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Fedora 10 has a lot of neat new features to play with, but the upgrade process isn’t as automatic as with Ubuntu. For people used to doing a dist-upgrade, follow these simple instructions and you will be able to upgrade your Fedora 9 box to Fedora 10 painlessly.

First make sure that your system is already patched and current. Depending on how far behind you are, this might require a reboot.

yum update

Now we need to cleanup any cruft that has accumulated in the yum cache, you can do that with

yum clean all

If you need to reboot at this point, I would do it.  A nice application exists in the repository called preupgrade. It gives you a very simple GUI that allows you to upgrade with just a few clicks. Install it with

yum install preupgrade

and then, as root, run it

preupgrade

You’ll be presented with a window that has a drop down box allowing you to select which version you would like to upgrade to.  Select Fedora 10, hit apply and wait for a few hours for the process to complete.  Your box should reboot when the ugprade is done and then you will be running Fedora 10!

In a never ending goal to have enterprise level stuff in my humble home, I have put this short guide together on how to assemble the cheapest VMWare ESXi server possible.  There are a few guidelines to keep in mind.

First, ESXi will run using SATA drives in AHCI mode connected directly to a motherboard that uses an Intel ICH7 or ICH9 chipset, but NOT an ICH8 or ICH10.

VMWare will use as much RAM as you can give it. RAM is more important then CPU.

Having said that, a multicore CPU is really helpful. ecspecially if you plan on using the software iSCSI initiator.

Use an Intel Pro 100 or Pro 1000 NIC. NIC support is pretty bare in ESXi, so just hop on newegg and spend 20 bucks on one.

We have two options, the first and cheapest is to use a motherboard based on the ICH7 or ICH9 chipset. ESXi will support SATA drives in AHCI mode connected to this chipset,so an ICH7/9 board, a few gig of RAM, a SATA drive and an Intel NIC will have you on your feet.  If you have this kind of setup, all you’re going to need to do is boot off of the ESXi installer CD and you’ll be done a short time later.

The second option is a bit more involved, but will work on ICH8 and ICH10 motherboards. I personally run an ICH10 based board with a quad core and 8 gig of RAM using this method.  This method also requires iSCSI storage to be available. I use Solaris and ZFS for my SAN. So, if you have an ICH8 or ICH10 motherboard, you need to create a USB bootable thumbdrive and install ESXi onto that. You can follow these simple instructions for linux or you can google for instructions for windows. Once you have your boot drive created, you will need to give your host an IP and use the management console to setup iscsi storage.  Have fun!

I’m having some serious stability issues with all of my ubuntu VMs on ESXi. After a period of several days, they have all locked up with a message about the mtp driver having read errors, or something along those lines. The short summary is that it looks like the scsi disk (emulated by ESXi, actually an iscsi LUN) becomes unavailable and lots of sense key errors are generated. The VM goes to 100% CPU and I have to reboot the entire ESXi server to recover. In the meantime, my SAN, Fedora, Solaris and Windows VMs never skip a beat.  I’ve rebuilt the VM several times with different version of ubuntu in the 8.x line and different patch revisions, but have finally gave up. I’m back on Fedora and we’ll see if it remains stable.

Another failure of Ubuntu 8.10,   they forgot to include the /etc/X11/rgb.txt file. All of the symlinks on the filesystem that refer to that file still exist, but not the file itself.  This gives TK applications, like crossover office and wish, all sorts of trouble and will give you odd errors like the “Black” error. To fix it, download the rgb.txt file from here,  put it in /etc/X11 and log out of X windows.  I’m giving ubuntu one last shot before I kick it to the curb.

Well, this is cyborg workshop and the definition of a cyborg has to include some biological component, so don’t be so surprised. I have created a spreadsheet in open office that my wife and I have both used to a great degree of success to shave off some weight. I recently converted it to google docs and have decided to share it out.  You can find a copy of it here. Remember to save off a copy for yourself because you won’t be able to edit the one in that link. You only need to fill out the cells that have a white background, everything else will auto populate.  This sheet will provide a couple of key pieces of data. First,

• It will calculate your metabolism or the number of calories you need to consume on a daily basis based on your activity level. Use this number to set your weight loss goals.

• It will calculate the day that you will reach your goal. Need to drop 10lbs in a month? With your metabolism number, you can tweak  how many calories you are consuming on a daily basis to reach that date.
• It will tell you how many pounds you are set to lose, or gain, in a week and alert you if that number goes over 3lbs. 3lbs a week is the high end of safe weight loss. Beyond that, you start to get into dicey territory where you risk damaging your body or going into an unsustainable starvation mode.
• Pretty graphs on page 2 showing you how you are doing. The graphs aren’t great, but google still has some limitations in that area.
• And lastly, if you fill out the sheet faithfully, you’ll see that no matter what diet you are on, it all comes down to counting calories.

Give it 10 days worth of data to get accurate measures on your metabolism. Good luck and have fun!