I am typing this post in Fedora Core 3 running in the virt-manager in Fedora Core 14, I found out you have to start the backend daemon to get the hypervisor to work perfectly, but now it is all good. I am using Firefox 0.10 to type this in WordPress and it all works, which is pretty cool, but the Internet has not changed that much since that old version of Firefox was released. But running this operating system in the virtual machine is better than running it locally, you can re-boot and shut down the machine and not interrupt whatever else you were doing. And I can see what the 0.10 version of Firefox was like to use once again. Anyway, I am pleased I got it to work and I can now test out various distributions of Linux and Unix without worrying about dedicating a hard disk partition to the distribution and worrying about installing boot-loaders and some such. Fedora has not changed that much in between version 3 and version 14, but obviously, there are a lot of changes behind the scenes to the technology like Selinux and many many, kernel patches from Red Hat that are put into the Fedora project, which benefits everyone.
I will have to try FreeBSD in the hypervisor and that will make it significantly easier to install than using a hard disk and having to re-boot to get something off the Internet, with the virtual machine the Internet connection to the virtual machine is set up automatically. Too easy. I am impressed.
The screen-shot to the left shows the Fedora Core 3 desktop in the virt-manager running on my Fedora Core 14 KDE desktop.
In other news, NASA has used the Kepler space telescope to discover more than 1200 possibly habitable planets orbiting distant stars, one of them is 2000 light-years away and is a member of a planetary system orbiting a star comprised of six planets. But 2000 light years is an inconceivable distance and it is far beyond our abilities to travel that far at all, it would need a giant generations ship with a whole city inside it and the descendants of the original crew get to see the planet. A hollowed-out asteroid would be perfect for this task as it would give protection from radiation with the thick iron ore skin. Although the planet is actually orbiting too close to the star to harbour life, it still gives hope that we will find another M class planet very soon. Let’s hope. We need to expand into the universe and move away from the concept of overpopulation and congestion, if we could move to Mars and set up a colony there it could be the start of our expansion into a space-faring society that is more reminiscent of Star Trek than our present polluting and greedy society that values Sports Stars and Oprah Winfrey above real progress. We need to find something to unify humanity that will enable us to work together and finally go back to the moon and build a base there, that can be the stepping stone to Mars and then on to the stars. If we were not wasting billions of dollars on a pointless war then we would have done this easily and also worked on fixing the problems in Africa with starvation and Aids that is ravaging that nation.