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Another presentation from RHVE 2009. This one is entitled, "Red Hat Virtualization: Breaking Performance and Scalability Barriers" by John Shaksober and Vijay Tehran of Red Hat.

I downloaded all of the videos offered from the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009. They made them available as Ogg Theora .ogv files so I didn't even have to convert them. They are of moderate to low quality especially with regards to audio... so they can be a little annoying but the presentation material is generally top notch.

In this video, Andrew Cathrow of Red Hat spends about 23 minute explaining what KVM.

The Red Hat RHEV presentation lasted for about an hour and forty-five minutes and I video taped it. I can only relase the first 23 minutes of the presentation which is where the slides ended. The demo after the slides contained details about the upcoming (and currently in beta) RHEV for Desktops product which can't be shared because it is subject to change between now and the GA release.

As an attachment to this article you will find the PDF of Tom's slides.

The video should work in Firefox 3.5 and above... or any browser that supports the HTML 5 video tag and Ogg Theora video. In-browser playback isn't always perfect so if desired, right-click on the video and select "Save Video As..." to download and play locally. The videos is approximately 105MB.

If your video player can't handle Ogg Theora then I recommend you check out VLC media player.

Ok, the dust has had time to settle after Apple's announcement last week of their upcoming iPad device. There has been plenty of praise for the new device and even some criticism. Given the title of this entry, it is clear that I'm here to criticize it.

A New Form Factor?

During his presentation Steve Jobs railed against the Netbook form factor and said they were just cheap, slow laptops. While that might have been true for the first generation of Netbooks, the second generation (with 1.6GHz Atom H/T CPUs) have been quite usable. In fact, I wrote this on one. Intel has followed up with an even more capable Atom processor that is just starting to appear in newer Netbook models. It appears more generations of netbooks are coming: those with the newer Atom CPUs, and those with ARM CPUs. One will speed up the Netbook, and the other will reduce its capabilities and make it cheaper.

I suspect the iPad is what it is because Apple decided it couldn't compete on features and price against the Netbook... so they decided to change the game. I think several of the major PC makers wish the Netbook would be declared a fad and just go away. Why, because there isn't a lot of mark-up on Netbooks and the competition is fierce. Apple wanted a device that would be inexpensive to manufacture yet something in a category where they could do what they always do... price it with a large profit margin. Amazon has done quite well with the Kindle and Apple has done quite well with the iPhone / iPod Touch so why not combine the two?

The sad thing is that Apple has basically delivered a Netbook but by chopping off the keyboard (and all of the I/O ports), giving it a touch screen, and crippling it significantly in several ways, they have everyone convinced that it is a new form factor. This is aided by the fact that it is reminiscent of devices from the Star Trek universe. In writing this article, I hope to expose the iPad for what it really is and stay out of Steve Job's reality distortion field.

I slapped together an SELinux presentation for the BozemanLUG and some people said they wished they could have attended it but missed it, so I decided to record a quick screencast.

Please note, that I do not claim to be an expert on SELinux but I do present the basics. If anyone with more SELinux knowledge notices any mistakes, please let me know.

You can find it here:
selinux-demystified-bozemanlug-jan2010.ogv
91.2MB, ~34 minutes

It is an Ogg Theora .ogv file that I recorded with gtk-recordmydesktop. Right-click and "Save as..." to download. Or if you have a newer version of Firefox with .ogv support, watch it in your browser. The better experience is probably to download it. If your preferred media player can't play .ogv files, I recommend you check out VLC Media Player.

Win One, Give One?

When I got home from work last night, my 17 year old son (Bryan) demanded I watch something on TV he had found. Wielding the TiVo remote he played for me a commercial aired during SpongeBob SquarePants. In the commercial I kid got a package in the mail that contained two OLPCs one of which the kid picks up and walks out of his house with, journeying until he is in a village in Africa where he gives a village kid the OLPC. At the very end it is revealed that it is a contest being run by General Mills with chances to win provided with some of their products. They appear to have a website for the contest.

According to the official rules, they are giving away 230 OPLCs valued at $42,550. They put a value on them of $185 but I'd assume that with the Give One part of the deal that actually translates into 460 OLPCs valued at $85,100 plus whatever shipping would be. Given the fact that they are airing television commercials, it seems that the figure spent on promotion would be many times that of what is being given away... but I guess that is how such promotions go.

I have yet to find a digital copy of the commercial online so I made a cheesy cam version off of my SD TV. I also made an ogv version.

Sugar on a Stick Blueberry

A new version of SoaS was released early last month but I found a video interview with Walter Bender talking about it that I thought I would share.

Red Hat actually opened up the SPICE protocol yesterday during their Virtual Experience 2009 event. Somehow I missed that. Have a look at the press release if you are interested... as well as their site to house the new open source project - spice-space.org.

This seems to have caused some buzz in certain corners of the virtualization websphere (does anyone still use that word?) but so far no one has said what it could mean for us run-of-the-mill Linux users looking for a good, fast remote desktop protocol. I asked a couple of questions on the fedora-virt mailing list and received some informative replies. I haven't had a chance to actually check out the SPICE website in depth yet though. For those wanting technical documentation, I've attached their spice_for_newbies and spice_user_manual PDFs.

I did want to share with you my response to one of the articles about the SPICE release that I ran across. You can go there and see the context this came from but it is pretty self explanatory.

Main HallRed Hat held the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 today and it was awesome. What was it? It was a completely online conference that offered everything you'd find at a traditional face-to-face show like the annual Red Hat Summit.

I was hoping Red Hat would use this event to introduce / announce RHEV for Desktops but no such luck. I guess we'll have to continue to wait until January.

Virtual Areas

• Conference Center - 15 presentations in three tracks with live video, audio and slides including chat submitted questions from the audience
• Exhibition Hall - 3 regions, US region had 14 vendors with staffed booths offering public and private chat
• Resource Center - 15 background items (PDF and Flash videos)
• Birds-of-a-Feather - 4 Topics
• Networking Cafe - Chat center with presenters and guests
• Help Desk - Section for help with the virtual experience usage

I originally wrote this as a comment on LWN in response to a feature article Jon Corbet did entitled, "Between Fedora 12 and 13". It was basically Jon's review of his upgrade experience from Fedora 11 to Fedora 12 in which he claims that features don't matter, only the upgrade experience does. I felt compelled to comment.

- - - - -

I started writing a review of Fedora 12 a while ago but put it on the back burner as things came up... thinking the longer I wait to finish it, the more time I will have had with it... the more complete of a review I can do.

I don't really recommend upgrading to anyone... except under certain conditions. On servers where the package count is fairly low and the possibility of third-party add-on packages is low, upgrading has been painless for me for the last 5 or 6 releases I've been doing them.

On desktops where there is a large number of packages as well as a greater potential for third-party packages to be installed (think RPM Fusion for certain verboten media codecs and apps)... I don't upgrade.

Description of InfBASE-Q
InfBASE-Q is a theoretical link-layer addition to Ethernet for transmission of signals across a link between two ansible connections. Because there is no transmission delay across an ansible link, the bandwidth is limited only be the time to read the signal off the ansible connection. As switching hardware improves in its ability to push data into and read data out of an ansible link, data transmission speeds will approach infinity.

Ansible: