Minds Eye

So far my time using Fedora 7 has been seamless. The Xen virtualisation creation and management is a breeze which was one of mhy main reasons for moving back to Fedora. There are no apps I have wanted for which were not either installed by default or a quick "yum install" away. I am happy with the default media playing, removeable device management and overall application integration. I have installed the livna and freshrpms repos, only for the ability to play the stupid "wmv" files which I get sent every now and then.

I have used the new package manager "pup" and I must say that I am impressed. It is not quite as fast as synaptic to start up, but it is not far off either. The searching is fast and the install is just as fast as your internet connection will bring the packages down.

I even went as far as to upgrade my mothers desktop PC, which was alreading running FC4 and in desperate need.

Now for the problem. Where is the "Print" option from the "File" menu in the GIMP??? I had not noticed, but after the upgrade for Mum it was not on my mothers machine and she used it all the time to print photos.

After a little searching I found the answer. You need to install the gutenprint-plugin. Now this is all good and well, but wouldn't you think that the most powerful graphical application in the distro which has the most features for manipulating photographs would by "default" be able to print?? Not so helpful for someone like my mother. Pretty weird if you ask me :-(

So to get you a print menu in GIMP, as root, do this from the command:

yum -y install gutenprint-plugin 

Hope this helps someone else out there :-)

I have literally just finished installing F7 onto my laptop.

The process was as smooth as could be. No errors and it worked first go. I had to manually install the madwifi driver for my wireless to work, but that was as simple as

make
make install

I love the new theme and stay tuned for other musings about how it all performs.

For those that are interested here is the smolt profile for my laptop - http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/show?UUID=7ed9def6-451a-4816-bd29-f0fd2da...

Well it might not be the only thought I have all week, but something I have been thinking about for a while now is the whole virtualisation thing.

The three most prominent methods of virtualisation that I have seen and used are VMware, Xen and now more recently (since kernel version 2.6.20) KVM.

My questions are pretty simple really.

• Which one will lead the pack in the future?
• Which technique is the easiest to deploy and administer from and advanced adminsitrative point fo view, from a non-graphical server stand point and from the basic deployment and management features angle?
• Which technology provides the best performance?
• Which one offers the most flexible file system storage solution for backup and migration?
• Which one is the most secure and stable?

Now the answer to each of these simple questions most likely poses other questions. The big answer to which one should I look at using more will differ I suppose depending on the circumstances surrounding the requirements. I will need to play more and investigate each for their respective merits.

I suppose I expect no real answers, but this in short outlines my ponderings on virtualisation... :-)

I got this in reply from the send profile command
To view your profile visit: http://smolt.fedoraproject.org/show?UUID=5758efc0-ea59-4b18-9614-75aff04...
My only regret is that I have not rebooted since the 2.6.20 kernel has come down and that I am still ashamedly running FC5. F7 is days away and bet your bottom dollar I will then upload my updated profile.

Happy smolting