Kevin Fenzi's Journal Recent Entries

Just finished up days one and two of Fudcon (the 'hackfest' days). Read on for some snippets and impressions:

Just a quick note to let everyone know that I am at FudconF10 , which is being held here with the Red Hat Summit. Any folks who are there and want to meet up, just drop me an email or catch me on IRC (#fudcon on irc.freenode.net).

Look for more reports from Fudcon in the coming days.

Since the release of Fedora 9, I have seen a number of folks pop up on the #fedora support channel on irc.freenode.net with the following statement: "Fedora 9 was released with all kinds of Beta software, it's not usable, why would they call it a stable release with a Beta X server, Beta firefox, and Beta package management system?"

I think this misunderstanding comes from folks not understanding how distributions are put together. In the end I think Fedora 9 is quite a good release, even given the Beta packages in some areas.

Read on for my take on how a distribution is put together and why Beta versions are OK sometimes.

Fedora 9 was released last week (2008-05-13). Overall, I think it's another great release. Congrats to all the folks who worked so hard on it!

As with any release there are a few gotchas and bugs, but not all that many from my (biased) viewpoint. Read on for further impressions of the release.

Just got back last night from this years fudcon in Raleigh, NC. Read on for my recap of the event.

For the recent Holiday, I managed to get a lovely new camera. A Fuji FinePix F50fd. There wasn't anything particularly wrong with my old camera, which I liked quite a bit, it was getting a bit worn, and some of the features on the new Fuji are great.

With the new camera comes the age old problem: How to manage all the photos I take with it. Read on for my thoughts on Linux software for photo management and plea to readers for better ideas...

In the past for running virtual machines on my laptop, I had just used a command line using the kvm tool. It worked pretty well, although it had some quirks and limitations. With the recent re-install of my laptop, I decided to check out libvirt and see how easy it was to get working.

Turns out it works quite nicely... read on for more info on my libvirt adventures...

Last Thursday several big events occurred:

• Fedora 8 - Werewolf was released on the world. This was a pretty smooth and good release cycle I think. If you haven't tried a Fedora release in a while, this would be one to check out.
• My laptop drive started having uncorrectable read errors, which made it less than happy running. It would hit one of those sectors, and then go into a infinite loop of resets and drive access.

Clearly this was a sign that I should do a fresh F8 install on a new drive, and also try out Sean's root encryption HOWTO. Read on for more information about encrypted root filesystem installs.

Since I have been involved in Fedora development, I have spent time in some of the Fedora IRC channels over on irc.freenode.net where a lot of the Fedora development takes place. Last week there was some discussion about the main #fedora channel, where end users come to seek help. So, I decided to hang out there for a week and see if I could help out.

It's been a while since I posted anything. Been very busy, and then last week I was out on vacation in lovely Durango, CO. Once I got back I decided that I should upgrade my FC-6 machines here to F-7. Being the tinkerer I am, I elected to try upgrading via yum. Read on for my experiences with upgrading 3 machines.

The other day I took a very nice Bike ride around Boulder, CO. I had my GPS unit with me ( A Garmin Vista-C), and had it take trackpoints along my route. Once I got home I wanted to try and grab the track points, transfer them to my Fedora laptop and then have some means of mapping where I had been. Read on for my adventures with gpsbabel.

Yet another small package that I use all the time that not too many folks may know about is mussh (MUlti host SSH wrapper). Read on for a quick overview of this useful script.

This week's quick package review is of Twinkle, a SIP software phone.

A bit belated (I was going to try and do a package every Monday), but here's another review of a Linux software package I use and think would be great to bring to others attention. Today's package: claws-mail Read on for a short review of this great MUA.

I thought I would try and do some blogging about interesting packages that I use here that perhaps not too many people know about. Today I am going to look at the (PowerDNS) pdns packages. If you think that bind is the only DNS server out there, you might want to look into pdns. Read on for a review

I recently ordered a Dell latitude D820. It arrived last week. Now that I have had a few days to play with it, he's my lengthy review of the laptop with Linux.

Fedora in particular and Linux in general, works quite well on LOTS of hardware these days. There are still however some vendors that just refuse to release specs for their hardware. Read on for a simple thing that we can all do to try and change things for the better.

One of the really nice things about the Open source world is that there are so many choices. If there is a very simple or obvious way to do something there might be only one or two applications available, but for more complicated applications, there are almost always many more options to choose from.

There's recently been some discussion and heated exchanges on the Fedora Devel List about a new package called "smolt". Read on to learn what it is, how it works and why there shouldn't be any controversy on it.

This last weekend I was able to go out and attend FudconBoston 2007. Read on for a recap.

I recently picked up an old ppc machine to build, test and play with ppc Fedora. I ran into an interesting bug in rpm along the way. Read on for adventure...

As probably everyone who follows Fedora in particular or Linux distributions in general now knows, Fedora Core and Fedora Extras are merging into one big more community driven distro. Read on for some thoughts about the big Merge

I ran into something today that made me realize how extensive the fedora repositories are getting. It's getting so you can find almost any package you need already available and ready to install.

I've been using a bluetooth headset connected to my laptop for a while now, and the state of Linux support for this setup is still in flux. Read on for a current status report.

Yesterday after 2 years of development, Xfce 4.4.0 was released. A new website was also launched at the same time.

Read on for some more info about the new release.