Working on Triton in the lab, what’s on the horizon

January 27, 2016

As we’ve talked about before, a few of us in Dell’s CTO group have recently been working with our friends at Joyent.   This effort is a part of the consideration of platforms capable of intelligently deploying workloads to all major infrastructure flavors – bare-metal, virtual machine, and container.

Today’s post on this topic comes to us complements of Glen Campbell — no, not that one, this one:

Glen has recently come from the field to join our merry band in the Office of the CTO.  He will be a part of the Open Source Cloud team looking at viable upstream OSS technologies across infrastructure, OS, applications, and operations.

Here is what Glen had to say:

What’s a Triton?

Joyent’s Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure, a Private Cloud variant of the Joyent Elastic Container Service PublicTriton slide

Cloud, allows customers to take advantage of the technologies and scale Joyent leverages in their Public Cloud.

On the Triton Elastic Container Infrastructure (which I’ll call “Triton” from now on) bare-metal workloads are intelligently sequestered via the use of the “Zones” capabilities of SmartOS.   Virtual machines are deployed via the leveraged KVM hypervisor in SmartOS, and Docker containers are deployed via the Docker Remote API Implementation for Triton and the use of the Docker or Docker Compose CLIs.

What’s the Dell/Joyent team doing?

As part of interacting with Triton we are working to deploy a Dell application, our Active System Manager (ASM), as a series of connected containers.

The work with Triton will encompass both Administrative and Operative efforts:

Administrative

  • Investigate user password-based authentication via LDAP/Active Directory
    • in conjunction with SSH key-based authentication for CLI work

Operative

  • Use of:
    • Admin web UI and User Portal to deploy single/multi-tier applications
    • Joyent Smart Data Center (SDC) node.js client to deploy from remote CLI
      • Newer Triton node client to see next-gen of “sdc-X” tools
  • Docker Compose
    • build a multi-tier Docker application via Docker Compose, deploy on Triton via its Docker Remote API endpoint
  • Triton Trident…
    • deploy a 3-tier application composed of:
      • Zone-controlled bare-metal tier (db – MySQL)
      • Docker-controlled container tier (app – Tomcat)
      • VM-based tier (presentation – nginx)
    • Dell Active System Manager — a work in progress
      • aligning with Dell’s internal development and product group to establish a container architecture for the application

Stay tuned

Our test environment has been created and the Triton platform has been deployed.  Follow-on blog posts will cover basic architecture of the environment and the work to accomplish the Admin and Ops tasks above.  Stay tuned!

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Mark Shuttleworth talks 16.04 LTS, Snaps & Charms

January 26, 2016

Last week I flew out to sunny California to participate in SCaLE 14x and the UbuCon summit.  As the name implies this was the 14th annual SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo) and, as always, it didn’t disappoint.  Within SCaLE was the UbuCon summit which focused on what’s going on within the Ubuntu community and how to better the community.

While there I got to deliver a talk on Project Spuntik The Sputnik story: innovation at a large company, I also got to hang out with some of the key folks within the Ubuntu and Linux communities.  One such person is Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu and Canonical founder.  I grabbed some time with Mark between sessions and got to learn about the upcoming 16.04 LTS release (aka Xenial Xerus) due out on April 21st.

Take a gander:

Some of the ground Mark covers

The big stories for 16.04 LTS

  • LXD — ultralight VMs that operate like containers and give you the ability to run 100s of VMs on a laptop.   Mark’s belief is that this will fundamentally change the way people use their laptops to do distributed development for the cloud.
  • Snappy — a very tight packaging format, for Ubuntu desktop and server distros.  It provides a much better way of sharing packages than PPAs and Snaps provide a cleaner, faster way of creating packages.

Juju and charms

  • Where do Juju charms and snappy intersect? (hint: They’re orthogonal but work well together, charms can use snaps)

OS and services

  • The idea is to have the operating system fade into the background so that users can focus instead on services in the cloud eg “give me this service in the cloud” (which juju will allow) or “deliver this set of bits to a whole set of machines ala snappy”

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Posted by Barton George

Covering Mesos and Mesosphere

January 8, 2016

Today’s post is the penultimate video in my series of interviews from KubeCon back in November.  Below, Aaron Bell, the product manager working on developer facing tools, talks about the Mesos project and Mesosphere — what they do and who’s using it.

Some of the ground Aaron covers

  • How mesosphere is connected to the Apache Mesos project (powers Siri and is used at Twitter) 50% of the committers
  • What Mesos does and how it works
  • DCOS (data center OS) what it is
  • What to expect from Mesos in the next year

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Talking to ClusterHQ founder about Flocker and the Dell storage plugin

January 7, 2016

Continuing with my videos from KubeCon, here is a chat ClusterHQ’s founder and CTO, Luke Marsden.  Luke explains Flocker, how its being used and talks about the Dell/Flocker driver.

Some of the ground Luke covers

  • What is Flocker (hint: a way to connect the container universe to the storage universe)
  • Why you don’t want containers that are “pets rather than cattle”
  • What types of customers are using Flocker and how Swisscom uses it along with Cloud Foundry
  • The Dell storage center plugin for Flocker

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Learning about CoreOS and Tectonic

January 6, 2016

With today’s post we are five interviews into the videos I took at Kubecon with three remaining.

Today’s interviewee is Rob Szumski, one of the early employees of CoreOS.  Rob explains CoreOS, Tectonic and where CoreOS is going from here.

Some of the ground Rob covers

  • CoreOS began as an operating system for large scale clusters and how Docker came around at just the right time and worked with CoreOS
  • CoreOS as the original micro OS
  • The components of Tectonic – How you should deploy your containers, on top of: kubernetes, flannel, coreOS, etc; it also comes with support and architectural help
  • Whats on tap for CoreOS and Tectonic – tools and more

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Learning about Joyent and Triton, the elastic container infrastructure

January 5, 2016

Here’s another interview from KubeCon back in November.  This one’s a twofer.  Joyent’s CEO and CTO, Scott Hammond and Bryan Cantrill respectively, talk about taking their learnings from Solaris zones and applying them to the world of modern apps and containers.

Some of the ground Scott and Bryan cover

  • Joyent, a software company focused on delivering a container native software infrastructure platform
  • They had been doing containers for 6 years and when Docker came along they focused on that
  • How Solaris zones came about, how Joyent picked it up and ran with it, and how it acted as a foundation for today’s containerized world – How they were in the right place at the wrong time
  • Whats in store for Joyent going forward – supporting the movement to modern app dev and the intersection of containers – taking this new tech and productizing and simplifying them to allow enterprises to roll them out

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Red Hat launches OpenShift v3.1, full of Docker/Kubernetes goodness

January 4, 2016

Im just getting around to publishing my interviews from KubeCon back in November

Today’s interview features Red Hat’s Grant Shipley, director of developer advocacy for “container application platform” OpenShift.  Grant talks about the launching of OpenShift v3.1 and what’s ahead.

Some of the ground Grant covers:

  • Announcing 3.1, the latest upstream version of Red Hat’s open source project OpenShift Origin
  • Enterprise comes with support for docker/kubernetes in production
  • Moving away from “PaaS” to “container application platform”
  • All functionality exposed via apis; cli and web console tools for ops; ops has full control but devs can self service
  • How it works with Ansible (or Puppet and Chef)
  • Whats next going forward: continuing to focus on dev experience whether they’re using node.js or Java

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Google Kubernete’s new community lead: Sarah Novotny

November 30, 2015

A couple of weeks ago I attended KubeCon in San Francisco.  There were a series of talks as well as a bunch of vendors who were there in mini-booths chatting with folks and showing off what they do.  As always, the part I get the most out of at conferences like this is the “hallway track” where I get to chat one-on-one with various folks.

One such folk was Sarah Novotny, who recently joined Google as the first Kubernetes community lead.  Check out the video below where Sarah talks about her goals for the community, how it will fit with the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and how she hopes to extend this beyond a Google only effort.

Extra credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Containerizing an old school Dell application

November 24, 2015

About a year ago Senior Linux engineer Jose De la Rosa had heard so much Docker and container-mania that he thought he’d find out what the fuss was all about.  Jose started looking around for an app within Dell that he could containerize and came across Dell’s OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA).  In case you’re wondering, OMSA is an in house application used to manage and monitor Dell’s PowerEdge servers.  Rather than being a micro-service based application, OMSA is an old school legacy app.

To hear how Jose tackled the task, why, and what he learned, check out the following video (also take a look at the deck below that he presented at the Austin Docker meet up).

Here’s the deck Jose presented at the Austin Docker Meetup back in September.

For more info about what Jose and the Dell Linux engineering team are doing in this space, check out linux.dell.com/docker

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Flocker plugin for Dell storage up on GitHub

November 12, 2015

Today ClusterHQ and Dell announced the availability on GitHub of code that allows ClusterHQ’s Flocker to integrate with the Dell Storage SC Series. What this does is allow developer and operations teams to use existing storage to create portable container-level storage for Docker.

Before we dive into the back story on how the plugin came to be, take a listen to ClusterHQ’s founder and CTO Luke Marsden.  Luke explains Flocker, how its being used and talks about the Dell/Flocker driver.

How the plugin came about

Rather than coming from an internal planning process or committee, the idea for a Flocker plugin came from Dell storage coder Sean McGinnis. Sean was looking for ways to make Dell Storage an infrastructure component in an open source environment. Some time back he noticed that Flocker seemed to be a good integration point to allow the use of Dell Storage for users looking to move to containerized solutions.

Sean saw a lot of overlap with what his team was already doing with their OpenStack Cinder driver (both written in Python, with some common storage management concepts). He realized that that they could reuse the majority of this code for a Flocker driver by providing the Flocker driver interface to translate Flocker calls into our storage API. Along with Ian Anderson (another Dell Storage engineer) the pair engaged ClusterHQ to explore requirements for brining Storage Center support to Flocker.

Sean and Ian then worked internally to implement our Flocker driver, open source it and put the code up on GitHub.

The code, storage and beyond

-> You can check out the code and play with it for yourself here on GitHub.

Going forward the team is looking to expand Dell Storage’s open source offerings hosted on GitHub. They see a lot of potential for containers and will continue working in this space to make sure enterprise customers can leverage their storage arrays to support these developing environments.

Beyond storage, Dell is looking to start open sourcing more code and putting it up on GitHub.  Don’t expect a deluge right off the bat but hopefully over time you will start seeing more and more.

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Incorporating DevOps into the development of Dell’s Active System Manager

November 5, 2015

As Dell as a company continues to evolve we have started implementing DevOps practices in our software development.   Dell IT is employing DevOps as are some of our product development teams.

In the following video, systems engineer Chris Gully explains how Dell’s Active System Manager has incorporated DevOps into its development. (the audio could be a bit better so you’ll have to crank it up a bit for Chris 🙂

Some of the ground Chris covers:

  • What is the Dell Active Systems Manager (ASM)
  • Putting the ASM code up on GitHub
  • Their path from Dev -> IT -> Ops -> Customer -> Feedback
  • What were some of the issues the team had to overcome when implementing

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

ContainerCon: How Google helps developers with Kubernetes

August 26, 2015

Last week at Container/LinuxCon I conducted  a handful of video interviews.  Video number three stars Brian Dorsey from Google. Brian works with developers to get them up to speed with Kubernetes.

Here’s what Brian had to say:

Some of the ground Brian covers

  • Brian’s focus on cloud-building developers, specifically those working on Kubernetes
  • Key partners such as Red Hat, CoreOS, Kismatic and many, many more
  • How Brian and the team reach developers  (events, blogs, videos, sample code…)
  • Where he sees Kubernetes going over the next year

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

4th gen Dell XPS 13 developer edition available!

April 9, 2015

I would first like to thank everyone for their patience and support as we worked through various bugs that crept up.  This has taken longer than we would have liked but I’m happy to say that as of today, the Dell XPS 13 developer edition is now available in the United States, Canada and Europe!

A short history

As many of you may known, the developer edition began its life as Project Sputnik.  Funded by an Image result for images sputnikinternal incubation fund set up to drive innovation within Dell, Sputnik went from open-ended exploratory project to official product within nine months.

The entire program was conducted in the open in order to identify what you — developers — demanded in an ideal Ubuntu-based laptop. It was also your interest and support that drove Sputnik from project to product.

At the beginning of the year we launched an expansion to the line, the Precision M3800 developer edition, and today we are announcing the availability of the 4th generation of the XPS 13 developer edition.

General specifications of new Dell XPS 13 developer edition (see configs below. Note we realize that some of the tech specs are incorrect, they are in the queue to be fixed.  We made the decision to go ahead launch since we have had so much interest and we wanted to make it orderable as soon as possible)

  • Ubuntu 14.04*
  • 5th Generation Intel® Core™ i5-5200U or i7-5500U
  • 13.3-inch infinity display
  • 8GB Dual Channel DDR3L at 1600MHz
  • Intel (R) HD Graphics 5500
  • 1 Year ProSupport with Next Business Day Onsite Service
  • 2.8 lbs

* We recommend that users use the factory shipped Ubuntu image with the XPS 13 with at least BIOS A02.  We do however recognize that users will want to use other Linux distributions, Ubuntu versions or kernel versions so we’ve assembled a list to indicate problems users should expect with other distros.  In general you will have the best experience on the latest in development distributions with newer kernels.  For more information and instructions please see the technical notes at the end of this post.

US/Canada configurations:

i5/8GB

  • 128GB, Non Touch FHD (1920×1080)
  • 256GB, Touch TL QHD (2560×1440)

i7/8GB

  • 256GB, Touch TL QHD+  (3200×1800)
  • 512GB, Touch TL QHD+  (3200×1800)

Europe configurations/Countries

The XPS 13 developer edition is available in both the consumer and business channels in the following countries:

  • Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, The United Kingdom

European configurations

  • i5/8GB — 256GB, Touch TL FHD (1920×1080)
  • i7/8GB — 512GB, Touch TL QHD+  (3200×1800)

A big shout out

I wanted to give recognition and a big thanks to the members of our small but mighty Sputnik core team: Mario Limonciello, Jared Dominguez, Amber Huang and Amit Bhutani.  These are the folks who have worked their butts off and made this a reality!

Technical Notes:

Updated April 16, 2015: new information with regards to current status quo from some people who have used Debian as well as 4.0 updates.

Updating to BIOS A02 or later

  1. Download the executable from support.dell.com and save it to a FAT32 formatted USB disk.
  2. Reboot the computer.
  3. At the Dell POST screen, press F12 to bring up the BIOS boot menu.
  4. Select the option to flash the BIOS.
  5. In the popup menu, select your USB disk and select the BIOS executable.
  6. Follow on screen directions.

Systems shipped with A01 or A00 BIOS

If you purchased the machine with Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 and it contains BIOS A00 or BIOS A01, please update the BIOS to A02 or later.  If you choose to run a kernel version earlier than 3.15 you should also append the following to your kernel command line:

psmouse.resetafter=0

If you machine was shipped with A02 or later, you will not need this kernel command line change.  The developer edition units will ship with A02 or later.

Ubuntu 14.04

Ubuntu 14.04 includes kernel 3.13.  The touchpad will run in PS2 mode and the soundcard will run in HDA mode.  Currently (4/15) out of the box the HDA microphone will not work, and you will need some packages from the factory shipped image to make it work properly.  The patches needed for microphone support are available here:

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git/commit/?h=for-next&id=e1e62b98ebddc3234f3259019d3236f66fc667f8

and

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git/commit/?h=for-next&id=f3b703326541d0c1ce85f5e570f6d2b6bd4296ec

Ubuntu 14.10

Ubuntu 14.10 includes kernel 3.16.

With BIOS A00 or BIOS A01 the touchpad will run in I2C mode and the sound will not function.  Please update to at least BIOS A02 and the touchpad will run in I2C mode and the sound in HDA mode.  Currently (4/15) the microphone will not work and you will these patches for microphone support: https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git/commit/?h=for-next&id=e1e62b98ebddc3234f3259019d3236f66fc667f8

and

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git/commit/?h=for-next&id=f3b703326541d0c1ce85f5e570f6d2b6bd4296ec

 

Ubuntu 15.04

Ubuntu 15.04 includes kernel 3.19.

With BIOS A00 or BIOS A01 the touchpad will run in I2C mode and the sound will not function.  Please update to at least BIOS A02 and the touchpad will run in I2C mode and the sound in HDA mode.  (4/15) All of the relevant patches have been backported and all functions will work out of the box.

Fedora 21

Fedora 21 includes kernel version 3.17.  With BIOS A00 or BIOS A01 the touchpad will run in I2C mode and the sound will not function.  Please update to at least BIOS A02 and the touchpad will run in I2C mode and the sound in HDA mode.  Currently (4/15) the microphone will not work.  You can track the backporting of the patches here: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1188741

Debian 7.0

We recommend that Debian 7.0 users upgrade to a kernel 4.0 and apply those two patches.  The above notations will apply to Debian 7.0 then.

Debian 8.0

Debian 8.0 will use kernel 3.16.  With BIOS A00 or BIOS A01 the touchpad will operate in I2C mode and sound will not work.  The system will fail to suspend and resume due to a bug in the touchpad driver.  This patch: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/109571cf3ec78a39477eedd6b11927f52cbcb1e8

Will need to be backported for it to work properly.

With BIOS A02 the touchpad will operate in I2C mode and the sound in HDA mode.  Currently (4/8) the microphone will not work.  The patches needed for microphone support are available here:

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git/commit/?h=for-next&id=e1e62b98ebddc3234f3259019d3236f66fc667f8

and

https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git/commit/?h=for-next&id=f3b703326541d0c1ce85f5e570f6d2b6bd4296ec

We recommend for Debian 8.0 users upgrade to kernel 4.0 and apply the two extra microphone patches.

Also, there are some problems with the xserver-xorg-video-intel package today with Debian 8.0.  You’ll presently (4/15) need to backport from experimental to resolve them.  More details are available here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=782690

Other Notes

Extra credit reading

  • Designed for developers – Dell launches two new Ubuntu-based systems — Ubuntu insights

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Posted by Barton George

Available in Europe: Precision M3800 developer edition

February 16, 2015

At the end of January we announced the launch of the Dell M3800-ubuntuPrecision M3800 mobile workstation, developer edition.  This beefy complement to the existing XPS 13 developer edition is the direct result of feedback from the community who have been asking for a larger system.

Over the past few weeks we have been adding EMEA availability.   Here is the list of countries where the M3800 developer edition is available online.  For those countries that don’t appear here, the system is available offline by calling a sales representative.

M3800 developer edition — European online availability

We are currently working on rolling out the M3800 developer edition in the Asia Pacific/Japan region as well.  Stay tuned!

Extra-credit reading

  • Welcome the Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation, developer edition – Barton’s Blog
  • Update: Dell XPS 13 laptop, developer edition – Sputnik Gen 4 – Barton’s Blog

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Posted by Barton George

Welcome the Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation, developer edition

January 27, 2015

Update March 17:  Great  review in Network World — Review: Dell’s Ubuntu-powered M3800 Mobile Workstation is a desktop destroyer

Since the planning stages of project Sputnik over two years ago we wanted to offer two versions of our developer-focused systems.  The idea was to have both an ultra mobile laptop and a beefier workstation offering, a beauty and the beast line up if you will.  Due to the need to focus our resources however, we worked with the community to first build out the laptop, delivering the XPS 13 laptop, developer edition.Soyuz

Moving towards the beast

The first year after launching the XPS 13, we got a steady stream of requests for a bigger system.  This wasn’t lost on team member Jared Dominguez who decided to work on his own time with the Dell Precision M3800 mobile edition and put together instructions on how get Ubuntu running on the system.

A little over a year ago with the launch of the 3rd generation of the XPS13 developer edition we also announced its “unofficial big brother” and provided Jared’s instructions.  We received a lot of great feedback but there were also folks asking when we were going to deliver an officially supported version of the M3800.  What we told the community was — like the initial project Sputnik offering, if we got enough positive feedback — we might be able to offer it as an official pre-installed system.

A thread was started on the Sputnik Forum for people to express their interest in an official system.  We got a tremendous amount of positive feedback and as a result we listened to our customers and have added the M3800 to our developer edition lineup of Ubuntu-based systems.

Introducing the Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation, Developer Edition

One of the main features people were looking for in the Precision M3800 was 16 GB of RAM.  The new Ubuntu-based M3800 introduced today, has that and a whole lot more:

Dell Precision M3800 mobile workstation, dev edition – Key features

  • Preloaded Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
  • Next generation of the world’s thinnest and lightest true 15-inch mobile workstation
  • Starting weight of just 4.15lbs (1.88kg) and a form factor that is less than 0.71 inches (18mm) thick
  • Fourth generation Intel Core i7 quad-core processor, professional grade NVIDIA Quadro K1100M graphics, and up to 16GB of memory
  • 4K Ultra HD (3840×2160) screen option
  • Availability: worldwide

Unfortunately, one of the features that wont be available right out of the gate is thunderbolt support.  As Jared explains in his blog:

Because our factory Ubuntu installs only ship Ubuntu LTS releases, we were not able to ship with Thunderbolt support. However, thanks to the hardware-enablement stack in Ubuntu, starting with upcoming Ubuntu 14.04.2, you will be able to upgrade your kernel to add some Thunderbolt support. We plan to be working with Canonical to recertify the Precision M3800 with official Thunderbolt support.

How do I get one

You can get to the M3800 developer edition by going to the Dell Precision M3800 Mobile Workstation page: www.dell.com/create and choosing the system labeled “Fully Customizable” on the far left.  Or you can go directly to configurator, where under “Operating System” you can select Ubuntu 14.04 SP1 and away you go!

M3800Menu

What about the additional software?

This time around we went with the vanilla image of the most recent LTS release (14.04).  A vanilla image was actually one of the top requests when we gathered input on our initial Storm session.

Since the original launch we have been working on a profile tool and Cloud launcher.  We are still working on these but it’s been a bit more difficult than we originally thought :).  Stay tuned for more news on this.

Will there be a new XPS 13 developer edition?

You bet!  The 4th generation of the XPS 13 laptop, developer edition will be available soon.  It will based on the the new XPS 13 laptop that debuted earlier this month.

A Big Thanks

Thanks to everyone in the community for the tremendous support of the Sputnik program.  Without your support, this program would not be possible!

 Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Learning about Dell’s OpenStack private cloud offering

November 21, 2014

The week before last I was roaming the expo floor at Dell World and I bumped into Steve Croce.  Steve is at Dell and is the product manager and strategist for our OpenStack private cloud offering.

I got Steve to spend a few minutes with me and give me the lowdown on what we are offering and where Red Hat plays in.  Take a listen.

Some of the ground Steve covers

  • Who’s Dell targeting with our offering and how has that expanded
  • What is the stack comprised of: Hardware, Software and Services
  • Dell IT’s internal innovation lab running Red Hat’s OpenStack distro
  • What can we expect to see in the upcoming year

Extra-credit reading

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Posted by Barton George

Bernard Golden: PaaS, Standards and Open Source

September 26, 2014

Last but not least in my series of four videos from the Cloud Standards Customer Council is an interview with Bernard Golden.  Bernard, who is the VP of strategy at ActiveState, provided an industry perspective talk entitled: What Should PaaS Standards Look Like.  Bernard then sat on the PaaS panel that followed.

I sat down with Bernard and he gave a quick overview of his talk as well as provided his thoughts on OpenStack and its need for focus.  Take a listen:

Extra-credit reading

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The Future of PaaS, its “value proposition” and Docker

September 22, 2014

At last week’s Cloud Standards Customer Council held in Austin Texas, the first panel of the day dealt with “Current and Future PaaS Trends.”   The panel debated whether there should or could be a PaaS standard as well as what its future might look like.

One of the panelists was Diane Mueller, community manager of OpenShift Origin.  I grabbed some time with Diane after the panel and got her to share her thoughts on the viability of a PaaS standard and how she saw the technology evolving.

Stay tuned for two more posts from last week’s Cloud Standards Customer Council meeting and more PaaS prognostication.

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

Synaptics Touchpad drivers now in Test Kernels

May 14, 2014

Great news, yesterday the i2c Linux kernel drivers from Synaptics made it upstream and are in the proposed repository.  This is relevant for those Sputnik 3 users who have upgraded from Ubuntu 12.04 to either 13.10 or 14.04 LTS.

If you want to start kicking the tires before the drivers hit updates, you can enable the proposed repository and get to the test kernels by following  the instructions here:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed

What the issue was

From 13.10 on there is better i2c support and since there weren’t any drivers, this caused the touchpad to operate in very basic i2c mode, meaning no multi-touch, tap-to-click, scrolling, etc.  Users were either left with a minimally-functional touchpad in i2c mode, or they had to end up blacklisting the i2c-hid modules as a workaround so the touchpad would come up in psmouse mode and operate similar to how it did in 12.04.

Going Forward

Canonical, who has been instrumental in this whole process, is  also doing their best to try and backport this functionality into 14.04 LTS so that users can take advantage of native i2c touchpad support.

Thanks 

I would like to give big shout outs to Synaptics, Canonical and Kent Baxley from Canonical for making this happen!!

Pau for now….

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Posted by Barton George

Developers share experiences running Ubuntu on Dell M3800 and XPS 15

May 12, 2014

Back in November when we  launched Sputnik 3, we also announced its “unofficial big brother,” the Dell M3800 Precision workstation and the Dell XPS 15.  This announcement was based on the after-hours work that Dell Linux engineer Jared Dominguez did to test and document the system.

Quite a few developers have referenced Jared’s work, taken the plunge and installed Ubuntu on these beefier systems.

M3800 Precision workstation

Here is a video that Rudy Vissers from Belgium created last month.  Rudy walks us through his new M3800 Precision including touchscreen and graphics.

XPS 15 laptop

Web developer Matt Woodward, who is a Principal IT Specialist for the US Senate and one of the original Project Sputnik beta cosmonauts, decided on upgrading to the XPS 15.  He shared his experience running Ubuntu on the XPS 15 on his blog earlier this month.  Here is an excerpt:

…Once Ubuntu is installed everything works out of the box. The screen runs at the full, mind-blowing 3200×1800 resolution, and even the touch screen works. No issues with sound card, WiFi, or anything else. Awesome…

If you need something a bit bigger and beefier than the XPS 13 developer edition, you just may want to check out either the M3800 or XPS 15.

If you’d like to see these as official products that come with Ubuntu pre-installed add your voice here:  Gathering interest on official Ubuntu support for Precision M3800  No promises but who knows!

Extra-credit reading

Pau for now…

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Posted by Barton George

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