-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 (Apologies for this being sent in English only, translators are welcome and appreciated, I'll try to do better next time!) I'm trying to reach out to the various Linux communities to offer free remote access to POWER hardware and other development resources. This is not spam, so if you're interested, please read on! There's a lot of interesting projects going on with the various Linux on POWER and OpenPower initiatives within IBM this year and on into next year. But first, a brief introduction on myself.. My name is David A. Desrosiers (no, not THAT[1] David Desrosiers, make sure you use the "A." in the middle if you Google me). I've been working with Linux and Open Source since the early 90's back in the days of Ygdrassil, comp.os.minix and downloading Linux onto floppies to install it, and before that, I used AIX. Several years ago, I used to work for a company called Linuxcare in San Francisco in their Research group with some brilliant and very well-known Open Source developers. Remember the original "Bootable Business Card"? That was one of our projects. "The 1-800 Number for Linux"? We were that too. The company rapidly collapsed on itself, and all of the talent went to other companies, including myself. Now, several years later, I work for IBM with the title of "Linux on POWER Developer Program Manager". Basically I am one of the IBM interfaces into the Open Source community to help them gain access to hardware, documentation and other resources that they might need to develop-on or port their applications to, the POWER platform. This isn't a "sales" position so don't worry, I'm not collecting email addresses or selling anything, I am here strictly to help promote hardware and resources to Open Source developers. I'm also a long-time Open Source developer, maintainer and tinkerer myself and have been for over a decade with Linux. I'm the current maintainer of a few projects you might know about. pilot-link[2] is probably the most well-known one in this space. pilot-link is the glue between your Palm OS handheld device and your Linux/Unix desktop and PIM/calendaring data. Lots of OSS and commercial projects rely upon the code in pilot-link to function, and we get zero assistance from Palm themselves to maintain our efforts. I host dozens of projects and contribute code, web space, mailing lists and other resources to help these projects succeed. Feel free to ask me about my other involvement in the Linux community if you're curious. Developing in very constrained embedded Linux environments and PDAs provides a stark contrast to developing on something as vast and "virtual" as the POWER platform, so this is a slight learning curve for me as well. I'm learning how to use it just as much as you are. My main focus within IBM is to help bridge the gap between the Open Source development community and the internal IBM development process, to help developers and users grow to use and like the POWER platform. Some of my tasks include helping to provide remote access to POWER-based hardware for developers (and up-and-coming developers, tinkerers, hackers and curious lookers-be) to use to learn, test, debug and develop new or existing applications on the POWER platform. There are some subtle differences between POWER and something like Intel's x86 architecture. This makes having access to real hardware to develop on, very important. I'll go into some detail on that a bit later if you want. If you're interested in checking out what these POWER systems actually feel like under the hood, you can sign up and log in remotely to one of the University systems we've set up at the University of Augsburg and Peking University (its our intent to bring several other universities online later this year as well). You'll get a shell account, disk space and all of the tools and resources you'll need to work with the hardware and software components on the systems. http://openpowerproject.org/us/index.php Create an account, pull over some source code from some of your favorite projects and try building and testing it under the POWER architecture. Each server offers its own configuration and options with your remote (non-root) shell account. Oregon State University Open Source Labs: ------------------------------------------- http://wiki.osuosl.org/display/PPC64/Home SourceForge.net compile farm, with OpenPower ------------------------------------------- http://sourceforge.net/docs/compile_farm#cf_overview University of Portland Linux on Power Portal ------------------------------------------- http://egr.up.edu:8080/ University of Augsburg, in Augsburg Germany (Debian) http://tuxppc.rz.uni-augsburg.de/doc/faq/ ------------------------------------------- Server........: OpenPower 720 Equipment.....: 4-Way POWER5 Memory........: 8GB Installation..: Debian Peking University, Peking China (SuSE) http://ppclinux.pku.edu.cn/ ------------------------------------------- Server........: OpenPower 720 Equipment.....: 4-Way POWER5 Memory........: 16GB Installation..: SuSE Enterprise 9 There's quite a few other things going on that I'll elaborate on later. I'm doing my best to learn as much as I can about the POWER architecture (its new to me too!), and splitting my duties between being an interpretor for the Open Source community and for IBM as well as my own Open Source responsibilities. Its all great fun stuff. Feel free to comment or ask me any questions you might have about how you can get involved, and I'll do what I can to get you the answer, or point you to the right people who can get you the answer. Interesting times are ahead..! (don't forget to check out or Linux on POWER blogs too![3]) David A. Desrosiers daviddes@us.ibm.com Linux on POWER Developer Program Manager [1] http://www.simpleplan.com/band.php [2] http://www.pilot-link.org/ [3] http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/dw_blog.jspa?roll=0&blog=752 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFD9kA2kRQERnB1rkoRAr5dAJ9WUX7HfyHTnbEPmOU3DQ26rjmpMgCdGbaW DWxo7025OpAlabUezxLP0lI= =eINl -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----