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Yesterday, I finally talked Marilyn into putting another hard drive on her 'puter so she could add a Linux OS. Although I've installed several different distros on my own machine, I could never get her to even try Linux. Well her XP OS messed up enough to finally tick her off to the point of considering trying something, anything out. As I have been checking out so many distros, one retail version caught her fancy. She thought that the ease of CNR and having license fees taken care of by Linspire for most, if not all the multimedia codecs would make the difference.

Ten people attended the meeting last night. As always, thanks to Ken Dyke for drving in from Helena to make the meeting.

We had a lively discussion on Virtualization. Before the meeting I wrote up the various virtualization methods that were in play on the whiteboard. After the meeting had started and the ice broken... I went over my experience with XenExpress, Xen in RHEL 5, what I had learned about VMware ESX from a co-worker, and some about OpenVZ. There were quite a few questions.

[Update] Ken emailed me the link to the P2V Converter he mentioned at the meeting... Convert Physical Windows Systems Into Virtual Machines To Be Run On A Linux Desktop.

I had hoped to be in Montana for several months and was looking forward to meeting some new Linuxers in a new place. As it happened I have gone back to Texas and have no plans for being in Montana any time soon. Who knows what the future holds. Blessings

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...

Virtual Machine ManagerI got a bit farther with Xen this time. I did another CentOS 5 Beta install and made sure to add the Virtualization package set. It's not like I needed to do another install but I've been doing a few installs just to test out differences with the various package sets.

I originally tried out Xen about a year and a half ago on a Fedora Core 4 host on rather underpowered hardware and a lot has changed since then.

I had actually joined the YULG a couple years ago, but never attended a meeting because they were on Thursdays, which is a work night for me. I re-joined (now BLUG) primarily because the meeting nights had been changed to Tuesdays. If things had not gotten out of hand last month I would have finally made it to my first meeting, but alas, "stuff happens."

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.

cheesyone recently posted a link to a paper written by Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley entitled, World Domination 201. The article is very interesting as Mr. Raymond (aka ESR) plots a strategy to have Linux take over the desktop starting in 2008. If you haven't already read it... GO READ IT.

I believe I'm qualified to comment on the article given a few factors:

1. I lived through most of the computer history mentioned in the article
2. I've heard Linus' original World Domination speech
3. I've been using Linux since January 1995
4. I've been working in IT with Linux since 1998

You know to click on read more link below for the rest, right?

Here is a link that I think is well worth the reading.

World Domination 201
by Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley

Here's a teaser quote from the article: