Kevin Fenzi's Journal Recent Entries

The other day Sean mentioned to me in passing about iptables-restore being able to restore all the rules in a single atomic operation. For some reason I didn't know about that being the case, so I dug around a bit...

As a avid reader, the rise of ebooks in recent years has been interesting. I've read books on my little eeepc with Fedora, my openmoko phone and most recently my Motorola Droid android phone. Read on for my ramblings on ebooks, platforms and formats.

I've been busy and then out on vacation and then busy again, but there are a bunch of short Fedora notes I thought I would mention for those interested. Read on for more...

Just a quick note that I will be giving a class on libvirt in the Fedora IRC Classroom tomorrow at 19:00 (UTC time). Lots of good classes will be offered. See the above link for more info.

Late last week I decided to take a closer look at midori , The Xfce web browser.

Short summary: I am now using midori as my day to day web browser. Read on for more detailed ups and downs.

Looks like I have managed to get talked into speaking to two of the local Linux Users groups next week on Fedora: nclug and blug.

I thought I would go over the upcoming Fedora 11 Features list and then talk a bit about some of the more interesting discussions that have been happening in Fedora development, and then finally talk about where people can join the community.

Hopefully there will be good turnouts on both meetings. If anyone has any suggestions for things they would like me to talk about, feel free to leave a comment here, email me, catch me on IRC, or start a thread on the blug or nclug mailing lists.

I've been really meaning to write up some thoughts from the (now not so) recent Fudcon 11. Read on for some random thoughts about this delightful event.

Just a quick post to note a few happenings in Fedora land for those interested:

This weekend will be the first set of IRC Classroom sessions in #fedora-classroom on irc.freenode.net. Take a look at https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/IRC/Classroom for a list of classes and times. I'm teaching one on Firewall Basics on Sunday. Hopefully we will get a good turnout. Students (and Teachers) welcome.

It's also election season in Fedora land. There are 4 groups holding elections in December. See: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Elections for more info. In particular I would like to urge those folks that have disliked recent FESCo decisions to run for FESCo or perhaps see about putting forward someone who shares their views.

Finally, Fedora 10 is just around the corner. The Preview Release just went out this week. Testing is very welcome. I've upgraded my laptop from Fedora 9 with preupgrade and it went very smoothly. Congrats on all the great work for this release everyone!

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.