwidth requirements. Thanks a lot! Keep donations going!

P.S.: we are really close to release Sabayon 5.2!

More in the next coming days…

Categories: Development Tags:

Fosdem 2010, packing up stuff + PackageKit

February 4th, 2010 lxnay No comments

Maybe I didn’t write this in enough different places beside Twitter, Facebook, IRC, identi.ca, …. Well, see you there!

Of course I needed something to talk about with other guys at Gentoo, Sabayon, Tracker, Itsme. So, I just implemented the first version of the Entropy PackageKit backend. This is the first step towards World domination (read: making Entropy a PackageKit service provider in one year).

Get this nice screenshot while it’s hot (KPackageKit running on top of Entropy PackageKit backend):

Categories: Development Tags:

Scared by the huge amount of updates? It’s just your “brain”

January 25th, 2010 lxnay 5 comments

A certain subset of our users are scared by the huge amount of updates that sometimes are merged into our mainline repository (id: sabayonlinux.org) from our testing repository (id: sabayon-limbo). So last night I started to think about why this fear overcomes the “wow” factor.

It’s all about the number. Yes, the “number” of updates available. Look at other OSes (I mean, commercial ones), don’t they have the same amount of updates, in terms of “megabytes”? Last time I updated OSX I had to download around 500Mb. So, sometimes yes, it’s the same. What changes is just that ‘lil psychological number also known as “number of updates available: X”.

But what happens if such updates would be grouped into 5-6 main categories and presented as “category updates” ?
Let’s start with a fact: commercial OSes place dozens of updates into one “package”, that’s for sure. So, what about doing the same (more or less)?

But then, once again, if that’s the solution, what is it supposed to solve? Nothing. It just workarounds a psychological bug!

Categories: Development Tags:

Sulfur Love, a month later…

January 24th, 2010 lxnay No comments

Simple mode + UGC icons and Drag and Drop support (just drag images, documents, files over packages and see). Of course, this is from Entropy GIT, not yet available for general consumption (read: wait for Entropy 0.99.25).

Categories: Development Tags:

3 (three)

January 9th, 2010 lxnay No comments

33 years. 3 candles.

Categories: Life ! Tags:

Sulfur Love elixir: today’s changes

January 6th, 2010 lxnay 4 comments

Another interesting Sulfur Love <3 <3 day has gone. Here are the results (simple and advanced mode shown)

Categories: Development Tags: