John’s Blog-o-Rama

I have a new favorite Linux distro: Ubuntu. I installed it on one of my desktop systems a few weeks ago, and today I just installed it on my laptop, and I have to say that I’m very impressed. It’s a very nice, simple Linux distro that really is “Linux for Human Beings.” The installer was very simple and easy to use: it has one install CD that asks a minimal number of questions, and installs most of the packages off the web. The management and configuration tools are also very clean and easy to use, much more so that Red Hat or Debian. Since its based on Debian, Synaptic is used for package management, including installing additional packages. Overall, I think any new Linux user could easily install Ubuntu without knowing anything about the OS. I think I’ll recommend this distro to others in the future.

SUSE Linux really seems to be getting popular here in the US lately. On the Dell Linux PowerEdge mailing list, there has been a steady increase in SUSE Linux 9.1, 9.2, and Enterprise Server 9 questions for PowerEdge servers over the last few months. Couple that with the announcement we made last month to support SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on PowerEdge servers, and Novell/SUSE is really starting to pick up momentum. People in the industry have been predicting that Novell could topple Red Hat; I have to admit that I was skeptical at first, but now I think they have a real shot at doing it. Let’s see if they can continue to execute.

I just released version 0.65 of biosdisk on linux.dell.com. New features include support for creating Debian BIOS packages, URL retrieval, install/uninstall actions, and generic BIOS RPM creation. I have been working on this on and off for the past few months with Johnannes Jordens, and I think it has become a pretty solid little utility. Haven’t received a lot of feedback and not sure how many people use it, but it’s been really useful for myself personally, for flashing BIOSes on my own Linux systems, systems in the lab at work, and for BIOS distribution.

On the path to version 1.0, I’d still like to add the following features:

** Add support to update a pxelinux PXE server. Flashing BIOSes and other system software over PXE is immensely useful in our lab at work, as it removes a lot of manual labor. I’d like to remove the manual labor needed to update the pxelinux configuration for doing this

** Add support for automatically checking ftp.dell.com for a new BIOS for a given system, and then downloading and installing it. I already have the URL grabbing support with this release; now I just need to write some code that can figure out the system type and current BIOS version, check ftp.dell.com for the latest BIOS version, do a version check and proceed accordingly.

** Fix the command line option checking/parsing. This is terrible right now.

The last thing I want to look at is switching from bash to Python. The program is getting a little unwieldy, and would really benefit from an OO language. The problem is just finding the time and energy to do it, although I think it would be really interesting. Parts of this are already in Python already (blconf is, which does the menu.lst/grub.conf parsing/updating). Maybe over Christmas…