I realize there is Epiphany, Galeon, Arora, etc. However, they don’t provide certain features that just over time get quite irritating. As a minimalist, I prefer a browser that is light on resources, but still has full functionality and supports things such as flash.

Firefox uses the XULrunner engine, which is basically some knock-off HTML Markup-language to draw its interface. Whether you like it or not it is leaky leaky on the memory. If anything Opera is fairly annoying to browse through all the options, and its dependency on QT isn’t something I’m fond of either since I prefer XFCE.

Arora is somewhat useful, but it doesn’t really even have auto-complete or any of the small features we have grown accustomed to over the years. There is Midori, but it is still a little unstable at the moment seeing it is less than a year or two into maturity.

So I have to ask, why is it when it comes to choice of browsers, Linux gets the “beaten down doom stick”? It’s almost tempting to write my own cross-compatible browser, that is if I had any experience in that field, ha. I sure hope the choices broaden out eventually. There’s always room for one more browser in my book.

~
Justin C. Kinnaird
Programmer

A fine example of this is KDE 4, one of our lovely Desktop Enviornments on Linux. It’s requirements were always relatively a tad higher than Gnome or XFCE, but it seems anymore it won’t even function correctly without an aftermarket Nvidia graphics card and a nice 2GB 400mhz stick of DDR ram at minimum.

That’s great and all, but I guess they are forgetting about all the poor people who can’t afford a new computer that can handle the new tech.

Originally I thought the purpose of hardware advancing was so those nice applications could perform better, not for them to require that much more memory/cpu. Either way, I’m really hoping my favorite apps don’t follow suite on this one.

It’s saddening to see operating systems requiring much more than 256 MB R.A.M. for the core system, let alone the huge 1 GB that microsoft stamps on its newest Windows 7. I’m just glad we have choice over here on Linux.

Until next time, cheers.

Justin C. Kinnaird

Been messing around with alternatives to VMWares ESX and ESXi. Of the top contender thus far is KVM.

KVM is a true kernel-level hypervisor similar to ESXi. Unlike ESXi, you still load a typical Linux OS first – the KVM runs via a special kernel module.

At first glance, I was a bit confused: you install Qemu and KVM. “So is this Qemu or is it KVM”. It is actually both. KVM is largely comprised of two components: the kernel-level hypervisor and a handfull of shared libraries and binaries shared by Qemu.

At the core, you call the “kvm” command just as you would call the “qemu” command (they take the same arguments).

Installation on Ubuntu is easy-squeezy:

apt-get install kvm qemu

Currently, kvm supports all the neato stuff you would expect from a kick-ass virtualizer:

• Full virtualization that takes advantage of VTI and AMD-V extensions
• Supports snapshots and machine states
• Live migration of a running guest from one server to another
• Multi-processor support (up to 64 I believe)
• Good memory management with Windows guests

There are some GUI tools for managing the virtual machines – one of the neatest I found was virtual-manager. Similar to VMWares VCenter. I have not used this tool much however in favor of custom scripts for management.

Looks like I will be deploying this in an initial test phase at our TeirII data center in Franklin, TN for the Army National Guards website (http://www.nationalguard.com). I will keep everyone posted on how the tests turn out!