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Orbiting Debian: Interview with Bdale Garbee (Tux Deluxe)

[Posted March 30, 2007 by ris]

Tux Deluxe has an interview with Bdale Garbee, Chief Technologist for Open Source & Linux at Hewlett-Packard, and a former Debian Project Leader. "The role of Bdale Garbee at HP involves advising the company on both the technology and community aspects of Linux and open source. He mentors internal HP departments on how to productively participate in the free software development process, and encourages the adoption of open source software and principles across the company. A contributor to the free software community for more than twenty-five years, his background also includes many years of hardware design, UNIX internals, and embedded systems work. He was an early participant in the Debian project, helped port Debian GNU/Linux to five architectures, and remains active in the Debian community."

(Log in to post comments)

Posted Mar 31, 2007 2:40 UTC (Sat) by FraserCampbell (guest, #33142) [Link]

I've managed close to a thousand Proliant servers running various Linux
distributions, I love the consistency of the platform - from blade to
large rackmount mostly runs the same drivers, same iLO remote console,
etc.

However, I find the support packages to be not quite as baked in as I'd
like (not that I've found any of the big hardware vendors to be better).
For example:

* is there any good reason that the PSP installs tg3 driver version
3.66f from HP rather than running Red Hat's on 3.52 version of the
driver? Must this be forced in over the existing redhat driver resulting
in RPM verification errors for the kernel?

* as above for cciss and other drivers, I would much prefer to see HP
working with the Linux vendors to ensure critical updates get into the
vendor kernels directly.

* when I install HP SIM why does it insist on me removing Red Hat's
PostgreSQL package (even down to qt-postgresql)? Why can't the install
script create DB schema in existing psql (as well behaved Debian packages
do when they depend on a database)?

* why can't HP set up some mirrorable repositories for their PSPs,
firmware and perhaps some other relevant software. It would be a bit of
work to set up yum for RHEL, perhaps a YaST depot for SuSE and an apt
archive for debian but once there it shouldn't be much additional work to
maintain.

* why can't RPMs that build kernel drivers declare their dependencies on
the specific kernel so that when someone comes along and does "yum
update", up2date or online_update they don't break some of those
specially configured drivers HP is handing out (qla2300 for example). A
simple dependency declaration would alert the admin (through the update
tools) that he's breaking something.

On the last point it's possible that the RPMs can be easily rebuilt but I
haven't checked in a while, I often resort to my own dummy packages to
declare dependencies but it's kludgey.

Anyway this is starting to sound like a rant. If anyone from HP sees
this, hire a few more Linux packaging people please and let's keep Linux
with HP drivers and software as easy to maintain as Linux without HP
software and drivers already is.

Orbiting Debian: Interview with Bdale Garbee (Tux Deluxe)

Posted Mar 31, 2007 14:01 UTC (Sat) by mbottrell (guest, #43008) [Link]

Having worked for a few of the large vendors I know first hand the frustration. :-/

Unfortunately often the people that put together these 'packages' are from generic depts and not so much Linux savvy.

That's not to say the likes of HP, Dell and IBM don't have a bunch of good Linux people.

Unfortunately it's more a case that where these drivers 'pop-out' isn't the same place the Linux expertise of the organization resides.

I can only see this can improve if these hardware depts work closely and in co-operation with their internal Linux experts. It would be encouraging for all their customers if it occurred.

Stupid question

Posted Apr 1, 2007 7:55 UTC (Sun) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

How do you pronounce "Bdale"?

Stupid question

Posted Apr 2, 2007 1:33 UTC (Mon) by bdale (subscriber, #6829) [Link]

Like "Bee-Dale".

Bdale

Stupid question

Posted Apr 2, 2007 2:16 UTC (Mon) by ldo (subscriber, #40946) [Link]

Thank you for that. :)

Orbiting Debian: Interview with Bdale Garbee (Tux Deluxe)

Posted Apr 1, 2007 10:45 UTC (Sun) by muwlgr (guest, #35359) [Link]

He speaks about Dunc-Tank in present tense, saying that there are fewer and fewer RC-bugs thanking to it. May be this interview was made before the whole resulting stir.

(or may be I have just misread something?)

Orbiting Debian: Interview with Bdale Garbee (Tux Deluxe)

Posted Apr 2, 2007 1:35 UTC (Mon) by bdale (subscriber, #6829) [Link]

You are correct, the interview this was based on happened several months ago.

Bdale