Christmas Display: Powered by Open Source for Charity

By Dawn M. Foster (91 posts) on December 22, 2009 at 8:00 am

I wanted to share a little bit of open source holiday cheer this week just in case anyone is still around and reading blogs over the holidays!

I recently ran across the Komar.org Christmas lights display, and was amazed by the technology behind it. He uses open source software and allows anyone to help control the display remotely. You can turn lights off and on or inflate / deflate any of the many inflatables (Homer Simpson, Elmo, Frosty, etc.) Here's a short description of just some of the technology behind it:

It's all pretty vanilla open source stuff - Linux, Apache, and Perl - the later is hand-written.

The main komar.org computer is a dual 3.2 GHz Xeon with 4 GBytes of RAM running Redhat Enterprise Server 5.0. The webcam images are served up by two (and one year three) similar machines. So a total of 4 machines all with 100 Mbps connections - that's almost half a Gigabit of bandwidth!

While there is a significant cost incurred due to electricity, equipment, etc., he does not accept donations for his costs. Instead, if you like the display, he is asking people to donate directly to the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research to help his kids who both have Celiac Disease and help others like them.

2009_11_29_8286-christmas-front-yard

Categories: Open Source
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