Qube 2

One of my projects for Christmas is to get Mrs Chippy (a Qube 2 from Richard Mant, up and running).

Fedora CVS

Red Hat Magazine (a good read) reports that the Fedora CVS is now open. Cool. Both Fedora Core and Fedora Extras (at last).

Feel the fear of the examination

Oshitoshitoshit...

I'm booked in for RHCE on Jan 28th. Time to prove/disprove my 5k1llz.

clusterssh

Man I just get to the end of installing/upgrading Sun Explorer and Patch Manager on every Sun box and I finally get around to trying cluster ssh. Stupid boy - should have done it before!

Fedora Extras coming soonish?

http://blog.sethdot.org/index.cgi/190

About time too! :-) Ubuntu has clearly given Red Hat a kick up the arse on Fedora, and it looks like the Fedora project is finally going to deliver good on its promises.

God work people.

As if...

Java vs. .NET (as seen on java.blogs).

The Distro dilemma

I upgraded my work desktop machine to Ubuntu Hoary (very early development version - not due until April) amd while it was perfectly stable, living on the bleeding edge of desktop development isn't for me. Plus it still didn't fix the outstanding issues I had with Ubuntu (which were caused by using a borked pre-release of Warty which didn't set a lot of stuff up properly, and was unable to resolve certain package dependies).

So I re-installed with my distro of choice - Fedora Core 3. I'm familiar with RHL/RHEL/FC so I can just get it all working how I like with all the extra RPMs that I want from sites like dag, etc.

Now here's my situation as of two days ago:

• e082 (work) Ubuntu Warty 04.10
  
• sylvester (aging laptop) Mandrakelinux 10.1 Powerpack
• tom (home workstation) Fedora Core 3
  

What I really want is:

• e082 (work) Fedora Core 3 - familiar - similar to RHEL servers.
• sylvester (aging laptop) Ubuntu Warty 04.10 - best support for power on my laptop
• tom (home workstation) Mandrakelinux 10.1 Powerpack - comes with a lot of (proprietary) software that's good for my main machine (ATI drivers, DVB, DVD)
  

Actually what my ultimate dream would be Fedora Core 3 with 3rd party apps/drivers/etc. from Mandrakelinux Powerpack and all the cool bits from Ubuntu (best APM support, sensible menus, loads of prebuilt stuff available via Synaptic/apt-get/etc) but all bundled on about 8 CDs ( - I need media for home).

• Firefox 1.0
• Evolution 2.0.x
• GNOME 2.8
• J2SE 5 + Java-GNOME
• Mono 1.0.x
  

MySQL version comparison

Found an article on MySQL versions and what they do and don't support. Merci bien François.

Of course PostgreSQL 8.0.0 (now at RC1) is even better, but MySQL is pretty cool too.

Systemo now has its own blog

Systemo now has its own blog. Which is great! But it does mean I've been playing around with infrastructure when I should have been coding. But that's me: Nic Doye is The Procrastinator. ;-)

Perhaps I'll move this blog at some point as b2evolution is schweet.

Java

So my attempts at using C# floundered mainly because I only have Mono on one box, whereas I can get Java easily on all three.

In fact I can get many versions of Java! (Sun JDK 1.4.2, 5, 6 (Mustang), sablevm, kaffe and gcj 3.3 and 3.4).

I've also been trying out a few desktop Java apps: Azareus, RSSOwl (which is better than BLAM! 1.4.x), Sun Download Manager and QNext. The former two are brilliant, the latter two, just "OK". QNext offers a lot more than Gaim but only if you need it and I don't.

I've also built Scarab (a server app) using ant, which was painless. Thank god from jpackage.org!

Mandrakelinux 10.1 - more comments

For some history of my experience of using Mandrakelinux see these previous posts:

1. Mandrake 10.0 Community
2. Mandrake 10.0 RC1
3. Mandrake 10.0 RC1 and i810
4. Wireless Success (again)
5. Mandrakelinux 10.1

It seems that for whatever reason, my prism54 card is less reliable under this than under Ubuntulinux 4.10 (Warty) and Fedora Core 2. Odd.

Everyone and their dog has commented on the fact that Mandrakelinux 10.1 ships with GNOME 2.6 as opposed to the superior 2.8 (which ships with Warty and FC3). What's worse is that Nautilus (2.6.3) in this version is fairly unstable - especially when working with remote files (presumably due to the improvements in gnome-vfs in 2.8). When I say fairly unstable, I mean it's restarted itself a few times so far (or I've had to kill a Nautilus window which has forced it to restart).

The control centre is a very nice piece of work though. The whole thing is very user friendly, and I am impressed. Like I've said before, 10.1 is what 10.0 should have been; it's just sadly a little bit late.

Still if you like RPM-based distros (and I do) and are new to Linux (or just want a maintenance free box) then Mandrakelinux 10.1 could be for you.