FrOSCon is a two-day conference on free software and open source, which takes place on 24th and 25th June 2006 at the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, in St. Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

The Call for Papers ends on March 15th - so you better hurry if you want to give a presentation there! I proposed two MySQL-related talks and also asked some other colleagues to file a few submissions. There is enough stuff happening here to talk about

By the way, their registration frontend is very slick - it's called pentabarf (which I personally think is a weird name) and is powered by Ruby on Rails.

Alfredo announced the availability of version 1.0.5 beta of the MySQL Workbench, the latest product in the MySQL GUI tools family (also check out the Administrator, Query Browser and the Migration Toolkit).

I downloaded the RPM for SUSE Linux 9.3, which installed flawlessly on my SUSE 10.0 system. To test the reverse engineering capabilities, I installed the latest version of the Sakila …

I made reference previously to Testing/Trialing new MySQL Releases using VMWare.

Well, I’ve just about completed my own Image for the lastest MySQL 5.0 (given I’m now running MySQL 5.1). I’m interested in sharing my experiences, and even providing some images for users if there is any demand out there.

What I’ve decided on is to use the VMWare supplied Browser Appliance which is Ubuntu 5.10. The great thing is the image autoboots into graphical mode, auto logins and loads a browser. My goal now is to get a suitable startup page describing the MySQL environment, links, manual etc.

The only requirements to run would be the …

Some recent posts regarding Oracle (See Smart moves by MySQL AB and Larry Ellison still doesn’t understand open source) leads me to put in my 2 cents worth.

My background I’m sure like a lot of experienced MySQL people is in Oracle, and indeed in Ingres before that (starting in 1988). I have also worked for a number of years at Oracle Corporation. Ironically I started as their resident Ingres Specialist, in an international research project of DMS (Design & Migration Services) of re-engineering Ingres applications into an Oracle Designer Repository some 10 years ago in 1996. I of course moved into a number of other Oracle roles for clients following that. I still retain some …

Some days ago I interviewed Ian Linden, the Director of Operations at Linden Lab (the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life) about Second Life, Linux, MySQL and other OSS usage for their operations. I actually performed the interview inside of Second Life, which was quite fun, especially now that there is a Linux client! You can read the full interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. Have a nice weekend!

Update: The interview is now listed on the Featured Articles page on the MySQL Developer Zone, too. If you would like to know more about Second Life and MySQL, Ian will …

I had an exciting weekend at the FOSDEM Conference in Brussels. Initially I planned on writing a few blog entries while at the event (while memory was still fresh), but the Internet access there was very flaky and it was almost impossible to get a working wireless connection. So here is my (slighly belated) writeup.
Continue reading "FOSDEM writeup"

Later today I will be heading off to the sixth Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting in Brussels, Belgium. I look forward to the various sessions and meeting with the members of other Open Source projects, especially the folks from the openSUSE team. I hope this meeting allows me to build closer relations to other OSS projects that use or support MySQL in any way.

See you there! After having checked into my hotel tonight, I'll try to find my way to Le Roy d'Espagne to meet with others that arrived today.

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups - can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm …

In the last minute life of Colin, I managed to get a flight on Tuesday to head to Singapore for Mark Shuttleworth’s Ubuntu Asian Business Tour, pretty much in the nick of time. It was a complete rush from getting the tickets, to reaching the hotel, and getting to the Singapore Management University (arrived only five minutes past!). The LUGS meets are large - going by the numbers, it seemed larger than what we have at LUV in Melbourne, and definitely greater than the MYOSS meetups.

Mark is an excellent speaker, who told us about Ubuntu’s place in the market, and all the cool things Canonical is doing to extend its reach. Being on a tight schedule, he didn’t stick around for after-talk discussions, but quite a number of other folk did. Harish Pillay (RH’s CTA in Singapore) had a couple of boxes of Fedora Core 4 giveaways, which a lot were pleased to snap up!

So I stuck around to have some dinner, and realised something …

These are my first impressions of MySQL WorkBench 1.0.1. Rant and rave you may say, but a new user, or an experienced modeller would probably observe these points. Also, given that (with a poll?) I suspect a good number of users will be previous DBDesigner users, some level of functionality that may not be considered initially in a new product, should be considered for this migration path of legacy users.

I’ll take the time to review the Forums adding my points, and review Bug System but for now, just blogging is easier.

Conclusion

Note: Generally a conclusion is at the bottom, but I’d suspect most readers will switch off …