Sadly; I’ve been bootstrapping my web development company, Digital Alias, since November 2001. You’d think by now I’d have it in full gear. With a combination of my own personal defects, managing a family of four, and a full-time job I’ve learned a lot of DOs and DON’Ts. So; I’m going to start keeping a public log to track my progress. It’s more of a reminder and time line to me, but this IS the Internet… so everyone benefits.

I usually think better after getting a good night’s rest. Well; as a treat to myself I went to bed last night at 21:30. Which simply means that while I’m en route to the office I tend to think of good ideas, which is why I’m writing this post. I’m not sure if I should attempt to establish my meager credentials, but since this is the first post of the “Bootsrapping” category I’ll go ahead an try to win your respect.

In a nutshell I’m an open source web developer, which simply means that I prefer to use platforms that are not proprietary (Linux, PHP, etc).  Besides being a neckbeard programmer in a modern day body, my ultimate goal is that everything I post online would be integrated within other systems. So; I tend to follow “standards” with the hope that everything will one day overlap.

Project Management

I’m currently studying for the Certified Associate in Project Manager (CAPM) Certification. My employer (Northrop Grumman) has given me the opportunity to expand my knowledge base and I’m very grateful for that. My test is scheduled for the end of this month — so I have to increase my study sessions. Procrastination and mere tiredness has kept me from seriously progressing in the book “The PMP Exam: How to Pass on Your First Try, Fourth Edition” by Andy Crowe, PMP.

One of my major faults with bootstrapping Digital Alias is the ability to let other developers work on projects. I’m a pretty relaxed fella, but when it comes to code I’m as anal as it gets. I like everything to look structured and well documented. My experience with working with other people is I’m not familiar with their logic in coding something. So; whenever I have to come behind them to tweak something I have to follow through their logic and some times it’s not pretty.

What I have to accept is that I don’t have time to code sites while maintaining my family and day job. I don’t have a problem setting up appointments and following up with people, but I also want to code… I LOVE to code. That’s been my main struggle. So; one idea that’s formulating in my head while I understand these project management concepts is that I’m going to have let go of the hands-on aspect of a project and get someone to do the work. Deal with the different logic of other developers and simply get the revenue coming in. Maybe when I finally run the company full-time then I can get back into coding, who knows.

My major lesson for today is to “let go” of the code and manage these projects.

References

1. http://www.ussdragonstar.com/utilitycore/stardates.asp

I’m proud to announce that I’m working with KayFerg.com in producing some new, design worthy, Linux apparel. Since this venture is still in the beginning phases, we’d really love some feedback from everyone, especially the Linux community. Visit her site, take a lookie-loo (or purchase something) and post your feedback here.

The Designs We’re Looking For

The slogan for the “teaser” shirt came from the signature I use in Gmail. It may not appeal to everyone, but I got a kick out of it and knowing that I can have it on a tee – well, that just made my FOSSy-day!

With that said, we are really looking for input on other concepts from the community. We don’t want to have too many “wordy” slogan-like tees, such as “There’s no place like ~”, “RTFM”, etc. The main idea is to really make designer apparel, so even if the people looking at your shirt, don’t get the underline message – they can still say, “Cool shirt! Where’d you get it?”

Also, for our protection and yours please only convey concepts (i.e. “How about a shirt that says; When life gives you lemons, make Linuxade”).  Copyright infringement is a sensitive issue for everyone and since KayFerg.com is handling the design/art aspect of the shirts they cannot accept or look at any images, drawings or anything that resembles artwork, so please do not post those things in your feedback. It will not be considered. Okay… I  got the legal jargon out of the way!

Wait, Lurking, Feeding the Need

I’m very excited to see this idea materialize. I really think the combination of my enthusiasm for Linux and working with KayFerg.com should produce some really cool apparel for my Linux community. I’ve been wanting to show the world my love for Linux, but most of the shirts out there really seem lame. I mean not to offend, but that’s my take on what I’ve seen thus far.

KayFerg.com is going to be a vendor at Atlanta Linux Fest 2009 and 15 designs are currently in the works (scheduled to be released in September).  Since these apparels are for you, your feedback on designs and concepts is greatly appreciated. ALSO, if KayFerg.com decides to design a shirt around a concept you were the first to contribute, you will get a FREE shirt for yourself.  Lets really run with the essense of “open source” and see what the community can produce! “Go Team Venture!” (Venture Bros. quote, if you don’t know)

I wonder if the cut n’ dry world of Microsoft or the stylish enthusiasts of MacWorld could make me feel the way I feel right now. I’m having such a great time with Linux, learning all kinds of new commands and functions, etc.  True; it has its limitations, but the advancements that we have has been produced by majority of volunteers who have a love for open source.  I joined the ranks of the Fedora project and I’m slowly getting more acclimated to working with a community… I’m so used to doing things by myself and this group has allowed me to be apart of something greater.

Yes, one can say that religion or a local charity or organization can help me feel a sense of higher purpose – but those “avenues” don’t really appeal to my core.  Technology is a driving force for me and anything that involves a computer will grab my attention and stir up my passion.  When I first learned DOS, Windows 3.1 up to Windows 98, there were tons of things to learn and I learned them quite well.  After that I just became more proficient at them.  I’ve been running Linux as my main machine for over 9 months now.  I’m back in that “learning” mode, but there is no horizon line for the end of knowledge – open source is so broad, so vast, so liquid that I may never learn everything about FOSS (free and open source software).  That’s something to reach for.

Within the past day (really, several hours) I’ve learned about PGP/GPG encryption, SSH and command-line document editing using vi, and syndication. I’m a firm believer of supply and demand.  With Linux, and my distro of choice being Fedora there will always be a demand to perform some sort of function and FOSS will provide me the means of supplying it.  Yah, this post wasn’t very technical, but it’s a result of technology.  If you haven’t already joined, come and join us here at the Fedora Project.  I encourage to be part of your distro or any open source project.

I’m wondering what the state of Linux podcasts are. I never thought about it until Linux Outlaws did their year-end wrap up of 2008. They said it themselves, we’ve lost some good shows and they didn’t expect for their show to be in the same category as “one of the longest running Linux podcasts.”  Neither did I, but things change – Linux has evolved and so have podcasts.  Where do we stand in 2009?

Lost Shows

Here are a couple of shows we lost over the years:

• LugRadio – barely understandable, but a bunch of UK gents talking Linux.  Very funny and some how informative.
  
• Linux Reality – best one-man, linux newb-focused show in the history of Linux podcasting.  All 100 episodes are still available for download.
• Fedora Reloaded – never really got off the ground, but it could have been awesome!
• Linux Action Show – dramatically changed their format, in essence we’ve lost “Linux Action Show” for “In Depth” on YouTube.

True there are other shows, but these were kind of the pioneers of their time.  You can find all the relative Linux podcasts at www.thelinuxlink.net, which I believe is being maintained by one of Linux podcast mogle Dann from The Linux Link Tech Show.

Out of all these shows, I’m most sad about Linux Action Show.  These guys have a chemistry that is second to none.  They do have lots of other shows, but I’m not interested in their topics.  To have these guys go back and forth, kind of fighting for air time to share with us their thoughts (so passionetly) about a Linux topic was worth the weekly, bi-weekly, whatever release schedule.  Now, the YouTube videos are mostly one of them just droning on about the topic, no fun.

OGG on my Face?

I edited this post (14 Jan 2009 at 12:29) after replying to CDavis‘ comment.  What is the deal with some of these shows exclusively exporting their shows in OGG format.  I have a blackberry, which was provided by my job, and it does not support OGG.  So instead of my easy transition  syncin’ my MP3 files and my mobile device using gPodder, I’ll now have to use SoundConverter – and that’s just MORE steps.  I finally got gPodder figured out too – ARGH!!!!!

I understand the freedom of OGG, but since you’re trying to make Linux more mainstream – stick with the format… or at least offer the MP3 format… that the mainstream folks/devices are using.  Of course this is more easily said than done for me since I’m not a podcaster.  As soon as I find a smart phone that supports OGG, I’ll be all over it, but until then – I’m stuck with MP3 podcasts.

Your Thoughts

What are your thoughts on the state of Linux podcasts?  Do you think they are growing, shrinking dramatically, dying out, what!?

I am really surprised at the amount of postings that show you where to get the new Flash Player 10 (x86_64), but not really how to install it if all goes wrong. Yah, they’ll always have, “simply click double click on the RPM file and all will be well in the world.” kind of talk, but what happens if all is NOT well in the world!?  Luckily for me (and you), it always goes wrong – so I end up having to do a manual install every time.  Hopefully this post will help you figure all that out.

Where to Get It

Of course, you’ll need to know where to get this most fantastic program, debuting in Linux.  You think Adobe would make it a bit easier to find.  I had to do a Google search, but I guess since it is an alpha – only the truly persistent will find it.

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

What to Do With It

Once you’ve uncompressed the tarball you will have a simple “libflashplayer.so” file to work with.  What do you do with this .so file you ask?  You can copy or move it to your system’s shared flash player folder.  I’m using Fedora 10 and Firefox (both x86_64) so mine is located in “/usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins“.  That’s just a nice place to put it.

I know for the 32-bit versions, if you install it using an RPM or the Package Manger, it’ll put it in “/usr/lib/flash-plugin“.  It can be a combination of  places, but grab the overall concept first. Make the .so file available to multiple browsers on your machine, then refer to it.

Once you have it in a nice, safe place… create a symbolic link from your brower’s plugin directory.  Most of us are using Firfox so run the command:

$ ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
/usr/lib64/firefox-3.0.5/plugins

Of course I’m running Firefox 64-bit.  If you’re not then change the “lib64″ directory to “lib” and if you’re running a different version of Firefox, change that too.

Verify That it Works

If you have Firefox open, simply close it and start it up again.  Check your installed plugins by typing in “about:plugins” in the address bar.  You should see “Shockwave Flash” in there some where.  If you don’t post a comment and I’ll try and help you.

If it’s there… and it should.  Visit any web site that has Flash and you’re good to go. I usually like to try multiple sites at a time just to make sure it doesn’t freeze up on me.  So; I’ll visit YouTube,  MSN and my web site (FergyTech), etc.

Now Give Me Praise for Helping You

Ha-ha, just joking.  I seriously hope this post helped.  Happy surfing you bleeding edge/early adopters you!

Fedora 10 - Splash Screen (top)

Wow, I have been totally blown away today with what i’ve learned from my good friend Mr. Linux, my nickname for him is Fedora.  Basically; I was having a problem installing the latest release of Fedora 10 through the DVDs I burned (32 and 64 bit).  I thought all was lost, I literally thought that I would miss out on Fedora 10 and catch up with it next time on Fedora 11.  Thanks to the good folks in the #fedora IRC chatroom (shout out to elfstone) – he gave me the idea and provided the path to do my first internet install of an operating system. “Oh Fedora, how I love thee!”

It’s Like Woah!

It started a couple days ago with the release of Fedora 10.  I was eagerly excited about it as I heard that the new features are well worth it.  I started the torrent that night and let it ride till morning.  I made my lazy-man backups of the most important [dot] folders onto my data partition and rebooted with the intent to install Fedora 10.  Well; that didn’t happen!  After the splash screen asking what I wanted to do, I chose “Install/Upgrade Fedora”, and I was sent to a non-gui install screen.  I thought that was a bit odd.  It’s not even the nice text-based installer, it looked like some ol’ DOS attempt at a graphical interface.  After a few prompts it informed me that it needed a device driver.  I tried to choose a driver, but none of the options looked familiar.

After playing with it, rebooting a couple times and writing down some of the options I went to the #fedora chat room to try and get some help.  All-in-all, someone told me that my hard drive controller probably isn’t supported.  They instructed me on filing a bug report at http://bugzilla.redhat.com.  It was categorized as a kernel issue.  I waited a couple days, but nothing was done with the report.  A small part of me was hurt.  “What will I do now!?”  I thought to myself, “Will I miss out on this release and wait for the next release for the kernel issue to be fixed?  I really want to experience the new features of GNOME 2.2.4.”

Late Night, Early Morning

My wife and I were up till around 1:00 AM, we watched “Final Fantasy: Spirits Within” on DVD.  Leeanne and Alex were already asleep and Monica was kind of up and about.  So; I did what I could to handle her.  Since I’m finishing this article a couple days later I no longer remember the details.  Overall; I couldn’t go back to sleep so I stayed up and was determined to beat this issue.  I loaded up XChat and fished around for some help on the #fedora channel.  After a couple of hours of whatever (playing Urban Terror, juggling some work, blah blah blah) I met up with a great guy going by the handle “elfstone”.  Now I usually don’t get all mushy on people, but what I was exposed to after conversing with him, I believe has changed a apart of my life FOREVER!

In the end, he showed me that I was not bound by the faults of my hardware.  Someone else told me that my problem was kernel related and that it didn’t recognize my hard drive controller.  The actual process was weird to me though, it was looking for network devices when I specifically told it I wanted to do an install from “Local CD/DVD”.  Either way, elfstone provided me with a link to get a netinstall.iso for Fedora 10.  I didn’t need it though since I already had an .iso burned – the URL option was already there.  So; he provided me with a URL.

I was skeptical and excited about the process.  I booted up the DVD, chose URL, inserted the LOOOONNGGGG URL and watched a GUI install wizard load up.  My eyes lighted up with the hope that I have beaten the stumbling block!  At that time the kids were up and I was preparing their breakfast so I couldn’t stay to watch the complete install process.  In the end, I was greated by the warm solar flares of Fedora 10: Cambridge.  What a morning!

A Changed Man

For years I’ve always downloaded and burned ISOs of the full install files.  I never really thought a net install was good enough.  One way that I’m a changed man is I will no longer bound myself to a stack of DVDs that I will never use again.  I’ve got Fedora 8, OpenSUSE 10.x, and Ubuntu 7.x DVDs just sitting in a spindle – probably never to be used again and taking up valuable space.  Elfstone says he’s been doing netinstalls by default and I believe this method will be my default for installing operating systems to come!  He didn’t want me to mention his name, he just wanted me to post the Fedora Public Active Mirrors.  So; here it is:

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/

Hey folks, I’m writing these reviews just to help get more links out there for these podcasts.  You’re probably aware of the popularity of podcasts and if you follow my blog you know I’m a linux guy.  Quite the newb still, but a linux guy never-the-less.

Well this podcast, The Linux Action Show is one of the many shows produced by Jupiter Broadcasting, and by its title, you can tell it’s all about linux.  The chemistry of the two hosts, Chris and Bryan, are insane.  Two high-strung fellas ranting on and on about the wonders of linux and its community.  They are very comical and almost witty at times too.  They do a great job of bring you up to speed on some of the important linux topics.  Bryan is a nostalgic dude and you can tell he likes radio shows from the 50′s and beyond.  Chris is very knowledgeable about whatever he gets his hands on – both are full of opinions and great to listen to.

Along with The Linux Action Show, Jupiter Broadcasting produces other fine shows, such as: Beer is Tasty, Castablasta, Radio Revolver, and Mack Murphy, PI.  The Linux Action Show and Beer is Tasty are video recorded and streamed on their site and uStream.tv.

• Title: The Linux Action Show
• Host(s): Chris and Bryan
• Topics: Linux, Technology
• Web Site: www.jupiterbroadcasting.com
• Live Recordings: www.ustream.tv/channel/jupiterbroadcasting

You like my mathematical equation for dead playtime with World of Warcraft on a linuxbox?  When I first installed Fedora 8, I ran Wine 0.9[something] with nVidia’s proprietary drivers.  I had no problem playing World of Warcraft.  I did notice something though – that every time there was a kernel update – when I restarted my Xserver that things would be kind of haywire.  I would normally have to reinstall the video driver and then I’ll be back to status quo.  So; now I’m a bit more seasoned with linux and open source or non-proprietary software means a little more to me than before – and getting that to work with WoW has proved to be quite difficult.

The Free-be Process

First I’m going to talk about the natural progression of a user migrating from the “Windows/Mac” world into this vast ocean of the “linux” world.  I heard on a podcast that most folks come into the linux world for various reasons, but the consistent reason is for the FREE software.  It’s awesome NOT having to pay anything anymore.  As for me, I’ve been used to not paying for software for a very long time… I’m a digital pirate.  There; I’ve come out of the closet (on that issue, I’m really a heterosexual).  I haven’t paid for software in over 10+ years.  But over the past couple years my conscience has gotten the best of me and my escape from the underground is linux.

So; the natural progress is people want free software, later on when they become familiar with all this software – they are exposed to GNU and the fight between proprietary and non-proprietary software.  And that is where I am, my friend.  I wish to run linux with no proprietary software – well except for the NEEDED ones like Flash, etc.  If you’re running open source/non-proprietary software – you will have less complications as the kernel and operating system progresses and improves.

Getting WoW Installed

Ok; back to my dilemma at hand.  I installed Fedora 9 (F9) and I was stoked to see that Wine released their stable version, which is “one point oh” (1.0).  It’s a great milestone to release a 1.0 version and Wine has been in works for years.  I was happy to see that F9 had this in their repos.  I installed it and immediately installed World of Warcraft.  I had no problems with it.  I also installed the kmod-livna drivers for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card.  It worked because I was able to apply “Desktop Effects” and get the whole cube and wobbly windows effect.  But when I try to run WoW nothing would happen.  So; I ran the command in my terminal to see what the error messages were and it seemed to have not registered something with the Wine/Windows Registry.

I’m not certain which component is the culprit, but so far I can’t install any of my games using Wine 1.0.  GTA: San Andreas, Battlefield 2, etc.  I always get some freaky error and I usually just move on to other things I have to do.  So; I’ll try and keep a log of what happens, but this is my situation at the time.  I’ve done some Google searches and WIne forum searches, but no luck yet.

Well, I ended up installing a fresh copy of Fedora 9 this morning.  Didn’t take long at all.  I didn’t have the patients to try and figure out why my xserver wouldn’t work after my upgrade from Werewolf to Sulphur.  When I got home yesterday I reinstalled my video card drivers, for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT, but that didn’t fix the problem.  Oh well, the good thing is I’m back up and running with the latest version of Fedora – so now I just have to remount my DATA partition and restore my home directory.

There were some cool moments yesterday, such as: playing with Gparted and understanding this whole LVM thing a little better, understanding that I have a gigantic hard drive and if I move stuff around it’s going to take a long time to do things like that.  I also, finally, exposed my to Firefly (the television series, that got canceled) through Hulu.com.  I heard about hulu from some podcast and then I heard rave reviews from My ExtraLife Radio.  So; I tried it again (I signed up the first time, but didn’t do anything with it) and it is totally awesome.  I have the first season of Firefly que’d up and ready to watch.

Firefly Review

I want to do a full review of this series, but I’m only going to give a quick synopsis.  I’m very late to the game of watching this show – lots of scifi folks have raved about this series and are really upset that it got canceled and crappy shows like Battlestar Galactica is still running strong.

The show reminds me of a Japanese anime titled Cowboy Bebop.  To be honest I think it’s a total rip from that show, but they changed the story to fit American actors.  It’s done very well though – I really like the show and some of the dialog reminds me of the same kind of dialog you’ll find in Cowboy Bebop.  Very cool show – I look forward to watching more of it.

So last night I finally decided to upgrade my home desktop from Fedora 8: Werewolf (best name ever) to Fedora 9: Sulphur. My main reasoning was to get Banshee 1.0 installed and have a happier podcasting life. Lukily for me I have a seperate partition to store my data and I backed up my /home directory. Not all the files just the ones I thought were important, which included most of the [dot][files/folders].

I had a headache that night too, but I was determined to get this newer version running. After I took care of my family duties (kids, wife, blah blah) – I jumped on my machine and verified the ISO file I downloaded about a week after the release of Sulphur. Everything went well, I burned it to a DVD at 2.4x speed. Awh did it hurt to click “Burn” at that speed, but I found other stuff to do. Once it was finished I rebooted and started the process.

It took a long time to upgrade, so I went downstairs and watched some South Park with my brother. It was around 1:00 AM when I decided to go to bed. The process was almost finished, but I didn’t have any energy left to complete the process.

In the morning I saw the beautiful “congratulations” screen and rebooted the machine. The first thing that shows you something is wrong is I didn’t get a neat little splash screen while the processes were loading. I’ve learned that that has something to do with Xserver. It then tried to give me a login screen, but kept blinking out. I clicked the <ENTER> key and I saw a text login. All signs that Xserver is not running. I logged in, typed “startx”, waited, and recieved this error message:

giving up
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to Xserver
xinit: No such process (errno 3): server error.

Yah, no one likes to see those kind of messages. I’m researching it now on Fedora Forums. I do have a nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card AND I am using their propritary drivers (no luck with Lvina). So stay tuned for more adventures in me messing things up!