Paul Skinner

I’m going to cheap out and review FC8 in a VM as I don’t have a partition to dedicate to a full-on hardware installation (I’ll pay for this choice a bit later) at the moment.

FC8 was downloaded directly from the fedoraproject.org site in ISO DVD format.

The first part of this post discusses some pains in getting Virtual PC to play nice with FC8… scroll ahead if you don’t care about installing under Virtual PC…

A previously installed copy of Microsoft Virtual 2007 will be used to host the FC8 install. The VM will be allocated 512MB of RAM and a 32GB virtual drive. The host OS is Windows XP on an Intel E6600 with 3GB of RAM.

Right off the bat, the graphical installation seems to be out of the question. Once beyond the bootloader, the generic framebuffer doesn’t seem to be handled well by Virtual PC 2007 but I’m sure this is fine on real hardware (in hindsight, this probably isn’t true, if you specify the kernel parameters described below during the installer’s kernel boot, the graphical install should work just fine).

The text installer software is the ever familiar Anaconda installer, where the 32GB virtual disk was partitioned and formatted using defaults most of the way along. The “Office and Productivity”, “Software Development” and “Web Server” collections were selected for installation.

The installer chugged through and completed in fairly short order.

The VM was rebooted and then things got interesting.

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The never-ending quest to put a bullet in the Microsoft Exchange server has just chambered another live-round in the form something called Zimbra. To be fair, the Exchange server I manage is very stable, and runs great. I just loath the price of licenses and dread the obscure solutions to seemingly easy tasks.

I don’t know where this product has been hiding, but it caught my eye last week as a result of a Stumble! click. It seems Yahoo! has spent some coin and bought out Zimbra but is continuing to offer the code and binaries under a variety of licensing models. This is all good news for IT departments and service providers everywhere!

There are a number of How-To documents on the Internet that describe implementing various services to support an Exchange’esque environment. I’ve tried it, it works, but it’s ugly and a devil to maintain. Zimbra provides all the necessary technologies in one suite and centralizes the configuration in a uniform interface. The clever folks at Zimbra did it RIGHT. Both the authentication and directory Services are user configurable and 3rd party supported. This means that Zimbra can leverage your existing directory systems such as Active Directory or any other LDAP server for that matter.

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Earlier this week I ran into an issue with Eclipse PDT (PHP Development Tools) after upgrading to the latest version (Europa 3.?). My development platform is Windows XP and IIS, 3.2 P4 1GB RAM, IIS, PHP 5 ISAPI, MySQL. We call this the WIMP configuration (Windows IIS MySQl PHP) .

Some of the scripts in our application are quite large and something happened with the PDT; it simply takes forever for Eclipse to parse the script and extract all the classes/variables to render the Outline perspective. This gets really frustrating as it goes through this process on regular intervals as you work through the script. I can’t really complain about Eclipse up until now, its been my development workhorse for the past while and will eventually get fixed in this regard. I have faith. What do you want for free after all?

This lead me down a path where I uncovered things I’d rather not know or have experienced…

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My first ever Wordpress blog entry… goodbye cherry!

Starting off with a few notes and observations of Fedora Core 7 seems appropriate as it (used to, I moved to Wordpress.com) powers this site and some supporting elements for my home network.

Someone looking in might think I’m crazy, but my job and interests keep my stables quite full of computers. My wife and I each have our desktops, as well as one older HP NetServer 2U server as a firewall/ LAMP install and finally a PIII-800 with about 200GB of disk space that serves as my file dumpster and SAMBA NT domain controller.

Eco-concerns being what they are, it makes sense on a few fronts to combine the best of left over parts and build something to replace the HP and the PIII clone.

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Following the theme of my previous post on Fedora Core 7, I really wanted to touch on my experience with OpenPBX.

Just for a bit of background, we’ve opted out of traditional telephone in favour of a SIP based VoIP, provided by a Montreal area re-seller named BabyTel. I had figured out and configured BabyTel to run under Asterisk 1.2 on my HP NetServ machine where it was happily doing its job answering the phone and taking messages etc… However, with all this swapping and upgrading, the HP NetServ is being retired.

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Having recently replaced my desktop PC with an Intel E6600 based rig, I’m finally getting around to trying out all the new toys. Yes, I have been hiding under a rock, having only ever heard about LightScribe, this is really my first exposure to this feature.

As part of the upgrade kit, I had requested a new DVD burner. The order wasn’t very specific but my contact at Elco system did his best call to fill the order. A Samsung Model SH-S182 was selected.

I opted against the bundled Samsung Nero software and went with my Nero version. Using the Cover Page designer I was able to Copy and Paste some FC7 logos and a screen shot of the Gnome desktop to the layout and “print” to the label side of the LightScribe discs. Yeah, you need special LightScribe discs too.

The process took 17 minutes to complete but the resulting label is really pretty neat. This particular label was somewhat complex which is presumably why it took so long to process.

Label Close-Up

Features like this are great for me… my Sharpies are constantly being stolen or lost leading to my evil stack of unlabeled media. I guess I’m a slave to LightScribe media now!

Its gonna take some getting used to, but I can really see this being useful. Way to go HP!