Project White Hope PCQLinux 2005

It was during an early winter evening that the commander (Krishna Kumar) decided to launch a new mission. For this he called in an elite squad. The team, consisting of Anindya 'Anaconda' Roy, Sanjay 'Downloader' Majumder, Shekhar 'Oscar' Govindarajan and Vinod 'Sniper' Unny, walked in to the war room to begin planning. The mission brief was simple (or so it seemed)-create a new PCQLinux distro for 2005 and ship it in two months.

While planning the route to this mission, the team hit its first hurdle. Shekhar and Kishore (as consultants on the terrain) favored to go the Debian route. While the others favored taking the better-known Fedora route. After much heated debates, the commander took the call-to take the Fedora route to be able to complete the mission on time.

Left to right : Shekhar Govindarajan, Bendi Vishan, Anindya Roy, Krishna Kumar, Sanjay Majumder, Vinod Unny

Vinod took on the mantle of squad leader, with the commander outside the line of fire. The first job was the division of labor amongst the team members. Shekhar had the task of making two important pieces of the mission possible: the supercomputer and grid computing install options. Sanjay had to monitor the mission's components (such as new packages and updates) and make sure that the rest of the team members had their resources when they needed them.

Bendi (design) Vishan joined in at this point with the brief to provide stunning eye catching (graphics) for mission components. Anindya (as usual) had to make sure the prepackaging was suitable to the mission's objective. Since the prepackaging task (or installer) is deadly and slimy, it was aptly named Anaconda. Vinod was looking at the day-to-day operations and, for a good part, worked with Anindya to tame the Anaconda. They even came up with a way to quickly bring Anaconda down to its knees and work as they wanted it to.

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Install
PCQLinux 2005
PCQLinex 2005 comes with out-of-the-box grid computing and cluster support. The distro also packs the maximum number of installation option - 14!
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Clients
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Server
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Customer Contacts
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Desk
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own Forum
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Local Wiki
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Online Content
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Notebooks
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E-mailing
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Webmin
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Drivers
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on PCQLinux
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Grid
Computing

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However, the commander issued new instructions at this point. He wanted the user to be able to select his preference in a hierarchical manner. It was then that Anindya and Vinod ran into their first roadblock.

Anaconda protects its inner self very well. Although deceptively 'open', its functionality is hidden within layers of obscurity, such as unstructured source, hard coded values and lack of or useless comments. Anindya and Vinod tried to ferret out its secrets but to no avail. Every time they thought they had done it, another problem popped up in a different part of the Anaconda.

Weary from a two week battle with the big beast, Vinod almost reported to the commander that they had lost the battle, but hoped to win the war as long as this sub-mission was ignored. However, a late night brainwave on the last possible day saw a way to hack through the layers of Anaconda's defenses and get it to bend to their will. Anaconda finally started behaving the way that the team wanted it to. The commander again threw another sub-mission at the team. Having announced a limited public display of the mission to certain members of the public, the team was asked to release a Beta. The team rushed to get this half functional, untested and wild beast packed up and ready to ship to many testers around the country. It was only once that was done, that the team got back to whatever it was doing.

Shekhar, in the meantime, had overcome Oscar, the supercomputing package and had moved on to bringing up the grid computer. Sanjay was hosing the team with updates and new packages on a continuous basis. And finally the day to release the complete mission came near. A day before the release date, the team took a collective sigh and patted each other on the back for a battle well fought and the experiences shared.

And then it had to happen. A random check of the system revealed a showstopper. An important piece refused to function correctly, putting the entire mission in danger. Anindya and Vinod got cracking again. On the day that the mission was to be completed, they were hard at work trying to get PCQLinux 2005 running. It was during a frustrated code trace that Vinod hit upon the answer, which resulted in Anindya and Vinod storming into the commander's office and using the choicest of expletives for the people who had originally built that piece of the system. The amount and placement of hard coded values was almost the team's undoing. Quickly making the required changes, the team rebuilt the system and tested it again. Imagine their horror when the same piece malfunctioned again! Yet again, they went through the process of checking and rechecking. The team decided to do one more round of tests before releasing it and get a good night's sleep as well. The final mission was complete with a few hours delay; but then battle plans never really work out 100 percent right, do they?

Terms used Anaconda: The installer for Fedora Core as well as PCQLinux. Oscar: A supercomputing cluster server included in PCQLinux. Showstopper: A bug that can derail the project schedule as it has to be corrected before shipping. In our case, we hit this bug not due our code, but because of the original developers' mistakes. Beta: A test release of the final product that is sent over to a small set of users to check out any major issues that they might find.

There is, however, still no rest for the veteran team- as of writing this article, they are busy writing articles, delivering the PCQuest Summit for Developers and preparing for the upcoming the Summit for Linux as well. Do read the articles on installing PCQLinux 2005 and some of the cool new features that have been added to it. And do not forget to discuss your own tribulations and triumphs at PCQuest forums-
http://forums.pcquest.com.

Anindya Roy, Sanjay Majumder, Shekhar Govindarajan, Sujay V Sarma, Vinod Unny