I feel that many of my package picks are console tools, more appropriate for system administrators and advanced users. So this week I Wanted to pick a GUI app and so I picked smplayer. Smplayer is a frontend to mplayer which is a highly compatible video player. Smplayer adds what I consider to be a nice interface which has led to it becoming my video player of choice.

If one were to rank computer issues subject to intense debate, how to partition a hard disk would certainly be high on the list. I’ve always tried to give a lot of thought to the partitioning scheme I’ve used for servers. In those cases I’m often trying to come up with something that will be a standard for some period of time. With desktops the issue is not so important because rarely will a mistake be a problem. So here are some schemes that have appealed to me recently.

What’s the difference between the “pause”, “suspend”, and “save” commands in the Xen management software? I only had the vaguest notion. And while I don’t consider myself an expert I decided to put together a bit of a cheat sheet to keep it all straight, including what the commands did and what their proper matchings are.

So far my research has turned up a few solutions though none that I consider to be that great. I’ve also learned that both Xen and VMware seem to have this problem and it would not surprise if other virtualization solutions do as well. The root of the problem is actually that the Linux kernel relies heavily on interrupts for generating random numbers. In a virtualized environment a Linux kernel will be unable to generate random numbers due to being unable to access the hardware. The solution would probably be for the virtualization software to emulate a hardware random number generator that gets random data from the host system. That’s assuming that the Linux kernel isn’t adjusted in some way to account for this issue.

I’ve been using Xen for a little while now and while there are many aspects I like there are a few that are troubling. I’ve been wanting to write up some tutorials on using Xen but before that can happen I need to feel comfortable recommending Xen as a virtualization solution. At the moment I’m not sure I can do that, partially because of the issues I’ve encountered but mostly because those issues do not seem to be acknowledged or discussed in any meaningful way. That is perhaps the most troubling thing of all.