We caught up with Chris Wright at the Red Hat Summit to discuss how the oVirt sessions were going, and why people are so excited to see open source bring a virtualization tool to the market. oVirt works across platforms and architectures to meet the challenge of managing virtualization in the datacenter. For more information, check out http://ovirt.org.
Python has a good reputation for tasks like systems programming, network programming, and scripting, but Python for the web is becoming red hot. Part of this has to do with the very popular web framework Django, that was developed at a newspaper to help quickly create Content Management Sites. . Another reason is that Google App Engine–Google’s Cloud Computing offering for developers–only exposes a Python API.
If you are new to Python Web Development, then I’d recommend Django, as it is ideal for building CMS-type applications, social networking websites, and blogs. On the other hand, If you want a hacker’s framework, you might want to give Pylons a look.
Please note: By hacker, I am referring to the kind of hacker Eric Raymond refers to when he writes, “Becoming a hacker will take intelligence, practice, dedication, and hard work. Therefore, you have to learn to distrust attitude and respect competence of every kind. Hackers won’t let posers waste their time, but they worship competence — especially competence at hacking, but competence at anything is valued.”
Ok, so what problem does a hacker’s framework solve that a framework like Django doesn’t? According to some of the Pylons developers, their framework is geared to solve 80/20 problems. Most people—80% of people–want to build blogs, and CMS-type applications. And for that 80%, Django works just great. Of course, the other 20% is where Pylons comes in to play as a “hacker’s framework.” » Read more
JBoss Operations Network (JON) recently became available as an open source solution through the Jopr project. (That’s pronounced “jopper.”) We interviewed Chris Morgan from Red Hat’s JON group to learn more.
1. What does Jopr do?
Jopr is an open source project that provides an integrated management platform that simplifies the development, testing, deployment, and monitoring of your JBoss technologies. From a single console you can inventory and monitor resources from the operating system to deployed applications. It also lets users control and audit application configurations to standardize deployments. It’s a robust solution to manage, monitor, and tune your applications for improved visibility, performance, and availability.
In the second installment of the Spotlight On series, we feature Red Hat engineer Richard Hughes on the fantastic new abstraction layer called PackageKit. PackageKit allows users to manage packages in a secure way using a cross-distro, cross-architecture API. This maintains a common set of GUI features, enabling the user to have a better session experience overall. For more information, visit www.packagekit.org.
People often wonder how to get new capabilities—new packages, new features in existing packages, or even bug fixes—included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The process for doing so is straightforward, but may be foreign to those with a background in traditional software products.
To summarize, the process is:
1)Get the new code accepted upstream.
2)Get it included in Fedora.
3)Get it included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Although this article focuses on the Linux kernel, the steps apply to all Red Hat Enterprise Linux components and packages.
The key element in the process is that Red Hat tracks upstream. This means that Red Hat works closely with the open source community. Any new features must first be accepted upstream before they’re added to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. » Read more
Red Hat engineer Dan Williams demonstrates the shared networking capabilities of Fedora 10.
We here at Red Hat are pleased to bring you a brand new set of videos aimed at showing off the latest and greatest enhancements in our technologies–featuring the very people who helped create them in the first place. The “SPOTLIGHT ON” series highlights the ways in which collaboration drives innovation by looking at projects that have been improved by community input. In our first installment, we track down Red Hat’s own Karsten Wade and Stephen Smoogen from the University of New Mexico to talk about Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), the Fedora-sourced repository of add-on packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They discuss how EPEL is a tool for user-driven innovation that comes from and benefits enterprise customers with more stable code and lower business costs.
co-authored with Grig Gheorghiu
The dd command is one of those ancient UNIX tools that is extremely powerful, yet at the same time, the syntax can make it feel slightly archaic. A lot of seasoned sysadmins and developers still remember the first time they saw the dd command used by a bearded wizard. He might have used it to test the disk I/O, capture a disk image, or restore it.
In some ways, dd can seem like Old Spice–only the guys over 60 use it. But the younger generation should know that dd still has some tricks up its sleeve. In this article, we’re going to put a new twist on this old favorite and show how grandpappy really does know best sometimes. The new twist is to mix dd with Python and the Google Chart API to make a UNIX 2.0 mashup tool. (”UNIX 2.0″ is a play on words for what happens when you change the original behavior of a tool like dd to make it do something a bit different.) » Read more
