Upgrading caeryn

After installing Fedora Core 3 in text mode without X installed on caeryn (my home server), I did the following to get her ready for use:

  1. Followed the instructions to initialize Yum off of the Fedora Core 3 Installation Notes.
  2. service httpd start
    chkconfig httpd reset
    service sendmail stop
  3. Yum didn’t seem to want to cooperate, so I downloaded Apt off the web for Fedora Core 3 and did an apt-get upgrade, which seems to have done the job. I also ran:

    apt-get install mysql-server

caeryn is now much easier to update and manage remotely than her old FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE software. Oh, did I mention I switched caeryn to a different box, since the old one can’t boot from CDs through the BIOS? She’s now a 233MHz Pentium MMX (better than her old case, which was only about 133MHz, if that) with 64MB RAM. Hopefully, this helps, though Fedora Core 3 is also more memory/CPU-intensive than FreeBSD.

Domain Names

Today’s the day when I add stuff I’ve been meaning to post about but haven’t. One of them is my recent domain name purchases, including one made just today though Dotster. This includes all domains I own currently, and all automatically renew:

Domain Name
Creation Date
Expiry Date


darkfusion.net
06/06/1999
06/06/2006


dreamrift.net
11/26/2004
11/26/2006


naturalaxis.com
04/06/2002
04/06/2006


naturalaxis.info
11/13/2004
11/13/2005


pixelary.info
11/13/2004
11/13/2005


republicofelisium.info
11/13/2004
11/13/2005

I’ve also owned willworkfora.tv and insidelogic.net in the past. I got the three .info domains for free, since Dotster recently allowed its customers to register 25 .info domains for no charge. Fun. I may not keep the .info domains, or point them anywhere — we’ll see.

Fedora Core 3 Fine-Tuning

I had to add in the MySQL server, since it wasn’t installed properly:

yum install mysql-server

As root on my Fedora Core 3 partition, since SETI@Home, mysqld, and spamd weren't starting properly:

service setiathome start
service mysqld start
service spamassassin start
chkconfig spamassassin reset
chkconfig mysqld reset
chkconfig setiathome reset

Windows XP Install

I've also installed Windows XP Professional on my other partition with Adobe Photoshop 6, Adobe Acrobat 6, Araneae 5 Public Beta, Microsoft Word 2000, and Mozilla Firefox 1,0, and ZoneAlarm Professional. The partition has something like 1.5GB left out of the 4GB allotted, and that's without running any major Windows Update programs. I still have to add in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX to round out the selection.

Fedora Core 3 Reinstall

Apparently, the Fedora Core 3 upgrade didn’t work out quite as well as it should have — flashing the installation with the most recently available packages didn’t work well and stopped me from logging into X.

So I figured, since I have to repartition anyway, I might as well set up a fresh Fedora Core 3 install. Not my ideal solution, since it meant I had to back stuff up, which, without a network connection, took a while, but got done.

I repartitioned the drive, reinstalled Fedora Core 3, then picked up the display drivers for my GeForce 2 Go video card. Once downloaded, I installed the drivers and restarted X, then reconfigured my display.

From there, I ran the instructions for updating Yum from the Fedora Core 3 Installation Notes, then executed yum update to safely update the system software.

From there:

yum -y install pine
yum -y install libdvdcss
yum -y install xine xine-lib xine-lib-devel
yum -y install apt
yum -y install synaptic
yum -y install blogtk fortune fortune-bofh-excuses fortune-hitchhiker fortune-tao

DVD playback works fine, but I can't currently play back MPGs, AVIs, WMVs, or any other movie file. The wireless card I have now works again -- changing some settings to optimize the wireless connection actually screwed over the connection, so that's fixed.

Apparently, xine will play MPG/AVI/WMV fine but Totem won't. I discovered that there are two versions of Totem -- one that uses the xine engine and one that uses a separate engine. I installed the proper version, like so:

yum remove totem
yum install totem-xine

Works just fine. Seems like most of my problems are solved, though others will doubtlessly come up.

Washington Gubernatorial Primaries

From the Seattle Times Breaking News service:

Wednesday, November 24, 2004 12:44 PM
Rossi wins recount in governor’s race

When the final votes in the race for governor in the state were tallied shortly after noon today, Republican Dino Rossi won the the election by just 42 votes over Democratic challenger Christine Gregoire. With a margin that small, a hand recount is almost a sure thing.

Story

Of Gregoire and Rossi, both are moronic clowns. Should’ve voted write-in for Gary Locke…

Upgrading to Fedora Core 3

autumn, my Dell Inspiron 8100 laptop, has been upgraded to Fedora Core 3 from Fedora Core 2, an amazingly easy upgrade process. It detected my previous Fedora Core install, identified the packages installed on the system, and started the upgrade, no problems whatsoever. I didn’t happen to time how long the upgrade process itself took, but I’d estimate at least an hour and a half, probably more.

After that:

  1. First observation: the boot splash screen used under Fedora Core 3 now feature the words “Fedora Core” in the lower-right, which is nice. The boot screen also seems more capable of switching back to graphical mode if interrupted by something else. X-Windows seems to have kept my display settings and NVidia drivers intact.
  2. The new Gnome 2.8 install did override my previously installed bootloader themes. X also didn’t boot into my profiles properly first time around, complaining that it couldn’t find /bin/bash2. This required logging into a failsafe terminal as root and changing the shell for my main user from /bin/bash2 to /bin/bash.
  3. The Fedora Core splash screen no longer shows the “2” in the background — now it’s just a generic “Fedora Core” splash screen. I also had problems with some icons specified in my Gnome 2.7 installation (namely my BloGTK icon) — it failed to load initially. I also lost some of the panel applets and shortcuts I had set up — all easily restored.
  4. My wireless network connection refused to activate initially, which still doesn’t really make sense. I had to clear all the available network connections in the configuration, re-add the wireless device, and try again, only to find that it still gave me a “Determining IP information for eth0… failed.” message.

    I went ahead and restarted, watching the network interfaces boot up — I notice a “Device eth0 has different MAC address than expected, ignoring” message, followed by a failure message. Hmmmm….. I also noticed a “/dev/dvd: no such file or directory” notice for the DMA setup, which is a simple fix, but will wait until after my wireless connection can be fixed.

    It wasn’t my D-Link DI-614+ router, since that doesn’t have any MAC address restrictions on it currently, I cleared the hardware available in “Network Configuration”, saved the changes, closed the wizard, then reopened it to ensure the hardware detected correctly. Thinking it might be a weird thing with the Netgear MA401 card I’m using, I swapped the card to another card slot — THAT didn’t work. I updated the system through apt by stealing the wireless bridge connection from my home FreeBSD server.

At this point, autumn’s wireless card still isn’t cooperating — I’ll be trying to fix it tomorrow morning (Turkey Day!).

The other problem is that the Anaconda installer FC3 uses didn’t allow me to resize the partition during install. I’ll probably have to use GNU’s parted to nondestructively resize the partition and load Windows XP again.