Redhat/Fedora

I recently wiped out my Ubuntu install on my netbook, and reinstalled it with the current beta of Fedora 19. It's a wonderfull deep dive into the desktop world of Red Hat/Fedora after 12 years of Debian & Ubuntu. And boy, is this bleeding edge : Linux 3.9, Gnome 3.8, ... The installer worked as a charm, and everything on my netbook is supported. As previously said, I really like gnome-shell but I do notice some usabililty regression versus Gnome 3.4 on my Debian stable.

There are still a few rough edges in this beta, like broken package dependancies, but I expect this to be resolved with the official release tomorrow.

I visited the Red Hat summit in Boston lately. Two and a half days of sessions about the latest and greatest of RHEL and the multiverse of software around it. I really like it, though 2.5 days is way too short in order to have the opportunity to see all interesting sessions. Most sessions even didn't have a second edition, so chosing when to see what was a real challenge. I must say I really like the Red Hat summit Android and IOS apps which offered a nice agenda/messaging interface. First convention also where I exclusively used a tablet instead of a netbook, which is really recommended.

Some time was left to visit the nice city of Boston, and do some shopping ;)

Wel, it seems I've found a solution for my Redhat-in-a-VMware network problem. What's causing this is still unclear, but I now have a workaround. The problem was that Redhat (RHEL4) and Fedora (Core 8) had a lot of trouble in obtaining an IP address in a VMware cage. Other operating systems like Solaris 10 or CentOS5.1 worked like a charm. After meticulously comparing the settings in CentOS and RHEL, networking still refused to work, so I decided to give up (thinking this might be a RHEL/VMware combination issue) and resorted to QEmu.

But Qemu has its world of problems on its own. Kqemu wasn't supported on my laptops CPU, which meant a fairly low performance, but in the end I could live with that. You can download torrents for preinstalled Qemu OS images on FreeOSZoo, but that won't guarantee that anyone is seeding the image of your choice, of course. I opted for a OpenSuse guest, which after a long install, also had troubles getting on the network. But that one bound itself to another network class address than my wireless connection.

A then I bumped into the solution : on my laptop, eth0 is bound to the wired Realtek ethernet controller, whereas eth1 is bound to my wireless connection. As I use wireless exclusively, eth0 never gets attributed an IP address. It seems that on the problem images in VMware, eth0 is bound to eth0 on the host, and if that one doesn't get an IP address, you're lost too in your VMware guest. I tested this immediately, and connected my laptop to a good old utp connection, and fired up the RHEL4 guest. And bingo, IP address obtained !

This doesn't off course explain why CentOS or Solaris do get an IP address. Maybe NetworkManager or avahi-daemon are configured differently on CentOS (and are absent on Solaris), but the fact remains you better attribute an eth0 address on the host if your VMware guests want to be connectable.

Dear lazyweb,

I installed a RHEL4 as a VMware guest in VMware Player, using the RHEL image from the VMware site. This RHEL instance has lots of trouble obtaining an IP address from its VMware host, resulting in DHCP request timeouts. I double, triple, and quad checked the settings on the guest, and on the host (the dhcpd part of the built-in vmware dhcp server), but without success. If I manually start dhclient, then I see the BOOTP/DHCP packets trying to leave the guest, but on the host I don't see anything entering the vmnet1 or vmnet8 interfaces. I tried the fix which suggests modifying /etc/sysconfig/networking-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, but without any success.

The strange thing is that I tried a Fedora guest also, which results in the same behaviour. When I install a Solaris 10 guest, the network works perfectly. This leads me to the conclusion that the problem resides on the Redhat side, and not on the VMware part.

Who can shed any light on this matter ?

Update : the solution (or at least a workaround).

Red Hat's Virtual Machine Manager is a GUI for Xen. Not as fancy as the VirtualCenter of VMWare, but it's a start.

Owen Taylor threw down the gauntlet :
Currently, the time to boot the Linux desktop from the point where the power switch is turned on, to the point where the user can start doing work is roughly two minutes.

Ideally, system boot would involve a 3-4 second sequential read of around 100 megabytes of data from the hard disk, CPU utilization would be parallelized with that, and all queries on external systems would be asynchronous ... startup continues and once the external system responds, the system state is updated. Plausibly the user could start work under 10 seconds on this ideal system.

The challenge is to create a single poster showing graphically what is going on during the boot, what is the utilization of resources, how the current boot differs from the ideal world of 100% disk and CPU utilization, and thus, where are the opportunities for optimization.

Two days later Ziga Mahkovec posted some cool-looking results.

I upgraded my redhat-artwork-0.73 package to the redhat-artwork-0.88 version, found in Fedora Core 1. I was curious to see which enhancements they applied to the beautifull Redhat login screen, but boy, what a dissapointment ! The Fedora login screen is butt-ugly. Just a plain boring darkblue background, what a difference with the soft blueish tints of the Redhat GDM theme. I guess there won't be an upgrade to redhat-artwork-0.88 of my GDM Bluecurve package...

Red Hat has announced a merger of its Red Hat Linux Project with Fedora Linux, a group that has specialized in providing high-quality RPM packages for Red Hat. According to Red Hat, 'The Fedora Project is a Red-Hat-sponsored and community-supported open source project'.

Sounds a lot like the Debian or Gentoo community model, but I'm confused about Redhats future. Will they rename the consumer version 'Fedora' now, and try to bind the Redhat brand name to their RedHat Advanced/Enterprise Server line ?

Red Hat released Taroon, a public beta of Enterprise Linux 3.0; it supports i386, IA-64, x86-64, and PowerPC. It includes Eclipse, but you'll have to download your own JVM.