SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 - SNEAK Preview is out!

Hope I'm the first to report this... though unlikely but I noticed that Novell just officially released a SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 Sneak Preview (looks like Release Candidate No. 4 code).

Here's the landing page -> http://www.novell.com/promo/home/sneakpreview.html

Have fun!

OSSPAC 2009

I was at the Open Source Singapore Pacific-Asia Conference (OSSPAC) and had the privilege to share the Novell SUSE story at their keynote event yesterday (17th Feb 2009).

In the afternoon, while walking through the various vendor and partner exhibits, I came across these two fellas and just had to take a picture with them... from left to right: The Duke, MySQL Dolphin and me with SUSE Geeko in tow.


SUSE Linux Enterprise with JAVA and MySQL ... nice

Oh, and here are a short snippet on the contents of my keynote:

• The Novell SUSE history and how SUSE is gaining more than 5000 new customers for Novell in 2007 alone... and growing revenue at 38% from 2006 to 2007 and from 2007 to 2008. We are growing SUSE at a higher rate than the Linux market at 22% year on year
• All these are possible with the strong support from Novell partner ecosystem and it includes our strategic relationships with IBM, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Intel and AMD
  
• SUSE is important but not the only open source story at Novell. I picked Mono/Moonlight and SUSE Studio as some of the projects that Novell is investing in and hoping to yield fruits down the line
• Mono success at Unity3D and FusionFall MMORPG (other success stories)
  
• Moonlight bringing equality to Firefox users for President Obama's inauguration
• SUSE Studio and how partners can create custom Linux application appliances in multiple format (disk image, VMware and Xen)... and its still in Alpha!

Have fun!

openSUSE 11.1 mirror in Singapore!

I was playing with the new openSUSE 11.1 two weekends ago and noticed that our local national university of Singapore has started mirroring the vanilla binary, updates and additional repositories for openSUSE 11.1.

This is simply brilliant! Much faster downloads for software and updates.

Here's the link to the mirror provided by the National University of Singapore (NUS): http://mirror.nus.edu.sg/opensuse

Have fun!

Field Notes: Installing Virtual Machine Driver Pack for RHEL 5

The SUSE Linux Enterprise Virtual Machine Driver Pack (or VMDP) is a set of drivers that enhances the disk and network I/O of a fully virtualized (FV) virtual machine.

I was installing VMDP on SLES 10 SP2 this week at a customer site. They have a fully-virtualized (FV) RHEL 5.2 (i386) domU. The documentation on how to install this is fairly straight forward and can be found at this LINK.

Here are some additional stuff I did to complete the task:

1. Mounting the virtual CD-ROM

I could use virt-manager (GUI) to mount the 2Mb ISO file for RHEL 5 32 bit from the /opt/novell/ directories. However, from within the RHEL domU, the CD-ROM icon appears on the desktop but double-clicking it launches the CD/DVD Creator software!!?? It appears that RHEL thinks the mounted virtual CD-ROM is blank. I had to use the terminal to figure out, with fdisk -l, that the mounted virtual CD-ROM is /dev/hdc. I then manually mounted this at /mnt/cdrom using the mount -t iso9660 -t ro,loop /dev/hdc /mnt/cdrom.

2. Installing the 2 rpms fails because the default RHEL install does not have the rpm-build package

Yep, installing the 2 VMDP RPMs will fail with the error "cannot create /usr/src/redhat/SOURCES". It appears that the rpm-build packages are not installed with a default install of RHEL. Easily resolved by mounting the RHEL 5.2 DVD and installed the rpm-build package.

Done.