Hugh Brock, Jeremy Katz and myself have been working hard on various aspects of the Xen GUI management tools. Jeremy’s re-factored the xenguest-install.py script from Fedora Core 5 into a formal python module / library API called ‘xeninst’ which should be appearing in rawhide fairly soon. Hugh, meanwhile has been tackling the Xen guest installation problem from the UI side, producing a wizard for the virt-manager app to collect the info neccessary provision new guest instances. Today we reached the major milestone of connecting the wizard to the xeninst libray and were able to perform a (near) end-to-end graphical install of a guest OS. With seemless progression from the data collection wizard, to the embedded VNC (or serial) console in virt-manager, installation of Xen guest operating systems in a Fedora host ought to become a whole lot more friendly RSN. A few days more bug fixing / tidying up loose ends and we’ll release another snapshot virt-manager and make re-try pushing RPMs into rawhide for wider testing. Today also saw a major new release of libvirt providing much better support for hardware assisted virtualization (aka HVM / VT), automated testing via the mock hypervisor driver, and a plethora of bug fixes / minor feature enhancements.
So at the start of the year I moved from London over to Boston. In that time I’ve slowly figured out the way of life over here, but of course at the same time I’ve been trying to keep in touch with British culture. So what does my ‘little britain’ consist of…. The first stage is to find a house in a place with a solid English name – in my case Cambridge. Next up is finding a good source of news (ie not Fox) – the excellant BBC news is great for online news, and more recently I got the BBC World Service streaming straight to my SqueezeBox. On that topic, SqueezeBox is setup out of the box to receive 100’s of radio stations from all over the world, so I can still listen to favourites like Virgin Radio – although it tends to lead to timezone confusion – from about 7 in the evening US time, you’re listening to the UK graveyard shift of DJ’s – oh, and you get all the UK advertising still which is a little amuzing. Back to news though – I discovered you can also get a The Guardian Weekly edition delivered anywhere in the world – a high density / condensed round-up of the weeks happenings.
While back in the UK a couple of weeks ago I paid a visit to the Plymouth Gin Distillery which is England’s oldest Gin distiller having been in operation since at least 1793. Even today every Royal Navy ship commissioned is provided with a wooden casket containing two bottles of the special “Navy Strength” (100% proof – 57% by volume) gin – so named because it is the concentration at which gin can be spilt on gunpowder and still be able to ignite the powder. Well you can’t get the navy strength version over here, but a number of liquor stores carry the regular Plymouth Gin. For a summer’s afternoon though, one should really be drinking Pimm’s – the drink of choice at garden parties, or events like Royal Ascot & Wimbledon – its not well known over here, but its surprisingly easily available none the less.
Back to Fedora related news, we’ve been working hard developing the capabilities in libvirt and virt-manager, racing to be ready with a really useful tool for managing Xen VMs in Fedora Core 6. Virt-manager didn’t make it into FC6-test2 (primarily thanks to an inconveniently timed 2-week vacation on my part ;-), but I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to slip it in before test3. Since the 0.1.5 release 2 weeks back, we’ve got the serial console embedded directly in the app, added ability to tune memory allocation & number of CPUs on the fly, and designed & mostly implemented a wizard for creating new VMs (a GUI equivalent of the xenguest-install.py script), so things are looking very promising on the features front.
davej is wondering how to get Google maps to show you where the Boston T-stops are located. Why, ask Google of course, where upon the first hit is a link to a very handy MBTA station/map overlay. I’ve needed this many times before, so that’s another site for my bookmarks. Well actually, not really – Google is so good at answering these kind of questions that I’ve mostly ceased to keep bookmarks – its just as quick to ask Google for the link each time as to look for it amongst hundreds of un-organized bookmarks.
DV writes that 5 years worth of archives of the xml@gnome.org and xslt@gnome.org mailing lists have gone AWOL. All is not lost, however, since GMane has historic archives of xml@gnome.org stretching back to December 2001, and for xslt@gnome.org stretching back to March 2002. I don’t know if there were older messages than these, but that looks like a sizeable chunk of the archives.
Like many other Red Hat folk, I was down in Nashville for the summit last week. One evening I was chatting with jrb about developers either being “starters” (people who kick off projects & then drift off into other things) or “finishers” (who see things through to the end & put the polish on apps). Well you only have to look at my Mercurial server, to see I’m pretty much a “starter” – lots of code, very little of which is “finished”.
So, this weekend I decided it was time to be a “finisher” for a while. To that end I released an update to the Perl DBus bindings (Net::DBus), and Config::Record. I also applied a little polish to a “mock” test driver for libVirt which I will shortly commit, and continued documenting more of Test-AutoBuild in preparation for a major release (which has been an unbelievable 2 years in the making). All in all, quite a productive weekend.
Oh, BTW, for those who were at the summit – I’ve uploaded copies of my slides which contain a fair bit of extra info compared to the version distributed on the CD. For those of weren’t at the summit – I was talking about management of virtual systems, with a heavy emphasis on libvirt, and a little about the tools we’re building on top of it. Before anyone asks, I plan to make the source for the GUI virtual machine management tool available in the next few weeks.