Yesterday, 28/11/2009, the first Belgium Fedora Release party was held at Don Bosco Wilrijk, around 25 people showed up. Bert gave a brief presentation about Fedora and how to join the community. Kris was as usual very punctual, and provided us with a very appropriate talking stick, a red fedora. Vincent setup a PXE install server for those interested in installing Fedora 12. Later on in the evening Martin Langhoff joined us to talk about the OLPC and some of the upcoming advances. I had already played once with the OLPC, but I still learned some interesting new feature about power management. All by all a very good organized and planned first release party, which we need to thank the Don Bosco Wilrijk Team, Robert Keersse, Peter Peeters, Johan Jacquemin, Linda van Hoeymissen, and Fedora Belgium, Bert Desmet, Bart Couvreur.

My spare laptop got changed, I got an “upgrade”, another somewhat better spare laptop came free, and so I decided to change my spare laptop to this newer ThinkPad, the main reason being, that the processor has virtualization technology built-in. I decided to install CentOS 5.4, Fedora 12, Windows 7 and Scientific Linux 5.4. The order of installation is of importance. First you need to install Windows, then Linux. So I selected to install first Windows 7, Fedora 12 and CentOS 5.4 and Scientific Linux 5.4, which will be installed within CentOS Xen.
Windows 7 installation went quite smooth, however Windows 7 creates a boot partition, similar to /boot, of 100MB and the rest for the real instance of Windows 7, this took me by surprise and had me redo whole my partition layout. On first sight, Windows 7 works much faster than Windows Vista, and all Vista software and drivers seem to be compatible.
Fedora 12 was released on 17th November 2009, I finally got some time to install Fedora 12 on my spare laptop. The installation went smooth, and finished in less then 20 minutes. For Belgians or people passing through Belgium, be sure to attend the Antwerp Fedora release party on 28th November 2009, more information go to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Release_Party_F12_Antwerp
Installing CentOS 5.4 went as usual smooth and quick, 10 minutes to install. Once the first boot sequence finished and the Xen kernel is booted, the virt-manager application can be loaded and makes it easy to install Scientific Linux 5.4 in a Xen machine.
Now I can start playing with all the applications and the operating systems they run in.