SharkOS Project Portal

I have started a new project on RubyForge.org called ‘rinit’.  It is a development project to recreate the Linux sysvinit scripts using the Ruby Programming language. So far, I have a working ‘/etc/rc.sysinit’  and replacement rc.conf in YAML format working on ArchLinux. This project is still in early development and not ready for production. By using Ruby, I hope to be able to leverage some features of that language to streamline, simplify, and extend the current way Linux systems bootscripts are designed. This project is not intended as a replacement for sysvinit such as Upstart. You can visit the project page here: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rinit/

As a Linux power user, administrator and developer, I spend a lot of time working with Virtual Machines. Both at home and in the datacenter. I’ve experimented with most of the mainstream HyperVisors currently available (xen, kvm, virtualbox, vmware). In the datacenter, Virtual Iron was my preferred platform. A xen based hypervisor with a Java based set of  Management Tools, and a great set of features at 1/2 the cost of VMware. Now that the evil empire of Oracle has acquired and crushed the product, we were left with little choice but to consolidate onto VMware.  Oh sure, there was OracleVM, XenSource, and Red Hat’s new RHEV platform. we could have looked at Parallels or some other obscure new solution. But at the end of the day, the tried and true VMware is what all companies seem to choose based on brand recognition.

Most of the above mentioned Hypervisors are great for datacenter loads or server deployments with their expensive price tags, management tools, and optimization for servers. But what about the desktop user?  While I love my Linode.com VM, its great for testing pre-production deployments and for testing scale of an application outside of the local workstation, but not cost effective when I want to have lots of RAM for a short period of time, or need more disc space on the fly. For Linux Desktop users, there are a few choices available. VirtualBox, KVM, XEN, and VMware Workstation.

Let me preface the remainder of this article by saying that I am approaching this topic from the perspective of the following criteria:

• User experience across any distribution
• Ease of Install and VM Creation
• Completeness of graphical interfaces
• Impact to Operating System as a whole (kernel drivers, package manager, etc)

VMware Workstation

I’ll start with VMware Workstation. This is a commercial product that does cost $$$, however, it has several advantages over its free version cousin (VMware Free Server – see vmware’s website for comparison). Updates are released relatively frequently to fix bugs and  keep up with the changes in the vmware kernel drivers. Although easy to use and fast, VMware can be a challenge to manage depending on the Linux distribution you are using. On ArchLinux, the tarball based installer works fine, but due to the cutting edge nature of Arch, there comes a time when trying to stay current can break your VMware install or things start to get buggy. The same can be true with Ubuntu or its derivatives such as Linux Mint where one day a kernel upgrade happens and the vmware host tool files stop compiling. Typically a search on a set of Forums will find the answer, but its a hassle none-the-less. Other weird problems I have come across is issues with Keyboard such as not being able to type inside of the VM, or the caps lock being stuck or reversed between the Host and Guest OS.

Conclusion: Overall, VMware Workstation is a great product if you don’t mind paying for each major version that gets released. VMware as a company definitly understands Linux and even has open-source versions of the tools. Although annoying at times, it performs well, and has a great set of features and tools out the box.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox is probably my favorite. Its got a great set of tools, a complete GUI interface, Conversion Utility,  packages for multiple distros, well documented, and best of all FREE. This was a great acquisition by Sun and even smarter to keep open-source. Lets hope the Oracle will keep their greedy destructive hands off this product. I have tested almost every OS on Virtual Box to ensure its compatibility. This includes (BeOSR5, WindowsXP, Windows2003, Windows2008, Linux (various distros), OS/2-warp, Ecomstation, Minix, HaikuOS, Plan9, HelenOS, etc…). Overall with positive results. I had only issues with  OS/2 & Minix crashing either during boot or installation.

If running a distro such as Ubuntu or Mint that supports DKMS, then VirtualBox will try to keep its kernel updated during package updates of your system.  There were easy instructions on the Virtual Box site on how-to install for each distribution where a binary is available.  Although not configured out of the box, Bridge networking can be setup for your Guest VMs.

Conclusion: Best Desktop Virtualization solution for Linux Users.

XEN

Xen is a great Hypervisor. Another to fall into the large of a Corporation (Citrix). Although there are tools available to manage XEN VM’s, it seems there are no standards around it. There’s libvirtd, Virt-Viewer, Virt-Manager, oVirt, the list goes on. Of course there is also commercial versions available from Citrix, but not without a cost. My biggest complaint with XEN is that is a patch to the linux kernel. So unless your distro provides a pre-built xen kernel you might be spending time compiling a custom kernel.

Conclusion: XEN is great for datacenter purposes and the advanced linux user across the board. Distros that include XEN management tools such as SuSE or Fedora.

KVM

The latest entry into the Hypervisor realm for Linux. Introduced into the Mainstream vanilla linux kernel around 2.6.21, KVM is a KLM or kernel loadable module that may be inserted anytime to enable access to the Virtualization Extensions provided by a CPU. KVM was written by Quamranet, later acquired by Red Hat, as an answer to the XEN acquisition by Citrix. KVM is based around the QEMU emulator and the work done in the k-qemu project to merge an open-source virtualization driver into the Linux kernel. Many of the open-source tools that were written to work with xen have been updated to also work with KVM, such as Virt-Manager, Libvirt, Virt-Viewer, oVirt, and several others.  KVM has accelerated drivers known as “virt-io” which provided better access/performance for  block and network devices. KVM is compatible with almost all Linux distributions and most versions of Windows including Windows-7.

I recently tried to switch to using KVM fulltime after I encountered problems with my VMware workstation installation. Running on ArchLinux, I was unable to get the libvirt/virt-manager to work without crashing. So I instead wrote a set of scripts to start the Virtual Machines manually using a terminal window. This was a good experience as I was able to understand more about the command switches of the qemu-kvm commands, the differences in displays (cirrus, vga, vnc) as far as resolutions and emulation are concerned, and the challenges of getting virt-io drivers to install onto Windows-7.  I have found Windows-7 to run very slowly on KVM. This conclusion is based on several different types hardware including workstation class Intel & AMD systems, and several laptops. I also run Virt-Manager on a Linux Mint 8 workstation and have no problems on that distro as far as the stability of the program or GUI is concerned. Linux runs extremely fast inside as a KVM Virtual Machine.

Conclusion: KVM is still in its early phases of reaching perfection. More work is needed to improve graphics performance, and the tools need a lot of improvement as well.

Recently, as I was setting up my new workstation, I was torn between the KDE vs GNOME desktop environment. Sure, I’ve used other WM’s over the years. I’ve always been a big fan of Window Maker, and although I’ve dabbled with XFCE and LXDE over the years, I always preferred the desktop environments.

I think back to when Gnome was still an infant and KDE 2 was by far the best Desktop Environment of the day (circa 1999 – 2002). No matter how many times in recent years I’ve tried to install KDE, and embrace it, something always shy’s me away. I’ve always been attracted to some of KDE’s application integration, such as  Kmail, Akkregator, and Konqueror.   Sure, the latest KDE 4.3.2 has some really nice features and built in effects… but, For the life of me, I can’t get Audio to work correctly. This has always been a recurring theme with KDE over the years… for some reason the sound system queues the sounds and causes delays on sound events. There comes a point when you just dont want to spend any more hours trying to troubleshoot and twak.

In comes Gnome 2.28.  I’ve been using Gnome steadily over the past 4 years, and have never had a major issue with it. This go round, my only complaint is with the GDM Login Manager. Somewhere along the line, GDM has been rewritten and many of the tweakable settings such as Themeable login greeter are missing, but easily fixed by installing and switching to “SLIM” login manager ‘pacman -S slim’ .

Well, goodbye KDE. Try you again around 5.x when you look less like Aero

I recently decided to release my 24″ iMac to my Wife for her photography work, thus leaving me without a decent workstation. Sure I could fire up that old OS/2 Warp (E-Comstation) machine that is collecting dust somewhere in the basement, but I decided it was time to get a serious Linux workstation (Rather than running off a MacOS VMWare Fusion instance). So as any one would do, a price hunt ensued to find the best deal. Sure, I’ve built machines hundreds of times over my career (desktops & servers), but being a bit out of touch with hardware specs, I decided to but pre-built. In my search on places like NewEgg, Costco, ZipZoomFly, Amazon, and even HP.com, I came across CyberPowerPC. A custom PC builder based out of Cali. I started toying with their Online Custom Configurator (much like one would when shopping for a new car). I was able to select components down to the manufacturer in most cases. they have an excellent selection of Cases, Cooling, Power Supplies, accessories, and so on. In fact, I think I spent about 4 days looking and tweaking the config until I had a pretty good idea of what I thought I wanted. Because of the amount of time you could spend tweaking, they are kind enough to provide a “Save Configuration” button. Now intersetingly enough, this Save button apparently also emails the configuration to an employee at CyberPower, who is nice enough to review your specs for any incompatabilities or conflicts, but also is available to ask any Pre-Sales questions.

Now that my specs were certified in pre-sales, and I took the opportunity to ask some questions, I shopped a few more places and even priced out the same parts at NewEgg for a DIY comparison. I found the price difference to be negligable and appreciated the added comfort of professional builds and company backed warranty. Order Placed!

During the post-sales pricing, the order status page is very detailed and keeps you informed as to which phase your system is in. I was contacted once prior to the assembly by my Sales rep who informed me about a backorder on a component and asked if I wanted an alternate. I took this time to upgrade the video cards as well. Something you probably can’t get at Dell. He indicated he was hoping to get it shipped out by the end of the week. Indeed it was.

Upon arrival, the system was packaged very neat and tight inside the box. The unveling revealed a very well built system overall. There was a minor issue with 2 case fans. One was loose in the chassis and required a minor reseat, the other was not cabled into the fan controller because of the shipping foam used inside the case to prevent shifting. All in all, a very excellent piece of equipment, great service, and lots of cool extras. I highly recommend shopping at CyberPowerPC.com before you go anywhere else.

So you are asking, what OS did you install on it? ArchLinux of course! The system does dual boot Windows-7 as well, strictly for hardware management (firmware flashes) and future gaming. But as of right now, its running KDE 4.3.2 on ArchLinux.

Its been while since I’ve posted an update to this site. An appropriate post would be an update to the status of the OCZ Solid State drive installed in my 24″ iMac. Overall, I am very impressed with the performance of this drive, but initially encountered some issues with system lockup when trying to wake from sleep. The symptom is that MacOS would goto sleep. If it happened on a screen blank, no big deal; however, when waking up from a deeper sleep mode, I found I was presented with the password prompt, but after entering my password, the system would just hang and never return to a working OS state without an actual power cycle. After trying to tweak out the power saving settings, I settled on turning off all power saving features in MacOS except for the Screen Blank feature. Thus far, I have had no wake-from-sleep issues since.

In addition to this bug, I copied over my VMWare Fusion Virtual Server running ArchLinux from an external driver over to the SSD. The VM not only boots quicker, but performs at least 50% faster than it did on the external FireWire disc.

I am in the process of moving the SharkOS server and services around. At this time, the main site and database have been migrated to another provider. The wiki and code repositories are still in progress at this time, and will reside on a secondary system.

The 320GB Western Digital drive that shipped with my iMac recently failed. I decided to replace it with a solid state drive from OCZ. After some research, I purchased the OCZ Apex Sata II 120GB drive from NewEgg. Taking apart a 24″ Intel Imac is certainly no picnic. At the time of purchase, I also ordered an adapter kit from OCZ for  converting 2.5″-> 3.5″. Because of the imac’s unique mounting paltes, the adapter did not fit as I had hoped; but, some strapping tape solved the problem and secured the drive (plus adapter kit) into the chassis. Once installed, I inserted the Leopard installation DVD disc and booted. To my dismay, the drive was not recognized by Disk Utility. There is limited information available on how to perform an SSD upgrade on a iMac, but I found one useful piece of information about the Partition Table format.

After disassembling the computer again, I connected the drive using an external SATA -> USB adapter and attached it to my Thinkpad running ArchLinux. I fired up GParted and discovered the drive was preformatted with an MS-DOS partition table, and an NTFS filesystem. I changed the partition table type to “GPT” aka “GUID” which is what the EFI bios uses in Intel Macs.  Sure enough, the drive was recognized by Disk Utility on the next boot, and the installation went smoothly.

The iMac now boots from the Apple logo to desktop in 12 seconds. The application performance also exceeds my expectations. Later, I’ll be testing VMware Fusion as I rebuild my Arch development environment.

UPDATE:

Please visit one of our subscriber’s websites. He has a site dedicated to SSD on Mac’s

http://www.mac-ssd-drives.com/

2  new projects have been added to SharkOS.org. ALPS and OpenTG have made their way under the Development Projects section of this website. Both projects are written in Ruby. Please visit this page for more information. ALPS in particular may be of interest to ArchLinux users, as it provides a facility to automatically update your pacman packages from upstream.  ALPS is in early-alpha release stages, while OpenTG is still in pre-alpha development.

A new document series called SharkOS Quickstart Guides has begun. Check out the first in the series, ArchLinux Installation Quickstart Guide. Available in both Flash and PDF versions. Learn the basics of installing and Configuring a new ArchLinux system. Includes the entire setup process, introduction to using sudo, and some basic introduction to using pacman repositories.

Download them here:

PDF Version (963 kb)

Flash Version (788 kb)

Yum has been updated to 3.2.21 for ArchLinux. The sharkoslinux repository has been updated, as well the AUR pkg listing.