One day you think "I can build a custom operating system for this PowerPC motherboard with Freescale semiconductor 7447 cpu and build the perfect passively cooled digital entertainment system ( pictures ). Its cpu consumes less than 10W, can be run at up to 105 degrees celcius and has clean vector instructions perfect for multimedia purposes"... Less than four weeks later you're at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando, Florida with your digital entertainment system on display in the Freescale booth, awarded best of show, you're selling hundreds of these machines and speaking with the companies who design the next generation fridges, ovens, lighting systems, airconditionings, cars,... on using your system as the center piece of an ambient intelligence network. Michel Mayer, Freescale Semiconductor CEO mentions your system in his keynote ( video streams ) and Yahoo Finance writes about your system twice, highlighting live television playback, the game engines gentoo developers ported, the ability to have video conferences, and some special features. Bill demoing the Digital entertainment system Me holding the award for the Digital Entertainment System Freescale Booth with the 'black'-version of the Digital Entertainment System. This version was used for the Keynote Demo Another thing worth mentioning is that Genesi launched the EFIKA 5K2 at FTF. We had the first five prototypes of this new board with a Freescale CPU that consumes just 1W on display in our booth at FTF. The board can be powered using Power Over Ethernet. Its current physical size is approximately 10cm by 10cm and we are convinced we can get that down to 5cm by 10cm. The board already runs linux just fine, in fact we had one one board in the Genesi FTF booth playing a movie of the production plant where the boards are produced. Each board can process sound and video, has solid-state flash storage but can also hold ATA hard drives has both network and USB connectors allowing for 802.11g. Of course as a development board for both the EFIKA and the Digital entertainment system, the Open Desktop workstation can be used. Porting OpenSolaris to the Open Desktop Workstation progresses steadily it seems. The freescale press release. Ideas, feedback, interested in buying/selling? Contact me. The ODW development system can be bought from the Gentoo Foundation at $799 and for each machine sold through to the Gentoo vendors website $50 is donated to the Gentoo Foundation. The Gentoo Foundation was also mentioned in the keynote.

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It is nice to see that Sun delivered on its promise to open source the Solaris operating system. The opensolaris.org website contains a ton of interesting information. If you haven't done so already, have a look at how the community established its own advistory board, who the nominees where (yours truly included), download the source code or contribute to the port to the Open Desktop Workstation. I'm happy to be part of the OpenSolaris developer community. On a side note. Genesi recently introduced a new revision of its Open Desktop Workstation. It has a new case, a dual-layer 16x DVD-+R(W) drive, an 80 gigabyte hard drive, 512M PC3200 CL2.5 DDR ram and an ATI radeon 9250 graphics card with 128M memory. The best part is that it costs only 650 euro and for each machine sold through the Gentoo store, 50 euro goes to the Gentoo foundation. The new machine will be assembled in large quantities by Directron. So what is happening on my side? Well, I'm currently in Austin, Texas at Motorola HQ working on some very cool things, I'll be at Directron in Houston later this week, I'll also be visiting the new appartment in San Antonio and I'll be at the Freescale Technology Forum in Orlando June 20-23. I'm looking forward to FTF because my work will be on display; a Linux-based digital entertainment system with some interesting features. Directron will also start selling these, which is why I'm visiting them in Houston. Other features worth highlighting include THX-certified 7.1 audio system, 256M ATI graphics card, SATA hard disk capacity measured in terrabytes, full-screen video conferencing support with Altivec optimized audio codecs (Thanks Kelly), dual TV tuner, Vacuum Fluorescent Display for system messages, fast DVD writer, smartcard support (protecting recordings, authentication, encryption), infrared support ... I'm happy a prototype of the machine will be on display at the Freescale Technology Forum in the Freescale Semiconductor booth. You may have seen this on Bills blog and wondered what on earth he was talking about... Well, here's the scoop. David Holm, Sven Luther and myself have ported Irrlicht, a 3D game engine to the ODW. The patch is not available in gentoo portage yet, but I've been using it internally for porting purposes; games developed using this engine and using DirectX on Windows, will compile just fine on the ODW and will be rendered efficiently using OpenGL on the ODW. As a proof of concept, I am in the process of helping different gaming companies port their product over to the powerpc platform. Who knows what could happen with the next generation of gaming platforms being powerpc based. One more thing I think is pretty cool to mention now before returning to work, is that the Belgian Federal Crime Unit started using Gentoo/PPC (They are using it for custom built powerpc livecds). I think that's pretty cool.

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Get them while they're hot. A third new Open Desktop Workstation GameCD has been uploaded and is available for download. Get your Trigger GameCD torrent here. To boot this cd type boot cd trigger at the openfirmware prompt. Not into rally? Here's a 3D shoot'em'up GameCD and here's a GT racing GameCD. Thanks again to PPCzone for hosting the torrent.

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A new GameCD for the Open Desktop Workstation has been uploaded and is available using bittorrent. Torrent can be found here. This GameCD features a racing game called Torcs. To boot from this cd type boot cd torcs at the openfirmware prompt. Some screenshots: I previously blogged about this GameCD here, other GameCDs available here. Thanks to PPCZone for hosting the torrent.

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A few pictures of my Open Desktop Workstation with its new internal Smartcard Reader and a personalized RSA-enabled Smartcard with 'Gentoo theme':     The SmartCard can be used for GnuPG signing, system authentication, online identity verification, ... The reader also has various other uses: pre-paid card ( video / audio / gaming ) services, internet café settings, ... Soon available for your Open Desktop Workstation.

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I've received a number of emails from people asking me to explain them how to create their own Gentoo-based LiveCD/DVD. This blog entry discusses how to build your own Gentoo-based LiveCD.

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The Luminocity X-LiveDVD can be converted quite easily into a hard drive-based Gentoo install in under 20 minutes. This blog entry discusses how the X-LiveDVD works, and how to (ab)use it for a quick Gentoo install. In a future version of the DVD, the quick-install process will be as simple as one-click.

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Update: First torrent available here. To boot this game type: boot cd torcs at the openfirmware prompt. Another GameCD is uploading and will be available in a few hours. You know that you should blog more when executives of other companies blog about your work before you have published anything on your own blog... I blame it on the success of our video conferencing-enabled LiveDVD. It's super easy to demo new stuff to people in a video conferencing session. However, final QA, uploading your stuff, staging mirrors, preparing torrents, and making your stuff available to the end-user takes a while. So, yes, more GameCDs are uploading and will be available! In case you're wondering, here's a screenshot of one of our conference calls (Bill was wearing a Gentoo t-shirt there, that's -obviously- a minimum requirement to video-conference with a Gentoo developer): Anyway, Bill's company has agreed to sponsor some more webcams, smartcard readers and smartcards for Gentoo developers. Personalized smartcards and smartcard readers are already here, I'm just waiting for the webcams to be delivered, so we can send packages out to interested developers. Torrent for the first gamecd can be found here. A final word of thanks goes out to PPCzone which has volunteered to seed the torrents. We already have a 3D shoot'em'up powerpc GameCD, so this time focus is on OpenGL-enabled racing games. Click the screenshot for a small video: We also have some other very impressive PowerPC GameCD stuff in the works. You'll be surprised. Keep tuned for the torrents.

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Quite a few people emailed me they wanted to use the Luminocity X-LiveDVD not only on the Open Desktop Workstation, a machine designed to be completely PowerPC Linux compatible, but also on Apple Machines. I underestimated there'd be a demand, so I promise to make a revision for Apple computers. Please note that a lot of features on the dvd depend on stuff that is not present on some Apple machines. 3D hardware accelerated graphics support, sound support, wireless network support are not implemented on some Apple machines, simply because there aren't any specs for the hardware available. That's a choice Apple has made. If you have an ATI graphics card, there's a good chance 3D graphics will be supported. The X-LiveDVD was demoed in the Chinese Ministry of Information Industry, Freescale Linux Lab in Beijing, China and at Freescale's HQ in Austin, Texas. Here're a few pictures of some machines running the DVD at the lab in Beijing:       The video conferencing feature was a popular feature amongst hardware engineers because the protocol can be vectorized using Altivec. An improved version of the X-LiveDVD will be demoed in Orlando, at the Freescale Technology Forum, June 20 - 23. One of the features that'll be available on the new DVD will be one-click Gentoo installation, but more about the new features in a future blog entry when the dvd is available for download...

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Update: Torrent available here. Boot the cd by typing boot cd live at the firmware prompt. The Gentoo PowerPC team successfully implemented automatic X-configuration a while ago and producing a few X-LiveCDs to demo this new functionality has been part of the PowerPC teams wishlist for quite a while. So, it is with great pride that I announce a Gentoo-based PowerPC Altivec-Optimized LiveDVD with a long feature list. The most unique feature is probably Luminocity, an OpenGL-based experimental window manager technology testbed, that recently made slashdot. This LiveCD allows you to try Luminocity out without having to compile or install any experimental software from the Gnome CVS repository. An overview of the other features... SmartCard integration Genesi, one of Gentoo's corporate sponsors sent me several SmartCard reader/writers. Also made available were a large amount of Cryptoflex 32k smartcards. Genesi plans to sell an Open Desktop Workstation expansion pack, consisting of a reader and smartcard(s), at a competitive price. Gentoo developers will get such an Open Desktop Workstation expansion pack for free to go with the machines Genesi donated for PowerPC development. The smartcard can be configured for authentication, email signing, web applications, ... The cards come pre-configured and simply plugging in a reader on a machine booted from this LiveDVD allows you to try out smartcard authentication without having to initialize and personalize the card. Personalization of a smartcard is quite easy using OpenSCs pkcs15. The liveCD/DVD login screen, and a regular smartcard-enabled gentoo login screen side by side:   A document describing the use of the smartcards will be available before the smartcard expansion pack goes on sale. Most likely this will happen after the 22th of April, since I'll be in Austin, Texas till then. Meanwhile, check out these excellent docs: QuickStart guideSetting up PAM for SmartCard-based system loginSmartcard personalization guidePaper advocating the use of Smartcard authentication in Linux Note that the OpenSC PAM module allows you to retrieve public authentication certificates from your LDAP database. Combined with pam_mkhomedir and pam_ldap ( check out the Gentoo LDAP authentication howto ) these components allow you to easily administer users, groups, machines and services on your network. GRID support I ported Sun Grid Engine 6 (SGE) core to PowerPC and have installed both source and binaries on this DVD under /usr/src/gridengine/ resp. /opt/gridengine. Also included are an Apple XGRID engine agent and standalone LAM-MPI, PVM libraries. The disc also provides a distributed compilation service, can be converted into a local Gentoo rsync server, and has nfs and ldap tools on board... In short, this thing allows you to develop your own grid-enabled applications on your own private GRID, before deploying it on the real thing. Also included are all often requested development tools such as the Eclipse-SDK. Video conferencing Compatible with recent Linux-compatible Logitech QuickCam webcams, or any video-for-linux enabled device, out of the box cross-platform Audio/VideoConferencing! Screenshot shows LiveDVD user chatting with an iSight-enabled ohphoneX Mac OS X client. Works fine with Microsoft Netmeeting too. A conference server, gateway and directory service are currently being set up by Genesi internally for testing purposes. 3D desktop switching The perfect feature to impress your colleagues... I'm a fan of innovative use of OpenGL desktop technology such as 3D desktop managers so I've pre-configured the livecd for this purpose. Animated gif shamelessly stolen from the 3D desktop project webpage. The actual OpenGL rendering is smoother. Text to Speech Includes the popular Festival text-to-speech engine. This livecd is equiped with a /dev/speech (reads all the text you send to it). Where possible accessibility support has been enabled. And more Blender, Ardour, Eclipse-SDK, OpenOffice, Gnumeric, Mplayer, GIMP, FireFox, ...          The DVD is available for download using bittorrent and is 1.8 gigabyte in size. A torrent file can be found here. A quick installation of Gentoo is possible by copying the contents of the live.data squashfs-compressed file on the DVD onto your hard-disk. When installing this way, make sure to: emerge syncemerge baselayoutreset user and root passwordremove ~/.eid in both user and root homedir Sound and graphics are supported on the Open Desktop Workstation. Apple machines with ATI radeon DRI-enabled video cards, a monitor capable of 800x600 and 1024x768 and Alsa sound support can be made to boot this LiveDVD given some effort. DRI detection still needs some work on Apple machines. Please test Gentoo's version of Xautoconfig on Apple machines and report bugs using the gentoo bug reporting website, so we can fine-tune our X-configuration technology and make these LiveCD/DVD available for Apple machines. I'd like to thank Genesi for their continued Gentoo PowerPC support.

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Man, wish I were there... Look at the smiles on these guys faces, they're definitely up to something. Rich (guy on the left) and Roy (fourth from the left) are wearing the one and only OpenSolaris t-shirt every pilot member got in the mail. Thanks to all the people at Sun for doing the right thing. And euhm ... Jim Grisanzio for pope!

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There are certainly some interesting things going on in the Linux enterprise market nowadays. Typically what happens is that some company starts making money on other peoples enterprise-grade product by for example forking the product, avoiding binary incompatibility and basically just removing upstream vendor branding and artwork, replacing it with their own. From an Open-Source point of view, it could be argued whether these companies contribute to the long-term survival of Open Source software such as Linux, since these companies don't seem to be funding research, hiring developers, innovating nor filling the functionality gaps. Some would say these companies steal revenue from a company supporting Open Source development by reinvesting a huge part of their revenue in R&D that benefits the underlying open-source product. However in a business context these things happen all the time and to people familiar with Strategic IT-management this phenomena is known as a Michael Porter force game. Often used in a management course to explain the game is the example of OTIS elevators. Most of OTIS profits do not come from selling new elevators, but from servicing the existing elevators. What happened was that third parties started servicing OTIS elevators using less expensive support contracts. OTIS was losing revenue. So, what OTIS did was to start servicing the elevators before one of their components broke. They could fine tune the accuracy of their predictions by using their years of experience in the elevator domain. The increase in reliability of the elevators was more interesting to companies than a cheap service contract from a company that is unable to pre-emptively service your elevators and prevent them from breaking down. The car industry got this message too and required pre-emptively servicing your Volvo or Lexus in a Volvo, resp. Lexus garage. Reliability, reliability, reliability. The best strategy for a company confronted with a scenario in which other people offer your expensive product, or a functionally equivalent competing product for free is to offer your product for free yourself, preferably open sourced and focus on the services using your experience building the product as a foundation. Sun clearly knows how to play the Porter force game significantly better than its two biggest competitors, who haven't realized yet they're part of a game. I wonder whether I'll have to blog about Nash-equilibria and their applications in economy someday...

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While I was writing the previous entry I couldn't help thinking why I like to travel to San Francisco. Need wireless Internet in your room at the twentieth floor of the hotel? Deploy your laptop by the window and use one of the countless access points from one of the Internet Cafes in the streets below you. (Ok, I admit, I'm a geek) It is interesting to see how the human mind immediatly associates the word GRID with lots of cables. I wonder what the wireless equivalent of electricity would be, lightning perhaps?

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Jonathan Schwartz got his hair cut, wasn't pleased with the result and decided Operating System customization isn't a good thing. I think he's missing the point. Jonathan writes "Consider another example - a packaged goods company deploying a large scale enterprise application, that failed to resist the tempation to customize their implementation. Their customization looked convenient (the end users will get "exactly what they want") - but such customization actually ends up creating bad hair days for CIO's (and CFO's) that linger for years. As with the custom distro, a custom SAP or Siebel or Amdocs deployment is vastly more expensive to support than a "standard" off the shelf implementation. The short cut, even paved over with a "commercial off the shelf" product, stays pretty muddy." The key to customization is declaring requirements. If you fail to communicate your requirements properly to your hair dresser, chances are you'll end up with a bad hair cut and end up hiding behind your desk at Sun HQ. Unlike some hair dressers, software architects don't start cutting right away, they usually iterate over a plan, making sure it meets the requirements. Convincing ISVs to declare metadata about their applications is sufficient to allow a tool to build a customized operating system plan that satisfies both the users requirements and the ISVs application requirements. If the ISVs application requirements are too strict, people will end up using a competing product with less strict requirements. This is exactly why OpenOffice or FireFox are cool things. They don't require you to have some non-free "standard" Operating System installed. Oh, and it doesn't matter whether you're running Sparc, Amd64 or PowerPC hardware either... This brings me to the GRID. Customization comes at a price: compilation. If it takes one year to convert a muddy path into a highway, a lot of people using the path will get dirty feet, using the path while it's being constructed. This is where the GRID could come in. If you've only got electricity to power one tile-cutting machine at a time, it will take you a while to construct that path. However if you've got the resources to power a hunderd machines all constructing the path in parallel chances are your CIO won't have to hire extra staff to clean up the building(s) after everyones dirty feet. Keeping the new, customized path clean simply requires a good plan. Leave that to metadata architects. I'd like to chat a bit about ISV support now and how a meta-distribution such as Gentoo is working with several ISV. This week was filled with meetings and conference calls with companies wanting to send us a check to make their commercial products available on Gentoo and the products we come pre-installed on. I won't spoil the complete surprise yet, but I can tell Sun Java 1.5 binaries for PowerPC are a part of the surprise. Let the games begin...

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Tom Chance from Newsforge published a nice article about Gentoo and the strenghts and weaknesses of our MetaDistribution approach.

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