I’m actually one of those 54,000 users as I installed Fedora 8 on my home PC which now dual boots Fedora and Vista (solely for Photoshop and my Sony HD camcorder video editing).  I actually replace Ubuntu Gutsy with Fedora to try out the new virtualization features in Fedora 8. I must admit, when it comes to virtualization, no distro comes close to Fedora (I tried Ubuntu 7.10 and OpenSuse 10.3). The polish, focus, and achievements with Xen and KVM are second to none. The Fedora 8 Virtual Machine Monitor is fantastic – worth testing the distro out alone. I have not (yet) seen any other distro port this with as many features available.

However, from an end user experience perspective, I would recommend every Fedora developer force themselves to use Ubuntu for the next month. The Ubuntu competition has a huge leg up on Fedora from a user experience perspective and it’s as if they don’t even know it  (or Fedora has decided just to not care). For instance, just try watching an MPEG movie, try even finding how to use the licensed, paid for codecs, try listening to an MP3, try enabling 3D desktop with nVidia drivers, try customizing the 3D effects. When you need help, does the Wiki really help? Does the FAQ that is still stuck on Fedora 7 content apply? Fedora has now released quite a few well done releases – why are there still issues?

It truly was difficult to accept that Fedora was still as far behind as it was from an end user perspective. Now, I don’t want to scare anyone off – as a Linux user – I’ve grown accustomed to self help and working through these issues one by one. None are insurmountable and Fedora 8 is no more complicated for these things than Fedora 7. However, Fedora 7 should not be the bar against which you’re competing. I’ve said many times that Linux distros should ignore Windows and focus on the value Mac OS X offers its users (security holes, firewall issues, and upgrade dilemmas aside).

You can grab Fedora 8 yourself over here:

http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora

First off, you need a system with full virtualization enabled processors, or virtualization assist. AMD calls this Secure Virtual Machine (or SVM) and Intel calls its technology VT-x (or vmx). You can read more about this at LWN if you would like here.

I’m using Ubuntu 7.10 64-bit on an AMD64x2 dual core processor that has the AMD hardware virtualization assist extensions . To find out if your processor supports this, use the following command:

# egrep ‘(vmx|svm)’ /proc/cpuinfo

Example output from an AMD system (hence, “svm” is highlighted). If this were Intel based, you would see “vmx”:

First, start by installing KVM and QEMU using apt-get or Synaptic Package Manager

# apt-get install qemu kvm
# modprobe kvm-amd (or kvm-intel for intel procs)

Note that if you do not modprobe the KVM module, you will get an error such as the following when you try to start KVM in the steps that follow:

Installing an Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy Gibbon server guest OS

# qemu-img create gutsy-server.img -f qcow2 6G

This creates a file for your virtual machine image in your current directory. QEMU and KVM actually support many other useful file formats as described in the qemu documentation. One of the more userful options here is to use “-f vmdk” as the vm image that you create and setup will be compatible with VMware 3 and 4. Obviously the ability to export and use the same image with VMware can be valuable.

One question you may have at this point is “why use KVM; doesn’t QEMU do this too?”. The simple answer is that KVM uses processor extensions for virtualization whereas QEMU uses processor emulation. QEMU emulates the processor and system devices. KVM does not need to emulate the processor but relies on QEMU to do its device emulation. The interesting use case for QEMU is that it can also emulate other processor architectures such as SPARC, PowerPC and MIPS (see this website) on an x86 host. While the difference may seem subtle, there are definite performance advantages to KVM (and once can assume stability advantages). Someday, we may see them merge… but I doubt it. You can find a great overview of the differences between various Linux virtualization technologies at developerWorks here.

Back to KVM, the command above creates an image file that grows as the VM requires. With an inflatable disk image, your VM grows with the space used by the virtual machine up to 6GB (versus pre-allocating a full 6GB disk image). Now, let’s startup an Ubuntu install for our new virtual machine.

# kvm -m 750 -cdrom /home/user/ubuntu-7.10-server-amd64.iso -boot d ubuntu-server.img

For new users, the /home/user/ should just be the path to where you stored your Ubuntu iso download. If you execute this command and only see a black window pop up that looks empty, you can hit enter to start the install and the screen will come back. Or, you can add “-std-vga” to the kvm command above to help with the framebuffer Ubuntu startup.

This will start up KVM and boot the virtual machine off of the Ubuntu iso image. You can also boot from a CD/DVD drive by using this command:

# kvm -m 750 -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d ubuntu-server.img

Once you execute the command, QEMU will startup and you will see the normal boot options as if you started your computer with an Ubuntu install disk in the drive. I had to use -no-acpi with Ubuntu 7.10 or else I would get kernel panics once it went to install. The title bar should show QEMU/KVM. If you just see QEMU (as in the image below), then KVM failed (you most likely forgot to load the KVM module in the steps above) and you should exit even though it appears to be working. If you see QEMU/KVM, you should now have a working KVM install. Continue with the server install process and configuration as usual.

Once installation is finished, the Ubuntu guest will try to restart. This will fail, and that’s fine. You can close out the QEMU/KVM window, return to the command line, and start up your KVM guest Ubuntu server for the first time. I also tend to give running guests less memory than during the install…

# kvm -no-acpi -m 500 ubuntu-server.img

(note that I installed the text based version of Ubuntu server with no GUI or X windows)

Fedora Core 8 Beta as a KVM Guest

I’ll create an image for Fedora 8 first, using vmdk as the file format to later use this same image with VMware. You can click here for more information on how to use a QEMU created vmdk file in VMware.

# qemu-create fedora8.img -f vmdk 6G

# kvm -no-acpi -m 750 -cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d fedora8.img

# kvm -no-acpi -m 500 fedora8.img

Windows Server 2008 in KVM with Ubuntu:

See my post here for setting up Windows Server 2008 in KVM

Next up: managing KVM processes, KVM networking, and sharing files between host and guests.

Other Resources to Check Out:

Virtual disk images: http://fabrice.bellard.free.fr/qemu/qemu-doc.html#SEC24

KVM Wiki: http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki/Front_Page

It’s been a few years since I last attended and at that time, I don’t believe I even registered – I just popped in, went to a few talks and left. But at that time there were maybe a couple hundred people there. I heard estimates that over 1,000 were in attendance although that figure seemed to underestimate the full number of people there. A couple of the speaker hall sessions were absolutely packed (and they were big halls). Ohio LinuxFest gives LinuxWorld a pretty big challenge. It was great to see all the regional corporate supporters but I was a bit surprised by all the “big IT” vendors with booths. There were sponsors from Google, IBM, HP, Novell, Red Hat, Fedora, Ubuntu, Vyatta and even Sun (although they seemed to be using Linux to try getting visitors to listen to their Solaris story).

Some of the sessions were fantastic, others less so but on the whole, it was an outstanding lineup of speakers. “Maddog” was a speaker and did a great talk on computing off the grid. Grega… wow, what energy for usability. Somehow I ended up being an impromptu speaker at an “IBM Virtualization” session. I was followed by Alena from IBM who did a great job covering the details on how NationWide uses Linux on an IBM System z mainframe with z/VM for their mission critical web based systems. Alena had a last minute “laptop issue” (ahem… Windows) but we were able to copy her presentation onto an USB key and present from my Linux laptop (Linux saves the day… again).

The special prize for those who made it was the untold number of great ideas, best practices, and partnering or finding others in similar situations that these networking events create. I actually met someone with a similar background who went to law school and passed the bar, he moved to D.C. as an attorney and he’s now managing IT systems for the federal court systems. He was looking to start consolidating some of the applications they run in every court onto a central system (mainframe most likely).

Anyway, here’s an obligatory picture from the show (apologies for not having my good camera with me). I encourage anyone who will be near Columbus next year to check this event out – it was a great show, a great place to meet others working in the Linux/FLOSS arena, and overall a great time. And somehow this whole event is put on by volunteers – truly amazing.

Note the body density in this picture – this place was packed.

You can read all about its history here.

You can register (it’s free) for the event here: http://www.ohiolinux.org/register.html  If you have the means, check out the All Conference Pass as it helps fund the event.

The Ohio LinuxFest Corporation is an non-profit corporation registered in the state of Ohio to promote the education of Linux and Free and Open Source software. The corporation was founded by people from various Linux User Groups in the midwest to promote and manage the Ohio LinuxFest. The corporation is non-profit and is an all-volunteer organization. If you would like to contribute your time and talent to the conference, then please write us at team@ohiolinux.org.

As things stand, it’s not worth it for any Linux user to migrate to Solaris 10, even if it is free.

Indigo Jo also seems to have chosen Fedora 7 over Ubuntu which is an interesting twist of late… I’ve heard of a couple (literally 2) people moving back to Fedora – not a trend by any stretch, but I like v7 and might eventually move one of my systems to Fedora to leverage the Xen/KVM workloads… maybe…

Article giving you an overview of “remixing” Fedora 7 – it’s a nice balance between a “roll your own” and “full standard” distro.

I also find it nice to see the newer distros competing on polish (no I won’t define it) and also producing some amazing graphics/eyecandy. The new Fedora splash screens and artwork are *very* nice.

ftp://sourceware.redhat.com/pub/systemtap/livecds/Fedora-7-systemtap-20070606.iso

http://fedoraproject.org/?sc_cid=bcm_bnrhpfedora_055

http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=236239

“Collaborators from Mayo Clinic and IBM (NYSE: IBM) have exploited parallel computer architecture and memory bandwidth to dramatically speed up the processing of 3-D medical images.

Through porting and optimization of Mayo Clinic’s Image Registration Application on the IBM® BladeCenter® QS20 ‘Cell Blade,’ the application produced image results fifty times faster than the application running on a traditional processor configuration.

With the images properly aligned over one another, a radiologist can more easily detect structural changes such as the growth or shrinkage of tumors.

This improvement with the application running on Cell, will achieve two things — allow for Mayo’s doctors and radiologists to achieve in seconds what used to take hours, which in turn will significantly decrease the wait time and anxiety for a patient waiting on news from the doctor.”

http://enterpriselinuxlog.blogs.techtarget.com/files/2007/04/44218-linuxdistrotimeline-72.png

Preview:

Also, “how should we support you?” Very interesting set of questions – I’d be interested in the results myself. I voted for Ubuntu and must disagree with them listing it as “non-commercial” – ever here of Canonical? No Gentoo offered (shocking…)

http://www.dellideastorm.com/ 

So I do think it’s ok to “count” users? First, “privacy” arguments/fears are mostly unfounded with a method like Fedora implements. Tracking unique IPs connecting to your yum server (or to your xyz server) is nothing that interferes with privacy. But it does offer an estimate into the size of the community and that lets people make informed decisions on where to invest.

If you ask IDC for the # of Linux desktops out there, it’s likely less than what Mark Shuttleworth would say Ubuntu has – and that’s just 1 distribution.

I also know other open distros are counting in their own ways, and I think all of this is good. What would be nice+ would be an automated collection process so that 1 site could aggregate all the distro stats together via an RSS/Atom/unameit feed. So take the Fedora count, add in an Ubuntu count, etc. The community could do good things by aggregating the mass # of voices out there for say hardware support from some market blinded company that won’t release Linux drivers. Once you have the hardware, next stop is ISVs who refuse to support the Linux desktop environment. Some catch flack over it when users voice in aggregate, maybe catch some bad pr, but can turn that around and respond positively.

Couple of interesting quotes:

One thing Larry (Ellison, Oracle chief executive) says on stage, another in reality. It’s half our list price without volume discounts and it’s just vanilla support. With Oracle, there’s one 24-7 support, the same subscription for all your environment. You are buying support you don’t need. We discuss with customers different service levels for dedicated parts of their infrastructure.

There were 18 security breaches in 2005 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Ninety percent were fixed within one hour. You will not see that at Microsoft.

1) Getting nvidia drivers running… what a mess. Don’t download from nvidia.com – get them through the livna repository (similar to Packman if you’re a Suse user).

2) Even when you figure out the nvidia trick, don’t expect AIGLX comes easily. I have been able to run AIGLX and XGL on my system under multiple distros but after 2 hrs of dedicated work, couldn’t get AIGLX on FC6. I looked at the popular sites describing how to (lunapark6 for instance) but no go.

3) Not a FC issue, but I’m so tired of not being able to use the nvidia drivers on a Xen kernel…. arrgghhh.

4) OpenOffice – not the Novell kind – when will these go upstream Sun?
5) The “development” options in the install… somehow fail to install kernel sources.

6) I LOVE the double helix graphic art.

7) Really like the LVM partioning maturity – very nice.

8) SELinux – who knew it could be mindlessly simple (ok, maybe not for grandma, but if you know what you’re doing, this is awesome)

9) Virtual Machine Manager – ok, this is really cool, but… lacks the ability to install a virtual image from CD/DVD – you can only do via kickstart or ftp/http???? Why?

10) System Monitor – love it.

11) Frysk fully enabled! Whooaa! Did you see that? I couldn’t believe it.

12) Disk Usage Analyzer – this came out of nowhere.. have never seen this before but it’s really useful. Makes du and df look dumb.

13) GDM is AWESOME – beats any other system’s login screen hands down. The graphics and layout are very polished – sorry Mark S….

14) Is it just me or does the RHEL based distro seem more “standardized” than the Suse stuff? No weird zdm stuff pushed in… I prefer standard.

15) In all my trials with AIGLX, I experienced the most robust xorg implementation and stability than I have ever witnessed.

16) Package Management: it’s much better in FC6. Much. It’s no Portage and it’s not apt-get, but it’s coming along. Even the yum implementation is better than previous experiences.

17) Don’t expect your broadcom wireless to work out of the box. It’s never worked for me out of the box and I’ve done ndiswrapper enough times to see the commands in my sleep.

18) Power management on my laptop WORKS – it’s never worked (not even in Windows). I don’t know what to say – I’m shocked.

Overall, I give FC6 at solid 7.9 out of 10. Once nvidia catches up to FC6 I could easily give this an 9.0.

SLED10 is probably still the best – and I never liked Suse – ever. I’m about to install Edgy so the game’s not over yet.

Oh, almost forgot to mention – FC6 has this “two tier” type menu for Grub. I was puzzled when I saw it for the first time. Not sure if it’s just a new grub or a new facelift for FC but it was cool.

Interestingly when I hopped over to fedora.redhat.com I was greeted by this.. not a healthy launch message…