LearnByDoingIT

  • From a post By Katherine Noyes, PCWorld

    Check out the full post for links to related articles and a wealth of other information.

    Numerous studies have emerged over the past few years indicating that Linux skills are a hot item in the IT hiring market, but on Tuesday the Linux Foundation will publish a brand-new report suggesting that the search for such talent is taking on a new level of urgency.

    linuxTo wit: While 81 percent of hiring managers recently surveyed said that hiring Linux talent is a priority in the year ahead–63 percent, in fact, say they will hire Linux talent over other skill areas–a full 85 percent of those hiring managers said that finding Linux professionals is difficult.

    Their solution? When they can find Linux talent, companies are increasingly paying bigger salaries and bonuses to those people. In fact, Linux salaries are growing at more than double the rate of other tech salaries–which themselves are on the rise–and bonuses are increasing as well.

    It’s a good time to be working with Linux, in other words.

    ‘Some of the Hottest Jobs in Tech’

    The 2012 Linux Jobs Report, co-produced by careers site Dice.com and The Linux Foundation, reflects the results of a December survey of more than 2,300 hiring managers around the world, nearly half of whom reported that they expect to add more Linux professionals to their firms in early 2012.

    The 2012 Linux Jobs ReportThe 2012 Linux Jobs Report

    While tech professionals on the whole saw an average pay increase of just two percent in 2011, professionals with Linux skills have seen a five percent increase in salaries and a 15 percent jump in bonus payouts over the same timeframe, the study found.

    Flexible work schedules and additional training and certification programs were among the other perks managers reported giving Linux gurus.

    Mid-level professionals with three to five years of experience were targeted by 75 percent of respondents as the most sought-after hires, particularly when they have development or systems administration skills.

    The infographic on the right summarizes some of the study’s key findings.

    “Linux jobs have become some of the hottest jobs in all of tech,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “Clearly, hiring managers throughout the IT tech sector understand this and are aggressively seeking Linux professionals.”

    ‘Simply a Core Skill’

    Indeed, no other tech skill has matched Linux in demand growth over the past 10 years, noted Alice Hill, managing director with Dice.com.

    “The best Linux candidates have options, and we need more talented professionals to join the community,” she added. “Linux is simply a core skill for anyone pursuing a career in software development or systems administration.”

    As of Tuesday, the new report can be downloaded from the Linux Foundation’s site.

    In the meantime, how are your Linux skills coming along? Don’t forget there are lots of ways to bolster those skills online.

  • Posted 21 Feb 2012 on OpenSource.com by Sebastian Dziallas

    Imdergrads and open source contributors without writing any code 

    This is the story of a college class taught inside an open source community. Last fall, I taught Release Engineering to a small group of undergraduates at Olin College, an engineering school a few miles outside Boston. The goal was to teach them how to become functional technical contributors to an open source project–without writing any code. In the hopes that others will be inspired to teach similar classes, I’ve written our experiences up as a case study in three pieces: cultural, technical, and "getting real."

    The cultural

    My students all came from different backgrounds, so we started the semester by diving into some of the cultural particularities of open source communities reading pieces such as "the Cathedral and the Bazaar." See our reading list and notes from the first session.

    We grappled with concepts such as "scratch your own itch," "radical transparency," and "release early, release often." (See a more detailed list of concepts.) Experienced open source contributors practice these cultural norms daily and often take them for granted, but norms vary from community to community and might not be immediately obvious to newcomers. When going into a new environment, it is important to know how not to offend.

    The technical

    The technical meat of the course came in a strange format: packaging–the art of getting an application into a distribution’s repositories. Although the task of packaging is at the core of every Linux distribution, it is unusual outside the world of open source, so many (if not most) computing majors will never experience it. So why teach packaging? It’s a complex task that depends on knowing and using a large number of key skills in release engineering, but it can also be done in a very short period of time, in a matter of hours or days–you don’t have to wait through an entire 6+ month release cycle.

    For instance, dependencies need to be tracked and kept up to date, meaning that students quickly get a firsthand knowledge of the chaos that ensues when developers independently decide on API changes that break compatibilities. Patches need to be maintained for accuracy. Bundled libraries need to be cut out without damaging the actual application. Things like "documentation" and "version control" and "modular design" become painfully relevant instead of abstract values students know they "should" follow but don’t see the reason for. However, I do want to point out that these materials are designed to be taught by an experienced packager and release engineer; as with many arts, engineering is best taught through apprenticeship. Since I’ve been doing release engineering in major open source projects (including Fedora, the project where my students worked) since I was 16, I was able to guide them through. CS professors may want to find one or more community liaisons to mentor their students through these sorts of activities.

    Real projects and interactions

    As their large project, my students packaged the programming language io. In order to facilitate teamwork, I required them to write the configuration file in Etherpad, a collaborative text editor. This way, they could see at all times what the other students were doing, ask questions, and launch into a conversation. Control was not solely in the hands of a single student holding the computer. The experiment worked quite well. They returned with a set of very precise questions and an almost-complete configuration file, which was farther than I’d expected. We eventually found that the package was already part of Fedora. (Read more details.)

    By the end of the semester, my students had interacted with the open source community primarily through IRC, but I also wanted to show them that in-person events were also valuable. So when Fedora Engineering Manager Tom Callaway gave a talk at the nearby Western New England University, we organized a field trip. Tom’s talk, "This Is Why You FAIL," (inspired by this chapter of The Open Source Way), was a hit. Having someone else explain to my students now not to Do Things Wrong was powerful. The Western New England students seemed to think so too.

    Many teachers, many thanks

    One of the best parts of teaching open source is that your students get to learn from many people, not just you. I’d like to express my gratitude to Tom "Spot" Callaway and all the Fedora contributors who answered my students’ questions online, as well as to professors Allen Downey, Heidi Ellis, and Zhenya Zastavker for being models and mentors for my own teaching.

  • From on GigaOM

    For anyone thinking the big data trend is a flash in the pan, there’s some new evidence to the contrary. A hefty 75 percent of IT pros and developers responding to a new Linux Foundation survey have their eyes firmly on this big data phenomenon.

    More than three-quarters of the 428 respondents “expressed concern” about big data, and nearly 72 percent (unsurprisingly) said they will use Linux to support big data applications.  The respondents, while biased towards Linux — this is the Linux Foundation after all – do not work in a vacuum. A respectable 35.9 percent said they plan to use Windows to meet their big data needs.

    The survey queried IT/IS people and developers in organizations with $500 million or more in annual revenue and 500 or more employees.  Just less than half  (41.6 percent) of the respondents are based in the U.S. or Canada.

  • From Carla Schroder, here, on Linux.com comes a multi-part series entitled the Unsung Heroes of Linux.  What caught my eye was the inclusion of Lady Ada whose products I have purchased starting soon after she started selling them as my son found them, and the Linux Wireless project, which, for those of us with early WaveLAN cards who worked through all the variations really came to appreciate.  You probably have other favorites, but a fun start to a list.  Head over to the site to see the full article.

    Everyone knows and loves Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Mark Shuttleworth, the creator of Ubuntu Linux, is pretty famous. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the GPL, is equal parts famous and infamous. But surely there is more to Linux and Free/Open Source software than these three. And indeed there are thousands upon thousands of people toiling away fueling the mighty FOSS engine; here is a small sampling of these important contributors who make the FOSS world go ’round.

    Lady Ada, Adafruit Industries

    Lady Ada is Limor Fried, electronics engineer and founder of Adafruit Industries. My fellow crusty old-timers remember way way back when Radio Shack was actually about do-it-yourself electronics hacking instead of the passive brain-decay of cell phones and big-screen TVs.

    Adafruit Industries is a welcome replacement for us weirdos who like to take things apart and figure out how they work. Adafruit Industries sells Arduino boards, kits, and related parts and tools. Even more valuable is the wealth of well-illustrated tutorials. You can start from scratch, with no electronics knowledge, and get a solid fundamental education in a few days’ of reading and hands-on hacking.

    Akkana Peck, Rennaissance Nerd

    Akkana is one of my favorite people. She used to race cars and motorcyles, flies little radio-controlled airplanes, is into astronomy, mountain biking, kayaking, photography, and all kinds of fun stuff.

    Akkana is a versatile and talented coder who has worked at cool-sounding places like Silicon Graphics and Netscape, and currently works for a startup doing embedded Linux and Android work. Akkana wrote the excellent Beginning GIMP book and a bunch of first-rate Linux howtos for Linux Planet. She also writes all kinds of amazing technical articles on her Shallow Sky blog. What earned Akkana a place on this list is her generosity in sharing knowledge and helping other Linux users. Learning, doing, and sharing – isn’t that what it’s all about?

    John Linville, Linux Wireless

    The Linux Wireless project is a model that more FOSS projects should emulate. Back around 2006 or so kernel developer John Linville and his team took on the task of overhauling the Linux wireless stack. It was a mess of multiple wireless subsystems (Wavelan, Orinoco, and MadWifi). Drivers were all over the map in what functions they handled, sometimes conflicting with the kernel.

    In just a couple of years, without fanfare, it was all significantly streamlined and improved, with a common driver base (mac80211) and assistance for vendors and end users. There are still some odds and ends to be worked out, but it’s at the stage where most wireless network interfaces have plug-and-play native Linux support.

    Jean Tourillhes, Wireless Tools for Linux

    Jean Tourillhes was the core maintainer and primary documenter of the old Linux WLAN drivers and userspace tools. If it were not for Mr. Tourillhes wi-fi on Linux would have been brutish and nasty. (WLAN and wireless-tools have been replaced by the new Linux Wireless project.)

    Ken Starks, the Helios Initiative

    Ken Starks does the kind of hard, hands-on advocacy that delivers the best results: rehabbing computers with Linux and giving them to children who can’t afford to buy their own computers. Since the Helios Project moved into spiffy new quarters in Taylor, Texas they’ve expanded to building a computer lab and teaching classes

  • I resolved the core.img is unusually large problem by expanding the boot partition.

    I was reinstalling a server yesterday and I found that Fedora 16 Anaconda will put a 1MB partition first in order to boot, before adding the 500MB (current standard) partition for /boot.

    Yeah!

    On the first machine, one of the tasks I completed in order to assist in troubleshooting was to create a USB key with Grub2 on it to boot the machine into Fedora.  That left me with Windows dual booting just fine and allowed me breathing space to troubleshoot and use gparted to solve my problem.

    Put these Grub2 Linux bash commands into Diigo today so you have them when you need them.  A reminder that GNU GRUB is a work in progress and the information in this website is incomplete and may be wrong and/or out of date. Please consult the official GNU GRUB 1.98-r2692 manual as well.  Still I did use the commands for Grub on a USB and they worked after I translated configuration file locations from grub to grub2.