Colin Charles Agenda

Well, its been a while since I dirtied my hands in the sysadmin forays. I was wondering why my system was not accepting mail for a domain that clearly pointed to it. Running host just pointed to the mailserver correctly, but when I ran it on the mailserver, there was an IP address mismatch. Thinking back a little, it seems that there was an IP change, just something I’d forgotten about. Oh how the great DNS, comes to bite you in the behind.

MediaWiki these days likes PHP 5 (5.1 being preferred). I’ve discovered why Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 might suck - they only ship PHP 4.3.9, which is nowhere near as adequate for modern applications. So if I were a corporation and wanted to run the latest greatest Mediawiki on my corporate wiki, I’d be in a bind if I’m on RHEL4. Luckily, this is where the centosplus repository comes into active play - its got a modern PHP, and modern databases.

I’ve gotten out of the Planet game. After running Planet MyOSS for a countless number of years, I’ve just decided that the final migration should happen today - and it did thanks to a Redirect 301 / http://planet.foss.org.my/. Update your bookmarks, feed readers, etc.. as Planet MyOSS now resides at: http://planet.foss.org.my/. (except I checked it just now, and foss.org.my was down… it seems to be regularly down, why?)

Those having to deal with MYNIC, keep in mind that their online forms differ if you’re logging in as the Administrative or Technical contact (the latter is where you get to change DNS servers). And no, its not instant, they say its a 24-hr waiting period.

Back to RHEL/Centos. Why does the Linux Standards Base (LSB) stipulate that servers need to have CUPS installed, to be LSB compliant? I’ll probably talk more about the recent cleanups I’ve been doing at another stage.

Just when I wondered where Eric Raymond had been, it seems he surfaces on fedora-devel-list. Read the interesting thread, titled Goodbye, Fedora (notice the CC-lists as well).

I have a few comments about his comments…

• Chronic governance problems? Yes, its called growing pains. And for a company to open to the wide outside world, its not the easiest thing. Trust me, I know this firsthand, these days. I think the likes of Max Spevack, Greg DeKoenigsberg, the Fedora Advisory Board, FESCO, etc. have really made Fedora happen and fixed most of his so-called “governance problems”.
• I do think the repositories are sane. I do agree that the submission process for Extras or any package tends to be overcomplex. And I don’t like some of the Packaging guidelines (for one, if I wanted to read my Bible on Fedora, it should be a yum away, really).
• RPM development might’ve drifted when jbj left Red Hat, but Paul Nasrat has taken over. I don’t see that as necessarily bad. And YUM has gone through leaps and bounds, its actually really nice software.
• The struggle for the desktop market share is a fine balance. I don’t think Fedora makes it unwieldingly difficult to install proprietary codecs - in fact, on a stock FC-6 install, you just fire up your web browser, and at the bottom there’s a link to the Unofficial Fedora FAQ. Guess what that does? It tells you to enable Livna, and enjoy playing MP3s, DivXs, and so on. Not including binary drivers for the latest greatest Nvidia card? Good, because nouveau wouldn’t have been born without it.

Ubuntu does have its advantages (single CD install, usually everything works out of the box on the desktop [until they upgrade your X server and it stops :P]) but even there, multimedia support isn’t the best. Sure, its a repository away, but it still requires work. Ubuntu on x86_64? They’ll actually tell you to use the 32-bit desktop release, because I fear dpkg/apt still have multi-arch problems. And I dare argue, that their governance is no better than Fedora’s.

Fedora has advantages. Its development team is extensive. Thats one thing you have to give Red Hat - they invest in prime quality engineers, they innovate (NetworkManager, written by a one-time OpenOffice.org hacker, SELinux integration, rocking GNOME desktop, etc.). Ubuntu is smart - they watch Fedora, to make “a better Fedora than Fedora”. And they compromise (though recently, Shuttleworth has stated otherwise).

I met Eric at the very first FUDCon. He spoke on some man page utilities for about fifteen minutes, then went on to tell us why Fedora sucked. There might actually be video footage of this, or not, since it was my first time recording video to disk, as the rest of the FUDCon crew ran away from the room. Lots have changed since then, and yet, Eric’s thrown in the towel?

This time, he’s installed Edgy Eft, so its confirmed that he’s leaving Fedora-land. From the comments, I don’t think many are going to miss him. I do think, Alan Cox says it best (notice the .signature as well!). Goodbye, Eric.

gnash

I’ve not exactly seen much working with Gnash, which is what I have installed: gnash and gnash-plugin. A quick visit to Youtube, confirms that gnash is still not exactly usable, and the bug seems to be with ActionExtend and Super (AS inheritance) not being implemented yet. There is hope nonetheless, as Lulu TV also use these features, and are hosting the Gnash developers wiki, which might mean there’s some corporate backing of gnash development.

gnome-dictionary

gnome-utils provides the Dictionary, which is just a front-end to an online dictionary. This is great, but works horribly if you’re offline. Mac OS X clearly has the upside here, as I can just use the Dashboard dictionary applet to find words. It also comes with a working thesaurus, something the “Similar Words” feature in the GNOME Dictionary doesn’t seem to grok.

Deskbar

Like Quicksilver? You’ll definitely like the Deskbar Applet (deskbar-applet from Fedora Extras). Its not Ctrl+Space controlled, which it instead has picked up on Alt+F3 as the keyboard shortcut of choice. It has Beagle (Spotlight equivalent) integration, can connect to the Fedora bugzilla just via a bug number, and do so much more. I don’t have Thunderbird integration, and notice that its a planned feature for the future - I can’t hardly wait.

Don’t know how many of you actually have heard of, or use, Mugshot, but I just started playing with it after a long hiatus, and decided that it’s pretty cool. Something the MySQL community will probably enjoy being part of (currently, to take full advantage, you want to be a Linux or Windows XP user).

By virtue of looking for the next new community hangouts, I figure we create a MySQL Mugshot Group. And before folk wonder what Mugshot’s all about, I suggest reading the feature list. Keep in mind that Mugshot is completely open source, and its a very live social experience, in this “notification era”. Its a whole lot of fun, and from what I can tell, the signups are now open to the public so what’s keeping you?

The site has i386 RPMS for Fedora Core 6, so I thought I’d rebuild them for x86_64 as well. Will probably get some PowerPC builds going next week. I’m surprised this hasn’t made it into Extras yet, it should be fairly clean-ish (haven’t looked at the packaging myself though).

Here’s a thought on why you do things…. Do you do things because of believing in the principle, or do you do things to get recognized (by people)? The latter is driven by ego, and the former is the true way of the open source jedi master.

Take a look at Stallman. Some of us may not agree with him, but he’s clearly still in the game, fighting the good fight. Where’s ESR these days?

Anyways, useful bits I gathered from chit-chatting with Ditesh a moment ago. Makes one think.

The 2.6.19-1.2911 kernel that just got released makes my Dell 640m very happy. It can now sleep (suspend) without any problems and wake up just as well. Marked improvement over the previous kernel, so I’m actually getting laptop mileage out of this.

It still has outstanding issues. The ACPI video driver (video.ko) needs to be unloaded, as it does cause a crash with the Fn+Up Arrow key. External displaying doesn’t work unless the video.ko module is loaded. And volume control is still dead via the hardware keys as well as the Fn combinations.

With the amount of folk actually using Dell’s from the Smolt statistics, I’m surprised that the Dell laptop support isn’t phenomenal. Yes, Fedora has opt-in statistics, which are great, but causing a row on fedora-devel-list recently - I personally don’t see it as wrong, as it is opt-in, and the Ubuntu (with their hardware database) folk do it too, its not something that’s forced. And eventually, this could be useful when it comes to saying “foo laptop is 100% supported” and so on. People like to know these things, and people like to buy things that “just work”.

As more and more people end up buying a laptop, or even a desktop with some snazzy video card, you’d want to know if it just works. I see smolt as being further extended to mine the data, and with a sensible API, a company like Dell could allow you to create custom open source capable machines. I know, thats something I would like dearly. System76 and the rest, will follow suit. I’m surprised this has not already happened.

Continuing in configuring the Dell Inspiron 640m (notice that no matter what you use, even Windows or OS X, you’ll never end up configuring these things on the first day), I needed to enable DMA. Running hdparm /dev/hdc I could verify this, so just adding options libata atapi_enabled=1 to /etc/modprobe.conf was all that was needed to be done. Making sure GRUB had the combined_mode=libata option was also required.

This speeds burns up - no waiting several hours for that DVD to write, it writes pretty quickly. And I got to say, the Places -> CD/DVD Creator in the GNOME Menu is really clever. Kudos.

GNOME’s Keyboard Shortcuts actually pick up all the hardware control buttons, save for the MediaDirect button (which I’m sure can be enabled, I just have to play with xmodmap soon I think). However, with 2.6.19 the sound buttons do not work (they do in 2.6.18). More oddness to poke around.

Anyways, this is a quick entry to mainly test BloGTK (boy, do I miss ecto) and see if it has advanced/sensible tagging (I was hoping to get Technorati styled tags, ala ecto.)

Downloaded the 64-bit version of FC-6, something I’ve never done before. Booted, skipped the CD test, and got caught out with:

mini-wm: Fatal IO error 104 (Connection reset by peer) on X server :1.0.

Rebooted, to try the graphical installation again, since this is an Intel graphics card, there shouldn’t really be a problem. Same error message, which seems rather odd - video card is detected as the Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller.

Looks like I’ll go back into the past, and try a text mode install - even specifying resolution=800x600 or 1024×768 on the command line still fails to start the X server in a proper manner.

Choosing the virtualization option meant that only the virtualized Xen kernel was to be installed - something that just maybe isn’t the smartest thing to do. Why not have a regular one and a xen one at the same time? Video was detected, at an abysmal 800×600, and as always with Fedora, WiFi itself will not work.

The Xen kernel doesn’t allow the Ethernet to be brought up, so I had to manually install a regular kernel via the DVD, allow the Ethernet to be brought up (which seemingly is only 100mbps, not 1000mbps, like Apple and my 2 year old IBM) and then aim to get the X11 going properly. This was done easily, via yum - picked up 915resolution from Extras.

I should probably mention that this install report has come in pretty handy at this stage. I’ve edited my /etc/rc.local to add 915resolution 58 1440 900, and changed the /etc/X11/xorg.conf to reflect that I’d like to use the i810 driver. To be completely lazy, I used system-config-display to get things going. Since there was a warning of a crash, it only made sense to do a yum update (arduous, slow process - 859MB, 475 packages).

Never using FreshRPMS, I have decided to give that a twirl, and installed: dkms-ipw3945 ipw3945d ipw3945-firmware which pulls in kernel-devel and dkms, to make the wireless work. Livna has also been added so that while I do respect freedom, I also get to play my DVDs and MP3’s from my iPod.

Suspend worked by default, which is always something that will please me. However, on the second suspend I do notice failure to bring the video up. Hibernate works to an extent where when it wakes up, the resolution is completely broken, something along the lines of 1024×768 by the looks of it. Running the 915resolution tool then, doesn’t help.

The updates to all the packages went well (with the exception of frysk), I rebooted, X didn’t start automatically, because it was booting to a default of runlevel 3. A quick /etc/inittab edit, to init level 5, and all was well.

The Fn + Up Arrow (which is meant to make the screen brighter) key seems to cause X to bomb. Its highly displeasing, and the quick fix is to rmmod video - something’s up with ACPI video…

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