This week’s TechMail is How to use Virtual Machine Manager on Fedora 11 which discusses my first foray into using Virtual Machine Manager and KVM. It’s no surprise that I’m a big virtualization fan, but this is the first time I’ve used something baked directly into the Linux kernel. I’ve played with qemu, vmware workstation/server/fusion, and openvz, but never KVM. It’s definitely different, but quite good. I’ve got a test F11 setup in KVM on my F11 laptop to use for breaking things that I don’t want to break on the “real” system. Extremely useful and quite light-weight.
Category Archives: Red Hat
Two hours (and counting) with an upgrade to Fedora 11
This week’s TechMail is Two hours (and counting) with an upgrade to Fedora 11, in which I describe my initial experience with the upgrade of my laptop from Fedora 10 to Fedora 11. All-in-all, the upgrade was good and has worked great. I have no complaints, except for two little things: Parcellite seems a little weird (probably due to a misconfiguration though), and after I enabled the fingerprint scanner, if I ssh into my laptop and try to sudo it wants me to swipe my finger (which is a little difficult when I’m ssh’ing in from upstairs or outside). The Parcellite issue I can probably fix if I took the time, the sudo issue I’m not too sure of (although, truth be told, the fingerprint swiping novelty has pretty much already worn off so I may end up disabling that, particularly due to the sudo/ssh bit).
Create an OpenVZ container
This week’s TechMail is Create an OpenVZ container which discusses how to create your own OpenVZ container using pre-built templates. I’ve really fallen in love with OpenVZ; I find it much simpler and much faster than VMware or other full virtualization solutions. It’s a real shame that it doesn’t work with SELinux and that the OpenVZ kernel as provided by the OpenVZ folks doesn’t even have SELinux built-in so one can’t even try to make the two play nice together.
Sappy, but…
Yeah, this is one of those sappy posts. But I like to think it’s worth the few minutes of my time to write it, and it’s something I’ve really noticed and I’d like to share my appreciation.
I’ve made it past my first 90 days at Red Hat and I sure am glad I made the transition. You get wrapped up in one way of doing things, or dealing with people, or whatever, for long enough and when you get out of the comfort zone, things sure change. Red Hat is *way* different from Mandriva, so I’ve had 8 years of one way of working to overcome in the last 3mos. I think I’ve tackled it pretty good, despite some frustrating moments. In terms of infrastructure and how things work, and how people work with each other, it’s so different I don’t really have the words to express it. So it’s been quite the adjustment for me, and long hours, lots of learning, lots of note-taking, more than a few oopses, and a lot of patient people.
I can’t say much about the Fedora side of things as I’ve not really had a chance to step into the Fedora community yet, although I hope to do something there in the next few months. For now, I need to focus on the Red Hat side of things.. and I’m loving it. Especially the people I get to work with… with an organization as large as Red Hat, it’s no surprise that I’m running into new people all the time as my work takes me here, then there, and then waaay over there. =)
Anyways, everyone I’ve encountered has been stellar. Not just in how smart and knowledgeable they are, but also in how they carry themselves and how downright helpful they are. I really appreciate working with the Security Response Team (an absolutely fantastic bunch of guys that made me feel right at home from day one), and the developers I’ve had the occasion to work with, and the Quality Engineering folks are absolutely insane (in a good super-hard-working way!).
To finish it off, thanks all of you for making my first 90 days awesome, and for all the incredible hard work you do. I can’t tell you how much easier it’s made the transition for me, and I appreciate it quite a lot.
Create your own yum repository
This week’s TechMail is Create your own yum repository which pretty much discusses the createrepo tool and how to use it to create your own custom yum repository. Handy little tool; this came about when I was figuring out how to make a yum repository for my Annvix packages.
Get a handy multi-item clipboard with Glipper
This week’s TechMail is Get a handy multi-item clipboard with Glipper which talks about using Glipper to manage a multi-item clipboard. When I started using Fedora daily for work, this was one of the first things I had to find for it simply because I’ve been using these multi-clipboard utilities on OS X for years. Glipper isn’t quite as feature-rich or as polished as what I use on the mac, but it comes pretty darn close and is a 100% timesaver for me. Definitely recommended (and for those of you using KDE, Klipper is supposed to be good (or even better) as well).
