Miguel Bolaños

So it’s been a while since I don’twrite anything… as i had mentioned before my posts depend on my time and inspiration… guess in the past few days i have not been in the mood for new posts.. god damn CR goverment arrgg.. aight lets let that go.

So I have been doing quite a bit of work with OpenSDE, and feel quite happy to see several member of the “Grupo GNU/Linux de El Salvador” joining us at this early stages on the project, I’m doing my best to provide guidance and support specially for those who have a hard time readin english.

As we I write this I am downloading packages for a new build.. I need to test several base repository updates before I commit them… hopefully nothing will break and no one will scream… ah well we will find out tomorrow

Discussing today with the Linux SV group i realized that there is ALOT of interest in people to see XGL working and in general people is curious about what OpenSDE can do.. so I will fix the desktop target and add XGL support to general some livecds and iso to give away at the Linux Lan Party in El Salvador on Septemeber the 23rd and 24th… wish me luck

I still have the idea of creating a fork of the Geek Code running on my head.. i would really appreciate to get input, ideas, suggestions from people of the categories we should have on this fork.

anyways.. its been a long day i’m moving to /dev/bed

Vivir en un pais donde se tiene un monopolio de comunicaciones es simple y sensillamente genial.. AARRGGG…

Los ultimos dias me he pasado lidiando con multiples problemas, perimo estaba teniendo ataques DoS en mi red, y fue un “mundo” convencer a mi “ISP” que bloqueara el trafico en su red de 2 IP’s porque me estaban saturando el ancho de banda… lo hicieron… bloquearon 2 clases C enteras… entre los afectados estaban varios clientes y mi proveedor de VoIP… llamo de vuelta.. y me dicen que _EL_ administrador de los routers estara de vacaciones por 2 semanas…

OK cool… luego de reconfigurar mi router de VoIP para utilizar mi coneccion de ADSL… a las 2 horas vuelvo a tener problemas… llamo al ISP.. luego de 40 minutos al telefono.. me dicen que el soporte de ADSL lo maneja otro departamento.. GGRRRR… llamo al nuevo numero… y despues de casi una me informan que su router de ADSL se averio… y demoraran de 36 a 48 horas para conseguir el reemplazo y reconfigurarlo… obvio aun mi adsl no funciona…

OK cool aun tengo coneccion de Cable Modem… entonces vuelvo a reconfigurar el router de VoIP para el cable modem… y entonces a los pocos minutos deja de funcionar la telefonia una vez mas… llamo a la empresa de cable… y me informan que por nuevas politicas del administrador de los routers de mi ISP han restringido muchos puertos no-estandard con el fin de evitar que la gente con servicios residenciales de cable modem utilicen VoIP…

Puedo hablar con el admin de los routers de mi isp para que haga un excepcion conmigo…

cuando regrese de sus PINCHES VACACIONES!!!

Es el colmo!

Due to commercial work related issues I must admit that I had to be away from many of the OSS projects I had been developing… and been done with that “stage” of my life has finally empowered me again to get back to my “beloved” projects, there are new things in line such the new OpenSDE project borned from ROCKLinux and T2, but there are also other projects that I’m slowly coming back to, such as keeping track and rediscovering SELinux and returning to ELKS, this last one really motivated by initiatives from my friend Claudio whom have been making commits and fixes as time allowes it.

I have also began to have the time to enjoy the research part of been a sysadmin.. not jus t killing fires and stopping attacks, but also playing with different technologies, I recently began to look into Qmail, I must say that even though I’m still in ;love with Sendmail, it sure is powerfull, I have taken qmailrocks as my guide to learn my way into it, and quickly developed my own way of customizing and setting up a decent Qmail server, a couple of clients have it and I’m quite impressed with the performance and web based administrtion was easy for the non-experienced admins,  most important clients are happy with it .. God it’s so good to always help people escape from m$ exchange

Currently I’m playing around with the different products that RedHat has to offer, rediscovering their internals and getting familiar again with everything, yes there is a porpuse behind it all… I will disclose it when the time is right

Long Life to OpenSource and GNU/Linux!

So today i gave talk on irc to the El Salvador GNU/Linux community, lots of fun, people actually enjoyed it.. or thats what it seemed, i will try my best and give more talks in the near future.. motivating the centralamerican folks is important… keep it up my friends

Also i wanted to specially thank my friend Alejandro Mery (mnemoc), Ihad horrible connectivity problems and if it wouldn’t have been for his help granting me access to a remote system i would have not been able to give my talk today.

In other topics, my birthday is tomorrow, I do not have any plans yet, and it feels weird to celebrate my birthday “alone” after having a special someone to share my time with for the last 6 years, but i’m sure i will survive… still miss special.. if you ever read this, you will be in my hearth always. Anyways… i don’t think i will write anything tomorrow, but feel free to post some coments or mail me if you need me.

cheers.

So i spent all night and all day working on OpenSDE, as i mentioned i worked with a few different architectures… things are not as messed with the misc archs as i was expecting which is good.

I was able to run a full x86 build with the minimal template no problem.. its stable and functional.

Experienced problems with sparc and alpha because my gcc does not support -mlong-double-128 .. will work on that later.

Intesrestingly sparc64 moved quite fine, i will be debuggin a bit more tonight:

root@talena:/home/madtux/Devel/OpenSDE/trunk-dev# ./scripts/Create-ErrList -cfg sys-sparc64

Error logs from sys-sparc64-trunk-generic-sparc64-generic-cross:

[1] base/strace

85 builds total, 40 completed fine, 1 with errors.
This is what our friend strace tell us:

/home/madtux/Devel/OpenSDE/trunk-dev/build/sys-sparc64-trunk-generic-sparc64-gen
eric-cross/usr/include/asm-sparc64/page.h:18:2: error: #error No page size speci
fied in kernel configuration
make[1]: *** [strace.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/madtux/Devel/OpenSDE/trunk-dev/src.strace.sys-
sparc64.20060819.152801.11159.talena/strace-4.5.12′
make: *** [all] Error 2

Ah well i will spend sometime with it tonight.

I will upgrade coreutils… have patch adaptation work will take place.. i will let ya know how it goes tomorrow or so.

Just cause i like to leave with a smile.. he is the output on the x86 completion:

-> Creating 2nd_stage archive.

Creating 2nd_stage_small filesystem:
-> Copy the required libraries …
-> `- Found lib/ld-linux.so.2.
-> `- Found lib/libblkid.so.1.
-> `- Found lib/libc.so.6.
-> `- Found lib/libcom_err.so.2.
-> `- Found lib/libdl.so.2.
-> `- Found lib/libe2p.so.2.
-> `- Found lib/libext2fs.so.2.
-> `- Found lib/libm.so.6.
-> `- Found lib/libpthread.so.0.
-> `- Found lib/librt.so.1.
-> `- Found lib/libuuid.so.1.
-> `- Found usr/lib/libparted-1.7.so.1.
-> `- Found usr/lib/libreadline.so.5.
-> Copy /etc/fstab.
-> Copy stone.d.
-> Creating links for identical files.
3 links created.
-> Creating 2nd_stage_small archive.
-> Creating isofs.txt file ..
root@talena:/home/madtux/Devel/OpenSDE/trunk-dev#

root@talena:/home/madtux/Devel/OpenSDE/trunk-dev# ./scripts/Create-ErrList -cfg
system

Error logs from system-trunk-generic-x86-pentium-mmx:

208 builds total, 208 completed fine, 0 with errors.

root@talena:/home/madtux/Devel/OpenSDE/trunk-dev#

So after a few days looking into the new project OpenSDE and performing some package updates and small modifications I have decided to download packages and run some test builds for some of the archs I’m used to work with (x86, sparc, sparc64, alpha and mips), I will basically just building the generic target with the minimalistic package selection, I just want to evaluate how stable the base system is, once this is functional and estable i will move on to bigger goals.

My plans right now are taking over maintainence of the GNOME repository, implement the SELinux support and make sure the desktop target is fully funtional with XGL included.

This is where are standing so far:

== 20:03:33 =[3]=> Building filesystem/parted [1.7.1 trunk].
-> Compiler Cache enabled: 0.00% cache hits so far.
-> Reading package configuration from package directory.
-> Preparing build in src.parted.system.20060818.200331.8286.talena
-> Building. Writing output to $root/var/adm/logs/3-parted.out
*> Corrected ./ltmain.sh
-> Compiler Cache Hits while pkg build: 6.08% (11 hits, 170 misses)
-> Cleaning up ccache …
-> $root/var/adm/logs/3-parted.out -> 3-parted.log
== 08/18/06 20:06:34 =[3]=> Finished building package parted.

Creating binary package file for parted.
-> Building build/…/pkgs/parted-1.7.1.tar.bz2

== 20:06:40 =[3]=> Building develop/gdb [6.5 trunk].
-> Compiler Cache enabled: 0.00% cache hits so far.
-> Reading package configuration from package directory.
-> Preparing build in src.gdb.system.20060818.200637.30452.talena
-> Building. Writing output to $root/var/adm/logs/3-gdb.out
*> Corrected ./ltmain.sh
208 builds total, 110 completed fine, 0 with errors.

One cool thing about working on OpenSDE is the fact that I’m already quite familiar with this type of project and know the people that is involved in it, in fact some of them are close virtual friends that I’ve known for years.

More info on progress will be posted tomorrow or so.

Es interesante comouno se motiva en general por enojo o por extra desilucion.

Durante las ultimos dias semanas, he estado reintegrandome nuevamente a la comunidad de Software Libre, luego una larga ausencia causada por exceso de trabajo (comercial) y multiples problemas y tropezones en mi vida personal, sin embargo ahora he tomado nuevamente fuerzas y he reorganizado mi tiempo y prioridades y de hecho he convertido la comunidad y el movimiento y la mas alta de mis prioridades.

Tengo que expresarme en algun lugar, y despues de todo creo que este es el mejor luegar… esto cansado de ver la mediocridad en nuestra sociedad latinoamericana, gente que desaprovecha las buenas oportunidades de trabajo y da el minimo … y les pagan por eso.. cuando hay gente con enorme potencial ahi afuera esperando que le den una sola oportunidad para poder mostrar de lo que son capaces, me indigna ver como los
“extrangeros” han tomado control en muchas industrias, pues como dia mi buen amigo Anahuac, tenemos mentalidad de hormiga obrera… lo mas patetico de todo es el hecho de que si se dan oportunidades de tner nuestras propias empresas, nuestras propias cosas, pero nadie esta dispuesto a sacrificarse para alcanzar metas altas, la gente ahora solo quiere que le pongas las cosas hechas y listas en las manos… y cuando algunos de nosotros queremos salir de este mundo de “hormiga” y buscar algo mejor, entonces aquellos con los que contamos paa que funcionen las cosas, se lo toman todo a la ligera y toman su maldita actitud conformista de que estan bien con el trabajo que tienen.. el salario que tienen alcanza y listo… talvez yo sea el problema, tiendo a no pensar que tengo limites y odio ser conformista, odio depender de otras personas… me gusta ser una persona que toma la iniciativa en las cosas y tomar riesgos.. es cierto a veces no es lo mejor pues se sale mal.. pero sino se arriesga no se gana.

En mi ultimo viaje a El Salvador, estuve cenando con unos amigos en un restaurante tipico.. bastante rico la verdad, habiamos 2 tipos interesantes de personas … Linuxeros y Economistas.. entre las muchas cosas que platicamos, se hablo mucho sobre los salarios de la gente… es indignante saber que en centroamerica ahi gente que gana $160 por MES trabajando de “sol a sol” mientras otros que no hacen realmente nada en la empresa y trabajan en una empresa porque son los hijos del dueno o algo asi se ganan miles de dolares… tienen el horario que les da la gana y no importa cuantas estupideces hagan nunca perderan su empleo… es ridiculo .. es triste vivir en una sociedad donde la injusticia predomina.. y donde los gobiernos apoyan las empresas multinacionales que no toman en cuanta la realidad economica de nuestros paises, en lugar de apoyar las iniciativas de personas y empresas locales que proponen ayudar al desarrollo y crecimiento de la region, teniendo una perspectiva clara de la realidad economica de nuestros paises, y nuestras necesidades reales.

La verdad no se si este post sirva de concientizacion a alguien, indiferentemente son las cosas que pasan por mi mente.. no creo ser capaz de continuar con los brazos cruzados, o hacerme de la vista gorda como muchos lo hacen… es hora de armar una “revolucion” por nuestros hermanos latinoamericanos… por salarios justos, por oportunidades por igual para todos.. por una sociedad mas conciente.

This seminar took place at the Universidad de El Salvador, San Salvador on Agust 12, I must say that the first thing that supprised me was looking at how this small group of people organized such a nice event, my estimates are that there were over 200 people attending to the event.

In the looby you could find the registration board, and some stands.. one specifically called my attention, the TuxPC stand, first cause i finally met an old friend from IRC, “funnytux” whom have been around since 2001 or so on his early 11 o 12 years old talking side by side with distro developers and coders, this is NOT that usual, anyways I liked to see how they have customized and adapted a Slackware install to fit on low price generic PCs, their philosophy of selling LEGAL software with the hardware that is been purchased is focused obviously and offering GNU/Linux installed, I will have to give them a better approach to OpenSDE when the project is a bit matture, it will definitely be a good option for then as well, we are starting to the take over El Salvador, and this guys will definitly be in the list of the companies that “took the risk” and succeeded. Keep it up guys!

In the end of the event I was extremly supprised to see a lot of programmers that are mostly oriented in .NET willing to look into Free Software alternatives, and asking how they can start developing in FreeSoftware for now in .NET, while their learn other languages.

We made an outdoor discussion after the event where i was basically telling people about my experiences developing FreeSoftware during the past years, and giving them hints and ideas to consider as there is an initiative by the local LUG to create a Development group.

I’m will be following this community progress very close, and definitely join them in other events in the future.

Some pics of the events can be found at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/madtux/tags/sv0806/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ciskosv/tags/ues/
http://www.linux.org.sv/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=82
cheers