I didn’t notice it before, but Adobe has released a new version of their 64-Bit Flash plugin for Linux. I quote: “The 64-bit Flash Player 10 alpha refresh for Linux was released on July 30, 2009.”
Grab it on the Adobe Labs page and follow my instructions on this blogpost to install it. these instructions are valid for Fedora 10, 11 and basically any 64-Bit Linux OS.
Recently I ordered a new server for my company, a HP DL380G6 to be precise. We already have the previous generation of these servers (G5) and are very happy about them. It’s a beast with 5 network cards (4 usable by the OS, 1 for ILO management); in our setup we only need one active NIC, so I went to the BIOS and deactivated all NICs except the first one…then I installed CentOS 5.3.
I’m not really sure about it, but there seems to be a bug in the current BIOS revision which has a rather annoying consequence: if you only activate ONE NIC in the BIOS, the OS can’t see it. As soon as you activate 2+ NICs, the OS sees all of them. And by “see” I mean that they even don’t show up in an “lspci”… Odd. This probably also happens on RHEL 5.3, which is an officially supported OS by HP on this machine.
Here are the culprits:
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)
02:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II BCM5709 Gigabit Ethernet (rev 20)
The last time I tried the Banshee music player it was around Fedora 8/9 and it was very buggy with a lot of crashes. So until now I was using the default Rhythmbox application provided with Fedora 11/Gnome to listen to music and manage my podcasts. To be honest, Rhythmbox was a bit flawed for my use case as it didn’t allow to synchronize my podcasts to my music player (a Nokia 5310 phone); I was using an rsync script for that. Recently, things went downhill…DAAP music sharing worked when it wanted to work and with the latest update, Rhythmbox has bricked all my podcast feeds. Great.
So it was the perfect opportunity to look for another application…it turns out that Banshee is now a really great and mature product (if you don’t mind installing the Mono stack). It supports smart playlists, automatic cover art download, dynamic music library update, videos using the gstreamer back-end, online radios, podcasts AND an automatic synchronization to my Nokia phone! Wooohooo…the only drawback in comparison to Rhythmbox is that it doesn’t act as a DAAP music server.
For various reasons I like the Apple Mac Minis, they are cheap, compact, silent, energy efficient and quite powerful. So sometimes I use them as mini servers for some tasks, like as an rsync backup server. For that, I usually install Fedora on them…these Macs are supported since Fedora 9 or so.
When you want to install Fedora on one of these machines, you have 2 choices:
If you use the second option (which is what I do), you will soon be faced with an annoying problem: the Fedora you just installed via the graphical interface probably won’t boot. Your Mac will display a message saying something like “No boot device found, please insert a bootable media”. Duh.
The problem is that Intel Macs are using EFI instead of a standard BIOS, and the hard drive is pre-formatted with a “gpt” partition table instead of the standard “msdos” partition table. To install a working stand-alone Fedora on such a machine, you have to do ONE thing at the right moment:
That’s it…it can be quite frustrating if you don’t think about it.
Sometimes, it’s happy news day. Today is one of these days. Paradox Interactive has ported 3 great games from the Penumbra series to Linux, they are horror games which received good metacritic scores ranging in the 70. The best thing about these games is that you can buy all 3 of them for only 5$! Go run to their online store, select “Linux” in the little menu and there you go…
They clearly don’t do this for profit, so if you want to support gaming on Linux, go ahead. It works perfectly on Fedora 11 x86-64 after some yum installs 
A more complete description can be read on http://linuxlock.blogspot.com/2009/07/are-you-afraid-you-will-be.html
Étant MJ pour le jeu de rôles “Cthulhu” publié par le 7ème cercle, j’ai profité d’un moment perdu pour mettre à jour mon générateur de fiches de personnages. Il s’agit d’une interface web toute simple permettant de rapidement créer une fiche d’investigateur au format pdf, prête à être imprimée…idéal quand vous avez des joueurs qui ne préparent jamais rien à l’avance et ne se souviennent jamais des règles!
Le tout est fait de telle sorte qu’il n’y ait pas besoin du livre de règles, tout est guidé de manière dynamique au fur et à mesure des différentes étapes de la création des persos. Notez qu’il n’y a pas de contrôle contre la “triche”, mais bon en a-t-on vraiment besoin…j’ajouterai peut-être un javascript pour ça un jour. Donc en résumé on a:
Le générateur dans sa version 1.1 est accessible sur par ici pour les intéressés. Ça a peut-être l’air con comme-ça, mais derrière il y a une base de données d’environ 1500 enregistrements afin de gérer toutes les combinaisons.
NEVER! I swore to myself that I would never buy one of these crappy, under performing Atom based computers. This was before I went to my local computer shop. They currently have really cheap and small Atom computers on sale, so I bought a complete Foxconn R10-S3 for around 120€. I already had a hard drive (500GB) and a memory stick (2GB) lying around, so it was a good opportunity to build a cheap computer to test Rawhide builds.
As you can see on the picture above, it’s a really small case in which you can fit an optical drive and 2 3.5″ disks. The whole thing is based on an Atom 330, which is a dual-core CPU running at 1.6GHz. As a desktop chip, it supports the 64-Bit instruction set. So I installed a 64-Bit Fedora 11 on it and I have to say that it works quite well…It’s perfectly usable to browse the web (even with Flash), listen to music and work on an OpenOffce document at the same time. Don’t expect much more as it will begin to feel sluggish…
One thing I don’t like about it is the integrated fan…it’s loud. In fact it’s as loud as my quad-core computer when it’s idle, which frankly sucks on a small computer.
Last Friday I handed in my Bachelor of Science diploma work, so I basically finished my studies! If all goes well (and it should), I’ll receive the title of “Bachelor of Science in media engineering, IT orientation” or something like that. I already got a proposition for a very nice job in the Open Source industry, but nothing is completely sure at the time. I really hope this turns out well
Maybe you want to know what my diploma work was about? Well, it was about setting up an industrialization process to create custom Fedora-based Linux distributions on the fly. Basically, Fedora appliances targeted at video surveillance.
The final workflow allows the developers to automatically create custom Fedora distributions containing all their code in less than 15 minutes (compared to 1-2 days before). All the configuration files, GUI code, kickstart files etc…are directly extracted from SVN and passed to Revisor.
Now I have time again to catch up with Fedora Marketing stuff, and there is plenty of interesting work going on…
There have been rumours about Linux support in Steam for months, but yesterday a friend pointed me at http://store.steampowered.com/app/900804/
If you look at the bottom of the page, you’ll see this:
So, if it’s not a typo, we could have a pretty good surprise soon
Yesterday, the Fedora 11 Retrospective Meeting was held, I had the chance to be invited there as a member of the Marketing group. This meeting, done by phone, was a cross-group talk to see what went well and not so well during the Fedora 11 release cycle. The goal is to gather feedback so we can learn from our errors to create an even better Fedora 12. People from the Ambassador group, Fedora Board, Design team, Marketing team, Documentation team, FESCo, Infrastructure team, Quality Insurance team, Release Engineering, Translation team and Website team were present, everyone had around 5 minutes to talk.
I found it very useful even if I didn’t talk too much; Jack, the Marketing team leader, did a good job of saying what needed to be said on our side :p
Long story short, it looks like Fedora 12 will be a “stabilization” release compared to Fedora 11. The main demands could be summed up with: