We finally upgraded our server to Fedora 11 this morning, after a weekend of work. In previous generations, we’d offloaded all of the data, formatted all the drives, and installed the new OS. And we, to keep up, would have to do this every 6-9 months, every time a new Fedora release came out. And our data kept growing. When you are storing many gigabytes of information, trying to slowly offload to a 4.3GB DVD is a slow process.

This weekend, we threw in the metaphorical towel, and got a 1.5TB drive and installed it in the computer. This allowed us to empty our older drives one by one and reformat them to EXT4 format. We had previously been using the more established XFS format. EXT4 is an update of the established EXT3 with improved handling for large files, among other things.

Improved large file handling is very important to us, because we use our server as a storage base for our MythTV DVR. Large file handling is required when an hour of over-the-air broadcast HD can be more than 8GB.

After reformatting all the drive to EXT4, we discovered another feature we’d never noticed before. The Reserved Block Percentage for the Superuser. A default setting, it holds back 5% of the reported available drive space for superuser privileged processes, ensuring that even if the hard drive fills up, the running processes can still do their work. Which is all well and good on an OS partition. But on a data partition, 5% of  a TB drive is almost 50GB being held in reserve. Ultimately, now that we know it is there, we left it turned it. You can override it as needed.

While we kept all the data on the data drives, although we did move around what was stored where, we did wipe and redo the OS partition completely. This is always a learning experience because as we rebuild parts of it, we add and fiddle with features, some of which are new to the upgraded OS. For example, we added an hourly run of status information which is ported to Linux’s MOTD(Message of the Day) feature so that anyone logging in receives a notification of them.

We also tried running tuned. Tuned isn’t enabled by default under Fedora 11, and it is merely an early version of a project that should be fully realized in Fedora 12. For several versions, Fedora has been auditing programs to look for redundancy or inefficiency. One of the most solid examples of that was a goal of a 20-second boot time.  There is an apparent lack of good discourse on tuned that we found, but the service will allow cpu, disk, and net devices to adapt dynamically to usage, reducing power, according to profiles set.

Tuned, unfortunately, kept bringing down our network link, causing hiccups. For now, we’ve turned it off. Power Management is a goal we aspire to. We want constant availability with low power usage, which means a service that turns things off when not in use. We look forward to the next generation of this program, when it may be enabled by default.

Since our server does not run a graphical environment by default, nor does it have a monitor attached normally, the experience of using it is different than most using a Linux machine. We’re always looking for things to cut from it to improve its efficiency. During this latest iteration, we cut a partition, no longer creating a separate home partition for the system. We never store anything in the home directories anyway.

You will be hearing more about our server. Our systems are the testbed for practical experiments in spinning down hard drives and other techniques to try and reduce waste. The drives are even 5400rpm ‘green’ drives, as the data doesn’t require anything faster. If you are interested in more specific details about the system, comment. We’d love to hear your feedback.

• Choosing the right Linux File System Layout using a Top-Bottom Process (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
• Is There a Perfect Linux Filesystem? (daniweb.com)
• Fedora 11 – Palimpsest Saves the Day (gadgetwisdom.com)

We plan to offer more thoughts later, as we will be doing some field-testing. We have installed Fedora 11, code named Leonidas on a MSI Wind U100 netbook which we will be taking with us on a trip this weekend, allowing us to explore it before rolling it out to other systems.

Our initial impressions are that F11 is a winner. It has been cleaned up at every level. We installed it from scratch and proceeded to install everything we routinely use on a mobile system, including Firefox(with Xmarks, formerly Foxmarks to store our bookmarks), Dropbox for our Documents and some configuration files, and Adobe Air so we can run our Twitter client. There was a problem with Adobe Air, but a quick net search found us the solution(a symbolic link so Air could find a library). The whole process took very little time.

Plymouth, Fedora’s graphical boot loader, now supports Intel based graphics cards, which are found in a majority of productivity based notebooks and netbooks. Since our previous systems didn’t support it by default, and we saw no need to override that, this is the first time we’ve seen the graphical loader outside of one try. Plymouth is plug-in capable for different boot screens. The default one is merely a circle that gradually fills in until it is complete. We’ll have to take a look at the alternatives there as well.On the other hand, it is a boot screen. We don’t want to spend too much time looking at it, especially if it slows things down to render something fancier.

Fedora also has changed the default volume group name to include the hostname…a minor touch, and the ext4 file system. Anaconda, the Fedora installer, continues to be fairly user-friendly. Fedora has rebuilt many areas of the program, but the feel is pretty much the same for installation.

Into the OS itself, Fedora 11 had a goal of a 20-second boot time. It isn’t quite achieved on a netbook, but it came fairly close. The netbook is the only system we use that doesn’t support the 64-bit architecture, so we used the 32-bit, which has now been rebased as i586 instead of i386 We also enabled Presto to reduce update sizes. On our first update, we had a 91% download savings with no noticeable problems.

The new versions of Gnome and Firefox look subtly different, but we haven’t had a chance to experiment with them yet, beyond configuring things the way we want them. We will report back on this.

Finally, as this is a mobile computer, Fedora 11 boasts new power saving measures, including an update to the handling of relatime backkported from the 2.6.30 kernel, which was just released, but after the Fedora 11 release. We look forward to seeing how these power measures enhance battery life.

So, in the end…Fedora, better than ever, no show-stopping problems we’ve seen so far…and more to come.

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To our disappointment, the Fedora 11(Leonidas) launch date has pushed back by one week. As noted on their announcement mailing list….

In a meeting today between Release Engineering, QA, and various team
leads, we decided to enact a 7 day slip of the Fedora 11 release date.
The primary reason behind this slip is the state of our blocker bug:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=F11Blocker&hide_resolved=1 We cannot begin Release Candidate phase until the blocker bugs are closed or at least in MODIFIED state. We are not there today, which would be our last day to enter RC phase and still have enough time to release on the 26th. We hope to enter RC phase in the next couple days, and hit our new target, June 2nd.

Freeze breaks for critical bugs will still be accepted, however trivial
bug fixes should be pushed as updates via bodhi. Thanks!

Better to have a stable system than an unstable one. Here’s hoping for June release.

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We continue to want to write about Fedora, especially in light of our recent inspiration. We were reading this post on a blog about the fact that Fedora 11 will have roughly 60 new features, some of which we previously summarized. The last few releases have had less than half that. Today is the feature freeze for Fedora 11.

The author predicts these features will have other distributions rushing to catch up.  The beta freeze of F11 is in a week, with the Beta release on the 24th. The final release is set for the end of May.

Every time there is a new release of Fedora coming, we wipe and reinstall every system from scratch. Our preparations begin a month in advance, when we start mirroring the complete Fedora repository and the update repository for the release, as well as our favorite 3rd-party repositories. Every night, a cron job updates any changes made.

Jigdo allows us to use those files to assemble an install image. And we maintain the repository and keep it updated to keep our systems updated. As we mentioned previously, the new DeltaRPM system will save download bandwidth.

Creating a local repository is easy. You start with your installation DVD, if you have one, and copy the packages to a directory. Then, run the createrepo command on the directory(you may have to install it). The directory should be accessible on a local web server…we use lighttpd over apache for memory reasons(but more on that another time). Then, you can edit your yum configuration files in one of two ways…adding a local only repository file, or editing the existing files to redirect to the local server instead of one of the Fedora mirrors.

To sync a remote update use a command like this…

rsync -avrt rsync://mirrorsite/fedora/linux/releases/10/updates/x86_64/ /var/www/html/yum/updates/10/x86_64

Go to the Fedora Mirror List to find mirrors that work for you.

As a final step, the Fedora Unity project releases re-spins of the Fedora releases with updated packages, as well as the Fedora Everything spin, which is a multiple DVD release of the entire Fedora repository.

With hard drive space so cheap lately, and metered internet coming into vogue, this is a decent solution. Once one has the latest distribution, one has to figure out how to distribute it to multiple systems. We start by loading it onto one system, and breaking it in before distributing it elsewhere.

More to come…

We’re Fedora users. Sure, Ubuntu is more popular, and openSuse and other distribution are gaining popularity, but we started with Red Hat 6 many years ago, and have had an installation of each of the Fedora distributions since. They are up to Fedora 10, and we are talking about distributions of Linux, for those of you not familiar with them.

Two years ago, Eric S. Raymond, a Linux evangelist, commented:

“Over the last five years, I’ve watched Red Hat/Fedora throw away what a near-unassailable lead was at one time in technical prowess, market share and community prestige. The blunders have been legion on both technical and political levels.”

Now, we can agree that Fedora has had some problems finding its voice. But now, Paul Frields, the Fedora Project leader, declared that since the release of Fedora 10, they’ve counted about 1 million new installations and approximately 2 million unique visitors to fedoraproject.org each month. Checking out the Ranking of various distributions on Distrowatch for the last 12 months, Fedora is #4, beaten by, in order, Ubuntu, openSuse, and Mint. The site is not a fully accurate indicator of usage, but it does provide a baseline to consider.

openSuse, is a project sponsored by Novell. Mint is a distribution based on Ubuntu whose goal is to provide a more complete out-of-the-box experience by including browser plugins, media codecs, support for DVD playback, Java and other components. Fedora doesn’t include these things in the default distribution for legal reasons.

Fedora 10 included many significant changes, including a new graphical boot system called Plymouth, and boot-time improvements. Speeding up the boot process is a major push for all Linux distributions right now, and developers are looking at unnecessary delays they can remove, such as probing for obsolete hardware, and how they can present the startup screen while loading certain things in the background, so the user can start working while programs are continuing to load. Fedora continues to push the envelope with new technologies, and while there are still some issues even we admit it has.

To map our improvements…wireless support has been vastly improved over the last few versions, and has worked out of the box for us with few disconnects. Some elements of any distribution are upgraded versions of software included…such as the latest version of OpenOffice. For these, any problems cannot be blamed on Fedora itself, except in how the various pieces fit together. So far, no complaint on that front. Multimedia support under Fedora is a bit tricky, because Fedora, for legal reasons, cannot include proprietary codecs, including ones for MP3 or DVD. But there are a variety of start guides that take you through adding 3rd-party support.

For video DVDs, which are encrypted, there is no software you can license to play them. There is only a decryption program which is open-source, and thus disapproved of by the DVD industry, despite the fact they’ve offered no alternative. So, it can be done, but it can’t be included in any distribution to avoid lawsuits.

We’re glad that Fedora is regaining users. We’re hoping it means more projects, Boxee, for example, release their software in Fedora-compatible packaging. We’ve thought about migrating one or more systems over to Ubuntu, but we know the ins and outs of Fedora design, and sometimes you stick with what you know.

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