Jan 19 2009 1:53AM GMT
Posted by: John Little
Linux,
consultant,
suse,
red hat
It’s been a few days since I’ve had a chance to write so I want to catch up.
I recently accepted a 3-5 week consulting job about 400 miles from where I live. I had to leave in the late afternoon because I had an interview for another job, this one closer to home and about 60 miles in the wrong direction. This meant that I wouldn’t actually be on the road until 1500 EST or later.
After the interview off I went. About 90 miles into the drive my truck started missing so badly that it was shaking as I drove and the “Service Engine Soon” light came on.
I called my wife and asked her to locate an auto parts store in the town that was coming up, Champaign, IL. 60 miles of a teeth rattling miss in my engine. This was fun. She called back with directions to a store that was about 10 minutes off of the highway.
I arrived there about 1700 CST. If you’ve ever been in the midwest in January you know that it starts getting dark between 1730-1800. I had them put a tester on the truck and sure enough the Coil on Plug 3 was bad. To top off everything it was 10 degrees F outside.
I had somewhat expected something like this as my truck had been acting up for the last few days. With that in mind I had brought along enough tools to pull a spark plug which meant I had the necessary tools to remove the coil.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been under the hood of an F150 4 wheel drive but some of the plugs and coils can be difficult to reach. It is also high enough that it is helpful if you have a step stool of some sort. Fortunately the coil/plug 3 is not under the firewall so it wasn’t too bad. I did have to crawl up onto the grill housing to get to the coil though.
I bought the coil and went to work. It took me about 10 or 15 minutes to get the old coil off and another 20-30 to get the new one on. By now I’m working by the light of the auto parts store and the temperature is dropping. Cold, very cold. I’m glad the wind wasn’t blowing or it would have almost been unbearable.
The rest of the drive was uneventful although driving through St. Louis wasn’t much fun. Finally I reach the hotel in Rolla, MO about 2200 CST. This puts me about 4-5 hours from my destination. Ahh, I say to myself, the hotel has wireless and breakfast so I’ll just hit the sack and check email and what have you tomorrow morning.
So much for day 1.
-j
Dec 4 2008 6:41PM GMT
Posted by: John Little
windows,
solaris,
sun,
Lotus Domino,
red hat,
suse,
opensolaris,
inventory,
inventory tag,
tag your gear
Sun has a unique application on their web site called Sun Inventory that will track hardware, software and operating systems. It is unique in that it is, more or less, a cloud application. You can access your inventory anywhere that you have internet access.
The Sun Inventory application tracks these items by installing a small application on the machine that you want to inventory. Initially it will report back the hardware and operating system. As qualified applications are installed the agent will report these back to the Sun Inventory application without any interaction on your part.
Getting started is simple. Go here to get started. If you don’t have a Sun account go ahead and sign up. Once you are signed in it is a 3 step process to get started.
Step one is to download what are known as service tags. This is the application that you will install to “tag” your inventory so that it can be put into the application. Tags are available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Suse Enterprise Linux, Solaris and Windows. Download the appropriate tag for your operating system and install it on the machine on which you want to inventory. The tagging also works on Virtualized Machines from Red Hat Virtualization and from VMs using Virtual Box. I didn’t check any other virtualization applications.
Steps two and three are discovering and registering your “gear” as Sun calls it. This downloads a small java program onto your machine to help in finding and registering tag ready machines. With this application you can find your machines in various ways such as hostname, subnet and ip address. Below is a screen shot of the information that you can use to find your tagged your machines.
Once you have done this a screen will pop up showing the gear that the registration client found. You will then login to your Sun Account and choose which products that you want to register. Once they are registered what you will see is like the following screen shot.
As you can see I have my 1u server tagged along with the host and virtual operatings systems. The OpenSolaris machine is running on Virtual Box. The OpenOffice application was installed after I tagged and registered the machine. Since the tag runs as a service it picked up the OpenOffice application and registered it as part of the OpenSolaris machine.
This is a great way to get your machines and related software inventoried and get control of it.
-j
Oct 10 2008 10:54AM GMT
Posted by: John Little
Linux,
red hat,
suse,
netbook
A few days ago we had this quote from all over the Internet regarding Netbooks;
“They start playing around with Linux and start realizing that it’s not what they are used to,” MSI’s Director of U.S. Sales Andy Tung said in the Laptop mag interview. “They don’t want to spend time to learn it so they bring it back to the store. The return rate is at least four times higher for Linux netbooks than Windows XP netbooks.”
And now there is this from SuSE:
” People typically don’t care what operating system is on the netbooks, because they don’t buy them to run a suite of applications like Microsoft Office, but to be on the Web using a Web browser,” Nat Friedman said in an interview with IDG Applications Service. Novell’s SUSE Linux is already being pre-loaded with laptops from vendors including Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo. The company is now in negotiations with Lenovo and HP to start offering its Linux distribution on their netbooks as well, he added.
That could be two very conflicting statements. If the marketing people will get it right though I believe that it should work.
It all comes down to the expectations of the users. The typical consumer, unless told several times over in bold print, is going to assume that he is getting a Windows machine. Much to his/her surprise when opening the box there is this strange beast that says Linux, no Windows logo, no notepad or wordpad, no Windows media player…do you get anything else with Windows?
The braver among them may try and make it work. However this is not the consumer’s bag. He wants it to work with what s/he is familiar with. So what happens? The only natural thing that can happen-the consumer returns the Netbook.
Now picture this. The marketing people do their job and hype it up as Linux so the consumer knows what s/he is getting. The even go so far as to put usage videos on their website or YouTube. And yes they must point out that these things are available to the consumer. Now the new Linux user is more than willing to get his shiny new Linux netbook to work. Someone is showing him/her where the applications are located, which applications are used to perform various tasks such as play music, create document and spreadsheets and edit photos. Now the consumer has a Netbook computer, at a low cost and is happily running Linux on his new machine.
Do consumers care what operating system is on their computer? For the most part I don’t think that they do. What they do care about is using the applications on the computer with ease. With the right marketing and hand holding and with videos showing the consumer how to use the new Netbook I think the consumers and sellers of the Netbook will be much happier. However if their expectations are different than what they are getting they are not going to be happy and the returns will continue.
-j
