EPKPhoto's Tidbits

As I mentioned earlier this summer, I built a new server to power several pieces of my network at home as well as my website and email services.  After much testing and careful planning, I can now happily say that the epkphoto.com website is running on this new server.  The site is now much more responsive thanks to larger memory and other resource allocations than it had previously.  Luckily, this transition happened with very few issues, so most would not have noticed the change until this announcement.  Read on for more details about the server.

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For those interested, I am building a new server that will end up hosting epkphoto.com and many other services within the next couple months.  I have already put together a decently powerful computer that is running CentOS 5 and allows for multiple virtual machines to run simultaneously.  These virtual machines will replace the following existing hardware and server instances: my webcam server, my home web server, my home router/firewall server, and my virtualized web/email server currently hosted by RimuHosting.  More info to come on this little project!  I hope to share more details on my final hardware and software configuration.

Call me crazy, but a little under a week ago I installed Fedora 8 as a second operating system on my new MacBook Air.  It was not a small undertaking since this computer is essentially hot off the press with several brand new internal components that are not yet natively supported by Linux.  So, here are a few pieces of advice to help others: First attempts at Fedora 8 on the MacBook Air.  I hope many more people try out Linux on the MacBook Air over the coming weeks and months and give feedback to developers so some of the issues I have seen are ironed out.

I always find it interesting when someone reveals that a certain organization is running Windows, Linux, or whatever on their web server. That kind of information is quite easy to find out just by looking at the headers a server sends back to your web browser. Well, I recently ran across a survey of the various announced candidates for the 2008 US presidential election. It details the operating system and web server used to power those candidates' official websites. Go take a look at the report for an interesting perspective on the elections.

As you can see in the news section on the epkphoto.com main page, Canonical released Ubuntu 7.04 this past week. The Parallels issue I reported was not quite fixed in time for the release, but it looks like the fix will come soon. The unfortunate part is that this will likely affect all Parallels users that try to install Ubuntu in the next six months. At least the upgrade of epkphoto.com to Feisty Fawn went well. All I had to do was run "sudo apt-get install update-manager-core" and "sudo do-release-upgrade" as described on the Ubuntu upgrade page. I only had one hiccup when the upgrade halted due to a lack of memory. After fixing that issue and cleaning things up, the upgrade completed successfully. I altered a bunch of config files, so if you see something wrong with my website, email, etc. let me know! Now I can look to upgrade my other Ubuntu desktop/server at home. I want to wait though, since the computer has not been turned off now for over 152 days! I have to say I love Linux's uptime 🙂 .

I haven't updated in a while, so nothing has been said about my spring break and the beginning of this spring quarter. I went to Washington, DC with some other students during the break, and I'll be sure to describe that more when I post the photos of the trip. In the meantime, I thought I would just mention that this quarter is off to a good start and could go many directions. I have an excellent set of interesting classes, so I can only hope for the best and keep up with the work to get the most out of them. While you have nothing else to do, feel free to check out a couple bug reports I filed on the Linux kernel in Ubuntu Feisty and Fedora 7 (I know, thrilling ;)). You can find them at Ubuntu's Launchpad and RedHat's Bugzilla.

I have been trying to balance studying for exams and work on final assignments with free time and playing in the new snow that has fallen :). I just wanted to put up a quick post since I have been spending quite a bit of time in my test install of Fedora 7. In the recent couple weeks, it has begun to look like Fedora's next release (though delayed a few weeks) will be much more of an improvement than Ubuntu's next release. This excites me since I have been a Fedora fan since the Core 2 release. To tease you, I thought I should post a couple screenshots from Parallels of the new graphics that recently were added to the development repositories. Take a look after the break.
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As the quarter is nearing its end, things have been quite busy. No need to talk much about that, though. I'd rather mention that the weather forecast is finally showing some temperatures above freezing within this next week here in Rochester. We have had solid packed snow on all the walkways across campus since it has been too cold to melt anything. That may change quite soon :). Also, I am going to the hockey game tonight against Mercyhurst. It is RIT's last home hockey game of the season. Last night's game was an exciting win from what I heard, so I hope tonight's game lives up to that standard. Read on for Parallels and Linux comments.

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I have been trying out the latest test release of Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (Linux) in a Parallels virtual machine. It is currently at the alpha 2 (v7.04) phase of the Feisty Fawn release that is set to be finished and available by April 19th. I do say that one feature that really catches my eye is the new "Control Center" that consolidates a lot of preference and admin functions of the computer, similar to SUSE's YaST. This is a much needed organizational upgrade. I am a bit more excited about the planned features for Fedora's upcoming v7 release on April 26th.

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