What’s kvm, you ask?  Some kind of virtual keyboard/mouse thingy?  No, it’s the Kernel Virtual Machine.  It’s basically like vmware.  It’s actually a modified qemu that uses hardware virtualization (and only hardware virtualization; if you don’t have Intel VT or AMD-V, then use qemu or something else).  It’s fast, it’s featureful, but it’s not exactly user friendly, at least not without help.

In the coming weeks, the Gentoo Virtualization team will get libvirt and the associated front ends working for it.  That should up the user-friendly factor a fair amount.

Thanks Cardoe (cardoe) and Tiziano (dev-zero), the kvm co-maintainers with me, who did a lot of the work getting this ready for the tree.

The Penny Arcade guys teamed up with the PvP guy to play the new version and chronical the game in comics and a podcast.  I love Penny Arcade, so this interests me.

So, I go to the site (hosted at Wizard’s of the Coast).  Guess what?  You need an account to view the set.  Fail.  I have to sign up and give personal information (at least a working email address, and I don’t know what else, more later) to view what amounts to advertising for D&D 4?

Okay, so I finally decide to bite the bullet and fork over an address to get an account.  What am I greated with?

Epic Fail.  Guess I don’t get to see them afterall, and I’m slightly less likely to care about D&D 4.

The surprising thing is how much faster everything is.  I guess it was fragmented into oblivion (hardly surprising, since it was full…)  Booting is about 1/3 the time.

Now, back to kvm/uml…

I’d like to get a bigger hard drive, but it’s a laptop, so thats slightly complicated. Maybe I can get an external firewire drive.

Time to go scan my drive again to figure out what I can delete…

See, I’ve been reading all about decibel on the planet, and I thought I’d give it a try now that it’s in portage. I emerged it, started it, and it said to pick a location. Apparently, it can only find music in your homedir. If (like me) your music is elsewhere, tough.

Ah well. I didn’t really need a new music player anyway…

EDIT:

Okay, it’s only the minor fail of being undiscoverable.  Thanks to nightmorph, it actually works (with a few minor caveats).  I suspect I won’t change from rhythmbox to it any time soon, but you never know.  If someone were to write a library plugin based on tracker, I’d probably switch.

I’ll see how I like it. If it’s not any good, I’ll switch back to my self-hosted repo. So far, it’s pretty nice.

Fortunately, due to the wonders of distributed version control, I always have several local copies of the whole repo, so I can leave any time.  Lack of lock-in is a great thing.

[09:40 athena] ~> history|awk ‘{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’|sort -rn|head
52 cd
45 vim
32 sudo
29 git
29 emerge
26 ls
26 eix
21 rm
21 ebcd
10 ll

Note, the next couple are:

10 equery
9 vcs
8 svn
8 genlop
7 ssh
7 gecd

Apparently, I do tons of Gentoo work…

Thanks to U-verse, we’ve been able to get rid of Comcast, get more content (yes, even more HD content, dispite what Comcast advertises on their own cable channels), and pay less for TV + Internet than we were paying for just TV before.   And, we even get the Big Ten network, and have the NFL network back!

Comcast: you suck.