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.

Like Ubuntu it uses NetworkManager by default now – yuk! For some reason you don’t seem to be able to retain DNS settings, so when you enter the DNS server IP’s, click save and they disappear from /etc/resolv.conf, hopefully that’s just a bug and not some stupid setting or way to force you to use DHCP. I just disabled NetworkManager in the end and went back to a plain old ifcg-eth0 script!

I also had a quick look at Ubuntu 8.04, which like most of their other releases is pretty boring.

Someone at work gave me the idea of playing with iSCSI via VMWare – he has it working with three Solaris 10 instances running on his Mac (VMWare Fusion – which is now about 30ukp to buy). I might have a go at that too, but using Linux host/guest. A virtual SAN would be cool.

I just watched 10,000 BC, which was OK, but no Golden Compass action movie – its more of a Neanderthal love story with hideous historical errors.

Weather’s been good this weekend – hottest I’ve ever known Ipswich, although I could say that for 11c!

Update: I just upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.5.1, its got some spliffy new dashboard which I don’t particularly like, but otherwise the bugs/security fixes are invisible to the user.