Anil Gulecha’s Musings

It was nice to wake up to a Nexenta story on slashdot. Find the discussion here.

There were some things I wanted to address some comments that were brought up.

Dont call it a Ubuntu derivative; say Debian.

The Nexenta project is an derivative of Ubuntu much the same way as Edubuntu is a derivative.. It uses the same repository and packages (and version numbers), and as such the slogan “Ubuntu userland + Opensolaris kernel”.

That does not mean Debian isnt in the picture.. Nexenta is thankful to the project for the amazing work it has done, and the great packaging ecosystem it has created. But Nexenta as such is a direct port of packages in a particular Ubuntu Repository (NCP2 is based on Ubuntu 8.04).

“Proprietary” comments..

Nexenta is fully open source. Enough said.

GUI and the desktop

Refer to my earlier post.

Looks interesting..

Great! Give it a shot on your fileserver.

For more chatting on all things Nexenta join in at #nexenta on freenode or use the web based chat.

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And now for the “other updates”

FOSS.in

I’ll be at the FOSS.IN conference, which is the largest FOSS conference in India. It draws people from all around the country, and few from past the borders. This year’s conference lies from the 25th to the 29th of this month.

I’m looking forward to interacting with folks, and seeking folks interested in contributing to the project. My plans include conducting hands on sessions (BoFs) for those new to the project, as well as those who understand Debian’s packaging system. I’ll be there with other members from BOSUG, and will either at the FOSS stalls, or near the Hackcenter area.

If you’re nearby, drop in at the conference, and if you are attending, stop by and say Hi. Looking forward to meeting enthusiastic members of FOSS India.

Recently I had been hunting around the web for a very lightweight, simple to use, flat file using, php based wiki. And I managed to find one. It’s called Pawfaliki

Pawfaliki

This wiki package is under 50 kb in size, has an easy to use wiki syntax, is CSS based, and has a very cool dark look. It matched my needs almost perfectly.

Test it out at www.pawfal.org

Fancy URLs

One minor nit I had was how the URL looked.. for example the About page would look like

http://www.pawfal.org/index.php?page=About

rather than a nice wiki like

http://www.pawfal.org/About

So like any good FOSS denizen, I went ahead and implemented small changes for this. Get the modified sources: pawfaliki052-modified.tar.gz

If you’d like to see the changes, get the diff for the original package at this bug I raised. (Note, I’ve renamed pawfaliki.php to index.php, and added a .htaccess file). The changes would go in if theres another release (the last one was a while back).

So there. Give this very small wiki package a try.

There area few things one wants to do in their lifetime. Lots for me; and one of them is taking a magnet to latitude -90S, drop center to the south pole and watching how it behaves.

I came across this page with astonishing pictures of Antarctica, on the Big Picture

The Commonwealth Glacier in the Transantarctic Mountains

an Iceberg

And, by far my favourite, this picture of an ice carved cave, titled “Ice Tunnel”

"Ice Tunnel" by Brooks de Wetter-Smith

Go take a look at the whole series.. the cold, dark, brooding, star-filled, aurora clothed, ice-covered continent will take your breath away.

And to plan your future travel, IAATO is a good place to star.

Thats it for now.. we should be getting some pictures of our natural satellite from our man-made satellite soon.. will blog then.