General Ramblings

Ever since vmware made ESXi a free download I have wanted to install and run it at home so I can P to V my systems at home. And save money on electricity. And before you ask I have looked at the Xen and Virtualbox and Kvm solutions but have found them not quite ready fro my prime time.

I had been running vmware server in the past with reasonable success.

I downloaded an iso of the ESXi installer and dutifully copied all my VM’s to an external disk. When I tried to install esx it complained about not finding a device to install the image on-to.

I initially thought it was the SATA problem so installed an IDE drive to see if that would help but it did not.

I even tried a full ESX3.5 install CD but that also did not work.

So I downloaded Opensuse 11 mini and installed that and vmware server 2 which is actually quite decent and the new web based management is actually quite usable.

I will continue my quest however. But it looks like I will have to get some new hardware. The prerequisites for this is that it must be quiet as the machine stands in out lounge next to the TV and the missus does not want to hear it. I also need 64bit support as I do some dev work for foresight and need that for packaging.

We will see how it goes.

The links below are the ones I currently have looked at. And will add more to the post as I find them or they are suggested.

http://vinf.net/2008/01/14/vmware-esx-v35-on-cheap-pc-hardware/

http://www.theinquisitivegeek.com/2006/11/esx-on-whitebox-as-many-of-you-know-i.html

http://www.techhead.co.uk/building-a-low-cost-cheap-vmware-esx-test-server

Mypaint has now been added to FL:2-devel.

from their website

MyPaint is a fast and easy painting application. It lets you focus on the art instead of the program.

It comes with a large brush collection including charcoal and ink to emulate natural painting. Other features are:

• support for pressure sensitive graphic tablets
• unlimited canvas (you never have to resize)
• undo
• fast
• no layers (work in progress)
• using pygtk with C extensions

If you want to look deeper, MyPaint is built around a highly configurable brush engine. This allows you to experiment with your own brushes and with not-quite-natural painting.

Monsoon 0.15 has been committed to FL:2-devel. This is a bugfix version.

LIbvirt has been updated to 4.3 in the fl:2-devel.

I am investigating video config (x config) for Foresight linux as the current config tool is a bit hit and miss.

I have been investigation who  does what and how but it seems quite difficult to get any information about this stuff from the different distributions and also what works and what does not.

I would appreciate any comments on the above.

After some head scratching and help from doniphon we now have a working virt-manager, virt-viewer, virtinst and libvirtd on Foresight Linux 2-qa so hopefully soon it will be released into the main repo sometime soon.

Please create issues on https://issues.foresightlinux.org for any problems

I have packaged Monsoon for foresight 2, it has been passed though qa and is now in the main repo.

I am glad that it has worked so easily

I have eventually been able to get a 64bit laptop.

Which means I will be able to package for Foresight Linux, Rpath and the Bongo Project again.

I feel I have been neglecting all my projects somewhat, hopefully when it arrives I will be able to package some great apps.

Well I have been able to get vmware running on Foresight 2 it was a bit of a mission as since Vmware have opensourced their vmware tools the foresight developers have built the tools into the kernel by default. The problem is that when you try to install vmware workstation or vmware player they would complain about the modules already installed and fail.

After manually deleting these module files I was able to install and run vmware on the workstation.

All was not lost though while I was trying to get this to work. I was able to build and run a QEMU (kvm) machine and run that so I could work and keep running. As one of my friends said they need to get virt-manager built and running on Foresight so that the machines can have bridged networking.

So this is a start at least.

So I migrated my desktop to Foresight Linux v 2

It has been a bit of a bumpy ride mainly due to me being a newbie and the fact that FL:2 is still very new to market.

I will see how things go and keep you updated.