The Sean Dague Page :: Projects and Hacks

I am very much a believer in the merits of Open Source Software, and am fortunate enough to have found a job where I get paid to work on OSS as part of my day job. Most of the projects I contribute to for work are related to massive installation and clustering. I also try to contribute what little I can to projects that I use on a daily basis.

Installation and Clustering Projects

Here is the list of things that clasify as my day job.

System Configurator

System Configurator provides a unified API for Linux installation. This is a required element of the SystemImager. project, and part of the System Installation Suite project. I am the maintainer and designer for this project.

System Installer

System Installer is a tool for building Linux images that are compatible with System Installation Suite. System Installer can also be used to build chroot compile environments, i.e. a Red Hat build environment on a SuSE Linux machine. I have contributed to the package installation API, and am the maintainer for the very simple Perl-Tk GUI, tksis.

OSCAR

OSCAR is an HPC Cluster installer for Linux. The attempt of this project to lower the barier of entry into cluster computing. Version 1.2 of OSCAR has just been released. This version uses System Installation Suite as the installation tool. OSCAR can been downloaded from its sourceforge site. My main roles in this project include the SIS integration and maintenance, as well as the OSCAR GUI, and the OSCAR package API which will be included in the 1.3 release of OSCAR.

SystemImager

SystemImager is an image based installation and maintainence tool. I am now a core developer on SystemImager, mostly focusing on a port to the IA64 platform, and an internals API which will enable other programs to interact with SystemImager more cleanly.

Projects I have contributed to

I try to contribute back to all the projects that have made my life a little easier over the years. Here is a list of the contributions that I can remember doing.

Perl

I have sent in a few patches to the Perl interpretter over the last year, mostly involving configuration and build scripts. I am a huge fan of Perl, and tend to do most of my programming in it.

mod_perl - Guide

I contributed to the mod_perl guide while I was using mod_perl extensively for the FanMail 2000 website. My little FAQ item about using mod_rewrite to get variables passed through a proxy is still in the guide.

AfterStep

I haven't actually generated a good patch for AfterStep yet, but I tend to spend a fair ammount of time bugging the developers about things I find that are bust. AfterStep is a truly excellent window manager that I don't know what I would do without.

Linux Mandrake

I did the initial package for Xplanet for Linux Mandrake which first started in contribs, and is now part of the main distribution. Linux Mandrake is an excellent product, and my distribution of choice. It makes Linux so easy, that even my mom now uses it.

Feel free to sean at HAM dague dot HAM net if you have any questions or comments.