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.

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.

As usual, I’m slow to notice: Fedora Core 3 is released as of November 8th. I’m downloading the CD images now from the University of Oregon, and will probably make some substantive changes to autumn (and possibly caeryn, my home server, and darwin, my home desktop) over the break.

caeryn’s been running the FreeBSD 5-RELEASE branch, which isn’t that easy to upgrade remotely. Thus, she may be due to a switch to a slightly more manageable Linux distribution…

Personally, I like the looks of Gnome 2.8, included with Fedora Core 3. It looks slick (screenshots available here). We’ll see what happens.

Thanks to this forum post on sendmail issues, my Linux laptop now actually boots quickly, whereas before it was taking years to boot. Apparently, /etc/hosts has to look like the following for me:

127.0.0.1       localhost.localdomain   autumn

I hadn’t realized the localdomain component was required by sendmail, or else it runs into severe name resolution issues that apparently have very high timeouts.

Now all I have to do is fix this weird DMA hanging problem that I’m having occasionally on boot…

Apparently, you can use Boinc (the new SETI@Home platform) as a system service. This is interesting (and useful). Downloading this init script and placing it in /etc/rc.d/init.d/setiathome with permissions 755 works fine under FC2, along with the following commands:

root@autumn(/etc/rc.d/init.d): service setiathome start
Starting BOINC client as a daemon:          [  OK  ]
root@autumn(/etc/rc.d/init.d): chkconfig setiathome reset

I tried to do this for MySQL as well:

root@autumn(/etc/rc.d/init.d): service mysqld start
Initializing MySQL database:                [  OK  ]
Starting MySQL:                             [  OK  ]
root@autumn(/etc/rc.d/init.d): chkconfig mysqld reset

This doesn’t seem to have worked. My MySQL server install was via apt, so I’m not sure that makes any difference at all. With a mysqld file in the same directory as the setiathome file, it seems like this should have worked…

My laptop, autumn, is now themed using a custom theme: Yattacier3 for controls, Plastik for the window border, and the default Fedora Core 2 Bluecurve theme for the icons. This makes my screen pretty much exactly like the example given in the BloGTK blog, which is really nice and clean. Great combination, if you ask me.

I’m also using the Space theme for GDM, GNOME’s login manager.

Due to some problems I had with system inconsistencies, I decided to take the opportunity and switch autumn (my laptop) to Fedora Core 2, which is primarily a GNOME-based distribution. I switched partly because of the inconsistencies, but also because I wasn’t completely satisfied with KDE and SuSE isn’t a strong Gnome distribution. In fact, SuSE’s version of GNOME 2.6 is highly corrupt.

In addition, this distribution comes out with the newer updates much faster than SuSE can. Thus, I’m running 2.6.7 on this machine now, whereas before I could only run 2.6.5 due to SuSE’s less-than-rapid response to software upgrades. The software is still the same for the most part, though I’m now using BloGTK to post to this blog. I have yet to reinstall the unstable version of Ximian Evolution so I can check my mail, however, so that’s one of my next tasks.

To further the Linux escapades I’ve been on, there’s a helpful article on using SpamAssassin with Novell Evolution. I also found an awesome apt for SuSE Howto – apt is usually limited in use to Debian and the like, so this is absolutely awesome. Just typing:

apt –no-checksig upgrade gtk
apt –no-checksig install gftp

gave me two new applications with no effort. I love it — now if they’ll expand to other areas. I may take the liberty of upgrading my KDE install, hoping like hell it doesn’t break too badly.

I found a handy little crontab generation utility for those of us who don’t get crontab at all. A simple Google search pulled it up for me. My laptop is now set to run the new version of SETI@Home every couple hours and export my contacts from Evolution every 15 minutes. Yay.

Warning: Programming/Technical Content

I’m currently using Novell Evolution 1.5.9 as an Outlook replacement, using it for my Calendar, Contacts, and e-mail. I’m also using SpamAssassin 2.63 (specifically, spamc/spamd) for e-mail filtering. What I used to do under Windows was have Outlook check all e-mail against my Contacts and throw away any messages that weren’t explicitly from those people. However, Evolution lacks any method of doing this. As such, I decided to write my own scripts that would allow me to do the exact same thing with SpamAssassin’s user preferences file. The result is quite nice. It goes through all of Evolution’s addressboook.db files (stored for me under ~/.evolution/addressbook/local/) and outputs any line containing the word “EMAIL”, then does some text stripping with sed, sorts the addresses, removes any duplicates, and then regenerates my SpamAssassin user_prefs file with the addresses specified for whitelisting.To avoid making everyone incredibly bored, I’ve added more details in the extended entry.

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