I’m back in France for some R&R to get over my back pains from the car crash. The weather’s been lovely for a couple of days – at least 28C. We noticed that the spray job on my car isn’t 100%, so that will be at least another two days faffing around with Citroen. I’ve added tag support to my blog, so you can see the tag cloud on the right sidebar, which shows what I’ve been writing about mostly – the bigger the text, the more entries.

I’ve been looking at Fedora 9 prerelease today. Its not working too well with VMWare – the Tools partially install but don’t actually run – so the NIC is down on boot and the screen drivers don’t seem to work. Anyway, it’s got LUKS disk encryption out of the box – i.e. you select “encrypt disk” in the Anaconda installer and it will encrypt the entire disk minus the /boot partition, and prompt you for a passphrase on boot.

I’ve been playing with RedHat Kickstart – which is the Linux equivalent of Solaris’ Jumpstart, basically an automated network install. I kickstarted a virtualised CentOS 5.1 (RHEL 5 update 1) from Fedora 7. It was quite easy actually, you just boot from the CentOS CD, type “linux ks=nfs:….” at the grub prompt and away you go. I had to enter IP information as I wasn’t running DHCP. I noticed that Fedora’s system-config-kickstart seems to add “%end” statements that don’t seem to be compatible with CentOS’s kickstart parser, but other than that it works.

There’s a new show on TV called Breaking Into Tesco’s, which I gather is a Dragon’s Den rip-off in that people try to get their products bought by Tesco. Well from the new products that I tried in this week’s shop, it must be pretty easy to do as I was shocked how awul this stuff was – and yet it still managed to get past the tasters and quality control people onto the shelves.

I’ve just received my 20ukp wireless infrared CCTV, the colour is crap, but the below image is in total darkness and transmitting from across the room, being fed into my WinTV card and played through TVtime. I’ve not tried the audio yet, and when I find a PP3 battery I shall try it from downstairs. Click for larger image.