I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them.  It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source.  So now that Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager is starting to look pretty useful I figured I should check it out.  That way I could be using a FLOSS virtual machine program - assuming the features were good enough to match Oracle’s offerings.  Also, Virtualbox requires a kernel module that has to be recompiled every time a new kernel is installed and that’s annoying.  I figured I’d test out both programs by installed a VM of Centos.

As usual, every time I upgrade Fedora I write a blog post to preserve this knowledge for others who might run across the same problem or in case it happens to me again next year.  This time around the situation was a little less smooth than previous upgrades.  After the preupgrade was done, when I rebooted I was 2 MB short in /boot.  This shouldn’t happen to you if you started with Fedora recently, but I’ve been on the same install for two years.  In the past if the preupgrade failed, the installer would put your system back into its previous configuration and you could use it again.  This time around it didn’t do that and I no longer had a working system.  It complained that a bunch of services weren’t starting and I couldn’t get a shell, not even in single user mode.

I’ve been reading a lot about kde-telepathy and it seems to be the next evolution beyond Kopete.  So I decided to check it out in my Fedora Rawhide VM since that’s going to have the latest packages and telepathy is still in deep beta.  When I installed all the packages that seemed to be important, I got the following when I launched it from the alt-F2 menu.

[caption id=“attachment_5130” align=“aligncenter” width=“384” caption=“kde-telepathy accounts menu in Fedora Rawhide (F17)”] [/caption]

In the past week I’ve listened to the most recent episodes of The Commandline Podcast and The Giant Bombcast. The former was a discussion of those who willingly violate copyright law as a comparison to those who violated the Volstead Act and 18th Amendment to the US constitution both of which made it illegal to sell “intoxicating liquors”. The latter had a discussion during the listener emails section that revolved around buying illegal VHS copies of movies and TV shows that have never been released on DVD (or sometimes even legitimately on VHS). (For my younger readers — VHS is a cassette tape format that held video . It was the precursor to DVDs) Together these different shows got me thinking about how copyright should deal with unreleased video.

Another semi-random photojojo time capsule.

This month’s photojojo is a mix of various things.

Just click on the image.  Then right-click and set as desktop background or save it to your computer and use your OS’s methods for setting the background.

[caption id=“attachment_5115” align=“aligncenter” width=“480” caption=“Dec 2011 - 1680x1050”] [/caption]

This time around my Photojojo time capsule constists only of photos from Dina’s birthday last year:

My graduate degree has stemmed my play time this month.  This is all I was able to put in.

Mass Effect 2 (1 hr)

Team Fortress 2 (41 min)

My latest photojojo time capsule consists of photos from my Grand Canyon trip.