Category: Technology

For the past few months I was thinking about implementing virtual servers on some hardware. The reason is that the hardware is too powerful to run few tasks and running many can lead to mess. In addition I have different people using different stuff and I do not want them to interfere. With virtualization I can solve all the problem and even get some more benefits.

I was looking at many solution and it seems that I found the one (thanks to by brother): OpenVZ. It is very easy to install. Guest OSes run on the same kernel (so no need to have multiple kernels consuming each its own resources) and it does the job I need.

I am in the process of installing it, so I can not tell a lot about it yet (except from what I was told and what I have already seen in the installation process), but when I finish with it, I think I will cover it here.

I have installed Fedora Core 5 on my workstation now. Looks nice. There few things that I noticed at once:

1. Improvement in speed (boot, load of apps and other)

2. Look and feel is much better than before. Nicer colors and so on

3. Very fresh software. They managed to include almost all latest stuff

There was a long long long downtime because of the problems with ISP. I\’ve been fighting with them a lot and finally I have switched to other one. Now I have a new line (of business lite kind) with a bunch of public IPs. This time I went with LogosNet who are although smaller, provide me with more quality service. From the past experience (I have some lines from LogosNet at other places) there were only 2 failures (for less than 10 min) during the whole year while I have a whole bunch of long failures with CytaNet (the provider I switched from now).

I hope that from now on everything will be just fine.

I\’ve never used wikis before a lot. I actually didn\’t like them due to the reason of poor navigation (as I thought it was), but few days ago I faces the situation where only wiki could help me in a way and (thanks to my bother) I set up DokuWiki.

After a couple of hours around I realized that it was not Wiki navigation that I didn\’t like, but instead it was the way the authors of the pages that I\’ve seen were doing it.

Anyway – it seems that I felt in love with Wikis now :)

Some of you might already noticed that I am writing a lot about KDE and related software. This is mostly because I like to use KDE over other desktops for its flexibility and usability (at least from my point of view to avoid any wars in here).

This time I decided to look into Gnome. The reason for this was that I was trying to find some simple and nice desktop which would fit the basic needs in most of the offices. I have many friends who would like to try linux, but they want the desktop to be simple and ready to work out of the box.

I have installed the \”Personal Desktop\” package selection of Fedora Core 4 to see what it offers. Seems to be very good. Gnome is quite strait forward. It does not look so fancy and is not so flexible as KDE, but it is right what the most people who do the usual office job would like to see in front of them.
From the set application to check were Gaim and Evolution. Since I use OpenOffice.org for a long time already I didn\’t bother myself checking it, I just knew it is fine.

I remember that I had problems with Gaim and russian encoding while using ICQ – now it is gone. I noticed a field in the account setup wizard to specify custom encoding and after all it worked fine.

Evolution really impressed me a lot since its abilities to integrate with MS Exchange just amazing. Just specify the MS Server OWA URL and hostname of MS AD and it gives you almost everything you need including email, contacts (both Exchange personal, Exchange common and AD Global Address list), todos and whatever else.

The are only few problems which I found with Evolution:

1. The are no multiple identities as is. In order to have an option to have them, I need to create new account with \”None\” in type field. So basically instead of just plainly creating an identity I have to create an account.

2. Sub-folders of exchange public folders are not displayed – this really sucks. For instance if I have a trea of public folders (what is quite normal) than I will see only the root of the tree and all messages under it, but not the sub-folders (not their content).

3.Message threading by subject is not very intelligent since I have many mail with the same subject unthreaded. This irritates me a lot.

4. Almost no UI customization.

Anyway, overall I liked the expirience, although I still prefer KDE and its software, but for those who needs a simple business desktop – try Gnome, since I beleive KDE needs some tweaking inside of KControl until one can feel fully comfortable.