I found this video on Google Video very interesting and decided to share it.

The State of the Linux Kernel by Andrew Morton
Google Tech Talks - May 1, 2007

Linuxfest Northwest has been an annual event since 1999 held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham Washington which is approximately 90 miles North of Seattle. To allow for the largest participation, it is held on a weekend. Linuxfest Northwest 2007 was held on April 28-29th and was attended by approximately 900 people.

Warren Sanders, Donnie Lunder (BillingsLUG), Ken Dyke (HelenaLUG) and I (BozemanLUG) made the trip.

[Update: Added OpenVZ video!]

Package SetsIf one knows of the hype about Ubuntu, and it is almost unavoidable, one is led to believe that it is the most popular Linux distribution for desktop users. I have yet to see hard data that shows evidence of that claim so that will remain unresolved for now. One of the reasons touted for Ubuntu's popularity is that it comes on a single CD. Debian, upon which Ubuntu is based, also has fans because it too has a very light-weight install option (among other reasons) which will install the base system and allow one to install all the desired software post-install by downloading only what is needed. While Debian is huge, 27 CDs for the full distro or 3 DVDs (not counting the source CDs), virtually no one downloads all of the .iso images.

Since I'm a Red Hat fan (which includes Fedora Core and CentOS), I'm aware of the complaints people have about "having to download multiple CDs" before they can start installing. In fact, the recently released CentOS 5 is 6 CDs (i386, or 7 CDs for x86_64). To counter those complaints, I thought I'd try a single CD install of the recently released CentOS 5 "Debian style" and then add everything in post-install. Join me if you will...

Doc Searls is challenging the big OEMs to think outside the Microsoft PC box. It was three or four years ago that Searls observed that Linux is not a platform. Here he is back riffing on that theme...
Thinking Past Platforms: the Next Challenge for Linux

Towards the end of the article he challenges us in the FOSS community to stop thinking of and advocating Linux as an alternative to Windows/OS X. This is a very good point and one I, personally, should have thought of a long time ago.

Each April computer buffs from across the Pacific Northwest trek to Bellingham, WA for Linuxfest Northwest.

Bellingham, WA, April 4, 2007 — The eighth annual Linuxfest Northwest takes place from 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., April 28 and 29, 2007 at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, WA. Exhibits, presentations, and parking are free. All ages are welcome.

OpenFiler iSCSII installed OpenFiler on an extra machine the other day. What's OpenFiler? According to the OpenFiler website:

Openfiler is a Storage Management Operating System. It is powered by the Linux 2.6 kernel and Open Source applications such as Apache, Samba, LVM2, ext3, Linux NFS and iSCSI Enterprise Target. Openfiler combines these ubiquitous technologies into a small, easy to manage solution fronted by a powerful web-based management interface. Openfiler allows you to build a Network Attached Storage (NAS) and/or Storage Area Network (SAN) appliance, using industry-standard hardware, in less than 10 minutes of installation time.

I've never worked with iSCSI before... but now I want to. The reason I'm looking into it is because RHEL 5 and others can use iSCSI disks to install to... and hopefully it'll work well for XenVMs too. Care to follow me on this, the initial leg, of my journey?

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.

"Each year, Bellingham Technical College generously hosts Linuxfest Northwest."

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.

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.