The hardware for our new computers arrived yesterday. This means that I have the functioning wreckage of two PCs strewn across my office as I get the data transferred. It also means that I haven't had much time for blogging, or much to blog about.
Perhaps the most significant thing is that at least two of us will be using virtualization for our desktops. Base OS, and the real production stuff sitting on top of that ready for VMWare snapshotting. Going in with both feet you might say.
I tried really hard to get SLES10 (we don't have any SLED10 licenses) onto the new system, but I ran into two big road-blocks. First and foremost, the Intel P965 chipset has no built in PATA support so that had to be provided third party. All of my optical drives are PATA, and the third party, JMicron, just plain don't work with Linux (though it will with the 2.6.18 kernel, which SLES doesn't have, but openSUSE 10.2 will). Secondly, the Marvell NICs need a driver that isn't in SLES making a network install challenging.
The first made a DVD install impossible, though it could boot-from-DVD. The second required me to put an E100 card into the machine to attempt a NFS install. Unfortunately, I ran into problems with the network install dying periodically about packages failing MD5 checks... even though the DVD iso MD5 checked out just peachy. Three times, three different packages. That's when I threw in the towel.
So I'm keeping one of the two hard-drives in this new machine blank until either openSUSE with Xen releases, or a SLES version with 2.6.18 (or newer) comes out. Whichever. I REALLY wanted that 64-bit support, as this machine has 4GB of RAM and I'd really like to use it all at full speed. With WinXP, I'm stuck for the time being. Happily, VMWare machines are transportable between Windows and Linux.
Maybe I'll look at Server 2003-64 bit tomorrow. Hmm.
Perhaps the most significant thing is that at least two of us will be using virtualization for our desktops. Base OS, and the real production stuff sitting on top of that ready for VMWare snapshotting. Going in with both feet you might say.
I tried really hard to get SLES10 (we don't have any SLED10 licenses) onto the new system, but I ran into two big road-blocks. First and foremost, the Intel P965 chipset has no built in PATA support so that had to be provided third party. All of my optical drives are PATA, and the third party, JMicron, just plain don't work with Linux (though it will with the 2.6.18 kernel, which SLES doesn't have, but openSUSE 10.2 will). Secondly, the Marvell NICs need a driver that isn't in SLES making a network install challenging.
The first made a DVD install impossible, though it could boot-from-DVD. The second required me to put an E100 card into the machine to attempt a NFS install. Unfortunately, I ran into problems with the network install dying periodically about packages failing MD5 checks... even though the DVD iso MD5 checked out just peachy. Three times, three different packages. That's when I threw in the towel.
So I'm keeping one of the two hard-drives in this new machine blank until either openSUSE with Xen releases, or a SLES version with 2.6.18 (or newer) comes out. Whichever. I REALLY wanted that 64-bit support, as this machine has 4GB of RAM and I'd really like to use it all at full speed. With WinXP, I'm stuck for the time being. Happily, VMWare machines are transportable between Windows and Linux.
Maybe I'll look at Server 2003-64 bit tomorrow. Hmm.