CDOT

The Fedora ARM secondary architecture project reached a significant milestone last week with Paul's announcement of the beta 1 release.

Interested in ARM but lacking ARM hardware? Not a problem! Fedora includes support for ARM virtual machines, and I'm packaged up a preconfigured ARM VM for your convenience:

• ARM virtual machine package: http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/arm/armvm/noarch/armvm-f13beta1-15.fc13.noarch.rpm
• Repo config for staying up-to-date on ARM VM releases: http://scotland.proximity.on.ca/arm/armvm/noarch/armvm-release-1-1.fc13.noarch.rpm

The armvm package will install a preconfigured ARM virtual machine named "f13-arm-beta1" with a 2GB image and a 128MB memory footprint. Since x86_64 processors don't provide hardware support for ARM processor virtualization, the ARM VM will run slowly compared to i386/x86_64 VMs, but the performance should be tolerable on most machines (Atom netbooks excepted). You can manage the VM with virsh or virt-manager. I've tested these packages on F13 and F14, but not on F15 Alpha yet. (By the way: the root password on the VM is "fedoraarm").

Enjoy!

(Please don't forget that both the Fedora ARM beta release and the armvm package are very definitely at the pre-release/beta stage of maturity. In particular, updating the armvm package will REPLACE your arm VM with a new image - beware!).

Today, the ATX power supply for the PandaStack I described in my last post is working happily. I have no idea what changed... which is a bit worrisome.

Our "PandaStack" of PandaBoard builders (shown here with 9 of the 15 builders installed) is now ready to run as part of the Fedora ARM build farm. However, I've run into a weird problem -- the ATX power supply I bought to power the boards works fine with 1-3 boards, but Something Bad happens when a fourth board is connected. It's not a capacity issue as far as I can see; it seems to be related to noise. Time to borrow a scope and take a close look at waveforms ... in the meantime, we'll power some of the boards with the ATX supply and some with stand-alone power bricks.

We're adding a group of dual-core, 1GHz, 1GB PanadaBoards to the Fedora-ARM build farm.  Paul Whalen and I hacked up the PandaBoard builder filesystem at FUDCon and I tested it with the farm on Thursday -- so far, it appears to build about twice as fast as the older GuruPlug builders. The PandaBoard's randomly-assigned-at-boot MAC addresses did force us to take a new approach to builder identity, though, because our previous approach of serving the identity via DHCP was no longer practical.

We ordered a total of 15 PandaBoards; 12 have arrived, and the others should be shipped shortly.Two are being set aside for testing, and we'll get the other ten building as soon as possible.

Our plan is to stack the boards on threaded rods, powered by an ATX power supply; the stack will be run on its side (with the boards oriented vertically) to aid in convection cooling. More photos to follow as we get this running! (Yes, that is a Powered by Fedora badge on there )

So I've safely arrived at FUDCon. Oddly, our plane was delayed for two reasons: the inbound flight was late due to a storm in Winnipeg (not so odd), and there was a "Coyote Strike" by a plane that landed just before we took off -- so they had to check that the runway area was animal-free before we were cleared for takeoff.

Coyotes in Arizona, yes. But Toronto?!

Looking forward to a great day of talks tomorrow! Hope I have two brain cells awake to rub together -- doubly so for the students, who are now on the prowl for food...

My colleagues in the Centre for Development of Open Technology have been doing some amazing work enhancing the open web. One of their libraries, Popcorn.js, enables web video to move beyond being a box on the page to become a part of the hyperlinked, dynamic web. With a ton of frantic hacking by the Popcorn team which began on Tuesday morning (!), PBS launched an interesting web page that night showing analyst's comments synchronized to a video of the US President's State of the Union speech. PBS comments about the effort are posted on The Rundown.

You should check out what these folks are doing with 3D on the web -- the Javascript port of the Processing data visualization language, Processing.js -- point cloud data -- and web audio!

Update: Dave Humphrey has blogged about the work that he and his team did on the SOTU page with PBS.