Posts tagged 'work'

• This week in Anaconda - May 16, 2011

  Over the past two weeks, I’ve been working on figuring out where all the memory goes during installation. As many people have no doubt noticed, we’ve increased the memory requirements a good bit for F15. This is mostly due to my single large initrd change. wwoods is working on further refinements for F16 that should lower that requirement by a good bit. But, that alone doesn’t tell the story of install-time memory usage.

• This week in Anaconda - February 4, 2011

  This past weekend was FUDCon and for the first time since expanding to other offices, we had the entire crew in one place. That includes our remotees in Washington, Alabama, and Hawaii; people in other US offices, and the whole group from Brno (which is a very long flight). This was very nice as many of us had never met others before. In particular, I’d never met bcl, mgracik, or akozumpl before this weekend.

• This week in Anaconda - December 23, 2010

  I don’t really have anything to talk about for this week. Since it’s almost Christmas break here, everyone’s been taking it pretty easy. For those of you who don’t know, much of Red Hat will be shut down starting tonight through New Year’s. Given that, there’s not really any reason in starting anything new this week only to put it down for ten days and then try to remember what you were doing. I did a new build yesterday and since only translations have changed since, that will be the last build until 2011. Please keep all this in mind if you file bugs or make mailing list posts. Someone might get back to you before January, but don’t count on it. Have a good break, and remember to step away from the computer for a while. I know I will.

• This week in anaconda - December 17, 2010

  This week’s entry is all about how we create installation media.

• This week in Anaconda - December 3, 2010

  This week’s entry covers installation to a disk image, storage testing, and disks with 4k sector sizes.

• No this week in anaconda this week - November 24, 2010

  There’s no TWIA this week because it’s Thanksgiving and I’m off work both Thursday and Friday. Personally, I’ve been plenty busy with merging my storage tests into autoqa. That’s probably the thing I’ll talk about next week. So for now, go off and do something that doesn’t involve computers for a while. Your body and mind will thank you.

• This week in Anaconda - November 19, 2010

  This week’s entry covers building updated anaconda packages post-release, the UI redesign, and problems with the kickstart -noformat option.

• This week in Anaconda - November 12, 2010

  This week’s entry covers variable substitution in kickstart files, the new user interface, the default filesystem, and more.

• This week in Anaconda - November 5, 2010

  The biggest news this week is that Fedora 14 finally escaped from its holding cell into the wild. Congratulations to everyone who put in so much time on this release! I’ve summarized the relevant anaconda F13->F14 changes on the changes wiki page. As you can see, it’s largely internal stuff or tweaks around the edges. Lots of old crud got removed too. You can also see the changes from F14 to rawhide.

• This week in Anaconda - October 29, 2010

  Quick bug fix round up

  Nothing too exciting happened this week in anaconda land so I’m going to recap a couple commits and then get to something completely different. dlehman committed all his action sorting patches I discussed last week and we will shortly have a build including them. akozumpl got us away from the nasty old pile of timezone setting code and closer to what’s in system-config-date. Now that we’re running in full screen, we have space for stuff like that. We also had a bunch of build fixes and logging changes.

• This week in Anaconda - October 22, 2010

  /usr is not recommended

  The surprise controversy this week was that I removed /usr from the list of default mount points in the UI. That doesn’t mean you can’t still use it. It just means you have to type it in manually as opposed to choosing it from a drop down. The rationale is that Fedora in general does a pretty bad job of supporting /usr on its own mount point. We do such a bad job that even the install guide recommends against it.

• This week in anaconda - October 15, 2010

  This is my first installment of This Week in Anaconda, where I try to explain what we’ve been up to and why things are the way they are. I hope you find it interesting, if not exactly entertaining. Hopefully I’ll get better with this over time.

• This week in Anaconda - October 13, 2010

  In case you were wondering what happened to the other days of beers, the short story is that writing about beer gets really old really quickly. There’s only so many things you can say, so many adjectives you can use. I got tired of feeling compelled to find and drink a new beer every day. Basically, drinking beer became work. Now maybe if I were able to turn it into a book deal, it would be worth it.

• 10 years of anaconda - April 24, 2009

  With this commit, anaconda began its reign of terror over the installer landscape. Ten years and hundreds of thousands of lines later, we are still working on it. Sure, all of the original authors are gone and most of the original code has been rewritten or removed, but anaconda marches on. So today, say a brief prayer thanking anaconda that your computer got installed upon, and have a drink in its honor.

  I, however, have only been working on this thing for 4.5 years. It will be a long time before we’re celebrating the ten year anniversary of my first commit. Perhaps I will have moved on myself by then.

• The return of clean clothes - April 17, 2008

  The long national nightmare of no washing machine is finally at an end.

• More things I've noticed - April 16, 2008

  I don’t have anything specific to say, so it’s time for another installment of unusual things I have noticed since I have been here.

• Washing - April 15, 2008

  Last night was an interesting experience. I’m here for three weeks total, but I only brought about a week’s worth of clothes because there’s a washing machine in the apartment. There’s no dryer, but I can take care of that part easy enough. This sounded pretty good to me since it meant I wouldn’t have to haul twenty pounds of clothes across the ocean and I wouldn’t be taking twenty pounds of dirty clothes back with me. I hate that.

• Things I've noticed - April 10, 2008

  Well I have been here in Brno, Czech Republic for a couple days now. I’ve made it in to the office every day this week, wandered around town a bit, and even navigated the grocery store. The only significant troubles so far were on Tuesday where I decided it would be a good idea to walk to the office (actually, the smallest coin I had was 50 Kr and the tram pass machine didn’t take it), took a couple wrong turns, and got lost. It didn’t turn out too bad since I saw a lot of new stuff and in the end basically ended up walking around in a big circle back to my apartment. After that I was able to buy a drink and use the change for tram fare.

• And I'm here - April 7, 2008

  Sometime around 10pm Sunday night, I got to the office apartment in Brno, which was a quick 30 hours after leaving my apartment in Nashua. Sure that includes six hours of time difference, but it’s still a very long trip. As I write this it’s 4:25PM local time on Monday. Who knows what time it is where you are. There was some confusion at the office as to whether I made it or not so this post is mostly directed at them to let them know I’m still alive.

• Planes, busses, and more busses - April 5, 2008

  Today, I leave for a long work trip to Brno, Czech Republic. This is my first time flying outside of the continent so it’s about equal parts exciting and terrifying. While I’m looking forward to being over there and seeing some place totally new, I’m not really looking forward to the two bus rides and two plane rides I will be experiencing over the next eighteen hours. I would say that my flight is through KLM, but due to the maze of twisty code shares I am actually flying on Northwest. Whatever. As long as they serve some drinks I should be able to eventually fall asleep. I arrive sometime around 8pm local time tomorrow, which works out to 2pm Eastern. We’ll see how my body handles that.

• Thud! - October 24, 2006

  Today we released Fedora Core 6, code named Zod. The most compelling new features of this new release are in the installer, of course. Our main new feature is the ability to install packages from additional repos at installation time. For the average user, this means you can just punch in the URL to your favorite mp3/DVD/flash/other patented stuff repo and select packages just as you would for the base system. There’s no post-installation step required to get this stuff. Administrators of large installations will like this because they can point anaconda at a local repo of all their custom site-specific software. Naturally, this is supported by kickstart too. We also added IPv6 support, simplified the number of screens you have to go through, and sped up package dependancy calculations by quite a bit.

  Oh, I guess some other people within the Fedora Project made some changes for this release as well. There’s the shiny new window manager compiz, new printing support, better package update support, new fonts, virtualization via Xen, and of course all the latest and greatest versions of packages. The release summary has the details.

  So go give it a try. The release announcement tells you how to get it. We worked like crazy on this release and should have it pretty well figured out, but there are always bugs anyway. Report them to bugzilla and we will do our best to fix them. And in the future, you will be able to install from the updates repo at install time too so you can get the fixes right away.

• FC6 - any day now - October 18, 2006

  Seems like we’ve been at this for months and delaying it for weeks on end, but I think we are really about to release Fedora Core 6 within the next week. At least, today David came over to my cube holding a CD and talking about 0-day warez, so that leads me to believe the packages have been signed, the final CD images made, and everything prepared to push it out to mirrors.

• Panic mode - September 29, 2006

  Today’s big surprise news at work was that we were going to make a sort of Fedora Core 6 test 3.5. Test 3 had a lot of installation problems, but we got most of those sorted out. However, we want to make sure they get extra testing before FC6 final goes out so it was decided to release this thing that’s not called test 4. Of course, I didn’t find out about this until I got to work today. And even after I got there and made some fixes, it was too late because the tree had been built the night before. I love our communication sometimes.

• Mutually assured destruction - February 11, 2006

  I promise that as long as David doesn’t start working on Fedora for Sparc, I will not start working on an Alpha port. Of course, if he does start doing that, I might have a hard time restraining myself from repeating six years ago and consuming what free time I have.