Fedora Core 3 vs. X.

What the Fsck have Red Hat done to my X server? It's running like a dog!

Ubuntu again.

I switched my 4 year old laptop back to Ubuntu, but with the new release (Hoary Hedgehog aka 5.04). After seeing some pleasing results on a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 box at work, I also sold my soul to the devil and opted for reiserfs.

Good things when compared to Fedora Core 3 and Mandrakelinux 2005LE (aka 10.2):

• Faster startup


• Machine no longer feels like it needs replacing (FC3 ran like a dog. FC2 and Mandrakelinux 10.x/2005LE were fine)


• Sound seems to function. (This could be a first on this laptop).


• The ultimate: software suspend !!! Bloody hell !!!


• Closing the lid locks the screen (Ubuntu 4.10 did this, too)


• Like FC3, the power button works - Mandrakelinux always immediately cut the power


• Wireless card works if inserted before poweron. Under FC3 you'd have to take it out and put it in again. Mandrakelinux was worse than FC3 because GNOME couldn't function if you inserted the card after login... Tut tut tut.


• Nicely themed GNOME startup splash screen (fast login, too) and xscreensaver box

The not so good:

• CPU monitor applet doesn't work. Admittedly FC3 and MDK never changed the CPU frequency, but Ubuntu 4.10 would correctly run speedstep stuff. I think I'm just missing an application to do this (but surely it should be a dependency?).


• Battery status applet doesn't work

Other distros had better watch out. Ubuntu 4.10 was already one of the best 6 months ago, now Ubuntu 5.04 is the best.

Postscript: I meant that Ubuntu 5.04 is the best desktop distro with the caveat that I use GNOME. KDE users may have other opinions. It also has the best support for older laptops. Other distros (e.g. Mandriva as it is called today - 07.04.2005) may be just as capable on newer ACPI compatible laptops.

Snap, crackle, pop.

Things achieved this week:

• Killed Snap Appliance beyond use. Useless piece of fscking shit.


• Desktop crashed: rpm -Va reports 3800 files (libraries and binaries) of wrong size. Upgrade machine from FC3 to FC3.90 (aka FC4 test1). gdm-binary keeps trashing CPU. Patch gdm 2.8.0.8 to see if it helps, but compilation is sloooow. In fact this PIV 2600 is a fscking dog. I'm sure the PIII 1133 was faster. Certainly my XP2100+ is superfast in comparison.


• Started to get annoyed at speed of laptop (PIII 800/256MB RAM/10GB disk). Where can I find 1200 quid for new one?


• Got a lot (1/2?) of my bookmarks on de.lirio.us


• Got Mono working at home. Yay!


• Read a little about SELinux and Spring Framework

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.