Tuesday, August 30, 2005


Mandriva 2006.0 beta 3 - update.


My X problem was cured by downloading the latest versions of xorg from cooker (6.9.0 cvs 20050825 - 15 days newer than the beta).


There are some other buglets for the GNOME user, but appart from that it's pretty good. I did try KDE, but it makes me ill. :-) Seriously, I can see why people like it, but it just doesn't do it for me. If I had to use it for a job, I wouldn't complain, and maybe I'd learn to like it.

Thursday, August 25, 2005


ScheduleWorld.


ScheduleWorld seems like a brilliant idea. I should be able to get all my Evolutions, work-based Outlook, Symbian S60 phone (and via Evolution) my Palm all synced together.


Bollocks will they.'


Evolution happily talks to the LDAP part perfectly. But the calendar? How?


Outlook 2003 won't give me the option of talking to the calendar - it's greyed out. It fails to log into the LDAP server too.


The J2ME app on my phone does nothing. It completely fails to start.


Obviously the J2SE 5 WebStart app runs perfectly, but that's no flaming good.


Now can I run SyncML / whatever between Evolution and my Nokia S60 phone. That would rock.


Anyone any ideas?


Mandriva 2006.0 beta 3.



Attempted to install this last night. All went well except X, which failed to put /etc/X11/X symlink in and also only draws black on a black screen (and locks the keyboard). Nice.


I don't think my Radeon 9200/Iiyama VisionMaster Pro 410 (702) is such a wild combination. I'll have to do some digging tonight/over the weekend.


Suicidal Squirrel.



Last night, a squirrel jumped from the verge into the side of my car, hitting the wing mirror I think. I stopped and went back, but it was dead. Perhaps it had been asked to document the entire searching for and burying nuts process.


Plus retro-actively fill in forms asking for permission to get nuts and log the location of each in the Squirrel Helpdesk, a spreadsheet and a word document on a weekly basis.

Thursday, August 11, 2005

Opening OpenSolaris; ubuntu, openSUSE vs. Fedora; yahoo.

Jonathan Schwartz seems to want to get on the right side of open source folk (at last - left hand and right hand working together). OK so opensolaris needs open source geeks to flock to its aid or opening it will have been much of a waste of energy, but the olive branch gesture and the potential to work with OSDL is nice touch. Nice one, Jonathan.

Ubuntu recently announced that they would be offering enterprise support for their distro (as I predicted) . Novell have opened up all of Suse at opensuse.org. Now the difference between these two and Red Hat is that you can download and use the actual commercial version for free. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat, do not allow a binary download of RHEL itself for free. Instead they offer Fedora Core which is nearly identical or you can get a respin from another outfit (e.g. CentOS).

Now Fedora Core has a different update policy to RHEL - RHEL offers the traditional "keep changes as conservative as possible" so you don't accidentally break customers stuff, whereas Fedora offers latest versions and changes galore. But why don't Red Hat offer RHEL US - for UnSupported? You get the software and the updates (via yum through a traditional mirror instead of up2date) without all this silly respin rubbish. Might keep the community onside? I suppose that the real problem is that we pay about £7.5k per annum in RHEL licences but as it never, ever goes wrong (only one call raised and that turned out to be hardware) we don't really need the support ourselves. Tough choice.

I've switched to using yahoo for searching from google. How about that for a shock?

Monday, August 08, 2005


64 bit RHEL 4 vs. Java


Just had to install the following RPMs on a 64 bit Linux box to get Java to run for some sybase app:


expat-1.95.7-4.i386.rpm


fontconfig-2.2.3-7.i386.rpm


freetype-2.1.9-1.i386.rpm


xorg-x11-deprecated-libs-6.8.2-1.EL.13.6.i386.rpm


xorg-x11-libs-6.8.2-1.EL.13.6.i386.rpm


xorg-x11-Mesa-libGL-6.8.2-1.EL.13.6.i386.rpm


zlib-1.2.1.2-1.2.i386.rpm


Friday, August 05, 2005


Faster boot times (plus radio silence).


Using bootchart and this information I decreased the boot time (as reported by bootchart) from 65 seconds to 32 seconds on tom, my XP2100+ box. Well OK, all I did so far was install bootchart and add in the gdm-early-login stuff. Next phase: compile custom kernel.


PS. All this geekery in my blog replaces any libelous or other content that I may want to write at the moment but realise that for reasons like "needing an income to pay the mortgage" I'd better keep my mouth shut.


Geek blog. Move along please.


Switched from Blam! to Liferea as my GNOME RSS feeder. It now works with flickr RSS feeds and doesn't use 130MB RAM (unlike Blam!).


Web browsers. Well we all know that IE blows, but the whole world is too stupid to change. But which web browsers do I use? Mainly Epiphany the GNOME Gecko-based browser on Fedora and Ubuntu; Opera 8 for Symbian Series 60 (on my Nokia 7610, and yes it is one of those few pieces of software worth buying); and Firefox when I'm forced to use the evil OS.


Laptop.next() - I've been thinking about chucking out my Fedora Core 4 Athlon XP2100+ desktop and Ubuntu 5.04 PIII 850 laptop and replacing them with (sharp intake of breath) an iBook. Specifically the £699 12' iBook. OK, so I can't afford one today, but that's not the entire point. The point is that for the first time in my life there will be a non-Linux machine in my house (excluding the big AIX boxen that didn't get much use, and the Evil OS partition I need for work). WIll I fart around and put FC4/PPC on it? Probably, but not for much. It's a proprietary OS (with open underpinnings) but it works - it's cheap and I don't have to go through the Jesus-I-hope-it-works-with-linux panic that comes with every hardware purchase.