Using a public Amazon EC2 Image on your account

Recently I have been in the need of having an image of Amazon Web services EC2 (Stand for Elastic Computing). Amazon was a pioneer in the offer of VPS, other companies have step up like Rackspace, Microsoft and Google.

However one thing that I most say is that Web Services from Amazon is a bit confusing if you are new into having to launch an image. The Dashboard just show you too much, that might get you confused.

Amazon web service dashboard

So to start using it, can be a major task. Here is a quick follow through instructions on how to get an instance running without breaking a sweat:

1. Go to EC2
2. Under Images, select AMI
3. Change the filter from Owned by me to Public Images
4. Go through the description of the thousands of images available. Once you find the one you want, check the ID which should be something like: ami-asd1312
5. Select it and Launch
6. This will take you to a wizard to configure your instance from that AMI (Amazon Image)
7. The final step is to connect to your instance, you do this by selecting the Public DNS and the user which would depend on the distro you are using. For example, ubuntu for ubuntu, fedora for fedora, and user1 for Amazon Linux.

That’s it, once connected you will be able to ssh into the machine and be able to operate it. Althought as you can see this is only once service, there are many ways to configure your instances and this will only be a first step to jump into what Amazon offers you.

Remember this is a paid service and that you are being billed, so make sure to keep an eye on your configurations, budgets and how you treat your VMS.

The help files give you instructions on how to install a regular LAMP server and how to configure it the way you want it.

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Are you ready for total KaOS?

KDE is a great desktop, it needs a good OS that knows what its doing to make it look awesome.

Marcel Gommans

      Another relatively unknown distro I recently came across is KaOS. In 2013 KaOS was created as an independent OS. It is based on the Linux kernel, although the makers still look at Opensolaris as an alternative base. KaOS 2014.04 uses pacman as its package manager. This might give you the idea that it is Arch-based, but the website clearly states that it’s completely indepentent. Let’s find out if KaOS is an undiscovered gem or if it leads to chaos…. Installation Before we start the installation, we have to know one important decision the creators have made when they started this distribution: creating an OS is about making choises. They decided to make a few decisions that can make this distro interesting for you, or not. After choosing the Linux kernel they picked KDE as the only available desktop environment and QT as their toolkit. KaOS only has…

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FLISOL 2013 – The experience

This post is dedicated more toward the actual event, having a great location in La Gran Plaza was a great way to start. Adding the wittiness of Sandy was a great help to organize the decoration of the venue. With many high quality flyers and also great ammount of projectors we were able to make a very lively and hip place.

balloons and fun

Awesome technology was exposed

Many people came to the event and was good to be able to chat with them and also see them gather around to learn about different areas of software and areas of discovery. The topics went from games to enterprise to educational involvements.

Some of the talks we had included:

• How to make money as a programmer
• Education in technology with free software

The installfest area,was the main area, which means that a lot of Free software was installed, from USB, to CDs. Many people was able to experience different distros and applications on education and such.

Finally we had some social media with tweets from across the globe, on different events across latin america.

I think the event acomplish it’s goal, we would have hope to see more students and such, but I think it was a great experience for everybody.

FLISOL 2013 – random notes for the future of events

Finally after 2 years of constant development, the event that I was hoping to carry across came to a reality. After a big push by some sponsors including Universidad del Sur and members of Tequila Valley we were able to gather the right spot, with enough tables, chairs, baloons and volunteers.

Organizing the event gave me a different perspectives and lessons learned from the previous ones. To start, I was able to focus more on the variety of the event. Different activities and also more focus on the amenities and decorations.

I also got some bad assumptions like trying to asume that the technique with the mic will work on the conferences and we wont be able to suffer from last minute delays.

Other issues were the way promotion was held, some schools are too bureacratic and are just not very easy to get a hold of the channels you need to go through many motions and most people don’t know how to handle your request.

Usually when u have 1 sponsor that cover most of th things, there is little to no problem, but trying to do this without any single big sponsor is a bit hectic.

Having documentation, does help, however there is alwaya a juggle between flyers, banners, digital promos and multimedia promos. The development is not as hard as the promotion but is definetly something you want to go about with enough time.

Money is probably the hardest thing to come by. Many people promise to give money but very few do, so is always good to plan for scarcity.

Besides all these lessons, we can also review some more specific goals. Things like, how much money you want to charge, and how much u think you will make back. If you charge is important to know who will handle it, and if this will be something you will be able to afford moving forward.

Events, specially free one, are sometimes hard to manage since resource are scarse, but having good footage of the event is something we want to consider for the future. If we want to get more and more partners we would need to have a better image and documentation of it.

A good blog, column, and gallery can be enough. Even better if ther is some video footage. In the end a sales pitch for next year and marketing kit should be gathered and developed.

 

 

 

This vim guy made me feel like a rook

This week I was able to watch a great talk by a VIM guy who went to town on how to use VIM. I consider myself a GNU/Linux power user. Experienced enough to say GNU before Linux and know enough to watch my daily Linux news, and weekly FLOSS podcasts.

However vim is one of those tools that I use everyday but I always feel guilty how lazy I am to not try some of the zillion of keystrokes like many of the ones showed on this tutorial. I found tons of keystrokes that I could very well use on my file editor.

So here is a list that clearly got my attention:

• w for word advancement
• a to add a new character after the cursos instead o at the current place like i
• e: to eliminate as opposed to x
• f: to find something within the line, this is awesome
• .: to repeat the process recorded
• c: for copy
• and so much more

I end up wanting a part two fof this tutorial and download it for later reference.

Happy Bday Linux

Just want to wish the Linux  kernel  a happy 20th anniversary

So I will talk a bit about my beginings with Linux, when I first knew about Linux and how I became to care for it.

I learned about Linux back in 97 where a computer magazine annouced their Red Hat version 3 in a magazine. This was the first Red Hat as opposed to RHEL.

However even thought I bought the magazine (or was it my brother) and actually got the CD in and start looking at what it had. I realize I need to errase all my data. Since I didnt had a CD burner it will take me a long time, which I wasn’t up to. So I left it alone and focus on watching and reading about it in the magazine.

In college my laptop got screwed and buying a new laptop I decided to give Linux a try. That’s when I start asking and talking about Linux to my internship mentors. They had Linux on their data center and want it to try it. Then like any other geek I did what most geeks do. Download every possible version of Linux and want it to emulate all the different distros and have an external Hard disk that will save a vm store of different distros.

Fast forward to my move to Boston and start attending the MIT BLU which gave me a great insight into what Linux really was and how hardcore the technology was. That turned me on and start selling me into Linux. I start listening to the linux show podcast (not the linux action show). Years passed and I was an avid fan and start digging around the groups and reading ebooks about linux. Even was so eager to get a Linux Red Hat certification video tutorial from IRC. But the 3.5 GB put me a bit off.

Eventually I move to New York and start going to all these different Linux groups and events including the NYPC, the NYLUG, the LinuxWorld Conference and so on. When I came back to Mexico I started my own Linux group called GULTab and from then on I started thinking into giving back to FLOSS. So I joined OpenOffice.org.

Eventually in 2004 I became the lead of the project, and launched Linux Xpo in Monterrey and had my little spot in the Linux ecosystem. Since then I have focus mostly in OpenOffice.org and leading other projects beside the spanish project like the Education and so on.

Also I have been using Linux exclusively for almost 10 years. Have worked as a System Administrator for large companies  and eventually came into pursuing other interests within the floss area as a way of living from.

FLOSS have made me for 10 years and I hope I could be here for the next 20 years.

Recording on FLISOL

Today the podcast I record with Rockdeveloper was launched, unfortunately is in spanish but hope still useful.

Por fin está listo el podcast del mes de Marzo.

En esta ocasión nos acompañó Alexandro Colorado, un entusiasta promotor del software libre, para platicarnos acerca del FLISOL y su realización en la ciudad de Cancún, lugar donde actualmente radicamos Cesar, Iaax y un servidor, así como el buen JZA (Alexandro) .

Espero les guste esta amena charla de aproximadamente 40 minutos, donde JZA nos comparte su experiencia como colaborador del proyecto OpenOffice.org y su vision de la filosofía del Software Libre.

Aprovechamos este espacio para animar a todos los escuchas a participar en el FLISOL ya sea en Cancun o en donde sea que radiquen (esperemos que se realice un FLISOL en tu ciudad), ya que la colaboración es la materia prima de este movimiento.

Les adjunto los datos de JZA para cualquier información sobre el FLISOL.

JZA
Coordinador Nacional para Mexico del FLISOL
twitter: @flisolmexico
web: http://flisol.info/Mexico

Gracias,  apoyen el movimiento y comenten. Nos vemos en Abril.

 

Download the podcast here:

 

My talk from ENLI

Here is my conference from ENLI

It was inspired on the lack of attention to the way to contribute, this was meant to be like a howto contribute to the projects and what are the real prerequisites and advantages of contributing from a student point of view or a recent graduate.

Preparing for ENLI and (re)funding contributors

So tomorrow I am leaving to ENLI and this morning I wake up to a terrible news that one of the oooES contributors got robbed at his place. The news came as a shock and of course I was inmediately concerned that his laptop got lost. So inmediately I wired him some money to get his laptop replaced. In the end I got to talk to him and even though he lost some data, fortunately he had some backups. As I was thinking about this I was also updating my backups.

I spend some minutes on the #Mandriva IRC chatroom since it allows to clarify the options when performing rsync:

rsync -avz ~ /path/to/destination/

and

rsync -avz –delete ~ /path/to/destination/

to keep my files update and delete the files that are not available or are obsolete. I was recomended an O’Reily tutotrial.

In all case, I think that I should remind people to backup and maybe I should start thinking on having web backups. Not just the 2GB dropbox but significally creating a mirror on the web. Unforutnately that would take me mantain a 1TB web disk. Not that I need to backup my movies and music but still.

So back to the ENLI topic, I need to start making the lougage and prepare for the trip. Fortunately the hours are confortable and I think I can be there in no time. So I hope that things work out well. The presentation is surely changing and I think the end result would be satisfactory to the listeners. Just hope to have a good ammount of images.

This week in starbucks….

This week was interesting, and by that I mean a bit unconfortable. Due to some bitching from my roomates, they decided stand up to the man and not pay the electricity bill, resulting in a 2 day (so far) blackout. Forcing me to report the rest of the week from a Starbucks. Is almost 11pm and soon i will be going back to my dark apartment. I’ve been here since 11am when I woke up, took a shower and report to my local starbucks for a good 12 hr period.

Sounds nasty? Well actually it has been quite the opposite. I dunno if its the elevator music or what else, but I have been quite productive everytime I come to the Starbucks. Also was expecting my weekly geek meetup which resulted also in good excuse to be here.

In general the day gave me a good period to produce some interesting work dealing with the recording of my first video for FLISOL, the event I am getting involved and pushing for 2 sites, one in Cancun and another in Villahermosa.

So far it looks pretty good. Good email communication, and great inroads fixing the recording,mixing it and finally generating a first draft of the video. Yesterday I did some 3D and have got some other members of the organization to help me out making some animations and provoking good results.

I will be posting the finalized video, so far I can add the original OGG mix.