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 friend told me to look at the “Why do people laugh at creationists?” videos on YouTube. It’s amazing how these creationists (aka Intelligent Design) can be stupid by mixing religion and science. The scary thing about these people, is that they use pseudo-scientific explanations that uneducated people could easily believe, everyone with a little knowledge should fight them.
Ok, here is one video of the series…it’s depressing. Why is the media covering these people in the first place?
Because the price of electricity rose by about 20% in my part of Switzerland during the last months, I was searching for a low-power backup solution for some servers. The Linksys NAS 200 seemed to be the perfect solution: a small box with an open source firmware based on a Linux 2.6.9 kernel. So I ordered one with 2 500GB SATA disks, planning to run it as an rsync server.
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.
If you ever made a cron job, or a script that executes something and produces an output in the console, you are probably familiar with the fact that piping it to /dev/null 2>&1 can silence it
But do you really know what this command is doing, or what the 1 and 2 mean? I found a damn good article on a blog just about that: explain pipes, standard in, standard out and errors to human beings.
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.
A very frustrating thing in Fedora 8, 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.
