Alphatek - Steven’s Tech Blog

As I said last week, I packaged the PHP MDB2 driver for PostgreSQL as an RPM for Fedora 8 and 9. Actually, this is my first self-made RPM ever and I’m quite happy with it.

I learned my way trough SPEC files and rpmbuild thanks to this excellent documentation on the wiki and of course by looking at other SPEC files…I love Open Source for that!

If I don’t detect any bugs, I’ll try to push this package in Fedora and become an active contributor

Ah, my homemade Hackergotchi was also accepted. I now have a face on the Planet. Yes, it’s scary.

Edit: someone already had the same idea

Sometimes, you may wonder why you should buy “expensive” hardware instead of el-cheapo-made-in-China stuff. Well, here is an example why the certifications and safety norms are important, and why you should pay a couple of € more to get a better quality:

This is what happens to a Heden PSX-A830 power supply under normal load. 2 of these PSU’s were tested with the same result. It is simply DANGEROUS, it should die by itself and not plunge your whole house in the dark. You should know that Heden is a purely commercial brand designed by Chinese manufacturers to sell cheap power supplies in Europe under a single name.

This is part of a french article from a friend (Doc Teraboule) at Canard PC.

As announced by Jay Estabrook on the axp-list, there is a 2.6.24 kernel available for the Fedora 8 Alpha port (along with some other updates). You may not see these new files if you run a yum update because of yum’s cache, the directory structure on the update server has apparently been changed as far as I can tell. So simply run a yum clean all and voilà, you can install the new kernel.

Once it is installed, you need to tell aboot (the secondary boot loader for Linux/Alpha, we don’t have Grub) how to boot on the new kernel, edit you /etc/aboot.conf file and add a new configuration:

0:1/vmlinuz-2.6.24.4-64.2axp.fc8 initrd=/initrd-2.6.24.4-64.2axp.fc8.img
root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 selinux=off rhgb quiet

1:1/vmlinuz-2.6.23.10-97.fc8.1axp initrd=/initrd-2.6.23.10-97.fc8.1axp.img
root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 selinux=off rhgb quiet

The first number is an unique identifier used by the SRM. For example, you can boot on the 2.6.23 kernel with boot dka0 -fl “1″ and on the 2.6.24 kernel with boot dka0 -fl “0″ (if your disk is recognized as DKA0 by the SRM). The second number represents the partition the kernel resides on, BSD-style. man aboot.conf is your friend if you are lost!

Did you ever wonder how to write portable PHP code that works on MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, MSSQL or SQLite? Then what you need is the Pear MDB2 package. It’s an abstraction layer between your PHP code and the database. It’s really not hard to learn and use! Of course, you have to use “standard” SQL queries that are common to all databases in your PHP code

In Fedora 8/9, you can install the MDB2 package with yum install php-pear-MDB2. This is the base package, now you need to install a driver for your database. To access MySQL it’s yum install php-pear-Driver-mysqli.

Note that on the screenshot above (PackageKit in F9), there are only 2 MySQL drivers available as RPM’s in Fedora. This little choice defeats the purpose of the abstraction layer, so I’m probably going to create driver packages for the other databases (or at least PostgreSQL) next week and try to push them into Fedora.

The screenshot says it all: the Fedora 8 port to the Alpha architecture works fine My old EV56 533MHz is happier than ever! The distribution was installed in 32 minutes, and around 50 updates were available via yum directly after the install. All my hardware works, you can see it on my smolt profile.

Alphas ROCK!

The Fedora 9 Preview ISO’s are available! If you want to help Fedora, try it and report bugs…the final version should come out around mid-May as you can see on the schedule page. Remember that this build is only meant for testing purpose, not for a stable workstation.

Today, there was good news on the Linux AXP mailing list: the Fedora 8-based Linux distribution is alive! This is time to reinstall my Alpha EV56 I guess, and playing with it is a lot of fun

Note that Gnome and Java is buggy, so you are strongly encouraged to use KDE.

Read the full announcement on RedHat’s AXP mailing list.

Today, there was an interesting but controversial article in my RSS feed: Fedora is the new Ubuntu. You should read it before you continue. This is the perfect moment for me to talk about why I chose to use Fedora instead of the universally loved Ubuntu distribution…first of all, I want it to be clear: I tested Ubuntu 7 and 8 beta and I’m not a sectarian.

The first point that made me chose Fedora is what’s perfectly described in the linked article: Canonical doesn’t contribute to the whole Linux ecosystem enough. On the other side, Fedora/RedHat is a HUGE contributor (as is Novell/SuSE by the way).

The second point has more to do with human feelings…particularly arrogance. Since some time, a small group of people using Ubuntu started hating/flaming other Linux users if they don’t use their beloved distribution, and that’s really sad. You can clearly see it on forums (French formus at least). You are not helping your distribution, nor Linux in general by behaving this way!

A much more recent event just happened yesterday during a PHP lesson at school; I’m using Fedora as my development environment, and the teacher is using Ubuntu. He constantly came to me, to tell me how superior Ubuntu was, and that I should switch…blablabla. This form of zealotry really annoys me…Hey! We are all Linux user, so let me chose!

Nah, this isn’t true, but it’s a catchy title don’t you think? There is just a fun phrase from Linus - I created Linux - Torvalds on RedHat’s Bugzilla page, precisely in the following post regarding a flash issue with YouTube: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=439858

The quote is at the end:

Additional info: This is “high” priority because the wife will kill me if she doesn’t have her videos. And the adobe player won’t install on current rawhide due to some library issues.

Note: his wife is a six-time Finnish national Karate champion:)

After some demands regarding the rsync on NAS200 post, here is a quick howto on how to (huhu) create an rsync server with a Linksys NAS200…feel free to comment this post if something isn’t clear enough. I assume that you know how to compile things under Linux and have all the necessary tools installed.

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