I have been resisting upgrading Ubuntu 8.04 LTS on my Dell Latitdue D600 because I had tried 8.10 and compiz did NOT work well at all - VERY slow. So with much trepidation I upgraded to 9.04 last weekend to see if the video/X11 side of the latest release of Ubuntu was any better at handling my aging ,but still very capable, Dell laptop(affectionally called dellboy). Things didn't look so hot at first but I just ran with the not-compiz settings until having a look tonight. Trying all sorts of AddRGBGLXVisuals and other, non-relevant, NVIDIA-chipset-only, options to xorg.conf resulted in no change - wobbly windows would appear but no window decorator and an unusable, completely white gnome-terminal. Then I remembered a couple of things I had seen mentioned elsewhere: 1. For some chipsets (Intel & now ATI): the default EXA acceleration doesn't work or is unacceptably slow. For ATI, trying the older XAA works marvels. For  Intel chipsets try the latest UXA acceleration method. And 2. The last time I tried with 8.10 I needed to increase the colour depth to 24. Well, I inserted both the following into /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Under Section 'Device':

Option "AccelMethod" "XAA"

Under Section 'Screen':

Depth 24

Voila! Compiz, in all it's glory, works very acceptably on my Dell Latitude D600 laptop running under Ubuntu 9.04 'Jaunty Jackalope'.

FANTASTIC.I am stoked!

I've been successful in creating my first 'real' KVM/QEMU virtual machine. 'Real' because it's running something Freedom IT relies on for the day-to-day running of our business: Email.

Yep, Scalix is running on top of Centos 5.2 inside a virtual box inside a Centos 5.2 Host. And it's performance is fantastic. 

 

Why KVM and not Xen?

I opted to create a KVM virtual machine as opposed to a Xen-based virtual guest since Red Hat seem to be heading in the KVM direction. And I am glad I did so since hearing they have acquired Qumranet.

 

Which type of disk did I use?

I chose to use a real disk-partition (as opposed to a file) and that partition is actually a mirrored device on the Centos Host

 

Why did I choose to virtualise the Scalix email server?

Well, previously I had it running on my underpowered Trixbox (PABX) PC. And while it was OK, I was never confident of it's successful restoration probabilities in the event of a catastrophic failure! Since Scalix includes numerous components (PostgreSQL Database, Tomcat, LDAP server) I thought it wise to give the software it's 'own' environment. So nothing else will run on that virtual server.

  BTW, a really useful script I found while finding out how to transfer  the existing Scalix data across to the new machine was sxstoreexp. This can be found here. And I'm going to use it for backup purposes on my customers sites too. It worked really well.

I had tried to install Ubuntu 8.04 onto my Dell Latitude D600 when Hardy Heron first came out. Everything worked EXCEPT the Broadcom Wireless. It produced a computer-stopping, hardware error just before GDM came up (presumably when the firmware was being loaded into the chipset). So I went back to the reliable 7.10. Well I have just tried again and now it works! 95% of the time! There seems to have been a kernel update since 8.04 was released. Awesome! The error does still come up occasionally  (which requires a reboot) but usually within the next couple of reboots it will be OK. For me its workable and I have also included the Ubuntu Studio repos so its running quite sweet now.

Who would believe we're 1/4 of the way thru 2008 already! I haven't been doing much blogging lately. Not that anyone reads it.

 

Freedom IT turned 1 on April 1 2008. Woo hoo! It's been a really good journey so far. Thanks to all our customers who have supported Freedom IT over this last year. We look forward to supporting you over the coming year.

Found this fantastic little advert for Linux on YouTube (via www.fsdaily.com)

Well I have just started playing with Fedora 8's builtin KVM/QEMU/XEN virtualisation - Wow! Why would you VmWare? This stuff is great.

I'm going to build a centos5 virtual machine so I can run Tomcat. I can then run the SugarMini server application to be the go-between for my SugarCRM installation and my Motorola A780, java-midlet-2.0-capable phone.

 I couldn't get it running on the SugarCRM box since that is running Scalix (and scalix-tomcat) also. Using scalix-tomcat - the settings were too different from normal Tomcat, I guess  and I couldn't see the URL from a web browser.

 So plan B is to virtualise!