The free-software world converges on Los Angeles this weekend, Feb. 21-23, 2014, for SCALE 12x, the Southern California Linux Expo at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

The Friday-Sunday convention welcomes users of the free Linux computer operating system that powers everything from servers and supercomputers to desktops, laptops, smartphones and toasters (and just about everything with a computer controlling it).

And it’s not just Linux. SCALE offers talks by experts as well as booths staffed volunteers from other Unix operating-system derivatives such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD, and offers sessions on the latest cloud-computing technologies, database software projects PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB, programming languages that include Python, Perl, Ruby and Javascript.

If you’ve ever wanted to know just about anything about running a server but were afraid to ask, SCALE is the place to get all the answers and more.

The show is thick with enthusiasts who come hear talks about the latest in free and open technology and meet in the exhibit hall with representatives from open-source software projects and the companies that build their businesses on them.

Read the rest of this post

As much as the open-source Radeon driver has improved in the 3.12 and 3.13 Linux kernels in Fedora 20 -- and that improvement has been significant, I returned to the proprietary AMD Catalyst driver for one reason.

Suspend/resume.

While everything else is working better in the Radeon driver, solving pretty much all of the problems I had with it in the 3.11-and-earlier days, the one thing it won't do with the 3.13 Linux kernel in Fedora 20 is allow the laptop to properly wake after it has been put to sleep. (The hardware is an HP Pavilion g6-2210us with the AMD A4-4300M APU, which includes AMD Radeon HD 7420G graphics.)

It makes me sad in a way. Radeon has come so far. And so fast. With Radeon DPM (invoked with a kernel boot parameter in 3.12 and by default in 3.13), 3D hardware acceleration works and CPU temperatures are pretty much the same as under Catalyst.

But the convenience of being able to shut the laptop lid to put the machine to sleep, then open it and have it wake up -- it's just too much to give up. I can't help it. It's a feature that's important to me.

Read the rest of this post

I haven't been for about five years, but this year, this weekend, I'll be at Scale 12x at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel.

And I'll have a longer article on Scale 12x as soon as I can crank it out today.

I'll look for interesting talks, but I'm more interested in being in the exhibit hall and talking to people involved in the world of free software.

I plan to grab a bunch of interviews that I can plow into articles in the days and weeks ahead.

So if you're at the show on Saturday or Sunday, maybe I'll see you there.

That title sounds like a bad master's thesis, right?

What I'm trying to do here is see how Ode posts that get their Indexette tagging locally play with my Unison sync setup.

If Ode doesn't "touch" the pre-tagged files on the server, I think we're all good.

Minutes later: That works. Now to code up a way to drop in the Indexette tag with system-generated current date and time.

Weeks later: I did write the code in the form of a short Perl script, and I incorporated it into the Gedit text editor via the Snippets plugin. I will detail this in a future post.

I took a look back today, and I learned that I started using Ode as my main blogging platform two years and 9 months ago. Call it "nearly three years," because that makes for a nice headline.

I suppose I could wait three months and write this post then. I'll probably do that, too.

But for today, I'd like to thank Rob Reed for all the care and feeding he has put into Ode over the years and all the help he's given me and the others who have used this software.

While Perl-powered CGI is as old as the hills, Ode does blogging in a way that is very satisfying for me. I'd rather write Markdown-tagged text files on my local machine and move them over to the server than work through a web interface (though Ode has one of its own in the form of the terrific EditEdit addin, which I do use on occasion).

Read the rest of this post

You can knock me over with a feather right this very moment: Mark Shuttleworth announced in his blog that Ubuntu will follow Debian in adopting systemd as its init system, even though Ubuntu itself coded the alternative Upstart:

Upstart has served Ubuntu extremely well – it gave us a great competitive advantage at a time when things became very dynamic in the kernel, it’s been very stable (it is after all the init used in both Ubuntu and RHEL 6 ;) and has set a high standard for Canonical-lead software quality of which I am proud.

Nevertheless, the decision is for systemd, and given that Ubuntu is quite centrally a member of the Debian family, that’s a decision we support. I will ask members of the Ubuntu community to help to implement this decision efficiently, bringing systemd into both Debian and Ubuntu safely and expeditiously.

I thought Ubuntu would fight to the end, but the SABDFL appears happy to offload init-system development to Lennart Poettering and company. A wise move, I think. Canonical's resources are spread thinly enough that anything not directly related to getting their phone OS to market should be seen as ripe for offloading to other parts of the community.

I'm nowhere near qualified to opine on which init system is better, systemd, Upstart or even the old SysVinit, but it was clear in the debate coursing through the Debian mailing lists over the past month that the licensing of Upstart, which required contributors to sign a Canonical CLA (contributor licensing agreement) that allowed the company to make the code proprietary in the future, was a huge, huge nonstarter for many free software advocates.

So Upstart will ship in the Ubuntu 14.04 LTS release, and all derivatives like Kubuntu and Xubuntu, which are due in April. These long-term-support releases will be around for five years, so Upstart isn't exactly dead yet, though it's quite the lame duck.

In an attempt to get a handle on Windows 8 performance on this hardware, I installed SpeedFan 4.49.

Quick tip. Avoid crapware and get the download here.

SpeedFan isn't pretty, but it works well. I can monitor CPU, GPU and disk temperatures. It also keeps an eye on GPU voltage, CPU frequency, battery charge state, uptime and CPU load.

SpeedFan can also manually adjust your fan speeds. I'm not interested in that so much, but I thought I'd throw it out there.

In case you're wondering, Windows 8 doesn't run any cooler on this HP Pavilion g6 than Fedora 20 with either the proprietary Catalyst driver or the open Radeon driver with Radeon DPM activated.

All about the point:

HOW TO SHARPEN PENCILS from Pricefilms on Vimeo.

This is a rewrite of My Fedora 20 system dies for a day, but I find the culprit. I started the original entry before I figured out the solution, and I wanted to tell it chronologically. And so I do:

Ever since I got suspend/resume working in Fedora 20, I've been rebooting maybe once a week. That's because I love suspend/resume.

I love being able to close to laptop lid to put the machine to sleep and open the lid to wake it up.

But since the battery was running low a few nights ago, I decided to do a full shutdown.

I turned the laptop on the next day, and it wouldn't boot into Fedora proper. I couldn't get to the login screen.

I was able to boot into rescue mode. All my files were there. They looked fine. That's the good news.

But when trying a normal boot, sometime during the process the machine just stalled. There was nothing I can do to get it to finish booting and give me either a console or desktop.

Read the rest of this post

Keeping an eye on Koji, especially for the Linux kernel, is a great way to see when an update is imminent for Fedora.

Today I see that a 3.13.2 kernel is being built for Fedora 20. That means F20 users will start seeing it in their updates sometime in the near future.

You could always grab it early (though the build isn't completed at this particular moment). I'll wait. I just got 3.12.10, and I already invoked Radeon DPM (which will be turned on by default in 3.13.x), so there's no hurry.