Stumbled across a tool that is much better than “screenshot” or “PrintScreen” for capturing the screen or components of the screen under linux.

Pssst.. Pass it on.

http://shutter-project.org/

Access to anything using root passwords is a Bad Thing(tm), so Policy-Kit comes to the rescue.  Having never used Policy-Kit (polkit-d), it was always something disabled in order to limit the number of extraneous processes running on a server/hypervisor system. However, in this case, it comes in handy.

Create: /etc/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/50-libvirt-remote-access.pkla

[libvirt Management Access]
Identity=unix-group:libvirt
Action=org.libvirt.unix.manage
ResultAny=yes
ResultInactive=yes
ResultActive=yes

From there, just make sure all of the VM admins are in the “libvirt” group.

You may have noticed that fresh installations of Fedora 15 have network device named of “em1″ or “p1n1″ rather than the easy to remember “eth” nomenclature.  It seems that those in the Linux world wish to take a step backwards, forgetting all that was gained with the simplified naming convention.

Dial back time about 15 years, SunOS and HP-UX dominate the market, and it was a nightmare scripting around the various network device names (as well as the disk device names, too, but that is another story.. let’s hope that doesn’t return!).  When dealing with multiple models within the same platform, there was no guarantee you would end up with the same device name.

In the most simplistic terms, with linux’s use of “eth” and “hd” (or now “sd”), it made the newly evolving world of systems administration that much easier to manage and maintain.

While there is justification behind the change on the Fedora site, it is clearly a “head in the sand” move, one that only moves the core coding difficulties out from the linux device drivers & udev to now be a difficulty for the administrators and end users.  Administrators and users now have to update udev rules to go back to “eth” device names if they want to keep things clean.  Thanks for the extra work.

One word: Boo.