Alphatek - Steven’s Tech Blog

Yesterday, I tried to upgrade my Fedora 8 test installation to Fedora 9 Beta using yum. The upgrade worked fine, after a 1.1GB download I could reboot, but only with the old Fedora 8 kernel. Fedora 9′s 2.6.25 kernel segfaulted right after the “uncompressing linux” message by displaying some libc.so errors.

So I felt smart, and thought that I could probably resolve this problem by installing F9′s glibc and glibc-common packages with yum.

I tried to uninstall them with an rpm -e glibc glibc-common, but these package had a lot of dependencies. Well, not a big deal...rpm -e glibc glibc-common --nodeps (remember, I felt smart).

Fatal error! NEVER try this at home kids! My system was obviously dead, I couldn’t even reinstall the new versions as yum relies on these packages

A simpe and short post to announce that the Beta of Fedora 9 is out, grab the ISO’s here and read the release notes here

A very useful and nice thing in Apple’s OS X, is that you can print to a PDF file from any program. This can also be achieved under Windows with PDFCreator. At its core, it’s “nothing more” than a virtual printer. I use this feature a lot, so how can this be done in Fedora 8? How hard can it be?

Well, it’s easy, fire up a terminal as root and type:

• /etc/rc.d/init.d/cups start : the CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) service needs to be started if you wish to have the pdf-printing support. I recommend that you start it automatically at boot time.
• yum install cups-pdf : installs the pdf-printing component for CUPS
  

You’re done, now you can print to the CUPS/CUPS-pdf printer from almost any program, including Firefox. Neat to save web pages.

This morning, I stumbled across an interesting post about OpenJDK, the Open Source implementation of Sun’s Java JDK. It should soon be available as a simple to install rpm in Fedora, which is GREAT news for all the Java developers out there. This is precisely one of the features that I need to completely stop using Windows: NetBeans with a solid JDK and an easy install process.

Enough talk, head to http://cgwalters.livejournal.com/14310.html and get the info from the source

Note: updated for Fedora 9

A very frustrating thing in Fedora, is installing PostgreSQL 8 via yum. It all starts in a very nice way:

yum install postgresql postgresql-server and yum install phpPgAdmin if you want a nice web interface to manage your database.

But now what? Where the hell should I look to find further documentation on what these rpm’s just did? Did they create a default database user, what password to use then? It’s not clear at all for the novice user.

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