Introducing the GoOSe Project

Recently I blogged about how some friends and I were talking about what it would take to rebuild an enterprise Linux project. We started researching what we would need and we got started. The result? The GoOSe Project.

What is the GoOSe project? It is a community rebuild of an enterprise Linux distribution based in the USA. But it is also more than that. The GoOSe project is more importantly a practice in building an Open Source community. We wanted to practice what we preach about how best to build a community. It just so happens that the product that this practice produces is a Linux distro.

Why "GoOSe"?

The name of the project was just a bit of riffing done on IRC(look around 20:03.38). We have quite a bit done as far as getting things rebuilt and have some ideas as to how we want to run this community. We have an ethos. A Koji instance running our builds. And we are just about done with the Buildroot needed to make a fully functional system bootstrap.

The GoOSe project is "in progress" to getting the first build out. We are currently just about done with the first step which is to compile all the upstream packages into a buildroot we can use to compile our packages. A more detailed status update will be blogged about later.

Why another rebuild project?

As I mentioned above, community is the hard part. And although there are various other projects similar to ours, we think we can fill a certain niche.

The centOS project for example is probably the biggest rebuild project out there and it caters to those who are looking for a 100% drop-in replacement for the upstream Linux distribution. Scientific Linux is built as a base for supporting computing clusters and experiments.

The GoOSe project is not out to replace or out-do any of these projects. We are here to build a community of passionate folks to build the best community-based enterprise operating system around. We will be sharing everything that we learn, everything we modify, and everything we build to help use create this distribution. We all benefit from an improved community structure. We also benefit from having more than one project meeting different goals/niches. The things we learn also help all the other projects out there to have a well functioning system themselves.

GoOSe Goals

Our goal with building the GoOSe project is to have a cool community built around an easily constructed set of enterprise-grade software. The technical pieces of the equation taking the hard part out of building an enterprise operating system. Herlo said it best when he said this with regard to the vision of the project:

"[I see the GoOSe project as a] group of friends hanging out, building cool things with an enterprise-ready technology. Not exclusive to building the technology itself."

Come help us

We're already working away on these goals. You can come and help us. Here are some resources to get you started:

• The project's development mailing list (currently the only list until we need more).

• The project's irc channel

• The project's main web site (currently being worked on)

• The project's main github page.

• The project's main wiki

• A link to "how you can help".

• The project's blog planet.

There is still plenty to be done. Come join us. It'll be fun I promise.

While trying to organize a complete mess of an nagios install (half borked
by a nagiosql install) I ran across a post where you offered up an example
of your nagios configs. The link is now password protected, I know the
post is over 2 years old and things change....but I was wondering if you
still had that info available?

I did poke around your github but didn't find any nagios info.

Thanks!

I just realized that my last post got eaten by the feed.

If you didn't see the sample files, please visit the post directly instead of reading it via a feed reader.

-- goozbach

There was some interesting action on the CentOS mailing list recently which stemmed from a tweet posted by Dag Wieers.

The question posited is: "How does one rebuild RHEL in a timely, open and collaborative way?"

Well, a few of my UTOSC friends and I did a little brainstorming and came up with what we think a good bootstrapping infrastructure for just such a project would entail:

Dot File Management

I have always wanted a simple way of managing my bash file settings (.bashrc, .bash_profile and the like). I had built a system much like this one, but it didn't work very well. So I created a ground-up rewrite.

You can find the latest code for _Dot_Files on the project's github page.

Enjoy

I'll be presenting at the Utah Open Source Conference (UTOSC2009).

My two presentations are on the Cobbler project.

I'll be giving a presentation entitled "Introduction to Cobbler" which deals with the installation, configuration, and initial use of the Cobbler system.

My second presentation is "Cobbler Power Tools" and will teach you how to make your Cobbler server that much more useful and powerful.

Come out and enjoy the conference, there will be many different presentations and something for the whole family on Saturday. More details can be found at the UTOSC home page.

The second conference presentation I attended was "Open source and Charitable Giving". Which was a married couple talking about a project called Qimo which is a Linux distro for kids, which they use for the computers they give away from their charity.

I hadn't thought a lot about it before but working on Open Source Software/Tech segues well into the charitable realm.

Today I'm going to be liveblogging from the Atlanta Linux Fest

The first presentation I attended was "Her PR Problem/Tooting the Horns of Women in Open Source" by Rikki Kite. Even though her presentation was about women in Open Source, there were many things she covered on marketing yourself.

She talked about overcoming "Imposter Syndrome" which is simply not being able to internalize your accomplishments. Another topic was the a good way to self promote, she called it:

Self promote without self promoting aka Tooting someone else's horn.

Also she talked about something called the "Daily Affirmations for Women in Open Source" by someone named Tiffany B Brown, which are:

• I know my shit
• Stop Trippin'
• Pretend I know
• I will be a braggart

The only item above I HAD a problem with was the one "Pretend I know" I thought that pretending that you know could cause problems, but after asking Rikki about it she said it was more of a confidence thing instead of a knowledge thing.

More to come as I get to other sessions.

Keeping my site up to date

I was having trouble keeping my Projects and Presentation pages up to date. I was always creating new projects, and presentation materials, however I always forgot to update the corresponding pages in Movable Type. I decided to make it easier to keep those pages updated.

The system I use is based on Mod_Include, MultiMarkdown and Movable Type.

Cobbler presentation

I've finally posted the first draft of my cobbler presentation materials. I'm not done with them, as I need to finish my remote-control system to do some screencasts. You can find the materials here.

Re-vamped pages on my site

Speaking of presentations, I've re-vamped some of the pages on this site. The two I've updated are the Presentations and Projects pages. These pages were long neglected, and weren't updated as new projects or presentation materials were made available. Now these pages will no longer get out of date as I've made them automatically update as new projects or presentation materials are posted. Watch for a forthcoming blog post about how to accomplish the same thing with your own Movable Type installation.

Until next time.

-- Goozbach