rPath presentation slides up

The rPath presentation slides are available from here.

Some photos from the event

Just had the camera in the iPhone:

The ZenOSS talk in progress..

The HP and Silicon Mechanics booths

Silicon Mechanics and IBM who eventually showed up

The Sun and HP exhibits

The photos were taken during the breaks between talks, the traffic was much heavier before the keynote and during the first few breaks but by 11pm, the traffic was much lighter.

Exhibit or on the ground networking

This year we didn't have an exhibit, good thing too as Frank was unable to make it. Manning a booth solo, is not fun. So this year, it was more on the ground networking. Spoke to a ton of people, mostly folks who recognized me from previous years, and a couple of people who overheard parts of conversations. Got very good word of mouth going about o3 magazine, and even signed up a couple of folks for AppOS 4.x deployments. This year, it seemed more beneficial to strike up conversations before the right presentations. It was a good event all around.

On the floor

There really was only one way to describe the exhibitor floor, and that is CRAMMED. The area around The Linux Box, Zenoss, Foresight Linux, GNOME and Ubuntu exhibits, and the registration area was a congestion zone. Several folks I spoke to commented that it was a bad idea. The aisle space was pretty small, when folks stopped to chat at the Ubuntu exhibit, at the same time folks flowed out of the Silicon Mechanics and Google Rooms, led to a fairly hard to pass bottleneck. Some exhibits were placed over by the BOF meeting rooms, it probably would have been better to place the .ORG desktop corner over in that area instead.

Noticeably different from last years event, was the number of big interesting exhibits. Silicon Mechanics and Zenoss were really the only two that made an effort. The Vyatta booth was a couple of banner stands and a desk, the rest were desks and banners. IBM did eventually show up, but again, their booth was pretty limited. Most seemed to be pushing hardware and other options. The Sun booth was simple, but fairly informative. Compared to last years event though, the exhibits were much lower key but there was still a fair amount of interest, and people flowing through the exhibit area.

There were plenty of t-shirts going around, Silicon Mechanics and Zenoss were handing out pretty cool t-shirts. The massive amounts of interest in the IBM booth from previous years seemed to be significantly reduced this year. The ORG area and smaller exhibitors seemed to be getting more attention than the bigger exhibits on the other side. Image Stream had their usual booth.

Giveaways seemed to be the big thing this year, Silicon Mechanics were giving away a 1U server, Zenoss were giving away a Nintentdo Wii, Novell gave away various spot prizes at their open source solutions stage talk, and a few other vendors were giving away prizes.

rPath Solutions Stage Talk and BOF

The rPath talk was given by Michael Johnson, who is a key developer at rPath. He is very passionate and excited about Conary, and wants everyone who wants to to use it. Conary (pronounced CON-A(IR)-E), is a pretty decent packaging system. Its major improvement over RPM, and in the BOF talk later in the afternoon, he explained how rPath looked at various packaging systems when designing conary.

The slides will be available on http://people.rpath.com/~johnsonm/ when he gets a chance to upload them. Conary does a lot of things auto-magically (such as grabbing the source, and its relatively easy to upgrade packages by simply changing the version number). An example of how Foresight is easily managed, and how they provided the latest Gnome so quickly after its release, were all attributed to Conary.

Conary in general, seems to be decent, and definately worth a look. However, Conary does have a fairly high resource utilization during updates. Ken VanDine indicated it was significant, Michael Johnson said you "would notice it". Conary does most of its work up front, hence the heavy resource utilization, the bigger the update, the longer it'll take. While they did address this issue, they try to quickly gloss over it and move on. While its not a big deal for a desktop solution such as Foresight, it would be a significant draw back for an appliance or server.

In the solutions stage talk, Michael Johnson seemed to directly contradict rPath CEO Billy Marshall's take on JeOS. In the talk, he called it Just Enough OS, enough Operating System to get the task done. Not a packaging solution, but just enough OS! In fact there was no mention of a packaging architecture at all!! In fact, Michael made far more sense that their CEO ever has in his blog. He went on to explain that No OS is really "Forget the OS", how conary makes things so the focus is on the appliance / application rather than the OS. In other words, the developer / user needs not concern themselves with the OS.

This makes far more sense than the "OS is dead", "long live the hypervisor" stuff their CEO spews out. It was nice to see rPath make the same case we've been making for years before they opened up shop - minimal OS (so you're not running things you don't need - security / resources), pushing the idea of enough stuff to let the box do its job, and that shell access isn't really necessary. Even the development approach is somewhat similar to the way AppStacks are built, essentially rMake is very similar to our IBE / RBE method, we just have different approaches for getting the software on there (conary vs subversion / compile), and different delivery methods.

After getting schooled in conary by rPath's finest engineers, I think conary is a good developer tool, and even a good package management system over RPM / DEB. However, the upgrade resource usage, the fact that upgrades are done on the appliance live (if rollbacks are a reverse upgrade, upgrades can take a lot of resources and some time, then rollbacks are likely to have the same problem), and the less secure delivery methods, still make conary a bad choice for server appliances (at least over AppOS).

Open Source Solutions Stage

The Open Source Solutions stage was new this year at Ohio LinuxFest. It was a fairly neat idea, a projection screen, small elevated stage for the presenter and some chairs. While I wanted to check out both the Puppet Talk and the rPath solutions stage talk, they were both on at the same time. Unfortunately Frank couldn't make it to OLF this year, so I made the decision to check out the rPath talk, mainly to see what the solutions stage format was like.

Cfengine talk

The Cfengine talk was interesting, but CFengine seemed to be an overly complex way of doing things you could do much easily with other projects. The presentation was good, although it was a little hard to see the console output on the projection screen from a distance. The one presenter, one person working the keyboard, dual presentation approach was very effective. CFengine seemed pretty cool, but it lacked in certain areas where other projects provide features (Monit, ZenOSS etc), seems like CFengine wants to be a jack-of-all trades but ultimately is a master of very few. Good presentation though.

Marketing FOSS talk

The marketing FOSS talk by Don Parris was excellent. Don walked through the dos and don'ts of marketing. He pointed out some good resources and the importance of making a plan. He even offered to help with plans that folks posted up on Blue Gnu. I had a brief chance to chat with Don, great guy, keep up the good work!

Zenoss talk

Zenoss talk was interesting, introduced the product, integration /
usabilty with cactus and nagios modules. Modelling via port scan,
snmp, or rpc

Various modules for monitoring, answered questions no netflow

John Buswell
Email: buswellj@gmail.com
(Sent on the go via iPhone)

Opening keynote

The opening keynote was a bit of a bait n switch discussing open
source community, open vs closed software and the economics of open
source. Instead of discussing fedora. Not bad, bit slow at times,
jboss plug.

John Buswell
Email: buswellj@gmail.com
(Sent on the go via iPhone)

Arrived at linuxfest

Finally got here after having to go back and switch cars because of a
leaking valve stem on the new tire of the rx8.

Despite arriving late took less than a minute to check in. Good crowd,
some interesting vendors and notably no sign of IBM at their booth.

Waiting on the keynote to start.

John Buswell
Email: buswellj@gmail.com
(Sent on the go via iPhone)

Off to LinuxFest

Well its just after 6am, I'm headed up to LinuxFest.

o3 @ Ohio LinuxFest coverage

The full schedule for Ohio LinuxFest can be found here. As everything with o3 is typically enterprise related, we're planning to attend things we think would be of interest to enterprise attendees.

After the keynote, we are planning to check out Erik Dahl's Open Source Monitoring with Zenoss at 10am. At the 11am session we are planning to have someone at both the Puppet and rPath sessions.

Following the break, we plan on covering Don Parris' Marketing FOSS: Beyond Word-of-Mouth, James Keating's Seven Cfengine Habits, and Nayyar Ahmad's Free Software, in Africa: a perspective.

Obviously, we'll chat to attendees, exhibitors and provide status on how the event is going live from the floor.

After the event, we'll release Issue 11 of o3 magazine, covering the event.

No exhibit this year

Due to prior commitments, we were unable to guarantee that someone from Spliced Networks or o3 magazine would be available to setup and staff the exhibit at Ohio LinuxFest 2007. We have sponsored the event in 2005 and 2006, and we will be there in 2008. By the time it was close enough to the event to know that at least one person could attend, it was too late for sponsorship. Instead, we'll be covering Ohio LinuxFest live, and enjoying the event rather than being on the go for the day!

Welcome to the o3 @ Ohio LinuxFest blog

Welcome to the o3 blog for Ohio LinuxFest 2007. This year o3 will be
covering the event live. Find out how the best Open Source event in
the mid-west is going.