MyEclipse and JSPX

Thank god - MyEclipse now supports JSPX (JSP Documents - i.e. written in XML).

Sun, JDS, scandal and OSS

Nice article.

l33t 5h1rt

Got my free OpenSolaris T-shirt through the post this morning.

This in itself makes me officially more l33t than you, regardless of any computing ability. :-)

Perhaps "T-shirt kiddie" should be a new phrase akin to "Script kiddie".

Tim Eden

Congratulations to Tim Eden for being appointed Professor of Teenage Oncology.

Just one of the cast of hundreds to whom I owe my life.

Strutting your stuff

So you think your clever? You've been around the web development block a few times. You know that MVC/Model2 is the future, and you can program in Java. So you decide to write a web app using Jakarta Struts.

What a fucking stupid idea.

Man, I suck!

My main problem is that when I decide to do something, I want to do it "as perfectly as possible". This of course means that I never get anything done, because I'm up against some infinite learning curve, which with Struts is infintely steep.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

Should have written it in shit PHP, instead.

MyEclipse

I've been using MyEclipse - a cheap wrapper around Eclipse that does one hell of a lot.

It can start and stop Tomcat and deploy to it (along with many other app servers).

One quibble, why does it include JSTL 1.0 versions in new web-app projects? (This took me for ever to hunt down...) Freaking stupid errors about not being able to understand the URI...

God damn! Anyway, back on with the show. Eclipse rocks, and my experience with it wasn't too great before paying 20 quid for MyEclipse, but in general, I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to start out with Eclipse with web apps.

RHEL licence is wrong

Seriously, what is the point of the RHEL licence?

There are so many "respins" (effectively identical versions) of RHEL (CentOS, Tao, WBEL) then why don't Red Hat bite the bullet, gain more market share (even with the same revenue base) and allow people to download and install RHEL itself.

What Red Hat are charging $349/£200/€279 per Basic ES server per annum for is access to RHN (without grouping a.k.a management) and updates. I am perfectly capable of fiddling the updates so that all servers can gain access them (I don´t - we have over 50 Basic ES licences and use CentOS for less critical machines) so why don´t Red Hat allow other sites to mirror them, and then non-licenced hosts to use yum/apt to get hold of them that way.

You can see bugzilla reports from the CentOS folk in Red Hat´s Bugzilla, so come on. Stop fannying about and bring Red Hat back to the masses.

Ubuntu all the way.

Well, all three of my machines now run Ubuntu Breezy (5.10). I gave up on Mandriva. Yes I still love Red Hat and Fedora, but Ubuntu is just that little bit more polished than FC4 which is a shame.

question.next() - will we support Ubuntu on the server when 6.04 comes out?

Français, s'il vous plait

Yay, I've registered with Alliance Française to study French.

Distro Tart 2000

Mandriva 2006.0 RC1 is a let down. The installer is very pretty, they've remembered to include gdm, but now it fails to notice my Intel eepro100 network card. (Obviously, I can fix this, but Mandriva is supposed to be easy). And epiphany crashes on exit every time.

Ubuntu Breezy Badger (5.10 preview release) is damned good. I can't praise it enough. How come the Ubuntu people keep delivering, when Fedora is too slow (honest) and Mandriva looks like it just doesn't have enough developers really. Perhaps they

Perhaps 2006.0 will be better when it's released. Perhaps I'll be running Ubuntu on that machine soon too.

Distro tart

Recently, I changed tom (my XP2100 box) to run Mandriva 2006.0 beta 3. Now, RC1 is out but there's no official torrent. No real worry I suppose, but if you want people to use torrents please put them up at the same time as the ISOs...

Today, I upgraded my desktop at work from Ubuntu 5.04 to 5.10 preview release with brand new GNOME 2.12 goodness. Yummy (or "apty" :-). Note: Synaptic may bomb out during an upgrade, forcing an apt-get -f dist-upgrade to be necessary, but other than that, schweet. No latest x.org with Ubuntu, but hey.

Sylvester (the aging laptop) still runs Ubuntu 5.04.

So I don't have any Fedora Core boxes at the mo'. This is weird as I'm such a huge Red Hat apologist/fan-boy. I also recommended to a friend to use Ubuntu for a desktop for his church as it "just works". I mean - it is dead, dead easy.

Can Fedora ever get equal with Ubuntu? Can Mandriva ever catch up? Who knows.

The Governor

Apparently, I am now a governor of my local school. Go me! Time to go in and tell them to install Linux everywhere :-)

Bloglines

If you're interested: here's the list of RSS feeds that I read,

Computer Books

Why are computer books so heavy? For example, the Microsoft 70-291 book (which I'm meant to be studying) weighs in at 3lb 9oz (1.614kg) which I am not going to lump around, just for 20 minutes of travel-sick inducing studying on the park and ride.

I really like O'Reilly's Developer's Notebook series though - they're neat and to the point.

Linus on slashdot:

"I don't tend to bother about slashdot, because quite frankly, the whole _point_ of slashdot is to have this big public wanking session with people getting together and making their own "insightful" comment on any random topic, whether they know anything about it or not."

opensolaris

Built opensolaris on Solaris Express Community Relase Build 20 (uname: SunOS edu-any-any-d07 5.11 snv_20 i86pc i386 i86pc) under VMware GSX Server on a dual 3GHz HP Proliant DL380 G4. It took 6 hours and 24 minutes. Speedy!

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.

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.

RHN hacking via XML-RPC

On systemo.org

Mycroft for JISC Mirror

On systemo.org.

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?

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

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.

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.

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?