We The Free

Well, last week was pretty full-on. The weekdays were taken up by LCA 2010 (Linux Conf Australia), this year held in Wellington, and the weekend was KapCon XIX, one (and probably the biggest) of Wellington’s annual RPG conventions.

Both were awesome. It was my second LCA (last year I went to the one in Hobart), and it was my first KapCon.

The one thing I noticed at LCA, or rather noticed the lack of, was attendance by Linus. He was at last year’s LCA, and he says he tries to make it out to all of them, but unfortunately he didn’t make it out this year (or stayed hidden, which isn’t likely).

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At work we normally do all our CentOS builds using Kickstart and our own local mirrors. On top of which I built a couple of custom repositories — one for own own private software, and one for customer boxes (with software such as updated Sendmail, Clam AV, SpamAssassin, etc).

That works very well, and a (reasonably performing) box takes about 5-10 minutes from plugging a flash stick in, to pulling it out and rebooting with a fresh OS install.

But one thing we’ve needed is to build a recovery stick for use on a customer’s site. The default LiveCDs are too bogged down with extraneous crap (like X for a start) to be of any use in the field, while the recovery option on an install CD suffers the opposite problem. I needed to build something that was the best of both worlds — it had to have heaps of tools on there and it had to boot quickly. On top of which we’ve got some custom stuff that would be useful to be able to carry around such as a custom version of gawk that has a lot of modules written by my boss, Don, such as file IO functions (ala libc), cgi, and more.

So I investigated building a flash image that would meet all our worldly desires.
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Several years too late as far as I’m concerned. Ars Technica has the story that covers McBride’s dismissal.

A nice quote from the article:

“Even after SCO’s deception was exposed and the company effectively lost its case, Darl McBride continued to insist that the company has evidence of System V code in Linux. No such evidence has been presented and McBride’s argument directly contradicts testimony given by other SCO executives. McBride’s stubborn detachment from reality has made him a subject of ridicule in the Linux community.“

In the wake of the disastrous attempt at litigation against everyone and their dog, SCO expect to “restructure” and continue to grow their UNIX business as if nothing had ever happened, but I think that irreparable damage has been done to them and their brand by McBride.