Thursday, September 27, 2012

My First Blog Post! - Oh and a Eucalyptus 3.1 Debian ISO

After 15+ years of being online, I think it's finally time that I started a blog.  I would have done it sooner, but I just didn't really have anything useful to share - although that doesn't seem to stop the millions in twitter land.

Since it is my first ever blog post, I think it best to give a bit of background on myself, but I will try not to bore you in the process.

My name is Brian Thomason, and I work for Eucalyptus Systems, Inc., the creators of the private Cloud, as a Release Engineer.  I will soon be transitioning into the role of Partner Engineer there and will be sure to keep you abreast of what's going on there with ramblings here from time to time.

I started my career 10 years ago at Lindows (which became Linspire) doing Debian packaging work.  While I cut my teeth on Linux using Mandrake 7.1, I later fell in love with Debian due to its package management system, and more specifically its dependency resolution tool, apt.  Lindows was trying to take Debian to the next level on the consumer Desktop by creating a user interface for apt dubbed CNR  (Click-N-Run)  In a world that was then dominated by off-the-shelf software on CD-ROM, Lindows saw the vision of digitally distributed software, and that was a vision I bought into eagerly.  Apparently it wasn't a bad idea, as Apple's App Store has shown.  Unfortunately, Lindows started going downhill financially and eventually shut its doors.

From there, I moved on to Canonical, the company behind the popular Linux distribution Ubuntu.  For my first few years there I worked on Debian packaging of third party software just as I had done before at Lindows.  During my last year there I was transitioned to the Systems Integration team where I worked on taking large software projects and integrating them into Ubuntu. (glorified terminology for more Debian packaging work) This is when i got my first taste of the "Cloud", working on projects such as CloudFoundry and OpenStack.

Ironically, upon my return from an OpenStack sprint (one-week jam session) at Canonical, I found a message from a Eucalyptus recruiter waiting in my LinkedIn inbox asking if I was looking for new opportunities.

So here I am.  You can guess what Eucalyptus hired me for - yes, aside from my dashing good looks and charming wit, it was for my experience with packaging various types of software for Debian/Ubuntu.

All of that is what has led me to you today.  Thanks to much help from the Debian Eucalyptus Team, Eucalyptus 3.1 is now available in Debian Unstable (Sid).  Sadly, it made it in just after the Wheezy freeze so won't likely make it into that release.

However, if you' like to give it a try, I have created an installer ISO image based off of the Debian Mini ISO that will allow you to easily install Eucalyptus atop Debian Sid on your amd64 system.  Please note that the mini ISO requires that you have an internet connection to perform the install as only a very minimal set of packages is included on the ISO itself - hence, Mini.

Without further ado, here it is:


Please comment if you have issues/questions.  For those not familiar with Eucalyptus, I will be posting a set of configuration instructions here very soon.

Thank you for reading, and enjoy!

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