Tagged: linux
So... something has been irritating me lately... It might come as no surprise that Windows bothers me to no end. Its sheer idiotic use and changing of the GUI is mind numbing. Because for the change they're making... it really doesn't make it more user friendly... its making it more flashy and dumbing it down for those that still believe computers to be magical boxes. They're not. Don't get me wrong... the hardware that is going into them is amazing and the hardware designers that are making it are doing a superb job.... My complain is not with them, it is with the idiot software being put on that hardware.
Windows was never designed to be use en-mass as a server... because the dependance on a gui and the fact they felt the need to change the GUI... Microsoft can claim all they want to and even be justified in the GUI changes made to their "Consumer" OS... Windows Vista... Windows 7... But why must they change the GUI on the Server? Why must they make it like their Consumer OS? They should not be designing a GUI for grandma and think thats the same interface that their tech workers want to use to manage 100 Servers... Its stupid. And for that Microsoft... You have earned my disdain, and will continue to have it. It is that reason I bought my wife a Mac, and I will buy my Daughter a Mac. I will continue to use Linux, and I will recommend every Server install to be of a Linux or Mac variety. Why? Because they don't sully my intelligence for the likes of a few that will NEVER use the Server version of your OS.
In light of seeing your more recent financial troubles... I lavish in it. To see that the world is coming around to my way of thinking with each passing release of your OS. I wait for the day that we will see your OS drop somewhere in the 20-40% range. That is, in my opinion, where you belong.
November 23, 2008 Posted by mitch |
linux, redhat |
I'm getting tired of Enterprise Linux Releases... I'm tired of how difficult it makes things. I fully understand why they are locked into specific versions of software, and that maybe I just need to upgrade... but business in my experience doesn't like not using the "Enterprise" versions of software and that the open source tools I need to use seem to want the latest versions. (Lilac requires PHP 5.2 for instance, so a PHP 5.1.6 release on CentoOS 5 isn't going to work) I've also run into some compile options lately that get quite annoying... like no mysql support for pam, or mysql support in postfix. It does cause me quite a bit more work, and I'm honestly seeing it all built into Ubuntu and Debian (I use both on my personal systems) and I'm thinking of starting to switch other people systems as well.
I upgraded to Intrepid Ibex long before I should have... Hardy Heron(8.04) is an amazing release, where 8.10 seems to have a lot of fine tuning still needed. I reinstalled back to Hardy yesterday on my laptop because of some issues with wireless (Intel 4965 - 802.11n), suspend wasn't as great any longer, and vpnc wasn't working. I also had upgraded my Mythtv/Router box as well... and now I wish I could take that back, however that ones not an easy reinstall, so I'll work with it for now.
anyway, after my reinstall back to hardy, my vpn is still not working, and I get the error: vpnc: receiving packet: Message too long
After some googling and not turning up anything, I decided to launch wireshark on my laptop and watch while I ran my vpnc-connect. Turns out the Message too long is a rather obscure way of saying that it was getting an ICMP fragment error... the IPSEC packet was set not to fragment and the packet was to large for some MTU setting on my uplink some where. I thought I'd check my router box... which has three nic's in it... one for wireless, one for wired lan, the third is my internet(eth0). Since it was doing the same thing on both wired and wireless, I checked eth0 which is where it plugs into the cable modem. Sure enough the MTU size on eth0 was set to 576 bits. I ran "sudo ifconfig eth0 mtu 1500" and tried my vpn connection again and it connects. My cable has been up and down all week (Thanks Comcast!), it could be an issue with the cable modem or it could just be the new kernel in intrepid ibex... so, for now, I'll add the following line in /etc/rc.local
ifconfig eth0 mtu 1500
this sets the MTU to 1500 on boot(if it wasn't DHCP I could add an mtu 1500 line for the interface in /etc/network/interfaces)
I've been shutting down and booting my laptop since the day I got it, and to be honest, the one thing I like the most about the mac is its ability to hibernate, and just "be there" when you want to use it, otherwise you can shut the lid and leave it for hours or days without plugging it in.
Well, I was up at 3:30 this morning not able to sleep and I thought about it, as I had immediately grabbed the macbook instead of my Lenovo 3000 n100. Even when I was getting up to read more of the online version of the Django book, I knew I wouldn't be doing any actual testing or playing with any django code, unless I installed it on this web server and "tested" it from here. The reason I find it interesting is because I've yet to like to do any form of coding on the Mac, other than the couple times I've played with the new iPhone development tools in XCode. So, I ask myself... why?
I find the reason is simply that it was more convenient, I could take the MBP and open it up, launch firefox (3 beta 5 - its awesome!) and be reading in 10-15 seconds. Instead of having to wait for my lenovo to boot.
after I had read a couple pages worth of django, it made me curious, because I haven't looked for any information about hibernate for my laptop for a long time. Everything else works (well, that I use anyway, I've yet to test the modem, and I don't much care about the finger print scanner.. that will probably be my next quest or possibly fixing the stupid alsa drivers for the sound)
And sure enough, I found an Ubuntu wiki post about my specific laptop, and to get hibernate working all I had to change was add one line to my grub config and reboot. Heres what I changed:
from the file /boot/grub/menu.lst
# defoptions=quiet splash
to this:
# defoptions=quiet splash locale=en_US i8042.reset
sudo grub-update
and reboot.
apparently the part that makes it work is the i8042.reset line, not sure what the locale has to do with it, but the poster on the ubuntu wiki had his locale set as well, so I figured it couldn't hurt.
Sure enough it works and I updated my power setting to start putting my laptop in hibernate mode when I shut the lid.
On that page, it also has the information about fixing the alsa drivers, as well as the much annoying touchpad while typing fixes, which I've also applied. I've yet to experience any issues with random grazes of the touchpad like I used to when I was typing, so I believe it has worked, but it rarely happened at home and was usually while I was at work for some reason so we'll see on that one.
Well, I've had the macbook pro for a couple weeks now, and while I personally don't have a problem with Mac OS X... its just not Linux. I like mac fine and all... When I'm using it however... I miss my ubuntu laptop. Browsing the web and doing email works just fine on the mac... also I generally would prefer the mac when doing movie stuff, however it was a pita to get xvid working. (it only took me 20 minutes or so, but that was still way to long, my "aptitude install gstreamer-*" works much nicer) And ports on the mac... what a joke, its an even bigger pita. It attempts to be like linux's package managers, however, you have to install all the xcode tools before you can even run those, and that took 45 minutes or so. Over all... the Mac interface is definately nice, thats not my complaint, its just I like my open source tools, and the mac is just to proprietary for me to really work on. So..
I believe I will be repartitioning this mac... or maybe, i'll try out the partition resizer built in... don't really care if I corrupt the data on it... By this time tomorrow hopefully, I'll be abe to dual boot the latest ubuntu 8.04 (yes, i know currently still beta)
Its been a while since I've posted, and in the time I've been out... I was on vacation, where my wife and I, along with her brother and sister, drove back home to New York to see their brother graduate and visit with the family. I couldn't begin to describe how horrible the drive was... the rental we had was really bad... not that it had problems, it just was incredibly uncomfortable. But other than that, I had a relaxing time atleast.
Now for the purpose of the post. My next Cell Phone. I've seen this phone before, but I didn't really like the colors that were shown before. Now that they've changed the colors, I love it. And I going to buy one. Even tho they're still not really ready for the general public yet... :) Its called "OpenMoko" and its awesome. The specific phone I'll get is the dark one probably, unless I can get the dark one with the orange ring, that would be sweet.
Anyway, have a look.
Well, Debian finally released version 4.0! Its been a long time coming, yet again, and I think I'll be staying with Debian on my server as a result. Since it comes with all of the things I wanted and had been running from Testing prior to its release. I updated to Etch earlier today, so if you experienced problems earlier. Thats what was going on. There was a change with Apache (upgraded to 2.2) That required some changes to my virtual host config file for metauser.net, after I got that sorted out everything else so far has seemed like its working really well... Other than some botched problems with wordpress and a bad plugin (I updated to the latest wordpress finally a while ago too...) But I'm trying to find a decent plugin that will allow me to embed youtube video's like the one I linked to a while a go(why they can't include the one thats been put into the online wordpress.com I don't understand). Anyway, its broken my categories stuff, so thats why this post and the one prior don't have any listed... its borken and I haven't been able to fix them yet. Rest assured that once I find the time to fix them I will... maybe later tonight in my other class, since I'll have SSH access there....
Recovery of data off my old hard drive (120GB SATA) didn't go as well as I would have hoped. I was able to recover a whole 1.4MB of the 107GB partion... yeah... good eh?
After trying for a couple days doing a "xfs_repair" and not finding out untill after I wasted two days trying, that xfs_repair dies as soon as it gets an IO error. The drive would kick one of those out every couple seconds when you were trying to access it. So, I waited two days for nothing... So, I had done a bit more reading and found that I should copy off the partion and then I will be able to perform a xfs_repair on the file that was coppied off. I used both dd if=/dev/sdb6 conv=noerrr of=PARTITION, and ddrescue /dev/sdb6 PARTITION and both resulted in the same 1.4MB file after all was said and done. So, it hasn't been a very good week. I lost everything... yet again.
On the bright side of things, I have a DVD burner on the way, and it will be here by friday :)
From The Register, the article talks about Sun's constant flux of wether or not they like linux this hour(yes they can change that often). Some people were excited when Sun said they were going to start supporting and selling linux(Java Desktop Anyone?). There were always the nay sayers who wouldn't give Sun a chance. Well I'm now officially going to stay on that side of the fence. I hate to say it (really I do). Sun sees the writing on the wall, but they *still* refuse to adapt to the changing market. They're bent on riding Solaris to the ground if thats where its going to take them. Maybe one day they'll wake up and pull a 180. IBM did... took them a while but they did it. Everyone else seems to be tip toeing around saying "maybe we will, maybe we won't... we're not sure". Getting on the boat would be great, but the ships not going to wait for them. It opens the door for more players to step up and take their place however. Which would be good, because we don't want everyone bowing out leaving IBM. Competition is a good thing.
Fedora Core 4 has been out a while, and repositories are just starting to pop up for it finally. Seems theres problems with the move to GCC 4.0 and getting things to compile. Other than that, I'm really liking it. I haven't made the move on my home PC yet, but I've been running it here at work for some time (since test 2 i believe...) and I've had it on my laptop since test 3. Major updates include Gnome 2.10, GCC 4.0, and more enhancements to SELinux. Worth the upgrade? I would say yes. Mostly for cosmetic reasons tho. I loved how it detected and even would allow me to install over my Cisco 340 Aironet wireless card at work. I was amazed (since Ubuntu could do it figured Fedora should too!). I'm loving NetworkManager. I finally can confidently say Linux does wireless as easy (i think its actually easier) as windows. (When the card is supported...) Anyway Props to the developers for another great release! I'll be posting more on my bro's install for his new Athlon64 and an ATI Express200 board, and a SATA Drive using the SB400 chipset.
I haven't updated in a while because my home computer has been out of commission for a while... Not sure what happened... For some reason, both Gentoo, and Fedora have corrupted ext3 partions on my computer... Not sure if its because of the via_sata driver, hardware, or a combination of them. Any how, this last time, it corrupted my home partion and I had fsck running but it was taking *days* to run. I even stoped it and restarted it from a knoppix CD, and the fedora disk 1. They all took forever, and still didn't seem like it fixed anything when they were done. So, I lost everything.... I hadn't bought the Dual DVD/CD burner yet, so I didn't have any backups... which is completely my fault. Anyhow, this time around I'm going with a different filesystem for my home partion. XFS is what I desided to go with. I did some research a while ago and looked into its benifits and it seems to have quite a few. Dispite not being officially supported by Fedora, I think it will be able to handle my 107GB partion better than ext3. ReiserFS would have been my other choice, but found on the fedorafaq site that SELinux won't work on anything but ext3 and XFS. That sealed the deal, XFS it is. I'm currently loading it up right now, so far so good.
Ok, I've been living with Fedora Core 3 for a couple weeks now... I also use Core 3 as a Desktop at work and I must say, for a Linux Desktop, Core 3 is great. However, my complaints are simply about multimedia on the web. All to often things are just written for Windows, and all the formats windows programs can typically read. My multimedia needs are simple... I want to be able to watch movie trailers off of apples web site! I've download all of the latest codecs from Mplayers website, and installed them in /usr/lib/win32 however playing off the web is still a pain... I really hope this will be fixed soon.
Well, my wife could really use Windows for school... (some of the DVD's and CD's she has for studing only work on windows or mac...) so, I thought I could run VMWare which would also allow me to play some games online with guys from work. I attempted the install in Gentoo, and the installer asks for the /etc/rcX.d directories, and since gentoo doesn't have them, i thought I could get away with creating some sym links to the directories they do have.... well, that ended up completly messing up my / partion.... So, instead of reloading Gentoo again and taking a couple days and then somehow maybe getting vmware to work. I desided to load Fedora Core 3. Since it was just released a week or so ago. I've been running it at work since the day it came out, and have really liked it. So I installed it and to my suprise I was able to load it in under 10 minutes. The SATA drives performance supprised me :) Anyway, loading VMWare from Core 3 so far has been cake. Just need to load an OS.
October 28, 2004 Posted by mitch |
gentoo, linux |
I finally got it back up and running last night... man... almost a whole week without it... (I started the rebuild sunday night) and maybe its just me... but it seems to be a bit snappier than it was before... Not sure if its because this time I went from a stage 2 install instead of the stage 3 I did before. Or it might be the fact I've only got one module loaded and everything else is compiled into the kernel with no intrd image.... Anyhow, I'm liking it. I got most of the applications I need installed, still working on the multimedia apps but those should only take me another couple hours to make sure they're working correctly.
September 24, 2004 Posted by mitch |
linux, mythtv |
A friend from work asked me to help him out with setting up his computer with MythTV on it. He bought an Via-ITX board and a 250GB hard drive, and I've been looking it a bit, and with Myth, speed is of the essence. So instead of trying to mess with KnoppMyth (which at the time seemed really good because it setup everything for you) however, with his PVR card he would have to recompile the kernel to get the ivytv driver. And if i'm going to be recompiling the kernel, and possibly other things... might as well make the optimizations for his VIA proc as well right? Anyway, all this and I'm came to the conclusion that Gentoo would probably much easier to maintain once it was setup, because of all this custom compiling I'd more than likely be doing anyway. So, thats what I'm doing. Started the Gentoo install last night, and I've created a 230GB partion for all his movie data. Formated it with JFS as it has the fastest delete times out of all the standard linux filesystems. And seems to be deamed "production ready" (not that I care that much... as Rieser has been production ready for a long time and just recently was given credit as such...) Anyway, I was thinking of starting with a stage 1 install of gentoo, however... had some problems, went with stage2, and I'm now stuck because automake depends on perl, and perl depends on automake.... So i'm not sure what I'm going to do... I might just go with a stage three and then recompile everything with my optimizations later... we'll see. I'll let you know how it goes... and hopefully once its up and running I can convice my wife that it would be nice to make one for ourselves after she sees this one in action. :)
Well, I've been having a hard time finding anything decent from Dells Linux forums... currently all they have is this biosdisk which is somewhat cryptic unless you want to look through the source code, it doesn't tell you what its doing behind the scenes. However, last time I was looking it up. I found this information which referred to an older version of the biosdisk. However using the latest 0.50 as of this writing.
Download this RPM http://linux.dell.com/biosdisk/biosdisk-0.50-1.noarch.rpm
Run: biosdisk mkpkg /home/mitch/GX270A04.EXE (as root [su -]) *note: path and file name may be different, this is the version I was using however.
This gave me this error: "Error! There was a problem creating your rpm."
However... it still worked. (it droped an image file in /boot called dosdisk.img, if this didn't happen for you... don't know what to tell you...)
Then, you need to copy the memdisk file from /usr/lib/syslinux (this is redhat specific your milage may vary)
"cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot"
Then edit /boot/grub/grub.conf like so, adding the fallowing lines:
title Dell BIOS flash
root (hd0,0)
kernel /memdisk
initrd /dosdisk.img
Once again, change as needed for your system.
Save grub.conf and exit.
Reboot, and fallow Dells normal instructions for flashing the bios (you will have to select the correct boot option from grub on boot to flash the bios... and hopefully you didn't put it as the default)
Update: I suspect it is failing for me because of missing dependancies... I will find them and update this when I do.
September 2, 2004 Posted by mitch |
linux, redhat |
Well, far as I know I'm still schedualed to take the RHCE exam/training the week of the 13th. I've been testing different installs on my test box at home, which I plan on taking with me. However, I still hope I know enough to pass.
I've been made aware of how cheap virtual servers are getting... Linode has vhosts for $20/month with 3GB of space, and I get root! This is looking very promising to me... I am probably going to be giving up netflix for it, but I feel like its worth it. I mean... my own box that I get root on, but I don't have to host it myself? man... Seems like a deal to me, because then no one could tell me what I can or can't run. I wouldn't really need to know my boxes ip back here anymore...
July 21, 2004 Posted by mitch |
legal, linux |
DaimlerChrysler Hearing was today. SCO lost on all counts except their complaint that DC took longer than 30 days to certify that they did not have any of SCO code on ANY of their servers... in use or just sitting on a file server... Well, FINALLY some of the air has been let out of their big heads. Hopefully this is the begining of the end. (I know its all going to end eventually, but sooner is better than later... because I'm really tired of hearing the crap that comes out of SCO..)
Linux: Global File System
RedHat can walk the walk as well as talk the talk. They bought a company a couple of months ago for several million who were the original inventors of the GFS file system for Linux clusters. And now they are releasing it under the GPL. They are asking for the community to help them get the patches needed to the kernel source to be added to the main kernel. Allowing everyone to be able to use GFS easily. Very cool stuff. Way to go RedHat!
I get one training a year at work, and I've decided to take the RHCE exam. I'm not sure when I'll taking the week training and the exam (tenative is Sept 13th in Las Vegas, but I'm not sure). Anyhow, I bought a book from amazon. I got it because its the newest and it has a 5 star rating on amazon... I'm looking forward to the practice test and drills it has you do. I could try to come up with my own to help me study but I don't think it would help me a whole lot. Anyhow, I plan on cramming for the next couple months, hopefully get a chance to do the drills over an over atleast one every day as time permits I suppose. However I do believe no one will complain if I work on them at work as well.
The latest from Groklaw has some insite on SCO's latest motion in the SCO vs. IBM case. My favorite part is this:
SCO writes that they need IBM to hand these things over because IBM "appears to assert that to establish IBM's breach of the Agreement at issue, SCO requires specific evidence of derivation from UNIX System V lines of code through the versions of AIX and Dynix code to Linux."
Basically, they don't have anything, and this whole lawsuite has been to see if they could get something from IBM. Which goes back to what everyone was saying in the beginning. SCO has NOTHING, they started the lawsuit most likely to be bought out, and since it didn't happen, they started playing a "high-stakes poker game, with lousy cards, but pretending to hold Aces, only now it's time to show their cards", I couldn't agree more with that statement.
Anyway... this all really still urks me, because it seems like its getting so close to an end... but the dumb factor keeps getting worse.
