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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga) was released on March 14, 2007 and yesterday was RHEL 5's 3rd birthday. Since then we have gotten 4 update releases. Given the fact that Red Hat original plan was to have a new RHEL release every 18 - 24 months, one has to wonder where RHEL 6 is and why it is so late. My best guess is that RHEL 6 (which so far has had a non-public alpha release within Red Hat as witnessed in some Bugzilla reports) will come out sometime this summer... possibly in time for the Red Hat Summit in Boston (June 22-25, 2010). For that to happen I would expect a public beta for RHEL 6 to be released in the not too distant future. We'll see how that pans out. While we are waiting, how about some idle discussion?

The sad thing is that Apple has basically delivered a Netbook but by chopping off the keyboard (and all of the I/O ports), giving it a touch screen, and crippling it significantly in several ways, they have everyone convinced that it is a new form factor. This is aided by the fact that it is reminiscent of devices from the Star Trek universe. In writing this article, I hope to expose the iPad for what it really is and stay out of Steve Job's reality distortion field.

When I got home from work last night, my 17 year old son (Bryan) demanded I watch something on TV he had found. Welding the TiVo remote he played for me a commercial aired during SpongeBob SquarePants. In the commercial I kid got a package in the mail that contained two OLPCs one of which the kid picks up and walks out of his house with, journeying until he is in a village in Africa where he gives a village kid the OLPC. At the very end it is revealed that it is a contest being run by General Mills with chances to win provided with some of their products.

Red Hat actually opened up the SPICE protocol yesterday during their Virtual Experience 2009 event. Somehow I missed that. Have a look at the press release if you are interested... as well as their site to house the new open source project - spice-space.org. This seems to have caused some buzz in certain corners of the virtualization websphere (does anyone still use that word?) but so far no one has said what it could mean for us run-of-the-mill Linux users looking for a good, fast remote desktop protocol. I asked a couple of questions on the fedora-virt mailing list and received some informative replies.

Red Hat held the Red Hat Virtual Experience 2009 today and it was awesome. What was it? It was a completely online conference that offered everything you'd find at a traditional face-to-face show like the annual Red Hat Summit. I was hoping Red Hat would use this event to introduce / announce RHEV for Desktops but no such luck. I guess we'll have to continue to wait until January.

Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers on November 3rd. A couple of weeks before the release, I emailed Red Hat media relations contact Kerrin Catallozzi and asked for an interview with some Red Hat employees regarding Red Hat Enteprise Virtualization. It took a several weeks to get the answers back mainly because the official product release happened... and after I had the chance to download, print and read the documentation, most of my questions had been answered... and I ended up coming up with all new questions. Kerrin found Andy Cathrow (Product Marketing Manager) and Jim Brennan (Senior Product Marketing Manager) of Red Hat to provide the answers.

Red Hat released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers and the accompanying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor products today. There are a slew of press releases and demo videos. They even had a webcast press conference. Oh, and hey, they also released all of the manuals too. What exactly is it? Once you learn, I think you'll be shocked... in more ways than one.

Proxmox VE is a very light-weight Debian-based distribution that includes a kernel with support for both KVM and OpenVZ. This means you get the best of both virtualization worlds... containers (OS Virtualization) and fully-virtualized machines (Machine Virtualization). Proxmox VE also includes a very powerful yet easy to use web-based management system with clustering features. Boot the Proxmox VE install media, answer a few simple questions, and within 10 minutes you have a very powerful virtualization platform you can manage from a web browser. Install it on one or more additional machines that are networked together and use Proxmox VE's cluster management tool to create a virtualization cluster that allows for centralized management, automated backups, iso media and OS Template syncing, as well as migration features. Proxmox VE really is a time saving turnkey solution... and it is freely available under a GPL license.

Apple realized some time ago that people might want to dual-boot their new machines so they created Boot Camp. Indeed, Boot Camp does make it easy to dual-boot and they even give you all of the drivers needed to make Windows support their hardware... but what about triple-booting? Maybe someday the Boot Camp developers will implement triple-booting but for now it only supports dual-boot. What is needed is a set of clear instructions for creating a triple-boot setup... and here they are.

Argh, there have been about a zillion articles and blog posting declaring the future of computing and a coming "OS War" between Microsoft and Google. Paaalease. Although I myself am writing yet another piece of content related to Google Chrome OS, I feel compelled to do so because the vast majority of everything I've seen so far is simply rubbish... and I don't often call things rubbish.

Then I learned of a new model from Acer with a 10.1" display screen (called the AOD150 or D150) and it has almost the same specs as the previous model but with one important difference... it provides access to the hard drive, memory, and wireless card via access panels on the bottom of the unit. Upgrading or replacing a defective part in the D150 is easy. The larger display is a bonus although it offers the same resolution (1024x600). Although the case was slightly wider to accommodate the bigger screen, they kept the same exact keyboard from the A150. The MSRP on the D150 model seemed to be $349.99 and a few local retailers had it so I decided pick one up.

Linuxfest Northwest is an annual free, two-day event held at Bellingham Technical College in Bellingham, Washington on the last weekend in April. It has become a hub of Linux activity in the Northwest with several of the Washington area Linux Users Groups supporting it. Visitors seem to come from all over the country especially those places that don't have a Linux conference anywhere near them.

I got an email from Jeremiah Gray announcing a new issue (#2) of Hackett and Bankwell, the educational comicbook about Linux and Free and Open Source Software from Intarcorp Ltd. Issue #2 is currently only available in electronic format (PDF) and they have decided to release it under a Creative Commons license.

I have always wanted a good quality audio player that works well with Linux and plays Ogg Vorbis files. Even though the Sansa Clip was originally released in 2007, I somehow missed it. The gang on The Linux Link Tech Show mentioned the Sandisk Sansa Clip as being an affordable, quality portable audio player that worked well with Linux so I decided to give it a shot. I did a little bargain hunting online and found a refurbished 1GB unit for $18.95 plus shipping so I thought it was hard to go wrong for that price. The unit arrived three days ago and I spent all weekend using it.

[I got this very model for free when I got my phone and it works with my Linux machines. - Scott]

Virtualization has been a buzz word for a few years now. Some people think it has been over-hyped but I'm not one of those people. The big competing products seem to be: VMware, Xen, KVM, VirtualBox, Parallels (including OpenVZ), and Hyper-V. Is there too much choice out there? Choice isn't bad, is it? Will there eventually be a market shake up with a thinning of product candidates as a result? Will someone try to proclaim that they are the virtualization "standard"? I don't really know. I certainly like competition and don't think having a number of competing products is bad. There are both proprietary products and FOSS products. As you can guess, I lean towards the later if at all possible.

Proxmox VE is a “bare metal” ISO Linux distribution that is a virtual machine platform. It is geared towards enterprise users and designed to be installed on enterprise grade hardware. The Proxmox VE distribution combines two virtual machine technologies; KVM and OpenVZ as well as a web interface to manage everything. Proxmox VE also integrates into its web interface a way to manage multiple computers as a cluster. For the rest of the article Proxmox VE shall be referred to as PVE. This review covers the latest stable release PVE 1.1.

ML: Who have been some of your most interesting guests? (List of past guests)

Dann: We have had so many great guests along the way. In fact, I am often quite surprised that some well known people come on our show and have actually listened to or do listen to us on a regular basis. Probably the biggest guest for me was Patrick Volderding, the creator and maintainer of Slackware; that was an awesome show. Other notable include Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, Jeremy Allison, Bruce Perens, Dean Haglund (of Lone Gunman fame), Bil Herd (former Commodore engineer) and more recently Scott Sigler. As you can see, not all our guests are strictly Linux related, but most are. There have been so many wonderful people who have taken the time to share with us and the community.

I was wondering just how many containers I could create on a beefy host and how many processes the Linux kernel would be happy running so I decided to do an experiment.

I have two OpenVZ hosts... one is the primary and the other is a backup. Both of them are HP Proliant DL380 Gen5 machines with dual, quad-core Xeon processors, 32GB of RAM, 32GB of swap, and a 600GB /vz partition. I decided to use the backup OpenVZ machine for the experiment.

A two-part screencast. The first part has some slides at the beginning of it that explains the process of how to build a LiveDVD remix of Fedora 10 and then includes a live demo of the build process. The second video shows booting the LiveDVD media that was built in part one and some of the features present in the remix.

Fedora 10 was officially released on Tuesday November 25, 2008. Since its release I have installed and used it on a number of machines and been running it as my full-time desktop. One of the main complaints about Fedora 9 when it was released was their decision to drop the KDE 3.x desktop and go exclusively with the KDE 4.0.x desktop. Being a KDE user I can concur with the assessment that the version of KDE that shipped on the Fedora 9 install media was not very usable. As a result, I switched to GNOME for a few months until KDE updated to the 4.1.x series. How is KDE 4 in Fedora 10? Much, much better.