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For me, the holy grail of working with virtual machines is
$ ssh root@my-vmI am tired of manually updating /etc/hosts or looking at arp tables1. There’s got to be a better way. And there is! Here’s how. This works with Fedora 20. Your mileage may vary with other distros.
- Read this article. It will explain the basics, but follow the instructions below because there are a few differences in the process on Fedora.
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Add the following line to
/etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.confunder the [main] block:dns=dnsmasqThis line tells NetworkManager to run a dnsmasq process.
- Download this script that will take care of writing out a
hostsstyle file that dnsmasq will use for name resolution.$ curl -o /usr/bin/virt-hosts https://raw.github.com/awood/virt-utils/master/virt-hosts && chmod 755 /usr/bin/virt-hosts -
$ echo "addn-hosts=/var/lib/libvirt/dnsmasq/default.addnhosts" >> /etc/NetworkManager/dnsmasq.d/virt-hostsThis line tells NetworkManager to add the
default.addnhostsfile to the list of places that dnsmasq looks at for name resolution. -
$ yum install -y incron -
$ systemctl enable incrond.service && systemctl start incrond.service -
Set up incron to run
virt-hostsevery time we detect a change in the status of a virtual machine.$ echo "/var/lib/libvirt/dnsmasq/default.leases IN_MODIFY /usr/bin/virt-hosts -ur" > /etc/incron.d/virt-hosts -
Add the following line to
/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-em1DOMAIN="default.virt" -
$ systemctl restart NetworkManager -
$ ssh root@your-vm
Done!
1 The arp table solution seems really simple, but half the time my VMs vanish from the arp table and I can’t get their IP anymore.
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Spotify is pretty damn cool. I think we can all agree on this. What’s even cooler (if you’re an Open Source/Linux geek) is running a third-party ncurses client to connect to Spotify. Here’s what I had to do on Fedora 17 (64 bit).
- Install the necessary packages to checkout and build the application
- Per the Open Grieves instructions, install the following packages:
subversion libtool libogg-devel libvorbis-devel pulseaudio-libs pulseaudio-libs-devel zlib-devel gstreamer-devel libao-devel openssl-devel ncurses-devel
- Per the Open Grieves instructions, install the following packages:
- Checkout the despotify source code from SVN
svn co https://despotify.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/despotify despotify
- Move into the
despotify/srcdirectorycd despotify/src
- Build and install the application
makesudo make install
- Because we’re specifically talking about an x64 installation we need to fix how
libdespotify.so.0got installed. Now, I’m sure there’s a more intelligent way to do this (please tell me if you know by commenting on this blog post, or hit me up on twitter: @tbielawa), but lacking the necessary knowledge, I opted use symbolic links (note: this fixes the “despotify: error while loading shared libraries: libdespotify.so.0:" cannot openerror message you may be seeing)cd /usr/lib64sudo ln -s ../lib/libdespotify.so.0
- Run the application (protip: Press the “
?” key to see a list of shortcuts.ctrl+eis a shortcut for:connect)despotify
- If you try and log in now you’re most likely going to receive a “
User not found” error message. Per the information in this thread on the archlinux forumsI did the following:- Logged into the Spotify web interface
- Went into the “Edit Profile” page
- Went to the “Set a password for your devices” page
- This page will give you a number you will use as your despotify user name, save it somewhere for the next step. Click the link/button to receive an email which allows you to set the password for this account
- Read said email, click link in email, set “device” account password
- Now, using the account credentials created in the last step, you can log into the despotify application
That’s everything I had to do. So, is it worth it? No. Not really. But it was a fun little experiment/challenge.
The interface is immature, at best. It’s lacking most/all of the functionality I really enjoy in the official Spotify client, such as creating and listening to artist/song based radios, receiving/sending music suggestions to friends, Starring songs for offline listening later, etc…
What you can do is search for artists/tracks and play the results, and, impress your friends? I guess. (probably not though)
- Install the necessary packages to checkout and build the application
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I just went through a harrowing experience of attempting to install Fedora 14 on a Lenovo T520 Thinkpad with my good friend, abutcher. The issue presented itself first as X failing to start after the installer loaded. After switching into low graphics mode we were able to go through the installer successfully. But that did not solve our problems completely. After booting into the desktop we were unable to change the display resolution from 1280×1024 to the native 1600×900.
We started as most people would, Googling for numerous combinations of “fedora 14 thinkpad T520”, “sandybridge linux”, “sandybridge fedora”, etc. The results were surprising. Numerous sources report the T520 works with “no special setup needed.” This was not true for us. We Tried installing a newer Kernel from rawhide and the newer
xorg-x11-drv-inteldriver (2.16). This did not fix the issue.To compound our confusion, we noticed numerous posts referencing a BIOS option to disable the Nvidia 4200M (Optimus) card. Our system showed no signs of said card or any “internal”/”external” BIOS option.
Next we attempted installing Fedora 15. *ugh* GNOME 3 was not on our list of things to try today. But it was all we could think of.
This also did not work.
I started doing some heavy research. Somehow I ended up researching Kernel Mode Setting (KMS). The Debian Wiki was an especially useful resource for this.
Kernel Mode Setting (KMS) provides faster mode switching for X and console. It also provides native-resolution VTs on some laptops and netbooks which, prior to this, would use some standard mode, e.g. 800×600 on a 1024×600 panel.
This was relevant to my interests. “KMS provides native-resolution virtual terminals” you say? A quick trip to
/boot/grub/grub.confshowed that we were booting our kernel with the nomodeset option. We made a new boot entry (protip: never change your boot loader without leaving a known “working” entry) and omitted the nomodeset option. We also set the value of the default variable to our new entry, settimeoutto 10, and commented out thehiddenmenudirective.This almost worked. We removed the xorg config file (
/etc/X11/xorg.conf) and restarted the computer for good measure.voila.
Our Lenovo Thinkpad T520 was booting X using the laptops native resolution.
Just to clarify:
- Not ALL T520s come with the dual Intel Integrated Graphcs + Nvidia combination (ours did not)
- This can really throw you off
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xorg-x11-drv-nouveaupackage/driver had nothing to do with this. That package provides an Nvidia driver (which did not affect us) - The
kmod-nvidiapackage/driver also has nothing to do with this - This laptop has an integrated Intel HD 3000 Graphics chipset
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Tonight I’m upgrading my desktop (“fridge”) from Fedora 11 to 12. For my own personal benefit I’ll be documenting the process. Things I want to take note of in particular include: which additional files must be backed up for system services like samba, my current partition map, and what process I used to perform the upgrade (optical media, netboot?).
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Andrew and I put together a small Linux 101 tutorial for new CS kids in our department. We collaborated on it using google docs for the outline and then google presentation to make the actual presentation.
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Technitribe by Tim Bielawa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.