[sf-lug] Report on SF-LUG meeting of Sunday November 6, 2016

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com):

> Rick M. showed up next to pick up the laptop that John S. had brought.
> He talked to the other folks most of the time. And he looked closely
> at one Linux Pro magazine, the issue with the article on the history
> of the file systems.

It's a terrific article, talking about the history of the ext
filesystems (of which the latest is ext4).

> But he discussed his past history with the hardware and how his
> exacting standards had forced him into a job, which while a promotion,
> took him out of a more congenial working situation.

It was an interesting story, that I'll be glad to repeat briefly here:

During the middle/late 2000s, I was working in the Linux Management
Department at Cadence Design Systems, the largest EDA (Electronic Design
Automation) firm, that being the industry that writes the software used
by everyone to design chips.  One of my sidelines was evaluating newly
introduced models of servers, workstations, and laptops for Linux driver
support.  (Cadence ran a great deal of Linux, some Solaris, and some
MS-Windows.) One peculiarity of Cadence's use of Linux distributions is
that corporate policy permitted using _only_ official distro packages,
nothing else, and they wanted to be able to use _really_ old releases of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server on
cutting-edge hardware.

One day, I evaluated the Linux compatibility of the Lenovo (formerly
IBM) ThinkPad T60P, a very close cousin of the T60 John S. was offering
this past weekend.  (The 'P' suffix meant that the T60P had ATI video,
giving high 3D framerate, while the T60 has Intel Centrino video, which
has respectable but not extremely high framerate.)

I was just in the middle of finishing up my report on the T60p late one
evening, and a gentleman chatted with me about my ongoing work.  I had
no idea he was someone very high up in the management pecking order -- 
and I told him frankly that there were multiple reasons why there was no
way in Hell that RHEL3 Update 1 was going to function, unmodified, on a
T60P, and likewise several other somewhat antique RHEL and SLES
releases (because of some cutting-edge hardware components requiring a
very recent installation kernel).

Next thing I knew, my boss was advising that I'd done absolutely nothing
wrong, but that my assessment of the T60p had become so controversial in 
upper management circles that a top Linux expert had been ordered to
test and attempt to replicate my results, and she hoped I'd take no
offence.  I said indeed I hadn't.  Luckily, the expert confirmed my
results right down the line:  The was (ten years ago) the very model of
a laptop with bleeding-edge chipsets posing Linux support challenges.

Because my test results had been confirmed in fine detail, I found
myself promoted into an unplanned job where I was responsible for all 
testing of a new candidate hardware purchases for use with Linux or
Solaris.  I got to play with quite a bit of cutting-edge hardware, and
this was rather a lot of fun.

Anyhow, I'm consequently just a bit nostalgic about ThinkPads of that
vintage.

-- 
Cheers,              "I know you believe you understood what you think I said,
Rick Moen            but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not
rick at linuxmafia.com  what I meant."         -- S.I. Hayakawa
McQ! (4x80)