Mine the Harvest

Last year I had some fun getting an OS X virtual machine  running under VM Ware server on my Windows box. (That was a geeky thing back then.) That box since died and I built a new system with Open Suse 10.3 as the primary OS. I installed VM Ware server and rounded up the Virtual Machine files I had made for this OS X Virtual Machine under Windows and just copied them into the new Linux environment. Honestly, I thought it would likely choke – I didn’t expect simply dropping the VM files into the Linux install to actually work – it did.

I find it greatly amusing to run OS X on my regular old Intel P4 2.8 generic system. It runs pretty much perfectly, though is slow given the fact the underlying Linux OS and the hosted OS X VM are all running on 512MB or memory, hehehe . . . All the more humor.

Getting the VM configured the first time required a few install attempts and a couple partitioning attempts from the install disk. If you want to run OS X on an generic Intel platform I found this site to be very helpful: http://www.osx86project.org/

Here is the underlying Linux host OS, Open Suse 10.3 running VMWare Server:

And here is the OS X running as a Guest OS:

I truly love VM Ware. You can run multiple different OSes simultaneously and switch effortless between them – Linux, Solaris, OS X, Windows – all running nicely. You can even make a virtual machine from your existing physical machines and move the entire install around to different hardware as though it were basically a file. You can also download many ready to go virtual machine appliances for all manner of purposes to test drive, all without having to install the OS and stack needed – download a virtual appliance to check out Wikipedia, or check out pfsense – a FreeBSD firewall appliance – and you won’t even have to bleed getting it all set up and sacrificing to the BSD Gods – just install and run the entire environment virtually.

I first started playing around running Virtual Machines about a year and a half ago. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. If you have not already, I highly suggest you play around with this. At long last, running whatever platform I want with easy. Wow, I remember talking about how nice that would be . . . someday. The frustration of trying to get multiple OSes to get along with each other, etc. All that is basically history. This makes me feel like a kid again – it’s what I always wanted to be able to do. While virtualizaton  is hardly new technology – the easy of use (and low cost) it has reached is unparalleled.

I never cease to be surprised at the ever increasing number of excellent quality Open Source applications. Here is just another to add to my list of favorite Open Source apps (you can find my whole list of favorites here.)

The new discovery is Blender – described on the page as:

“Blender is the free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems under the GNU General Public License.”

While I can describe blender, to do it justice you just have to see some of the work done by artists using it – check these out:

(Click for larger images.)

(These are all from the gallery at Blender.org site, more are available there to view)

Blender is available for Linux, Solaris, FreeBSB, OS X (PPC and Intel versions) and Windows. Installation was a one line rpm install of the package and it worked flawlessly for me.

Blender is one of the applications used to create the popular animation, “The Elephants Dream” – a pretty stunning production, and they are working on a sequel to this, a new animation called “Peach” – which is to be released quite soon. Here is a shot of a (minor) character from the new project:

(Click on me)

In addition, the project has a game development module with integrated physics engine. They are developing an Open Source 3D game using this called Apricot and it looks to be pretty damn cool too.

Though not a 3D artist myself, I do enjoy playing with 3D object modeling. As a kid I played with some 3D studio apps on my Amiga 500, these were precursors to the infamous Lightwave, which itself is still around and very widely used.

However, I could never afford Lightwave back then, nor the hardware to run it on.

What a pleasure to find Blender – completely Open Source, and it packs an impressive punch indeed.

If you are interested in graphics, 3D design or animation at all – definitely check this project out and spread the word.

The application is very well designed, has numerous tutorials and videos and extensive documentation.

I hope I can carve out some time and design some things myself.

My Cisco instructor at St. Pete College also teaches the A+ classes there. He knows of my interest in Linux and that my job is primarily *nix based and asked if I would teach a class for his A+ students studying the Operating Systems portion of their curiculeum. He’s a great guy and I have really enjoyed his Cisco classes so I thought this would be a fun thing to do for his A+ guys.

I have not done any teaching for a few years, but really looked forward to the opportunity. It was just a one night class to introduce the students to Linux and how it can assist technicians in diagnosing and addressing common PC issues. There are some fantastic linux tools for data recovery, password resets and hardware analysis which are available on live CDs such as Ubuntu that are perfect for PC techs. Plus it makes them look like Uber-geeks.

We had a great time and I really enjoyed introducing new people to the Path of the Penguin. Many of them had never used Linux at all, so it was a definite change for them.

Here is the  wiki article I wrote for the class and for the students to reference.

Had a great time and I think we will  do it again for the next class next semester.

Power to the Penguin.

Last week I stayed after work a bit and got BackupPC installed and configured on my server at work.

I wrote a wiki article describing the install process and a few issues I ran into which might be helpful should you care to try this software out.

BackupPC is really fantastic. It allows cross platform backups to a central point, pools redundant files to save space, has various compression and transfer method options. If a few clicks you can restore files back to the client, or download them directly.

One thing is that it requires host name resolution of the clients. Since I will be backing up clients at home over the internet I am going to next explore setting up a VPN using OpenVPN so the servers can see these clients directly. You could also just use something like dyndns.com to assign a domain name to you dynamic home ip, etc.

Highly recomend this as an automated backup solution for personal or business use.

Recently I have learned about a little Linux tool I wish I had become familiar with a very long time ago – the checkinstall program. I had an mistakenly assumed concept of what this tool did, believing that it checked or verified the installation, as in something one would run after using the usual ./configure && make && make install steps if you later wanted to verify everything was still where it ought to be.

Nope. And yet its so fun to make instant conclusions like that!

checkinstall is the bomb. Of course the slightest use of man checkinstall would have educated me, but it came to me through a colleague at work whom directed me to this wondrous gem.

With checkinstall you actually create your own .rpm or .deb packages which you can then install as an rpm directly.

There are several benefits to this:

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