If you ever want to see a Ubuntu Developer Summit at work, here’s a quick look into the proceedings of one of the BOF sessions.

This was from the Network “Authentification-isms” BOF - we were talking about LDAP, Kerberos, and all kinds of other nastiness.

As we’re trying to figure out what the hell we are going to do with this seemingly impossible task, Andrew is off scribbling on the whiteboard. This is what he came up with:

Then we had a surprise guest show up and all of our heads exploded. The end.

Yeah, I skipped out on blogging about days 1 and 2. See whiprush’s blog or Planet Ubuntu for more. I’m gonna blog about the OLPC - the One Laptop Per Child machine. Holy cow. Simply amazing technology, from the hardware up thru the OS and application stack.

Sophomore in #linux just asked “Wouldn’t it be more cost effective to send in off-lease/old used donated laptops?” The answer is no. The OLPC isn’t a PC per say. It’s a completely new architecture and way of looking at computing. The thing doesn’t have a BIOS, it’s using Sun’s OpenFirmware (and I just heard all the guys in #linux groan). Built in network meshing - so each machine can become a node in the WLAN or WWAN. Very cool stuff.

The OS is completely revamped as well. I came in late to the preso (traffic was freaking HORRIBLE today), but I did catch stuff like the OS patch model is one gigantic patchfile to bring you to the next level (like OS X). All the apps are enabled for wireless collaboration.

I can’t stress enough how this little machine will change education worldwide. Rather than continue blathering on about it (TOO LATE!) I’ll just link the site in here.

Check it out at www.laptop.org.

Well, I’ve gone and done it now. I’ve been talking in #linux about how cool it is to make a bootable USB key that does a bunch of stuff. I cleaned it up some and have released it as Billix. (Yeah, I know - real original name). Without going into too much detail, you can plop this on a USB key (or burn the CD image) - it should fit on a 256MB USB key with a little bit of room to spare, and then you can boot from it and do the following:

• Run Damn Small Linux
• Run Puppy Linux
• Install Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper, Netinstall)
• Install Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy, Netinstall)
• Install Debian Sarge (Netinstall)
• Install Fedora Core 6 (Netinstall)
• Install Centos 4.4 (Netinstall)
• Mount Windows partitions and edit the registry/change passwords
• Run the memtest memory testing program

All I’ve really done is taken the binaries for all these bits and aggregated them together in one spot with an easy to use boot menu… but I’ve been using this as part of my daily toolkit for a couple of months now and I can’t live without it. Hope you find it useful too – feel free to give me feedback. Get it from the Sourceforge project page.

I’ve been threatening to do this for some time, and I finally have. I’ve replaced the Sparc that used to power this blog with an Intel box (2x 2.8Ghz Xeon). The Sparc was very reliable, but the load on it was rapidly approaching critical mass. I’ve migrated the blog and my mailserver over to this new server - but I knew I’d have capacity to spare, so I figured I’d put the web+mailserver in a VMware Server virtual machine. We are having some tremendously stellar experiences with VMWare Infrastructure at the office, so I figured why not roll out this new server as a VM?

I’m glad I did. I’ll have a ton of flexibility (adding a virtual CPU, upping RAM, etc) and backing up the machine is as easy as copying the directory.

Anyhow, once I got the blog, webserver and other stuff migrated to the new VM I figured I’d tackle the hard part – my mailserver. I was previously running the Sun Java Enterprise System stack (affectionately called “The Pile” by us who used to (and still do) support it), so I was used to having a fairly functional webmail client. I’d been looking at Scalix and Zimbra and when Zimbra released a Ubuntu-specific version of their mailserver I knew I was there. I grabbed a copy of the Open Source version from the site, installed Ubuntu Dapper server in a VM, and threw it on the VM.

The install was surprisingly easy - I was done in less than a half hour and the documentation was clear and easy to follow. I used ImapSync to migrate the email from the old server to the new one and boom! It was all done.

Let’s take a quick look at Zimbra. Zimbra aims to be an Exchange-killer, and it seems like it’s got a great start toward that goal. It’s got out of the box IMAP/IMAPS/SMTP/SMTPS/POP3/POP3S. The webmail client is amazing - I may ditch Thunderbird and use it alone.

Here’s what the webmail client looks like:

It’s got all kinds of great features. On top of that, it’s AJAX-y, so Kyle will love it. It’s got a pretty good contact manager:

One of the coolest things about Zimbra is the excellent calendaring solution built into it. Shared directory, appointment, drag n drop, it’s all there, and works surprisingly well for a web app. I’m impressed. :)

The newest feature in Zimbra 4.0 is the “Documents” feature. It’s basically a shareable wiki built into the mail client. It supports embedded documents, uploaded documents and photos, and has different access levels based on what group you’re in.

On the mailserver side, Zimbra supports server-side filters… something that’s a total must for me.

There’s a darn nice web-based admin tool built into the product as well. It even collects statistics on the server’s … status.

The stats engine also collects data on the built-in antispam/antivirus filters. Speaking of spam, the antispam engine works very well also. I was using vanilla spamassassin on the old box and quite a few spam messages were getting through. No more - the built-in amavisd stuff works like a top.

If you are in need of a mailserver or a collaboration tool, check out Zimbra. You won’t be disappointed.

It’s an interesting article from Orson Scott Card on the War on Terror. Not sure of the accuracy, but I like the sentiment.

Check it out.