[dot] KDE Dot News: Sponsored by OSU Open Source Lab

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1134714488/

From: Navindra Umanee <navindra at kde.org>
Dept: happy-holidays
Date: Thursday 15/Dec/2005, @22:28

KDE Dot News: Sponsored by OSU Open Source Lab
==============================================

   I'm happy to announce that KDE Dot News is now fully hosted and
supported by the OSU Open Source Lab [http://osuosl.org/].  OSUOSL have
graciously provided us with both server and network hosting.  Of course,
OSUOSL has long been hosting us on their network while we had still been
sharing the Ark Linux [http://www.arklinux.org/] webserver.  As we
outgrew the Ark Linux server however and ran into resource limitations,
OSUOSL graciously offered us new server hosting.  The dot is now
significantly more responsive and we should definitely be seeing an
improvement in uptime as well.  A big thank you
[http://www.kde.org/support/thanks.php] to OSUOSL and all the great guys
[http://osuosl.org/about/] on their support team -- it's been a true
pleasure working with you.

     For those interested, the OSUOSL server hosting has been provided
to us in the form of a Xen virtual machine
[http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/] running Gentoo Linux
[http://www.gentoo.org/]. I must say I am truly impressed by the
combination.
     Xen is completely transparent to the VM user and if I didn't know
better I'd think we had a dedicated machine -- no doubt the OSUOSL staff
are also to thank for making it all work so smoothly.  Performance has
been fantastic although it will be interesting to see how things
progress as the machine gains more users.
     I've never used Gentoo before but I am finding it to be a well
thought out distribution.  Everything just works and it has some nice
touches out-of-the-box such a colorised bash shell (unfortunately I'm a
tcsh guy and experiencing colour in bash made me quite reluctant to go
back to my black and white world).  We were initially provided with a
fairly barebones Gentoo system but it has been extremely easy to pull in
and configure any extra software we needed -- a simple emerge usually
did the trick.  emerge even comes with an rpm-compatible command line
interface in the form of epm.  However, the fact that emerge compiles
everything from source is starting to get a little old -- nothing like
waiting for XEmacs to compile on your production web server.  It'll be
worth investigating emerge binary packages, if those exist.
     Finally, another thanks to  [http://www.arklinux.org/] for having
hosted us for so long despite their limited resources.