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Red Hat Magazine

Video: Fedora 10December 2 2008

Download this video: [Ogg Theora]

Fedora 10 is out, and to celebrate that milestone, Fedora Project leader Paul Frields sat down with Red Hat community guru Greg DeKoenigsberg to talk about where Fedora’s been over the past five years and where it’s going. Along the way they discuss KVM improvements, the debut of new Fedora artwork, and the future of codec support. Watch the video, then head on over to fedoraproject.org to fire it up!

Related links

• Download Fedora from fedoraproject.org.
• Get the release notes.
• Ten reasons to get fired up over Fedora: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and final.

Introducing Pylons: A hacker’s web frameworkNovember 5 2008

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 �

Video: Fedora 10 Connection SharingOctober 16 2008

Download this video: [Ogg Theora]
Video by Colby Hoke.

Red Hat engineer Dan Williams demonstrates the shared networking capabilities of Fedora 10.

This isn’t your grandpappy’s dd commandOctober 2 2008

co-authored with Grig Gheorghiu

Background

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.)

Setup

For this article, we assume you’re running Fedora Core 8. We’re actually just renting some time from Amazon in all of these examples. To do that we allocated a 1 GB Elastic Block Storage volume from Amazon and attached it as the device /dev/sdd to an Amazon Machine Instance (AMI) running Fedora Core 8. Learn more about using Amazon Cloud Computing with Red Hat.

Using dd for disk benchmarking with Google Charts API and Python

We benchmarked

The power of Collaborative InnovationSeptember 18 2008

With 1.4 billion people connected, the Internet is the greatest collaborative network that mankind has experienced. One of the consequences of the growth of this network is a shift in the way knowledge is being created and distributed. As we move to an interconnected world, the balance of power is shifting from old, proprietary models of knowledge creation to the open source model that emphasizes collaboration and sharing. From management gurus to consulting firms to leading business schools, everyone is taking note of this new phenomenon that goes by various names like ‘Collaborative Innovation,’ ‘Open Innovation,’ or ‘Distributed Co-creation.’

The open source movement has pioneered the Collaborative Innovation trend, and it is no surprise that the rapid growth of the Internet and the equally rapid growth of the open source community have mirrored each other. The Linux® operating system and Wikipedia website are both good examples of open source projects that embody the ideals of Collaborative Innovation. And those in the technology industry aren’t the only ones to take notice. Policy makers and corporate leaders in all markets are exploring how this powerful trend can be harnessed for social and economic development.

Let us take Linux as an example. In September 1991, Linus Torvalds released 10,000 lines of source code under the General Public License (GPL). The GPL gives users four freedoms:

1. The freedom to run the pro