Don't let the job get you down. Reboot your skills for serious uptime at OLFU. Photo Credit: dagoaty

The task of keeping current with skills and technologies is a never-ending job for a system administrator. If you work in a busy shop like I do, asking your boss for a week-long training session across the country is difficult. You have to make sure adequate coverage and some how scrape together the funding to go. If only there was a weekend-long community-oriented training opportunity for IT professionals.

The answer is out there. Think Ohio Linux Fest University (OLFU).

At the Ohio LinuxFest, professional training returns for the 4th year in a row with OLFU on September 10, 2010. A full day of classes plus technical sessions on  September 11 is only $350.

League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) classes will help you keep your systems, storage and networks top shape. Offerings include IPv6 Essentials and Deployment Strategies, Monitoring with “Non-Obvious” Nagios, Black Magic: Linux Troubleshooting and System Administration, Introduction to Automating System Administration with Cfengine, and Application Acceleration and Cloud Storage.

Linux Professional Institute Certification cram class will help you prepare for one of the industry’s most difficult system administrator tests. There is also an optional on-site test opportunity to get certified at an additional discounted rate of $109 per test.

Computer Room of Illinois’ famous Data Recovery class will be offered at an abridged length and price. When a disk fails it could cost your company tens of thousands of dollars to send away to a recovery service. Next time you will have the knowledge to retrieve what you can with open source tools.

Apress author, Vern Ceder, has a systems programming class with Python. Script it once and do the task as many times as you want – fast. Learn the basics in the morning and stay the afternoon to become a python wizard.

As professionals it is our responsibility to do what we can to keep the user communities around us productive. The more active the environment, the more you can use the training that OLFU has to offer.

Go for it and register for OLFU and invite your boss too. Trust me, it will make it easier.

Register, then come back here to enjoy Happy Sysadmin Day wishes from Ohio LinuxFest Saturday tech talk speaker, Jordan Keyes

The government gets free software: nurses at VA hospitals have been using and developing VISTA: the open source medical records system for vets Photo credit: US Army

Mom did not understand what I was up to with open source.
I did not understand what she was up to with open source.

At VA Hospitals nationwide, the government was deploying VISTA. No, not Microsoft Windows Vista, VISTA – the open source medical records system. It keeps track of all of information concerning a patient’s care – no matter where in the country they go. Medications, pharmacies, doctor visits, dates, diagnosis.. it is all there. Nurses recommended that VISTA work with scan-able wrist bands. Now patients’ wrists are scanned prior to medicating and procedures with immediate feedback for the medical professionals who are providing the care as the care is administered. It saves lives and the government money. This is change that I can believe in.

The change to open source nation-wide medical records can happen and is happening today. The US government is providing up to $64,000 for providers who successfully implement electronic medical records. While there are many most with commercial support, there are proprietary vendors who are interested in this business. With open source, medical records can remain available to the health care provider without paying yearly subscription fees. Proprietary software though, may entail vendor-lock-in contracts prohibiting your health care provider from moving to another system or other health providers in charge of your care.

At the Ohio LinuxFest, mom will chair a two-day track to discuss medicine in open source with an emphasis on medical records on September 10 and 11. Here we will reach out to health care administrators, nurses, doctors, patients, concerned family members of those who require constant care, taxpayers, open source programmers, and anyone else who cares about the future of health care with Free Software.

Friday kicks off with opensource.com writer and Red Hat employee, Ruth Suehle, who will discuss medical innovations around the world. It will be followed by Susan Rose MSN RN-BC (that’s my mom) talking about Electronic Medical Revolution. There will also be a free workshop from Dr.David Chan on OSCAR, the open source medical records system deployed through all Canada and world wide. Medical professionals who attend on Friday September 10 can obtain Free CEU’s upon request.

The discussion on medical records will continue with Dr. Chan of OSCAR, Fred Trotter of linuxmednews.com, Dr. Budman, MD, MBA of MedSphere on Saturday September 11. Ohio citizens can learn more on how electronic medical records are being deployed in their state with Amy Andres of the Health Information Exchange.

Other Saturday topics include will be a tele-medicine applications with talks from Dr. Barbash and Dr. Magee. These innovations will help patients to integrate health care to their every day lives – at home.

Closing will be a panel on how to choose open source products so that they qualify for “Meaningful Use” government funding.

If you care about more efficient and better health care for you, your family, and your medical practitioners, consider the Ohio LinuxFest Medical Track. That’s my idea of Free Healthcare.

Print off this flier to show anyone involved in your health care.

To help answer this question this Ubucon has an all star cast.

Jorge O. Castro, External Project Developer Relations for Canonical, will be speaking about Low-Hanging Fruit of the juicy software variety. Jorge works with getting really hard bits to integrate with Ubuntu, recently and namely Google Voice with video support. He will show us how we can all help by packaging and bug fixing. Yummy.

Next will be the outstanding Amber Graner of Ubuntu User magazine. She will discuss how it is possible to contribute to Free software, even if you are not a developer. Amber knows because she has done it all without compiling a single code or hacking a single kernel. You go girl.

Then we will have some words from the Ubuntu Ohio LoCo Team who are experts in gorilla marketing of Free software. They mobilize volunteers to support recycling efforts like Free Geek Columbus and distribute Ubuntu to the libraries. These party-animals also make sure every single release is properly celebrated. If your dance card on October 10, 2010 does not include Maverick Meerkat then the Ohio LoCo team will tell you how to plan a release party in your neighborhood. Ubuntinis anyone?

Master-of-the-Universe and Kubuntu programmer Mackenzie Morgan will discuss the Ubuntu software development process. She will explain how she makes great Free software available . Microsoft sells software like it is 1984 and Mackenzie packages Free software like its 2014. Take a time machine with Mackenzie and she will show us how its done. Mackenzie is the future.

Last, but not least is David Mandala, lead of the ARM team at Canonical, who will be taking your questions concerning ARM on Ubuntu. When not giving talks at LinuxFests, David travels the globe working with ARM board builders and councils them on making their hardware compatible with Linux ever since Ubuntu 9.04. Microsoft didn’t even get into the ARM operating system business until last month – and that took some arm-twisting. Catch David on Saturday at 10 A.M. where he will talk more about the future of Ubuntu ARM support in the “FOSS in Other Worlds” track. With David’s help, Ubuntu will be first and best on a full Free software stack on ARM-based tablets as soon as this Christmas. Game over for the Windows desktop.

At the Ohio LinuxFest, at Ubucon, we will seal the fate: Microsoft will lose majority market share come June 30, 2011.

Freedom through Ubuntu is possible and real…

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But I don’t know Linux well enough to go to a LinuxFest

Maybe you need some time learning Linux on the desktop skills. Even if you have always used Windows, by the end of the Ohio LinuxFest Linux Basics class, you will be savvy enough to install Linux and transfer your daily work into the GNOME desktop environment with Ubuntu. This class is a great too for anyone who wants an overview of Linux to broaden your IT knowledge. Either way, you will have a hands-on experience which will turn you into a bug-one crushing warrior.

The Ohio LinuxFest has something for both the Free software curious and those who want to get knowledgeable about Linux real fast. Educational and entertaining programming for the weekend ranges from zero to $350. Causal users will be pleasantly surprised by the free software available at the expo.

Register today at https://www.ohiolinux.org/register.html

Come and Free your Desktop at the Ohio LinuxFest: September 10-12, 2010 – where Microsoft lacks a majority market share.

With all other bugs resolved, Bug One will certainly follow.

Track the progress of Operation Clean Sweep here…

Come June 30, 2011, Microsoft will lack a majority market share.

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I am a shareholder of your company. The world is still waiting for your Q4 FY2010 report so that we will know how much money you made as of June 30, 2010. We are all on Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Peter Klein’s schedule. Mr. Klein, you rival Red Hat posted their FY 2010 report, what is the hold up?

Since I have yet to receive a personal invitation to your shareholders meeting on July 29, 2010. I have several more questions for Microsoft which I will ask from here. I welcome any answers from leadership or the floor.

What is your mobile strategy in a post-PC world? Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may try to deny it. The fact is that PC desktop sales have been on a decline, 23% down as of last year. Bill Gates has nothing to do with the day-to-day anymore and it shows.

Your attempt to reach the youth via smart phones was an epic failure. KIN has been pulled by Verizon in a matter of weeks. Anonymous purported employees claimed that the IP you bought acquiring Danger are now wasted and call it as embarrassing as Microsoft Bob. Joe Wilcox correctly predicted Kin’s failure as you fired the leadership of the Entertainment and Devices division just before the Kin product launch. I too predicted in November 2009 that Kin, then code-named “Pink,” would not live up to Mr. Ballmer’s nor Mr. Gates’ vision. How could releasing the Kin under the circumstances be profitable? Why would anybody buy a Kin? Android and the iPhone have cameras, Facebook, Twitter, and more… how could you proceed into the market with less?!? Sure you can say I don’t get it because I am not a teenager but still how can you make a social phone without a calendar? Sorry, the Microsoft brand does not equal cool with whatever crowd you expected to buy Kin.

You bought the wrong smartphone IP. Last year bloggers advised you to buy Palm for their Linux-based WebOS, but you let that HP beat you to it. Now HP plans to ditch Microsoft for WebOS on tablets netting a double loss for you. There goes Mr. Ballmer’s iPad killer. Your excuses come from Mr. Klein who complains that tech mergers are hard to do. Is this fiscal leadership?

With all of the Kin ads you bought, did you once stop to notice that Windows Mobile lost market share to Google Android Linux? Developers are not chomping at the bit to write apps for Windows 7 Mobile but they were so eager to do so for Apple that WWDC2010 sold out. Developers favor Android over Apple’s iPhone OS which makes any platform you put together a third class even before product launch.

What is next, Microsoft, yet another round of layoffs? No wonder Business Insider is saying “Microsoft’s Business Could Collapse in 2010.” First Google ditches Windows on security concerns. Next, IBM names Firefox its web browser standard. Microsoft apologist, Ina Fried reports that Microsoft is now forced to offer no-cost Office options in order to compete with OpenOffice.Org and Google Docs. How does firing people now help you make products that actually sell?

Microsoft, I can not say I did not warn you as I have been warning you of your demise here at whatwillweuse.com. I do not stand alone as Computer World is ready to admit: Linux could become the world’s most popular operating system. Come June 30, 2011, Microsoft, you will lack majority market share. What are you going to do about it?

Sincerely,

Beth Lynn Eicher

Before Apple’s “I am a Mac and he’s a PC” ads, long before Microsoft’s “I am a PC and Windows 7 is my idea,” Red Hat Inc. had released a campaign in 2004 “I am Fedora.” To Red Hat, Fedora is commitment, not a gimmick. Fedora is both a living community and a Linux-based operating system for those who love freedom.

I, Beth Lynn Eicher, am Fedora.

Here at “What Will We Use” we discuss Ubuntu bug one: Microsoft will lose majority market share come June 30, 2011. Some may be surprised then by my announcement of the title of this post, “I am Fedora,” as some people assume that one can be loyal to only one Linux-based operating system. I am here to explain why I love Fedora, and last weekend at the South East Linux Fest, I joined the Fedora Project. It was a long journey to join a project which produces a Linux operating-system. Still, it feels like I am finally home.

Back in 1999, my employer, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center put a Red Hat Linux system running an Alpha processor on my desk. From there I was supposed to do write parallel code for a Red Hat Linux beowulf cluster. It was tricky without some basic desktop tools. The default install for the Alpha lacked a browser, let alone an office suite. There was no Internet Explorer for Red Hat Linux… there still is not. If you used an Intel-based Red Hat system, you could get Netscape. The Mozilla Project, which beget the Firefox browser, was still very new and no one had compiled and packaged the source code for the Alpha. Despite all of these frustrations, I liked that I could use other tools such as Openssh, Gcc, and Ghostview. I came home to my Windows system, I missed the software at the office. While Windows alternatives existed for these applications, they were expensive. Sure, Cygwin existed back then but I did not know about it.

I saved my entire paycheck for several months to be able to afford a Linux box from of my own. The vendor was “Explorer Micro” who agreed to ship the system with a copy of Red Hat 6.0. The order took over two months which was this vendor’s M.O. Once the system arrived, it was painful: The operating system was not installed, the CD-Rom drive was defective, the modem was not US-Robotics, the sound card required a driver that was not in the Linux 2.2 kernel. Still, with the help of Western PA Linux User Group, I was up and running happily.

In 2001 I went to go work for Carnegie Mellon at the School of Computer Science. There, my job was to support the now defunct proprietary UNIX operating system, IRIX. Many UNIX-based platforms were used as a desktop with the fastest growing being Red Hat Linux. Before long, I was a Linux system administrator too.

Most of my days involved building systems. I knew and lived the pain points of Xfree86, isapnp, usb, and sound cards that would not support midi. Even though we could download the software at no cost and install off a floppy, I would still buy the boxed sets. Loki Games came with Each Red Hat Linux 7.2 only in the boxed set since the software was not open source. Still, I looked forward to each full number release with fantastic excitement. In 2003, Red Hat Linux 9 was simply glorious with Open Office and Mozilla – that was “the year of the Linux desktop” for me.

In 2004, that all changed with Fedora. Red Hat Inc. was no longer going to release “Red Hat Linux.” Instead, customers could buy support contracts for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or use their new community-based Linux named Fedora. Being at a non-profit university, the “per employee” model of support that RHEL sales contract tried to make us buy was not going to cut it. Fedora on the other hand was at no cost but would a distribution with an aggressive 6 month that welcomed volunteer code. But would Fedora be any good? Red Hat Inc. made Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science ask “What will we use?”

Much was going on in the desktop operating system market also during the same time: Microsoft Windows XP was the most popular Windows yet, Novell had just bought SUSE, Lindows (aka Linspire) was looking suave, Apple’s market share was picking up as MacOSX matured… In the end we chose to support Fedora  from day one. We figured that it would be the most familiar to our large Red Hat Linux user base.

Also in 2004 I became a major contributor to the Ohio LinuxFest. This will be important later.

After we started deploying Fedora, I did like it. I must have installed it over 1000 times for professors and graduate students. In 2005, I went out to the CPLUG Security Conference to do a talk. As a speaker, Red Hat gave us some really nice swag including a t-shirt that said “I am Fedora.” Even though I had used and installed Fedora just as much as some Red Hat Inc. employees, I did not know how I could make such a bold claim.

I am Fedora?!? I did not commit a single keystroke to the operating system product known as Fedora.

How could I ever be Fedora as a systems administrator? This question troubled me. Heavens knows I wanted to give back. I was giving back by organizing the Ohio LinuxFest for a solid year by then. Still, I could not wear the “I am Fedora” shirt, since surely it meant for someone who contributes code… not me.

After about 9 months after receiving the “I am Fedora” shirt I pondered what my Fedora-specific contribution could be. Installing un-vetted packages was risky business. The Fedora that we deployed at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science was fairly customized with OpenAFS, a distributed filesystem. I wanted to build a repository of .rpms that the user community at the university enjoy. Hopefully other universities that used similar dependency issues could use the repository too.  Unfortunately, we turned off up2date because the default Fedora kernel did not include the “tainted” openafs module. (Due to legacy issues, OpenAFS is distributed under a free software license but it is incompatible with the GPL.)

Building and maintaining the repository would have entailed more time than I had. Meanwhile, Fedora was so popular I was deploying several computers a day. I proposed the repository idea to the management anyhow. Regretfully they decided to keep their packaging of the in-house codes in depot format. My rpm repository idea did not support the almost moot system types such as Solaris and IRIX system types that depot treated like a generic UNIX-like system.

Still, I regret not trying harder. Users were downloading their own .rpms from Fedora, Fedora legacy, rpmfind, and sourceforge without any care if it broke something distributed by depot. The users wanted fresher packages than what the depot maintainers could provide and did not care what was considered “supported.” It was my job to clean up the rpm vs depot conflict mess. Meanwhile, the official stance was depot only or be darned.

Instead of just deploying a stealth rpm repository or arguing it out, I decided to leave the university. Sure there were other reasons for me to go including my suspicions of the Carnegie Mellon’s Gates Center of Computer Science which was funded from Bill and Melinda Foundation. Ultimately, I resigned for another job in September 2006. An opportunity to really do something for the success of Linux occurred with a system administrator opening at the Linux-embedded support company: Timesys Corporation.

While at Timesys, I supported the computers that ran the business and not the product. For the first time in my then 8 year professional career, I was supporting both Linux and Windows. The funny thing is the systems running Kubuntu, Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and CentOS required about 5% of my attention. The rest of my time was working with proprietary firewalls, closed-source PBX-es, Microsoft Exchange, viruses on Microsoft desktops, and Blackberry support. To this day I can not understand how a company who sells the cost-savings of software freedom can insist so much on a proprietary infrastructure for their day-to-day business. With all of the proprietary support, there was very little time to work with the Linux operating system I loved. Still I was producing the Ohio LinuxFest in my spare time. In 2007, I left Timesys for my current employer. There is not much I can say about what I do now but I am happily supporting Linux.

2007 was an exciting year for both Fedora and the Ohio LinuxFest. One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) was shipping with a Fedora/Sugar base. The Buy-Two-Get-One OLPC project was a little too successful. Yup. I bought the two. Meanwhile I had finally felt like I was part of the success of Linux doing not for pay work for the Ohio LinuxFest. There I was working with dozens of open source projects and for-profit companies to create an excellent expo. The icing on the cake was Fedora’s community manager,Max Spevak, keynoted at that year.

Still I did not feel right saying “I am Fedora.”

Why not? I did not want to publicly show preference for one distribution for another.

Meanwhile, I was running both Ubuntu and Fedora:

• Ubuntu to test so that I could support my friends who were using that distribution.
• Fedora for the freshest free software and drivers out there.

People would see me at user groups using Ubuntu and make assumptions that I was “just a Ubuntu person.” Instead of asserting preference of Ubuntu or Fedora, I proclaimed neutrality. I really did not want anyone to assume that I, as Ohio LinuxFest officer, would direct the conference to be too much of one distribution or another. Heck, I will defend to the ends of the earth that the Ohio LinuxFest has room for all of free software, even non-Linux distributions like FreeBSD and Haiku.

Freedom to choose from many excellent free software options means more free software for everybody.

Until last weekend at the South East LinuxFest 2010, I kept my allegiances to myself. There I joined the Fedora Project Documentation Project. Later I will post why documentation and why Fedora for my first free software project endeavor.

Even as I take my Red Hat out of the closet, I have no intention of snubbing anyone for what they use. Moreover, I will be sure to write more about Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu in the next twelve months.

I am not a Mac. Nor a PC. I am Fedora.

This post is in response to http://opensource.com/business/10/5/show-me-money where Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst asks “Do you have new ideas of what next-generation business models might be?”

Observe the picture on this post. On the left is a copy of “Free” that I checked out from my local library. On the right a bottle of “Connect” Vitamin Water. What do these objects have in common? They make free pay. So does Red Hat. This post really does relate to open source, so please bare with me.

Glacéau Vitamin Water is a brand of flavored non-carbonated beverages enriched with various combinations of supplements and juice-like tastes. Retailing at about $1.40 a bottle for 20 fluid oz. this drink brand is disrupting both the energy and sports drink markets without a single drop of corn syrup. How do they do it? They do what their customers want. How do they find out what their customers want? For free over Facebook. Glacéau, a child company of CocaCola, as all of the money in the world for marketing studies, television ads, and premium shelving placement. Yet they resort to Facebook?!? Yup, over a series of polls, Glacéau asked their “fans” to tell them what kind of beverage. Glacéau sat back and let their already loyal customers tell them what they are dying to buy through a website that they did not pay a dime to maintain. The side of the bottle carries the typical snarky Vitamin Water style by stating…

we caught you. no use denying it. your fingerprints are all over this bottle. after connecting on Facebook, you voted on the flavor & designed the label—it was great having you do all the work! and since you’ve been so busy pretending not to notice friend requests for about 3 days, posting pics of events (that you’re still at), and clicking through photos of ‘friends’ you barely know (ever get nervous they can tell?), better crack open this bottle. it’s got 8 key nutrients from vitamin a to zing plus caffeine to give you some extra energy… because based on last night’s pics, it looks like you’ve got some serious untagging to do.

Sounds rather gimmicky, but you know what, it worked.

• I bought the beverage
• I found the beverage so tasty, I could not help consuming it all before I got a chance to do this photograph.
• I wrote this blog post, giving facebook and Vitamin Water free marketing.

Glacéau is certainly making free pay. Anyone who has ever read “Free” by Chris Anderson is not surprised.

Mr. Anderson wrote a book named “Free: The Future at a Radical Price” while sitting in coffee shops enjoying free wireless on a netbook running Ubuntu. He writes about everything from that free cereal box toy to the Free Software Foundation. Heck, if you do not want to buy a book called “Free,” Google has you covered. Either way, Free is a best-selling book. While I type this book gets yet another no-cost plug.

So, what does Vitamin Water and “Free” have in common? They give away control to their user, in return the beverage company and the publisher get labor that they did not pay for.

In several ways, Red Hat already plays the free game well. Out of Fedora’s 21,676,499+ users, if only a 1/100 of a percent ever contribute any content that lands in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it is a win for Red Hat. It also behooves Red Hat to pay attention to CentOS’s rpm repositories when rolling up the latest updates. As far as I know, Red Hat pays nothing to the CentOS project yet Red Hat can use CentOS as a product development source.

Red Hat also plays the other side of the free coin while cashing out. By partnering with many OEMs, hardware manufacturers only pay for the units they sell for vendor-UNIX-quality operating systems. Indeed, Red Hat’s market share and profits in 2010 look bright.

The only thing I would advise Red Hat to do better is to market products to their fans, not just the consumer market. Red Hat’s merchandise store is cool and I already own the ladies pullover. I would not mind a free steel drink bottle. Hint! Hint! Seriously though, I miss the day when Red Hat had boxed sets which were sold in stores. Red Hat 7.1 was the coolest because they included a CD jam-packed with Loki Games. Red Hat could get involved in selling game keys today. Without the costs of creating media, it would be a practically free revenue source for Red Hat that fans would enjoy. Put it together with Fedora Games Respin, and Red Hat would have a very large collection of games just a yum away. All it would take is one killer game and all of the buzz will be about some new gaming system. Before you know it, DiY gamers will be asking systems-builders to ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop.

Companies must embrace free now or else they will lose market share in 2011.

Where will this all end, Microsoft? Are you going to sue anybody who displays a menu on a website? Will you sue anybody who produces products that are better than yours for your platforms?

Instead of suing, why not just build better products? When customers use CRM they are looking to build an edge on their competition by improving relations. Microsoft should improve relations with all the time and money they spend suing their partners.

Related posts:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/05/microsoft-files-rare-patent-lawsuit-against-salesforcecom.ars

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-a-patent-alley-thug-are-those-settling-words/6289

Here in Dallas TEXAS airport, there are power stations at the gate like as pictured. Look closely at the phone adverised… Windows! All of this marketing only gives Microsoft 2% marketshare. How did I use the power station? To charge my android phone and Ubuntu 10.r netbook.