reviews

Boot SplashYesterday the Fedora Project released a "Preview" of Fedora 9. Today Ubuntu released a "Release Candidate" for 8.04 "Hardy Heron" and the openSUSE team released openSUSE 11.0 Beta 1. Since my preferred Linux distribution for the desktop is Fedora, I've been keeping up with all of the test releases. What follows is some commentary about my experiences with the Fedora 9 Preview including an image gallery. I'd like to encourage MontanaLinux users of other distros to write up their experiences with their preferred distributions.

Xen in actionAccording to the XenSource About page, "XenSource plays the dual role of leading the open source Xen(tm) community, while simultaneously selling value-added enterprise solutions based on Xen technology." The first part of that leads to various Linux distro makers integrating Xen into their distributions (like SUSE, Red Hat/clones, and Fedora). For the second part of that, XenSource currently offers a product line which includes XenExpress, XenServer and XenEnterprise. Of the three offerings, XenExpress is designed to be the entry level product and is free. I recently downloaded XenExpress and gave it a try.

During the course of this article I will describe the basic design of XenExpress, its installation, installation and use of the Administrator Console client application, creation, monitoring and management of Xen virtual machines... and then I'll try to contrast how XenSource's product line stacks up to Xen as offered by Red Hat and clones. Feel free to jump directly to the XenExpress photo gallery if desired.

Zimbra DesktopZimbra announced Zimbra Desktop today. What is it? Good question. Basically, it is Zimbra Server stripped down to run on your desktop... that will sync with your account on a Zimbra Server and download all of your email, contacts, and calendars... for offline reading.

I guess they could have created a completely new email client but they opted to have you run a local web server/service and connect to it with your browser (port 7366 by default). More...

Install CD BootI discovered that CentOS announced a public release of CentOS 5 beta this morning. I quickly downloaded the 6 .iso images for the CDs and gave it a spin. The DVD iso is only available via .torrent and I can't do bittorrent at work.

Added to this release are package sets for:

• Virtualization
• Clustering
• and Cluster Storage (aka GFS)

Follow along with me as I do installs on both a physical machine and in VMware. Feel free to go directly to the screenshot gallery.

status pageThe problem: A webserver with a lot of files that are to be public... and the public is downloading too much, too fast, too often... in what seems to be a malicious fashion... especially since everyone seems to be using multi-threaded download accelerators.

Solution: mod_cband

Read more for a better explanation of the problem and the steps needed to install mod_cband.

QEMU in actionHave you tried QEMU? I must admit that I hadn't really tried it until recently... although I have used VMware and Parallels. Supposedly Xen and the new KVM both draw from QEMU code. What is QEMU? Obligatory quote from the QEMU wikipedia entry:

QEMU is free software written by Fabrice Bellard that implements a fast processor emulator, allowing a user to simulate a complete computer system within another one. It is similar to projects such as Bochs, VMware Workstation and PearPC, but has several features these lack, including increased speed on x86, and support for multiple architectures in-progress. By using dynamic translation it achieves a reasonable speed while being easy to port on new host CPUs.

I'm not sure why that says that QEMU is faster than VMware, because it isn't... but QEMU can emulate several different CPU families other than just x86. Read on if you want to hear about my experience installing Windows XP SP2 from an .iso file.