Crispin Flowerday

I’ve just got back from a VMworld 2006 (the flight was superb, we had a 120 mph tail wind ), it was a superb conference, with lots of exciting announcements. The record and replay support coming in workstation looks particularly interesting and useful, I might even buy a new copy if they don’t give free upgrades to 5.x users.

Also good is the interest in Virtual Appliances. We (Zeus Technology) released a production-ready virtual appliance this week, which is certified under VMware’s new certification requirements. This is a no-brainer for us, virtualization is becoming huge (7000 people were at the conference), and it gives us a complete range of offerings (software, physical and virtual appliance).

It was reassuring for us that the guys at proofpoint also have the same reasons for offering their Messaging Security Gateway product as a virtual appliance. Give it a couple of years and the market for virtual appliances running on a companies virtual infrstructure will be huge.

I have been going slowly mad with the noise that my server at home produces, so having just got a refund from the tax man I have bought a nice quiet, small mac mini. Now, I need to get dapper onto it: easy, or so I thought, but sadly it failed boot after getting things installed. I have found some guides on the web on how to install linux, but they focus on keeping the ability to multi-boot, which I don’t want.

Does anyone know the best way to install dapper totally wiping the MacOSX installation ?

For at least a year I have been saying “I will buy an iPod nano when they release an 8Gb version” and unfortunately they have just released one.

I was hoping for the ‘just work’ integration I have come to expect from Ubuntu, and sadly it doesn’t ‘just work’, lets take the apps I have tried one at a time:

• Rhythmbox – this is what dapper (and edgy) fire up when the iPod is installed, it detects the iPod but you can’t copy music to it, and in any case it doesn’t like most of my music.
• Banshee – This doesn’t find my iPod at all
• gtkpod – One look at that UI and it was off my computer
• gnupod – It claimed to copy music, but my iPod didn’t find it
• ipod – this is a little command line tool to test the libraries – it claims Not a Valid iPod!
• VMware + iTunes – When I run iTunes windows crashes

All in all not a very satifying experience. It looks like I’m going to have to either get used to that rubbish gtkpod UI (and hope it works) or re-install windows natively onto my laptop.

Are there any other programs I should try?

Update: Rhythmbox on edgy ‘just works’, so I’m happy now

Update 2:VMware + iPod works fine through a USB 1.1 hub

In England we have got Elections today for the local council, sadly the ones in Cambridge seem to degenerate into a shouting match between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. This year the issue is over bin collections, the Liberal Democrats say “Don’t vote for Labour they will get rid of the recycling collections” (without saying anything about their future policies), and Labour say “Vote for us, we will have a better bin policy” (without saying what that policy is). The Conservatives or Green Party never tell anyone what their policies are ….

Still, I made my decision, and tried to vote, only to find my name not on the list, after a quick phone call it was found that they had the wrong list of voters (my registration is moving to my new area on June 1st), so they had to add me back onto the list (in pencil!). I would have thought that they could get something as important as elections right!

I have been hunting for a house to buy for last 9 months (really seriously since the start of the year) and I have finally managed to find a place to buy. It is my first place, so am very excited. In theory I should be able to finish the purchase sometime in the next month, the sooner the better IMO

Sadly this means that unless anyone wants to sponsor me to go I won’t be going to GUADEC. I have been saying for the last year that I would be there this year, but things change and I should be spending what little money I will have on a washing machine and comfy sofa at the moment. In theory by the end of summer my finances will be in a much better situation so I may be able to get to Boston for the summit (I’m assuming there will be one?).

If anyone wonders why I have had no time to do any development work recently, see the house purchase above

We (Zeus Technology) have been working with VMware recently to launch a VMware appliance containing our Traffic Manager (ZXTM). The appliance is freely distributable, and contains a development version of our software (max simultaneous connection restrictions). What is particularly pleasing is that the appliance doesn’t look like a normal Linux boot – there are none of the bootup messages that confuse non-technical people.

Thankfully no one had to be awake at 5am when the website was updated, we just scripted ZXTM to automatically switch which content it was serving at the appropriate time. When I woke up this morning it all seemed to have worked ok which is always a nice feeling.

We are very excited about this, as it means that customers can evaluate the software without finding an extra bit of hardware to run it on. We managed to get the image to just 65mb compressed which is a lot smaller than we first thought. Many thanks to philipl for answering my many questions about building images, and the rest of the vmware team for their quality products!

In other news Galeon 2.0.1 was released yesterday, this release makes type-ahead-find work properly with Firefox 1.5, and makes Galeon build with xulrunner (although not on debian without patching due to their packaging of xulrunner).

Ubuntu recently started including GNOME Power Manager in main, and while it has been in universe for a while, it never had the underlying support from the acpi-support package until quite recently. So finally today I got it working (missing dep on libpam-foreground took a while to track down), and what can I say? It rocks … this and Network Manager are an amazing combination for laptop users, so roll on GNOME 2.16 when hopefully they will be included.

Best things about GNOME Power Manager:

• Sliding the screen brightness slider alters the screens brightness – Instant apply at its finest!
• Actually being able to control what happens when I close my laptop lid without having to alter files on disk.
• Control over whether the battery icon is showing anything (or in my case make it dissappear when it isn’t saying anything useful).

Congrats to Richard Hughes on such a brilliant bit of software.

It has taken me all day trying to download the new VMware server, only to get Internal Error every time I do it. Thanks to biesi, it seems as though if you select a state and zip code it works fine (even though I am in the UK).

Now I just need to get it installed, and see what it is like. If it is anything like player, workstation or ESX it should be superb. Congrats to the people who worked on it.

VMware really should solve their website problems, they need to recruit some web site people who are as talented as their product people, it always seems slow, and their download system seems really buggy.

So I decided that rather than hacking it with Xmodmap, I would try and get the back and forward buttons (on my IBM laptop) working properly just via the xkb stuff, and did eventually manage it.

Basically in /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/inet (ubuntu, other distros will vary) put:

partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "thinkpad" {
    key <I6A>   {       [       XF86Back                ]       };
    key <I69>   {       [       XF86Forward             ]       };
};

(how do I generate those <I6A> numbers ? it isn’t a direct conversion from the decimal that xev gives me)

and then in the $inetkbds bit of /etc/X11/xkb/rules/base add “thinkpad”. Once that is done, just select the “IBM thinkpad <random model numbers>” layout in gnome-keyboard-properties, and your back and forward buttons will ‘just work’ with no xmodmap messing.

I believe this is the correct way of doing things, so I have raised a bug about it.

Perhaps another bug should be raised about the name of that keyboard, and the fact that the keys appear as just a big black rectangle in the layouts dialog of gnome-keyboard-properties.

Next up, get my Microsoft Natural Multimedia keyboard’s audio buttons working…..

At the moment, the Galeon Website is useless; it is a wiki based on twiki, which uses files to store the content, however the web servers on the sourceforge site now mount the content read-only, meaning they can’t update the content.

We would like to keep it wiki-based, and so need to convert it to something like mediawiki. So, does anyone know of any nice mediawiki themes that are floating around that are available. I know that http://www.mono-project.com and http://www.hula-project.org are based on mediawiki, but is their theme available anywhere?