Pietro Abate homepage

I'm going to deliver this talk at fosdem 2012, room H.1301 (CrossDistribution Devroom) at 16:30 on Sat. If you are interested, please come by. In particular I'd like to talk with all the developers out there that are using our work (of edos fame) and to discuss with them future plans to migrate their programs to the new generation of mancoosi - powered QA tools.

This summer my beloved thinkpad x301 died in a cloud of smoke. It was exactly 3 years and 20 days old while my warranty was valid only for 3 years. Now, don't tell me this is a coincidence. Anyway. After about 5 months, I finally managed to convince my employer to get me a new thinkpad, the x220. My specs includes a 128G SSD , 4G of RAM, 2.4Gz processor, camera and fingerprint reader.

It's a pity that the x300 series is not in production anymore. They were light, with a solid battery and a large screen. The X1 just don't cut it.

Got my tickets, now looking for a place to sleep... My first debconf. It's going to be gooood :)

Recently, all relevant packages needed to run mpm (the mancoosi package manager) landed in debian (thanks ralf and zack !). Now it should be a tad easier to run mpm and to play with it. The code of mpm is available on the mancoosi svn repository (user/pass : mancoosi/mancoosi) . To run it, you also need to install python-apt.

These are all cudf solvers you can use as mpm backends.

Thanks to Ralf's work, dose3 has been just accepted in debian experimental !!!

After a bit of work, today I decided to start using mpm, the mancoosi package manager, to upgrade my laptop. My first use of it on a production system - until now I run all my experiments in throw-away virtual machines - and it works !

Not rocket science here. During the last month David Kalnischkies (of APT fame) visited our offices in Paris and together with zack worked out a communication protocol between apt-get and the mancoosi cudf solvers (EDSP). I guess somebody is going to announce all details about this endeavor soon.

One important aspect of the mancoosi project is to build a model of the installation process in order to simulate packages upgrades before committing the changes on the machine.

The next 16 of april in hannover at the hotswup workshop we'll present a joint work with Roberto Di Cosmo prepared in the context of the mancoosi project. Since we used debian for our experiments, we're also very much interested in the feedback from the community regarding our method. However keep in mind that this is still work in progress and to be considered as research more then a proposal for a concrete application.

A while ago I received a new desktop machine (8 cores, 8Gb of memory ...) at work. Since for the moment I kinda happy to work on my laptop using an external screen, I decided to put the hw to a good use and to explore a bit more some more exotic (at least for me) xen features.

In particular I spend half a day playing with different xen network settings. The bridge model, that should work out of the shelf, is the easiest one.