Small is Beautiful

Here is an article I picked up from linuxplanet about custom kernels. Im all about custom kernels but custom kernels on distros such as debian, fedora, suse and the likes is just askig for trouble especially if you hardware depends on modules such as nvidia, fglrx, ipwxx and so on.

The article fails to mention that once you go custom apt-get install x11-fglrx-drv or yum install xii-fglrx-drv (or whatever their names may be) will cease to function. The reason being that those particular modules were built for a particular kernel. A kernel that a different version / name that your cusom one and therefore they will no longer work.

You can however build ALL of the modules you need by hand (i.e. from source) and then they will find your kernel header / sources and all should be fine unless you run into problems such as dependicies or dependency version mis-matches.

Gentoo is the only distro that I know of that completely does away with this type of problem. I am sure other source based distros have their own workarounds.

Frankly, nowadays it is not as common place to build a custom kernel since the majority of major distros do a decent job of hardware support.

I have always liked network monitoring solutions. Since my first run-in with solutions such as HP OpenView (Operations and NNM) or IBM Tivolli I have always felt that if I were to ever become a developer I would make a piece of NM history.

Lately some of our current and potential clients have shown an interest in NM. I obviosuly showed a portfolio of software solutions that we work with as well as the possiblity for us to script something up if the shoe fits. In most cases a simple nagios, cacti or other such software will work. Unfortunately I have not seen anything from the Open Source world to compete with the likes of HP OpenView which I currently believe to be the leader in Network Monitoring (a killer combination is NNM and OpenView Operations).

Lately I have been toying with the idea of writing my own NM solution. Something that resembles NNM and Operations but without all the headaches of installation, patching and managing. I want to build something that is is easy to get up off the ground. I do not aim for this software to be user friendly but I would like it to be intuitive and have a solid foundation. I would like it to be easy to configure SNMP as well as agent and agent-less monitoring. I would like to have agents for anything imaginable.

Seeing how I am not the best C programmer out there and obviosly the core needs to be in C I have not given much though to the architecture of the software. I am at this point willing to start putting together something in perl/python/php. I am also at this poing looking to see if there is anyone interested in collaborating on such a solution.

Since I noticed that this blog gets about 300 unique hits per month (minus the crawling robots) I am hoping I can find people with a similar interest in such a project. So if there is such an interest let me know.

Cheers!

For those looking for a cool new video player that does online content too, miro might be the answer. I dont usually do a lot of online TV watching but lately as more of the shows I watch are being broadcast on the Net I found that having a tools to download and organize all these shows is essential.

Miro is still in beta but I believe it is headed in the right direction. The Linux version has several bugs and limitations but even with those it is worth playing. I havent tried the windows or mac versions but from what I hear they are all good.

Check it out , especially since my description of what Miro actually does is by far just a scratch on the surface.

In my last post I was using Fedora 7 and had hit a couple of road bumps. Most annoying was the whole ATI driver thing but once a proper driver was released I hit a couple of other road bumps that eventually determined to switch to Vista and then back to Debian and as of last week to Ubuntu again.

As much as I love Red Hat I find it difficult to believe that in order to get Xgl and Compiz/Beryl working I have to jump through hoops. I did eventually manage to ge beryl and Xgl working on Fedora but they were incredibly old builds.

To keep things short I had a small breakdown and I even switched to windows. Now I am back to Ubuntu (gutsy tribe3) and everything is working fine.

I’ve got compiz-fuzion with fglrx, vmware-workstation to run office 2007 and outlook plus nero home which I use to stream videos to my PS3. I would ditch Nero in a second if I could find a program for linux that does DLNA and on-the-fly transcoding.

Theres your update …