Doing PXE with libvirt / virt-manager

Installing hosts using PXE is a well known thing.
Why not do it within libvirt? Or: How do I do this in libvirt?
Do I need to setup my own dhcp server to pass the bootp option? Nope.
Just use libvirts default dnsmasq and add the bootp dhcp option.

All you need to do is editing the default network configuration using virsh (no way o do it from virt-manager).

# virsh net-destroy default
# virsh net-edit
  Now add "<bootp file='/pxelinux.0' server='$PXESERVERIP' />" under /network/ip/dhcp
# virsh net-start default

All done.
Just have a look at the definition here to read about more features.

Using oVirt Node with virt-manager

Virtualization is already an ubiquitous technique.
Fedora provides packages for many of the Linux virtualization components through the yum virtualization group.

$ sudo yum groupinstall virtualization

Well, anyway - When doing virtualization you need a host, hosting your virtualized guests. If you don't want to do this on your local machine - because it hasn't got the capabilities, isn't beefy enough, ... - you can use oVirt Node as a hypervisor on a second machine which you can easily manage from Fedora using virt-manager.
This can be useful for a small working group or developers.

oVirt Node is based on Fedora and optimized to quickly get a hypervisor up an running. You actually do not need to care about all the constraints - networking, services, storage, ... - you need to consider if you setup a hypervisor yourself (which can also be done with  Fedora). It is also stripped down (~150MB) to preserve most of the RAM and storage space to the virtualized guests.

Anyhow:

1. Download oVirt Node
2. Install it on a machine with a recent Intel or AMD processor
3. Log into the installed Node using admin and
1. Configure a network interface
2. Press F2 to drop to the console and run
3. /usr/libexec/ovirt-config-password 
1. set a root password
2. enable SSH access
4. Optional: ssh-copy-id your ssh key to node to allow a password-less login
5. User virt-manager to create a new connection (File -> New Connection) to the installed Node (IP can be found on the Node's Status page)
   URI: qemu+ssh://$OVIRTNODE/system

($OVIRTNODE needs to replaced accordingly)
Actually oVirt Node is intended to be used with oVirt Engine, which can manage from one up to a couple of hundreds (?) of Nodes.
But the Engine setup itself is not as easy as just using virt-manager :)
At least - Engine would be the next step to get used to the oVirt components.

P.s.: You can use virsh vol-upload to get some data onto the node.

Booting Fedora using Qemu and EFI

Thanks Harald.
After reading accross Harald's blog post mentioned above, I tried to boot one of the recent Fedora 17 composes. Sadly Qemu refused to find the attached (emulated) CD drive, but passing my primary hda (as a snapshot) worked like a charm: Fedora 16 ran in qemu with an EFI bios (OVMF).

Auto-Installing oVirt Node

oVirt - maybe you've heard about it. It's a project to create an open IaaS "virtualization management system" - So a bit like OpenStack, but different.
Fedora is the base for oVirt's hypervisor: "Node". Basicaly this is a stripped down Fedora, enriched with a couple of packages to prvide just enough to host some virtual guests and do some basic configuration.

Personally I'd like to use Node in conjunction with Gnome Boxes or virt-manager. But this is currently not possible - but we might get closer to it when solving this bug.
Anyhow, to quickly install oVirt Node you just need to add two (or three) additional kernel arguments:

BOOTIF=ethX storage_init

You should/could also add

adminpw=$ADMINPW

ADMINPW=$(openssl passwd -salt SALT) is a salted password, so you can log in (as admin) after the installation. Alternatively you can boot into single mode to reset the password.

The parameters above install oVirt node without user intervention,  setup networking on ethX and erase all data on the disk and create a defautl (lvm based) partitioning scheme.
The next step would be adding Node to oVirt Engine - or wait until it can be managed by virt-manager, which is much quicker to set-up :)

gstreamer as a multimedia backend in Firefox

Wow. After such a long time it happened. Gstreamer can be used as a multimedia backend in Firefox!

So what does this mean? I believe not much yet for the enduser, at least this is a very nice infrastructure change to enable stuff like hardware acceleration e.g. on mobile devices. And from my point of view also a good separation: Do one thing and do it well. Let gstream do the multimedia stuff and Mozilla all that compositing.

Maybe this can be enabled in Fedora - at compile time - to get an maybe accelerated experience. or better codec support e.g. h264 for those who need it (e.g. by using Fluendos codec pack) or even my always favored Dirac!

ICD and pocl

There is no official release from pocl yet, but I noticed that there is now some work going on to bring ICD to pocl. Very nice.
This will allow us to have more than one open CL implementation on our systems - as long as all of them honor ICD.

Migrate your fav. packages to a new workstation.

Once in a while we are setting up our workstations - yet again.
I often faced the problem to migrate my finest selection of packages from my former system, to the new one.
Groups are surely one way to install roughly those packages you need on the new system, but in very rare cases your package selection is unique.

The following snippet might help you, to install the packages of DA_OLD_HOST on your new system.
On your new host:

$ ssh $DA_OLD_HOST 'rpm -qa --qf "%{NAME}\n"' \
  | xargs yum install -y --skip-broken

Hint: It seems as if something is broken with the fedora mirros, you can work around problems by commenting the mirrorlist and uncommenting the baseurl option in the appropriate yum repo .conf.