Monthly Archive for December, 2009

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Fedora, Macs and EFI

Published on 2 December, 2009 in Fedora, FOSS and Tech. 16 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

When installing Linux beside OS X, Fedora toggles the boot flag on for its partition. This causes GPT to see it as an “EFI boot partition,” rather than “Basic Data”. This appears to cause a problem if you want to triple boot with Windows and under OS X the disk utility will see it as one whole partition, with the Linux half missing.

To fix this, toggle the boot flag to off using parted and then sync the GPT partition table to the master boot record partition table. It’s easiest to do this while the installer’s running (switch to TTY2) else you’ll have to install anaconda under your install to get gptsync (or run it from the rEFIt menu).

Simply run the following:
parted /dev/sda
toggle 3 boot
quit
gptsync /dev/sda

The gptsync command should spit out the “Current GPT partition table” which should show something like:
EFI System (FAT)
Mac OS X HFS+
Basic Data
Basic Data (if you have a fourth partition for Windows)

The “Proposed new MBR partition table” should show something like:
EFI Protective
Mac OS X HFS+
Linux
FAT32 (LBA) (or NTFS, depending if it's already been formated)

Now Windows should install cleanly on the fourth partition (if you’re doing that) and the partition structure under OS X should be correct.

Build libpst for Windows?

Published on 1 December, 2009 in FOSS. 12 Comments Tags: , , , , .

We’re about to do a new Xena release at work, but before that happens I need to (somehow) create a Windows binary of readpst (from libpst) to normalise Outlook PST files. Normally I’d just do it under cygwin, but as of version 0.6.x that requires the cygwin server to be installed and running on the client’s machine (which introduces a whole new level of pain).

We have a native build of readpst from before I worked there, but no-one on “the Google” appears to know how to build it. It’s certainly not my strong point! It’s starting to get tricky..

FreeNAS 8.0 will be GNU/Linux, no longer FreeBSD

Published on 1 December, 2009 in FOSS. 3 Comments Tags: , , , .

Looks like FreeNAS will switch from FreeBSD to Debian GNU/Linux for the next major release. In July this year Volker Theile registered a new project called CoreNAS, which is what 8.0 will be based upon.

This means that they will lose native ZFS support (probably one of the biggest attractions), I don’t think that ZFS over Fuse will really be an acceptable option. It’ll be interesting to see if they pick up on Btrfs instead :-)

The decision wasn’t easy, but was required due to users constantly wanting new features which were just too hard to put into the existing system. Bugs were also a major factor, saying:

My decision to use Linux for the next version was because there are too much bugs in the core FreeBSD system. Simply have a look into the bug tracker. FreeNAS does not run on many systems, mainly new hardware makes trouble. The main reason is the driver problem with FreeBSD which seems to be no problem with Linux because there are great companies in the back that support it. Also the Linux developer community is much greater than the FBSD one.

Volker also lists some of the pros:

- Text and grahical installer that can be customized. This means no hand written install scripts anymore which causes some problems in FreeNAS
- WOL works in Linux
- lmsensor – A WORKING sensor framework which is a really needed feature in FreeNAS to check the CPU/MB temps and fan speeds
- Better Samba performance
- Ability to implement HA features
- System can be updated via ‘apt-get’ or any other deb package manager
- Better driver support
- Maybe ‘ZFS’ over FUSE (there is already one commercial product available that uses this feature)
- NFS4
- …

VirtualBox continues to innovate, 3.1 released

Published on 1 December, 2009 in FOSS. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

I’m really impressed with Sun’s VirtualBox. Ever since they bought it from Innotek the development has not stood still. Today it’s probably one of the easiest to use and most popular virtualisation technologies, especially on the desktop. Sure, there are closed source bits which is annoying (USB and Remote Desktop support), but that aside, the project has really been innovating.

Now version 3.1 is out and it has some high-end features which might make VMware a little nervous:

VirtualBox 3.1, introduced Nov. 30, offers what Sun officials call “teleportation” capabilities. The software enables businesses to move a running VM between hosts that are running different operating systems, are different classes of computers—including moving from a server to a client—and running different processors, such as chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices.

The VMs can be moved uninterrupted when a physical host needs to be brought down.

The grass roots have also been improved:

In addition, VirtualBox 3.1 offers enhanced execution speed—including a 30 percent improvement in memory handling over the previous version of VirtualBox—upgraded network performance that offers better throughput and reduced CPU cycles through a new high-speed, paravirtualized network driver, and a new two-dimensional video acceleration feature for Windows VMs. It also includes better snapshotting features, according to Sun officials.

Here’s the list of new features:

* Teleportation (aka live migration); migrate a live VM session from one host to another (see the manual for more information)
* VM states can now be restored from arbitrary snapshots instead of only the last one, and new snapshots can be taken from other snapshots as well (“branched snapshots”; see the manual for more information)
* 2D video acceleration for Windows guests; use the host video hardware for overlay stretching and color conversion (see the manual for more information)
* More flexible storage attachments: CD/DVD drives can be attached to an arbitrary IDE controller, and there can be more than one such drive (the manual for more information)
* The network attachment type can be changed while a VM is running
* Complete rewrite of experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts making use of the latest USB enhancements in Solaris Nevada 124 and higher
* Significant performance improvements for PAE and AMD64 guests (VT-x and AMD-V only; normal (non-nested) paging)
* Experimental support for EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface; see the manual for more information)
* Support for paravirtualized network adapters (virtio-net; see the manual for more information)

Now, if only OpenOffice.org innovated like VirtualBox..

DreamHost rolls out Ksplice

Published on 1 December, 2009 in FOSS. 0 Comments Tags: .

Yep, I host my stuff on DreamHost for no other reason than I came across them somehow a few years ago. Are they the greatest service in the world? Nope, but most of the time it runs pretty smooth for me.

Anyway, the reason for this post is that DreamHost is rolling out Ksplice on their servers. Ksplice lets you patch the Linux kernel live and it’s quite amazing technology. I know the team already has a number of high profile clients, no doubt they’ll get lots more over the coming months and years.