Thinkpad X220(with SSD) and Fedora16

Last night, a new Lenovo Thinkpad X220 arrived. It has an Intel Sandybridge Chipset, and a solid state drive, 8G memory. Here is the Smolt profile info.

Without haste, I booted up a live-usb stick with Fedora 16 on it and started the hard-disk install. I clocked the live-usb install time for fun. It took 1 minute to copy live image to hard-disk, and a minute more to perform post-install file-system changes, install boot-loader. Nearly 3 minutes, install was complete and smooth w/o any glitches. That was pretty neat.

I did some usual post-install configurations. Then, configured virtualization with bridging. Speaking of bridging, some good news here. Red Hat’s Laine Stump recently submitted a patch to libvirt upstream, a very handy interface for bridging. Which now makes, adding a bridge as trivial as:

# virsh iface-bridge eth0 br0 

or with the recent Consistent Network Device Naming feature (which uses the BIOS provided network interface names.)

# virsh iface-bridge em1 br0 

I previously had a Lenovo X200, compared to that, X220 seems to have improved many folds w/ more screen real-estate and an optional touch-pad as well. And oh, did I mention Fedora runs smooth as ever on Thinkpads?

FUDCon Pune 2011

FUDcon (Fedora Users and Developers Conference) is happening in Pune, India. Plenty of interesting talks/demos/hack-fests are already scheduled. I’m giving two talks/demos. One on managing KVM hypervisor based guests via shell interface using Libvirt. The other, a working illustration of FreeIPA (with co-presenter shanks ). Will post my notes very soon.

Stay tuned.

pre-upgrade from f15 -> f16 – smooth as silk

For distro upgrades, I usually use pxe/tftpboot and do clean remote installs. So I thought I’ll give yum preupgrade a try for my remote test machines. I should also mention, this F15 machine is a minimal(@core) install.

Existing F15 install

 
# cat /etc/redhat-release 
Fedora release 15 (Lovelock)
 

Run the pre-upgrade command to upgrade to F16 branched pre-release

 
 preupgrade-cli "Fedora 16 Branched Pre-release (Verne)"
 

Everything went smooth.

Once, preupragde-cli is done, run the yum distribution-synchronization which synchronizes the installed package set with the latest packages available.

 
# yum distro-sync
 

Post preupgrade, let’s do some quick clean-up of dependency problems, orphans(installed pkgs which are not available from currently configured repos), duplicates, leaves(packages which are no longer needed by any other pkgs on the system)

 
 # package-cleanup --problems ; package-cleanup --orphans \
   package-cleanup --dupes ; package-cleanup --leaves
 

And reboot the host. There we go !

 
# cat /etc/redhat-release 
Fedora release 16 (Verne)