Mono and FC3.

I see that the dev version of mono (1.1.5) is available for Fedora Core 3. I have mono again (not in the American sense). Yay!

worldofnic on Flickr

New from the world of nic: photos. Hosted by flickr.

Uncle Tony.

I've found a picture of my Uncle Tony on the internet. Here he is (on the left) as the photographer in Half a Sixpence.

Mono--

Mono, the free implementation of MSFT's "it's not Java now!" VM and associated compilers a) works b) is pretty kewl c) gets Linux users on MSFT's bandwagon.

All Mono did for me was get me re-interested in Java. :-/ After all not only is C# only a minor improvement on J2SE 1.4, Mono's GTK# is just functionally equivalent to the (under-hyped) Java-Gnome project.

But here's the kicker: Java is easily available for Fedora Core 3 and Mono isn't. :-(

So no Tomboy, Blam! or Gossip for us FC3 users (one of the most common Linux distros). But I do get RSSOwl - oh, and that's it. :-(

MySQL, I loathe thee.

# /usr/local/m64/mysql/bin/myisamchk -o file
- recovering (with keycache) MyISAM-table 'file'
Data records: 3645545

Now twiddle thumbs. Twice in a myisamchking row. Bastards.

Symbian, Linux baby.

Man thanks to Andy Kwong and a few googled results, I'm now installing software (via bluetooth) from Fedora Core 3 onto my Symbian S60 phone. Schweeet. Now I just need to get Evolution syncing!

Acrobat for Linux

Yay! Adobe have release acrobat 7 for linux (get it from freshmeat) at last! A version of acroread that isn't 5 years old. Perhaps printing huge PDF files will be possible again.

SXEmacs, XEmacs and Emacs

You know XEmacs doesn't seem to have changed much in years. Now I hear via Dino and LWN and that Steve Youngs has started SXEmacs. Interesting. Also of note, FSF Emacs 22 includes GTK support (the first time since the GTK1 patch for XEmacs which wasn't particularly stable).

SXEmacs has all the Win32 cruft removed which is kewl. :-)

New Symbian phone

I've just got Nokia 7610 on Orange. Now I've just got to work out how to sync Evolution (which contains all the data from my Palm IIIe) and my Nokia 6310 and 7250 with it.

It's hella kewl as it has decent web, 1Mpixel camera, PDA and phone all in one which is all I want/need.

No time to play today though - too busy at work!

Sci Fi frenzy

OK, so I'm not the biggest Sci-Fi fan in geekdom. I like it, but I'm not some sad obsessive. (I hate Star Wars and all the new Star Treks).

Sci-Fi done right(TM) or inordinately badly (original Star Trek, anything British...) does interest me, so I'm really looking forward to Dr Who (which the BBC have started pushing) with the most excellent Christopher Ecclestone and the H2G2 movie (which looks really good in the QuickTime preview).

Happy Days.

Enterpise Linux

In the server area you can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Server or Mandrake Corporate Server. I expect Canonical will release a commercially supported Ubuntu at some point.

For desktops, Red Hat Desktop, Novell Desktop, Mandrake Corporate Desktop and Sun Java Desktop are all choices.

Next time someone says "hey, there are too many versions of Linux" say yes, but not in the real world.

Oh, and if you're using Debian or Gentoo in a real server environment (and yes it does happen) then feel free to be slighted by my comments and really 1337, smug and superior.

All change again for sylvester.

I installed Fedora Core 3 on sylvester last night, meaning that all my machines run the same distro once more. Sure testing Ubuntu and Mandrakelinux have been fun diversions but with limited time, and with Fedora Core 3 being excellent (RHEL 4 is based on it) and similar to my day job, I've come back round to the total Red Hat/Fedora camp.

Red Hat probably lost a some people over the switch to RHEL v Fedora, but I suspect a large proportion to come back since Fedora is a stonking distro and RHEL (and the cheapo respins like CentOS) are fantastically stable server OS which are dead easy to administer.

Useful yum command:

Syncronize your yum archive with a previously updated similar host. Dead simple but I thought I'd share.

rsync -uavz -e ssh remote:/var/cache/yum/ /var/cache/yum

Software Suspend

One of the things I like about the evil OS XP, is Hibernate. So I thought I'd experiment with Software Suspend on my home workstation, tom.

Dumb move. That's the worst xfs_repair, I've ever had to do, I had to do a '-L' which basically means, kiss your journal goodbye. Arse.

Well the machine still works (although not 100%). I've some investigating to do as rpm -qVa reports everything as untestable in some way; gdm is borked in some fashion and other things just ain't right.

Why does the blogger API suck?

Is it my imagination or is there no way to post titles?

gnome-blog, drivel and Hello!/BloggerBot all seem incapable of setting titles.

Hence why there've been no h3 titles in my recent posts.

I've blogged before about how rubbish floppies are, but yet we still need to use them for system installs.

Well, RHEL 4 doesn't support booting from floppies, only CDs and USB pen drives.

• For CD-Rs that means burning a separate one for each "type" of machine (we only really have two types, but what about swap? - we still do that proportional to memory. I sense a standards change coming on :-).


• For USB keys, we need HP Proliant DL 360/380 G4s at least. 320s and older 360/380s can't boot from USB.

So, in general I'm happy that we can move away from the crap that is floppy disks. (I've never really used them myself). The irony being that I bought 20 yesterday, as we'd run out of the damned things. Sigh.

I'd been considering getting an Intel 600 series proc for my next box (which only exists in my mind, bot in any affordable future) bu after reading a shootout between them at Linux Hardware, I'm not so sure.

I like the idea of having both HT and 64-bit on a box, but ultimately 64-bit isn't much of a win (for virtually everything in Desktop-land) but HT is a win and the benchmarks don't address that. So perhaps I'll still keep my options open.

Bristol Sound and Vision

It was what I anachronistically call "The Hi-Fi Show" this weekend. I've been most years over the 18 for which it has run, and it's always nice to wander round - hearing some lovely kit and the occasional bit of salesman-type flannel.

Yamaha launched a very clever device (a Sound Projector) which gave a realistic surround sound but just from an array of (42!) speakers sat below the TV. Good VFM at only 750 smackers but a fatiguing listen. Still, if you hate wires and multiple boxes then this is definitely the choice for you. Something to look out for in future revisions, perhaps.

Onkyo showed their very impressive looking AV products, but I didn't really get to hear what they sounded like.

Many manufacturers were using Arcam AV amps which certainly sound fantastic. A few used Yamaha's Z9 (which costs 3k!) and sounds rather tasty - as it should! Arcam's offerings (AVR250 at 1k and AVR300 at1300 quid) sound pretty fantastic and should be enough for most people - although if you can afford it their AV8/P7 combo - then be my guest - it was possibly the best sounding AV at the show. Their new Solo product was also pretty nice for people who want that sort of thing (it's an all in one box).

On the speaker front, ProAc, Spendor and PMC all sounded fantastic in two channel land. Tannoy's Arena sounds fantastic for small speakers (but it is pricey), Epos ELS series sounds great and so does Monitor Audio's Radius.

Personally, I bought a TCI Constrictor for my CD player which has clarified the sound even further (I bought a Constrictor 6-way block last year).

JWZ on groupware

After yesterday's photoblogfest, I thought I'd post a link to JWZ's comments on groupware. Very funny, insightful and revealing.

The nic-mobile 

My Mum's Honiton Lace 

You guys'll never make professionals.. 

Bob's beautiful cat 

At the park and ride 

Other peoples cats 

The fifth sentence

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don't search around and look for the "coolest" book you can find. Do what’s actually next to you.

I'm at work so you get:

"Now give sendmail rule set 3 and Hubset as you did before, but this time specify a sender's address that contains a user and a host part:"

Sad, I know. :-( (From "sendmail (2nd edition)", Brian Costales with Eric Allman).

Power PostgreSQL

As seen on PostgreSQL News, Power PostgreSQL looks like it's going to be a good book. We need decent books on PostgreSQL!

Why I'm a member of the EFF

Endangered Gizmos!

While I couldn't really care about P2P networks (although I use BitTorrent a lot for ISO images of Linux Distros etc.) it's this "you can not reverse engineer anything so that you can bypass our huge mark-up on selling you accessories" and "thou shalt not be able to copy/back-up your own music/films for personal use (or if we're talking Marcovision shit - even play the disk in the car, for example)". Plus more.

Read it and weep. And then donate or join!

Solaris on RHN!

Looks like we'll be able to update Solaris boxes using RHN. Yay!

Patching Solaris boxes is one of the biggest pains in the whole world (compared with managing a whole load of servers through RHN).

This should make my life one hell of a lot easier (until we ditch Solaris completely...)

RPM dependency hell? No such thing...


rpm -Uvh eclipse-gtk2-3.0.1-4jpp.i386.rpm eclipse-jdt-3.0.1-4jpp.i386.rpm eclipse-pde-3.0.1-4jpp.i386.rpm eclipse-platform-3.0.1-4jpp.i386.rpm eclipse-scripts-3.0.1-4jpp.i386.rpm libswt3-gtk2-3.0.1-4jpp.i386.rpm eclipse-source-3.0.1-4jpp.i386.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-antlr-1.6.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-apache-*rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-commons-* ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-jdepend-1.6.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-jmf-1.6.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-jsch-1.6.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-jsch-1.6.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-junit-1.6.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/antlr-2.7.4-2jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-nodeps-1.6.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-swing-1.6.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/ant-trax-1.6.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/jasper4-4.1.30-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/jsch-0.1.17-2jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/lucene-1.4.3-1jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/lucene-demo-1.4.3-1jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/jakarta-commons-net-1.2.2-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/jdepend-2.6-3jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/servletapi4-4.0.4-4jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/jzlib-1.0.5-2jpp.noarch.rpm ../../../generic/free/RPMS/tomcat4-4.1.30-6jpp.noarch.rpm


1280 x 1024

I've blagged a 17" screen at work now. It makes so much difference being able to see loads of windows on one workspace.

I won't be giving this bleeder back!

RHCE - passed!

I thought they said this RHCE thing was hard? I passed!

Can't believe I didn't get 100% over all though. ;-)

SECTION I:    TROUBLESHOOTING AND SYSTEM MAINTENANCE

RHCE requirements:  completion of compulsory items (50 points)

                    overall section score of 80 or higher

RHCT requirements:  completion of compulsory items (50 points)



Compulsory Section I score:                        50.0

Non-compulsory Section I score:                    50.0

Overall Section I score:                           100



SECTION II:  INSTALLATION AND CONFIGURATION

RHCE requirements: score of 70 or higher on RHCT components (100 points)

                   score of 70 or higher on RHCE components (100 points)



RHCT requirement:  score of 70 or higher on RHCT components (100 points)



RHCT components score:                             100.0%

RHCE components score:                             92.9%



RHCE Certification:                                PASS

RHCE - first part finished

I, like a few others, have already finished the first part of the exam (Troubleshooting and Maintainence) in 1 hour 4 minutes. 100%.

Big Head!

RHCE day

OK, so I'm here at Red Hat and I'm shitting myself. Wish me luck people!

Mandrake 10.2 beta 1

So, if you thought Mandrake 10.0 was shoddy, 10.1 was better, then try 10.2 beta 1. It means I finally get GNOME 2.8 - which means better shortcuts to sftp sites and much more.

Weird things: The clock in the panel is now transparent a la 2.9/2.10. Epiphany 1.4 hasn't been included. (WTF?)

OK, so my laptop doesn't shutdown cleanly, the installer still hates my graphics card (i815) and there's no laptop loveliness for 4 year old laptops (unlike Ubuntu 4.10 which rocked in this regard).

But they're catching up. It's a shame that Ubuntu 5.4 and Fedora Core 4 are snapping at it's heels.

OpenSolaris.org live - but runs...

OpenSolaris.org is now live and ready for business now runs on Solaris.

A surprisingly fast site considering it's on Solaris and running Sun ONE / Java bollocks system server thing.

Fedora Core 3 2.6.10 + ATI drivers

Got the ATI driver to install and work in FC3 last night. Fairly easy. Only two stumbling blocks

1. Change 'pci_find_class' to 'pci_get_class' in any of the code
2. You have to cut and paste the Device section from the XFree86 config file into the xorg.conf (and the change the Device to the new name in the Screen section).

Just using VGA cable and not S-VHS nor DVI.

Centrino and Sonoma for Linux

Excellent, I'll be able to buy a Sonoma-based laptop and run Linux on it. Well done intel.

PostgreSQL 8.0.0 is out

I've been using PostgreSQL 8 in beta/RC for a while and it's pretty good, and now it's released - woo-hoo!

We also use rhdb/PostgreSQL 7.3.x on a lot of boxes and that's fairly schweet. Not that I've anything against MySQL (I'm pretty sure that it's obvious that I prefer the GPL over BSD for the licence at least) but it just isn't anywhere near as featured as PostgreSQL.

Don't even mention SQLite! ;-)

An open source Java

Another open source java is going to break loose soon apparently but this time from one of the big names.

Very interesting.

Browser change

Currently, I've switched back from using Firefox 1.0 to Epiphany (1.2 on Mandrakelinux 10.1 and 1.4 on Fedora Core 3)

Pros:

• It's a bit faster
  
• fits in better with the rest of the desktop.
• Hopefully it shares more memory with the rest of the applications I run, but you never know.
• Typing Bookmarks in the Location bar is more sensible. (You type the name of the site, not the URL).

Cons:

• No add-blocking (coming in Epiphany Extensions for 1.6)
• Doesn't help the "we're all running Firefox" argument
  

That's my view, anyway.

<><>

Throw away the qube! (Not really).

Throw away the Qube or Mini-ITX PC and buy a Mini Mac instead. Seriously cool. But I have no money. :-(

ADSL a go-go

Fuck me, I've got ADSL working!

Draytek Vigor2600VG router thing and The Phone Co-op for access. I couldn't get it working until I looked at Draytek's support page.

So happy. :-)

Mrs Chippy vs. Maplin

I've ordered a 12V/5A PSU from Maplin for £12.49 (inc p&p). I'll try and bodge that into working.

Mrs Chippy: the PSU

Wheels has confirmed that it's the external PSU for Mrs Chippy that has blown. This is good news in a way, as I'll be able to find a 2nd hand laptop CPU and convert it. But safely?

Netscape at Red Hat, Evince

Old Netscape products at Red Hat.

Evince - a decent replacement for ggv, gs and xpdf.

A test of Drivel 1.3.0. (Installed via Fedora Core 3 RPM).

Qube 2; kernels; New Year resolutions

Mrs Chippy doesn't even power on. I've changed the fuse; the transformer windings buzz; the computer does nothing. Screwdriver time.

Alan Cox/Arjan van de Ven's kernels look like an interesting yum repo.

I'm undecided about new-year resolutions as I've spent the last year trying to change myself. But here's one for all you smokers out there: give up for this one reason only - you smell really, really bad. It's horrible.

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.

GTK# vs. Java-GNOME / C# vs Java

Apparently, there's not much difference. GTK# programs (Tomboy, BLAM!, monodevelop) generally rock, so if Java's equal to C# why aren't we seeing lots of kewl apps in Java, and is Java ready for the desktop (at last)?

I used to want to write lots of stuff in Java (but never did much) because the machines (Sun ELCs, SGI Indys) were too slow, Java 0.9/1.0/1.1 were too unreliable and the graphics toolkits sucked back then.

I've recently registered Systemo as a place to learn-and-release C# and GTK# programs. Perhaps Java and Java-GNOME programs might slip in there, too.

Foiling phish

I received a phishing e-mail claiming to come from paypal.co.uk today. I looked at it because it claimed that some abnormal trading had been going on on my account.

Of course the site showed it's true IP address, which I thought I'd look up. It came from a machine in a co.uk domain, which was odd. I checked out the owner and it was a specialist in HPTC - an unlikely organised crime syndicate.

I telephoned their support number and got put through to their technical manager immediately once I'd stated the problem. Obviously, they were initially suspicious of me and my motives, but they investigated quickly (while talking to me on the 'phone) and foind out that an old Red Hat Linux 9 box had been compromised. They immediately stopped the webserver (thus foiling the phishers). I left them at that point to mop up.

I won't name them as they would clearly be embarrassed by being hacked and then (ab)used in this manner, but they were quick, decisive, clearly clued up and willing to listen which makes them a good company in my book.

They're probably still confused as to why I bothered investigating and them informing them but so am I. Just some communal, British sysadmin love-in I guess.

Drupal and PostgreSQL

Been getting Drupal 4.5.0 working with PostgreSQL 8.0.0 (beta5) - I've added a quick how-to on the drupal site.

Mandrakelinux 10.1

I installed Mandrake 10.1 under vmware and then on my venerable laptop.

Let's get the bad points out of the way:

1. On my laptop, the installer still tries to use the framebuffer (i810/i815) which doesn't work. Mandrake knows this once it is installed, so they're using different logic for the installer to the installed running version.
2. GNOME 2.6. Hello? Fedora Core 3 and Ubuntu Warty (4.10) both ship with 2.8 (which has its advantages). Apparently 10.2 will ship with 2.8, but by then both FC4 (May 2005?) and Ubuntu Hoary (5.04 - due 6th April 2005) will be out with 2.10. It is funny to see Mandrake running with older versions of software than Red Hat Linux (now Fedora Core). I am not alone.
   
3. APM. Ubuntu 4.10 makes the power button work properly (proper shutdown) on my laptop (and locks the screen when you shut the case). Mandrake just powers the bloody thing off! (Same as Fedora Core).
   
4. Laptop Mode. Ubuntu's laptop mode means that less power is used - it spins the disk down etc. Mandrake just runs it at full power. (Same as Fedora Core).
   
5. No Firefox? OK - I like Epiphany (Debbie uses it) and KDE users love Konqueror, but to exclude one of the most well-publicised pieces of open source software is mad!
6. Mandrakeclub/mandrakeonline (an RHN clone) are as shit as ever. Well that's rude - it's just not all that integrated as I'd like yet.
7. My prism54 card went flaky for the first time in a year. Could be a one-off.
   

Good points:

1. Menus - Mandrake have worked hard on getting the GNOME menus sorted out, unlike those lazy gits at Red Hat/Fedora Core. Ubuntu have also worked on these.
2. Control Centre - the Mandrakelinux Control Centre is now a lot better in 10.1. It looked good in 10.0 but it didn't do enough - now it's great. I can even configure my Prism54 card through it! Very user friendly.
   
3. The most user friendly Linux I've used. OK, so this goes with the above two comments, but it's worth mentioning on its own. Red Hat have done a lot of great work in things like Anaconda (my favourite installer) and their other tools (system-config-* aka redhat-config-* on RHEL) but they're not quite there. Their lack of emphasis on sorting out the menu is mind-boggling. Ubuntu have come from nowhere (standing on the shoulders of Debian, admittedly) and produced a really, really easy to use/install/administer desktop. They're let down by a lack of GUI tools for certain things (back to good old vi for sysadmin) but give them a year and I believe they'll be parallel with Red Hat if not Mandrakelinux.
4. MandrakeGalaxy II theme (as included with 10.0) is very nice - professional, yet prettier than Red Hat BlueCurve, and more individual than Ubuntu's rather-nice-yet-run-of-the-mill Human.
5. Evolution 2.0.x as with the other two distros.
   

Ultimately, this is what I expected Mandrake 10.0 to be. 10.0 promised so much but became frustrating around the edges. This is a far better attempt. Apart from the GNOME 2.6 issue (and apparently you can get 2.8 from somewhere else), I'm relatively happy with this as desktop environment. They need to catch up a little with the work Ubuntu and/or Debian have done on laptops but so do Red Hat/Fedora Core.

Mandrake have a tough time keeping at the forefront of user friendliness. Let's wish them all the best.

Subversion

Been getting a copy of SVN up and running today (with WebSVN too). Once I'd bothered reading the FAQ on the site (which points at the relevant sections of the book (which I own)) it was all rather easy really. (I've used CVS, RCS and SCCS in the past).

Now it's time for testing and then the dreaded documentation. If we don't all use it, it'll be useless!

PS. For RHEL users, add this to your RHN sources file and you can get svn for RHEL 3

yum subversion http://people.redhat.com/jorton/Taroon-svn/$ARCH/

Safari vs. Bulging bookshelves

I've been trying Safari for a while and I'm getting on with it quite well. While I obviously love the joy of owning physical books (over 60 O'Reilly ones...) they go out of date quite quickly and take up a lot of space. Never mind the cost of purchasing them in the first place.

So now I can pick and choose up to 20 books and permanently keep changing them depending on what I'm researching/working on. Cool eh?

(PS. I have bought 5 computing books in the last month! Perhaps this will be the near-end of it though.)

Blam vs Sage vs Live Bookmarks

I normally use BLAM! as my news reader, I'm still stuck with 1.4.1 instead of the shiny Gecko# using 1.6 series but that's another matter. For some reason, it no longer reads Atom, which is a bummer, as most of my friends use blogger.

Sage (for Firefox/Mozilla) was odd as you were using big old Moz to look at stripped down content. Er, weird. Plus it fscked up terribly on certain Planet sites. (Fedora People, for example).

Firefox 1.0's live bookmarks are interesting but just a little mad. (They're menus and they're dynamic! Brain warp.) At least they use the full power of Moz to render any news you choose to look at.

Can't wait to try BLAM! 1.6 (or fix 1.4) as it's still my favourite all-in-one way of reading news.

56 bloody kb...

So Firefox 1.0 is out. Thunderbird 0.9 too! (I use both on the evil OS). They (and Gaim 1.0.2) have taken age to download... Mind-numbingly stupid amounts of time.

Some how, I think I'll wait until I get back to work before downloading Fedora Core 3.

Why do these things have to happen when I'm stuck on my modem, instead of on the company's infinitely-fat pipe?

More C#

Read this on bus on the way home. Should be enough to me started. These pocket guides are always good to have around.

Mono: A Developer's Notebook

I've just read Mono: A Developer's Notebook. Very good. I'm all raring to go at some Command Line and GTK# programming right now.

I have ideas. Lots of ideas. Too many ideas! Let's see what happens...

Fedora Core 2.92 vs. GNOME 2.8

Why is it that both Mandrake (10.0+) and Ubuntu have better laid out menus for GNOME than Fedora Core/Red Hat Enterprise Linux? I believe JDS has got menus laid out sensibly, too.

Red Hat are going to have to pull their fingers out over this. Their menus are a mess and need fixing. I guess it's too late for RHEL 4, but FC4 (5 and 6 and hence RHEL 5) must fix this ugly oversight.

Fedora Core 2.92

I stuffed tom (my main desktop machine up) yesterday by mixing too much of FC2 and Rawhide (FC2.92) to the point where Sys V init never started.

So I was forced to upgrade this evening (a mere 4 days before FC3 is downloadable from everywhere, and a couple of days from before we'll be able to get it from mirror.ac.uk, which we run).

Still GNOME 2.8 (which is lush under Ubuntu) is a nice upgrade and I hope I'll be able to get my renegade printer working again. Fingers crossed, eh?

Virus, CUPS (etc.), Radco, Evil Ray.

Yet another holiday and yet another (human) virus. This is starting to piss me off.

I haven't had printing working on tom (my main machine - runs FC2) for months. I fucked it all up by using the CUPS web interface which totally confused the Red Hat "system-config-printer" gui tool. I'm downloading a newer CUPS (I'd already done this to try and get USB printing working) and a newer HPIJS to see if it'll fix things.

The new Radco superstore is very nice - a huge improvement. Shame the ceiling fell in there yesterday. (The Co-op without a web site in Radstock, for the curious).

I was attacked (OK - it missed) by a feisty ray on Friday at the Seaquarium in Weston-Super-Mare. Odd. Very interesting creatures though. I could have watched them for hours.

monoforge

I've set up a monoforge account. Wonder what I'll do with it.

Gaim, BLAM!, notification panel, xscreensaver, bus, Liverpool, workrave, Lq

Various things:

1. Gaim - I wish gaim would show me as "away" automagically. Lq started typing at me the morning (from Oz) but guess what? I was still at home in bed. (Aside to Lq: hope you and A are having lekker time - thanks for message!)
2. BLAM! - Read this with excitement. Finally worked out that it only disappears from the GNOME notification panel area when I've read/ma
   
3. GNOME notification panel area: a bone of contention with some people. When I close gaim, it keeps running in the notification panel (the behaviour I want). When I close BLAM! the application quits completely.
4. Why xscreensaver still looks like it did when I first started using it, by JWZ.
   
5. The bus hit a car on the way in this morning gouging a hole in the car's front tyre.
6. Liverpool is the most modern and forward-looking city in Britain - they're banning smoking.

Back to work - and workrave is telling me to have a break (again).

Ubuntu Warty released

Ubuntu Linux Warty has been released. I'm running the release version now (and appear to have been for most of the day). Very nice. All the contentious graphics have been replaced with more usinversally acceptable ones (which is a mixed blessing, I suppose). Everything is stable and rock solid.

All I need to learn now is how to build .debs and I'll be as happy as Larry. (Who he?)

PostgreSQL weekly news

I can't believe that my humble (but glowing) blog entry on PostgreSQL training was linked to from PostgreSQL weekly news.

I meant every word I typed though. I am now a PostgreSQL convert!

Ubuntu Theme furore

The fine folks at Ubuntu Linux are getting ready for their first release (Warty Warthog a.k.a. 4.10) and have just started making the final changes for the first "Release Candidate". Way to go - a lot of hard work from some very clever people.

So what's up? Well, they've changed the default GDM theme, gnomesplash theme (that splash image you get as GNOME starts up) and the desktop background.

The old defaults featured the beautiful, stylish and simple ubuntu logo (three stylised people of different races in a ring) and text. Very nice, conservative, modern and professional - with a subliminal, powerful political message.

The new themes (and bear in mind ubuntu is all about humanity, and their themes are called "human") feature - shock, horror: humans!!! OMG! The humans in question are young and happy Africans of different racial groups: one bloke and two women.

• In the GDM background they're all happy and smiling and in a ring like the logo, on a white background. Very nice. Modern, different and human.
  
• In GNOME, your background should default to a nice brown background with the ubuntu logo showing through. Due to a previous bug (hey, it's beta software), some people got the monthly "Ubuntu calendar" background. Same shade of brown as the default background, but with our three African chums all shown naked from the top up (the ladies retain their modesty by positioning their arms well).
• gnomesplash isn't there long and is somewhere between the two.
  

The new themes/images are different, if a bit cheesy in some peoples' eyes. I'm almost won over though. I think it's a brave, radical change. Humans! On computers! Whatever next.

But I'm going to go on record and say I think the 3 people should keep their clothes on. It doesn't bother me. It doesn't bother Debbie either. It'd just be a bit more tasteful/less embarrassing in the workplace.

Here's Mark Shuttleworth's take on the whole thing: Mark's e-mail (can't argue with a man who has been in space).

PostgreSQL training 2

Had the second day of PostgreSQL training today. At last I understand how it works (to administer it). MySQL is a lot simpler to understand but is nowhere near as powerful/clever/well-suited to the enterprise/whatever.

Simon Riggs rocked as a trainer because he deserved ultimate respect. All that knowledge - wow. (I'm sorry; that wasn't a sentence).

Impressive stuff, especially version 8 (currently in beta).

PostgreSQL training

We're having on-site PostgreSQL training from Simon Riggs of 2nd Quadrant.

It's a bit different having training from someone who really knows what they're talking about. Other trainers may "know" their product well enough to train, install and troubleshoot it, but this guy knows the guts of the system being one of the contributors to it. (Not that he's full of himself nor is he mentioning it all the time or anything like that - he's humble and a likeable guy).

It's a damn fine course, and I'd recommend getting PostgreSQL training from these people any day. Props to them.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

I'm currently reading Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell - a book I knew nothing about until I picked it up a few weeks ago in Ottakar's in Wells. (Apparently it had just come out that week). I bought a black copy.

I'm only about 1/5th of the way through, so this isn't a review. It's just odd that I should

1. purchase a book which I'd never heard of before
2. purchase a book by an author I'd never heard of before
3. purchase a book by a female author (I'm no sexist, it's just the way things go - although I do have all five Harry Potter books ready to read at home)
   
4. purchase a new, hardback book
   
5. purchase a book mainly because the cover(s) looked good

Strange that it was that almost instantly reviewed on /. and then I saw loads of adverts on the tube in London. Do geeks have an in-built sense of "we must read this"? Are we attracted to the same thing? Or is the book more mainstream than I think it is? (I never really have understood why certain things I like are mainstream and some aren't).

The book so far is very good - I keep trying to cram in moments when I can read it between work, parenting, food, talking to Debbie and sleeping.

The associated web site www.jonathanstrange.com is an intriguing idea - good looking, extra content, associated stories and more. If only all web sites were like this (reminds me of the original Blair Witch one).

worldofnic.org is live

I've moved from www.nic.uklinux.net to worldofnic.org (hosted by ukfsn.org). At last.

The CSS (nicked from here) is still slightly wrong and I'm thinking about a 3 column layout, but apart from that it's all systems go.

Next will be smarty and then mysql back-end.

nic's web-history:

1. www.bath.ac.uk/~mapnjd (c. Feb. 1994-2000)
2. www.maths.bath.ac.uk/~njd1 (c. 1995-1998)
3. www.nic.uklinux.net (c. 1999-2004)
4. worldofnic.org (Oct. 2004-...)

Of course, no-one ever reads it, but that's another story!

Still here in London

So I'm still here in London.

/dev/random turns out to be in a patch (112438-03) for Solaris 8 which I've now installed. Now I'm just waiting for the first two disks to sync... and someone's just come in and told me that the machine room shuts at 7pm. Not tonight it won't. I at least want / and /usr mirrored before I reboot (to get the kernel module loaded so OpenSSH can start).

More importantly, my car is going to be stuck at the Park and Ride all night. (I'm not going to get home until about 10pm or later at this rate). I hope no pillock breaks into it.

Stuck in London

So I'm stuck in London at ULCC doing a Solaris 8 re-install (don't ask why) on a SunFire V880.

The joys.

First, a cut down (ie. faster) install failed because it hadn't installed awt, needed for the installer to continue and install the second CD.

Next: why do Solaris Patch Sets take so long to install?

Why isn't DiskSuite installed by default?

Why is so much other stuff started by default?

Where is /dev/(u)random? My OpenSSH build needs this and it's gone off on holiday somewhere...

I know Solaris 8 is old now... Let's hope 10 is saner. (Bet it won't be).

Elinks

Kudos to blogger: you can post using elinks (which I'm using now). You don't have to use a GUI browser. My main problem is I don't know the navigation keys off by heart and keep losing what I've typed by going backwards, or navigating away from the compose box and not being able to get back again. It's also a lot faster to render in elinks than in Gecko, etc. as the graphics for the WYSIWYG editor can take a long time to download.

Nice one blogger - if only all sites were this good.

Firefox and the common man

I wore my Firefox T-shirt to a family party last weekend, and was shocked when my Dad asked, "What's Firefox?"

It shows that sometimes we geeks can fool ourselves into thinking that the rest of the world will soon be marching in time with us. I'll burn him a CD when 1.0 final is released. And perhaps Thunderbird, too.

P.S. Debbie just read this and said "that's really interesting - not". More proof, if any were needed. :-(

Ubuntu 3

More comments about the fab Ubuntu Linux.

I installed it on sylvester (my venerable Dell Inspiron 2500 laptop) using "Sounder 9" (the Sounder pre-releases are known to install properly). First the problems:

• The supplied version of grub is bollocks :-) It's obsessed with ext[23] as opposed to any real filesystems (XFS, JFS).
• Not an ubuntu problem, but I got my keyboard wet, which screwed things up wonderfully!
• The installer is dog-ugly - I'm used to anaconda.

But that's it! My other install went horribly, so I didn't know what really went on. (The other install wasn't from a Sounder disk and didn't even install the kernel, grub, modutils, ... let alone a desktop)!

What you get with this install is a fully-featured, working GNOME 2.8 desktop installed with everything you could actually want. Unbelievable.

This is only a preview release of the first version of Ubuntu and it's nearly as good as Fedora Core already.

It was also a piece of piss to get my prism54 card working properly - a quick look at the wiki and that was it. Fantastic. (The firmware was already in the right place). I'm loving laptop-mode, too. Clever.

I'm becoming a convert, and I've used Red Hat Linux/Fedora Core since RHL 4.1. Weird...

Firefox inroads...

Seen on the interweb at a big corporate site

This Web site is best experienced using Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) version 5 and above, Mozilla Firefox or Netscape 7 and above.

Get Firefox - the future's here today.

Ubuntu take 2

So, this ubuntu thing installed badly (but it's a preview release dummy!), but redeemed itself with the Debian tools to get the system up and running.

Not everything is perfect, but I didn't expect it to be, but everything is the latest spanky version which is not something you'd expect from traditional Debian.

I think I'll keep it on here and keep learning.

Ubuntu Linux

I downloaded, burnt and attempted to install Ubuntu Linux on my work desktop.

Low point - the current (preview) release (of Warty Warthog - 4.10 apparently) fails to install. Why? Because it can't install a certain package (intird-tools) because it's already installed. At that point, everything else fails.

OK, boot up LNX-BBC, chroot into the / directory and type "apt-get -f install". Marvellous. That's a debianism that came as a great surprise. Now I just need to write a grub.conf and grub-install it and I'll be back up and running.

Felt very pissed off having to leave work before I got it running, but I'm sure it'll be fine within a few minutes of arriving on Monday.

So, Ubuntu looks promising, and understanding Debian better will make me feel like a more rounded person. Plus, I've never really wanted to touch Debian on x86 before because of the lack of "currentness" - Ubuntu comes with GNOME 2.8 which is only available for Gentoo 2004.2 and Fedora Core 2.91 at the moment...

And another thing, I do realise that there are now a plethora of distros out there (and that's another rant altogether), but it should be noted that Mark Shuttleworth is behind Ubuntu, which can only mean one thing - future success. Here, at last is a new distro that aims high with decent financial backing. Red Hat and Novell/SUSE had better watch out. There's a new kid in town.

EAC

I've moaned previously about a "CD" I bought which wasn't a CD-DA disc, but some copy-protected 5 inch silver coaster, which would only play in my main CD player. On recommendation from [mRg], I downloaded EAC (which runs on the evil OS). Fantastic. I took over six hours to copy to .wav files, but now at last I have a copy that will play in my car and on all my computers and my DVD player (which the original couldn't)!

It just shows that copy-protection has been and always will be crackable. Plus, I should have had the right to play the disc wherever I wanted in the first place. So what sense does copy-protection make? None at all.

Take heed record companies - pissing off your customers does not make a great amount of sense. It's months since I bought this CD, and I haven't been able to play it much at all. This means less enjoyment - less satisfaction and less value for money. In fact I've been pretty disgruntled. Next time I buy one of these pieces of shit, I'll rip it with EAC, photocopy the cover and send the original back. Something I've never done with my other >1,000 CDs (or >1,000 pieces of vinyl for that matter). This will:

• reduce your income
• piss your resellers off
• compensate me for the emotional distress you've caused me with this non-CD.
  

Bastards. Silly, silly bastards

A9.com

I've switched from vanilla google.com/co.uk to using A9.com. It's really nice and does a lot more than google. Fine for while I'm at work (with bandwidth to spare). At home, all those images would take an age. Although, I could use it to centralise my bookmarks. Hmmm. Hopefully, they'll let you switch to international versions of amazon at some point.

Also loving the search bar in Firefox - with the various plugins you can download. Clever.

gDesklets

I discovered gDesklets - a really cool piece of eye candy. On the work desktop, I've got iweather (introducing me to weather.com - pretty cool), stickynotes and the RAF Clock running (the monitors wouldn't start/work) but it did take out GNOME this morning.

At home, it won't start at all. (It didn't help that the first time I built it the machine ws heavily overclocked and cc1 SEGV'd). Weird.

So props to the eye candy, but shame about the stability. Looking forward to this all working better.

Good gaim, good gaim.

Gaim 1.0.0 is out. Fantastic. I use it under Fedora Core 2 and the evil OS now and it's pretty damned good. Well done to all those involved.

I've built an FC2 RPM (ok, some RPMs) from the provided SPEC file. You can get them at the following links:

• SRPM
• gaim
• gaim-debuginfo
• gaim-devel

Enjoy.

Software foundations

In the begining was the FSF and it was good. But being good was not an
excuse for being holier-than-thou.

Now we see an ascending star in the server software arena, the ASF. With
SpamAssassin joining the ASF, they more from just being that "Web and Java
stuff" outfit to a wider remit. What if any other prominent free software
changed licences and moved to the ASF?

Then there's the Mozilla foundation - top quality products for the desktop.
If you aren't using FireFox then what's wrong with you? ;-) (Of course, Camino,
Epiphany and the Mozilla suite might float your boat more, as might Safari and
Konqueror). Thunderbird is pretty good too (although Epiphany is my mailer
of choice). I can't wait to see Sunbird come on in leaps and bounds.

There are more foundations (GNOME foundation, KDE e.V., etc.) and they are important (to
us Unix-heads, at least) but I'd argue, not as important as the ASF and Mozilla foundation.

The GPL is the FSF's coup de gras.The FSF in and of itself is important. But the GPL is more important
than the FSF. The FSF's power is waning.

(Associate FSF member #1154)

Blogger so unreliable

Blogger has been really (and I mean really) unreliable recently. It's enough to make you want to move blogs. But again? I can't be bothered with that.

I know that I should have installed something on my own website (drupal, bloxsom, WordPress, etc.) but I was lazy and went for a service-based solution. Now I'm paying the price, I guess.

People wonder why I recommend Red Hat

For exactly this reason. You can s/Red Hat/SUSE/g if you like, but that's the raw facts. Live with it.

Dabs, USB, joy

I bought a 128MB USB 2.0 pen drive from dabs - part of their dabs value range. Only £19.99 including p+p. Obviously I wanted bigger, but I don't need any bigger. (1GB came in at under £90). This is just for using work's bandwidth to take home updates etc.

For some reason (check lkml) USB mass storage went a bit haywire recently in linux kernel-land and on my work desktop I had to go from Arjan V kernel-2.6.8-1.533 to Rawhide (FC3) kernel-2.6.8-1.540 to get it to work, but apart from that - it's fantastic.

Kewl little device.

Coldfusion, Java, pain

Oh god, why is Coldfusion such pain in the arse. When it works it's OK, but it's a shit to configure, relies on the ever-stable Java (normally OK these days, but currently SEGVing on me) and generally crashes out a lot. Plus, the toolkits for Coldfusion can generate shite code.

Don't use it. There's no need. It's cack.

ATI Petition

Sign this to get proper driver support from ATI. My Gigabyte 128MB Radeon 9200 works, but not as well as it should...

Is Windows ready for the desktop?

I know that this title has been used as a joke before, but I'm serious: is Windows ready to use as a stable, secure platform for me?

Answer: as ready as Linux is for you.

System: Windows XP SP2 on XP2100+ with 512MB RAM.

Stability: Windows XP is a stable platform on which to run applications.

Security: OK, OK, SP2 makes an effort, but isn't as secure as anyone would really like, but a great way to improve security is not to run MicroSoft applications. Use Windows as a platform to run better applications on.

Great applications that run on Windows and improve security and your life in general:

• Firefox - a superior, standards-compliant web browser. Never use Internet Explorer - it only brings you trouble.
• Thunderbird - a great e-mail client with built-in Spam-filtering, and guess what, better security. Never use Outlook Express or Outlook - they are worse than Internet Explorer.
  

Firefox and Thunderbird are the top-tier applications that will make your life better. You must also buy an Anti-Virus program. I can't make any recommendations here.

If you have a copy of Microsoft Office, it is the best office suite for Windows, but you probably don't need it. Get OpenOffice instead and save yourself hundreds of pounds.

• OpenOffice - more secure, almost 100% compatible with MS Office (honestly - you should try the 1.1.x versions if you've only tried previous versions).

If that's what you use your Windows box for (web, e-mail, docs, spreadsheets, presentations) then using the above applications will save you money and in the end time (as you won't be so readily infected with viruses).

Now ask yourself, why pay for Windows anyway? Take the time to install Linux and get these applications, (or in some cases, better applications!) better security and even better stability out of the box.