Scott Dowdle's blog

Next Saturday (August 4th), Warren and I head off to San Francisco for the LinuxWorld Expo 2007. We will be helping to staff the OpenVZ booth at the .org Pavilion.

This opportunity kind of fell unexpectedly into my lap when Kir posted an announcement that they were looking for a few community members to help staff the booth given the fact that they had seven exhibit passes and would only be sending two of the OpenVZ developers over from Russia, "as to not stall development."

I've been increasing my OpenVZ knowledge and plan to practice giving demos with Warren a bit on Sunday and Monday. I've been using OpenVZ on a daily basis for over a year now, given two public OpenVZ presentations, written several articles... so interacting with community members and promoting OpenVZ to the crowd at LinuxWorld Expo seems like a natural progression. I really look forward to meeting Kir Kolyshkin and Konstantin Khorenko from the project as well as Marc Perkel who will also be staffing the booth.

I noticed a blog posting by Daniel Veillard on Fedora People about initial support for OpenVZ being added to libvirt. If you aren't familiar with libvirt, it is an underlying library/API that can be used by higher level tools to create, manage, and monitor virtual machines. libvirt is trying to be technology agnostic by supporting several virtualization technologies. They started off with Xen and QEMU but have since added KVM. libvirt is used by the GUI tool Virtual Machine Manager which first appeared in Fedora Core (now Fedora) but became part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Looking at some of the postings in the libvirt mailing list archive for this month, it is mentioned that adding OpenVZ support is a bit different than previous technologies because the OpenVZ tools are already GPLed, "simple and straight forward", and than OpenVZ additions to libvirt "ends up looking very close to the original". I don't know how far away complete support for OpenVZ is in libvirt nor when it will show up in Virtual Machine Manager but I definitely look forward to it... although I doubt it would completely replace vzctl and the other OpenVZ tools for me.

Rocks ClusterI finally got Rocks Cluster installed today. I installed it on the six dual Xeon/P4 machines that Intel donated. Getting this going has taken me a lot longer than I had hoped. It wasn't the fault of the Rocks Cluster software package but the odd combination of hardware.

I learned about a handy dandy program today named recordmydesktop and the GUI for it, gtk-recordmydesktop. Seems to work pretty well. How well? So well that I actually ran out and bought a microphone so I could record the following video.

I've done a few presentations on OpenVZ and I had some slides made so... what the heck... I thought I'd slap together a presentation video.

The video is 800x600 and I didn't want to stretch the center column on the front page, so read the full story to see the included video.

I wish I could identify everyone in this video. I believe each person to be an expert in a particular field. I see Penny Marshall and Muhammad Ali. Can anyone identify some of the others? IBM must have spent quite a bit of money making this commercial.

This isn't much different than booting from a USB key but hey, it has a screen and also functions as a multimedia device so that increases its functionality and cool factor, right?

Wow, has it really been 6 years since we watched this movie at a BillingsLUG meeting? Well, if you haven't seen it, enjoy. I think J.T.S. Moore did a good job. Buy a copy if you want a high quality version on DVD. I did!

KDE Live CD InstallIf you've read any Linux news sites today, you know that Fedora 7 was released this morning and is codenamed Moonshine. You may have noticed by now that I only seem to cover the releases of Red Hat related distros. That is because that is what I prefer. I'd certainly welcome other members covering their favorite distros. Can you hear me Ubuntu users?

If you didn't know already, the Fedora Project has dropped the word Core from the name and with this release you no longer have to download multiple CDs. Fedora 7 is a lot like Ubuntu in that it has a single Live / Install CD that is based on Gnome. For KDE (K Desktop Environment) users, there is another, single Live / Install CD that is KDE based. For those who want to download as much as possible and have a lot of software to pick from, there is also a single DVD that has both Gnome and KDE and much, much more. Me? I decided to download them all... but since the KDE .iso completed first, and hey, I'm a big KDE person, I took the KDE Live / Install CD for a spin.

Boxes O' ServersOk, I posted some pictures yesterday and since the new content notifier doesn't have a setting to not notify when just images are posted, everyone got notified... and there wasn't a story to go along with it so I got a few comments asking... HUH?

To clear everything up... I posted the pictures to my Work Image Gallery... because the pictures were work related.

Turns out that two pallets arrived yesterday... because Intel donated twenty-six 1U rack mount servers to the MSU-Bozeman Computer Science Department. It just happens to be my job to do something with them. Hey, it took quite a while to get them all unpacked.

Seems all I can do lately is post videos. Well, here's another batch that show what some of the Linux native first person shooters look like.

Tremulous: tremulous.net