A couple days ago, the Fedora project released their latest effort, Fedora 11. The IT guy from the high school had been giving me a hard time about not trying harder to like Fedora. I had been hearing good things about Fedora 11, so I figured I’d give it a try. I should mention first that I’m doing this on an older laptop, so I won’t be too concerned with speed, except as it relates to performance of other linux distributions on this same laptop.

After letting the Live CD load up (not sure why you can’t have a ‘just install it for me’ option like Ubuntu), I started the installer. I wasn’t interested in playing around with a Live CD on this old laptop. It’s just too painful, and I was getting kernel failures like mad. Once I started the installer, things were going well, it even detected the computer name from the previous Ubuntu install. Then we got to the partitioning step. This is the place where we tell the installer how we want to use our hard drive (or let it do it’s own thing).

Being the optimist that I am, I let it do it’s own thing. It failed. The best part about this is, if the partitioner fails, it exits setup, and you have to start the installer again. That’s not quite as painful as it sounds, but still frustrating. I tried it again. Fail. Ok, I’ll do it myself. I created a swap partition, and then went to do my root partition. Hmm, no reiserfs, so I’ll stick with tried and true ext3. Fail. The install image on the CD was created from an ext4 filesystem, and somehow it’s impossible to use anything but ext4 on your root partition. Ok, whatever, I’m trying to give this a serious try, so I won’t let that stop me. Recreate the partition with ext4. Fail. You can’t boot from an ext4 formatted partition. From other reading, this is ridiculous, since Ubuntu (released a couple months ago) can boot from ext4 file systems just fine. Ok, so we’ll create a small ext2 formatted partition for /boot. Oddly enough, it recommended ext3, which is stupid, since the journal will eat up a good portion of your partition, and waste precious disk space. Some other fun things I noticed along the way. If you press the escape key while creating a partition, it actually creates the partition, instead of cancelling like it should. The arrow keys also cycle through the partition size options backwards as well. Finally, let’s do this install thingy. And it worked. One other item of note that I liked (because I’m an ntp nerd and run two of my own servers), is that it let you setup network clock synchronization during the installation process.

After completing the install, the display resolution on my laptop was not right, so I started trying to figure out how to fix that. I found a way, and had to install system-config-display. And then I remembered why I disliked Fedora before (and Red Hat, and Suse). RPM’s are the devil. After all that fun, what I really wanted to know, was how the speed compared to Ubuntu and Xubuntu on this laptop. So naturally, I have to go back and install them too. I timed the Fedora boot time: 1 minute and 20 seconds. It’s a far cry from the 20 seconds they mention as their target for this release, but I’m on slow hardware, and 1:20 is actually pretty good. I installed Xubuntu, and remembered that it wasn’t just Fedora that had issues with my display. In Ubuntu (and thus Xubuntu), I have to create the config file that sets the refresh rate for my monitor, and then it works at the right resolution. I timed Xubuntu. Ouch. It came in at over 1 minute and 45 seconds. My Ubuntu CD was apparently busted, so I burned a new one at work the next day. I had heard rumours that Xubuntu was kind of inefficient, but this just confirmed it. It seemed a tiny bit faster on loading menus and other trivial tasks, but nothing that would convince me to stick with it. I installed Ubuntu the next day, expecting something above 2 minutes for a boot time, and was pleasantly surprised. It booted almost identical to Fedora. So, thought I, I’ll go back to Fedora and just try living with it for a while to see how I like it (other than the RPMs).

Then the nightmare began. I had thought all the partitioning errors were behind me, but the Fedora installer was just getting started. I tried the same partitioning setup as before, and it went all the way to the end of copying the install image to the hard drive. Fail. It claimed it couldn’t load my /boot partition. I tried again, and it wouldn’t even load the partitioner. Then I got it to load if I told it I wanted a custom layout. It went all the way to the end again, and failed. After several more failures, of different types, I went to Google. It turns out that the partitioner for Anaconda (the Fedora installer) had been completely rewritten for this release. It was also completely in a broken state, and some people recommended using fdisk to partition your disks, instead of the installer. Hmm, yup, that’s going to be a great option for people that want to try out Linux. For the record, it does work, although I actually recommend cfdisk instead of fdisk.

Anyway, it’s installed now, and the fun will ensue shortly. I’ll have another post about that in a month or so.

A while back, Ubuntu released their latest update, Jaunty Jackalope. Yes, a Jackalope… Anyway, I usually wait a while to update my home computer because our internet connection is slower there (than at work). A couple nights ago, I decided the time was right, so I started the download and let it run overnight. The next day, I finished the upgrade, and rebooted. While I was at work, I got a call from my wife. We had no sound on the computer. Nothing was muted, and the speaker volume was fine. Great…

When I got home, I started troubleshooting, trying various audio settings, and changing volume levels on pretty much everything. I finally had some success when I switched the audio engine to OSS. I’ve been using Linux long enough to know that it wasn’t the solution I wanted. OSS is an old, deprecated sound system that is only kept around because some applications haven’t been updated in ages.

This at least gave me a starting point in my search on the Ubuntu forums, which are always super helpful. But audio issues on Linux are a dime a dozen, so it took me a while before I stumbled upon this post. I tried a couple of the things they mentioned, but nothing was working. Finally, there was mention of another post, which includes some information from one of the lead PulseAudio developers. As it turns out, the original implementation of PulseAudio by Ubuntu was very poorly done, and if you were upgrading, you still had all those broken settings lying around now that they’ve fixed things in Jaunty Jackalope. I followed the instructions for removing all the broken stuff, and tada, I had sound again. I celebrated by watching Hancock, and cranking the volume.

A bunch of my family members use Multiply for posting blogs, book reviews, photos, and links. It’s kind of like Facebook or Myspace, but slimmed down, and geared more towards blogging. Several of them have recently joined Facebook, and yesterday, my aunt asked me an interesting question. Is there any way to integrate the two sites? I knew there had to be, but it took me a while to think of how to do it.

So, here it is: On facebook, go to your Profile, and make sure you are on your Wall. Right below the ‘Write something…’ box, there is a Settings button. Click that, and the top section will say ‘Stories Posted by You’. As you can see, Multiply isn’t listed, but there is one called ‘Blog/RSS’. Click this, and it will ask you for the Public URL of your blog. For my Multiply site, it would be nosilver4u.multiply.com. Fill in yours, and click the Import button. Now it will automatically post anything from Multiply on your Facebook page. Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any way to go the other direction. This will also work for any other blogging site like blogspot, livejournal, or wordpress.com.

Some things just beg for a blog post. Like the stupidity of telling malware and virus writers exactly how to load their programs in safe mode. Thanks, McAfee. That was brilliant. Safe mode is typically the last resort for removing stubborn viruses, and I’ve only ever seen one that did this. Expect to see a whole bunch of new malware with this ability in the future. This makes me glad I only run ESET’s NOD32 on my computers.

Many of you probably already know that I use Linux. One of the awesome things about linux is choice. It was also the mantra of the first Linux distribution that hooked me on Linux–Gentoo. One of the choices that I made early on, was to use GNOME for my ‘Desktop Environment’. Of course, this begs a definition of ‘Desktop Environment’ for anyone who doesn’t use Linux.  It consists of the icons, toolbars (dock, taskbar), wallpapers, desktop, widgets, menus, etc. Perhaps the best way to explain this is by comparison. The biggest noticable difference between Windows 98 and XP (or between XP and Vista or even Mac OS) is the Desktop Environment. It’s what allows you to launch programs, and manage your files, and even determines how it all looks to some extent.

Now, back to linux. For those of us that use Linux, we get to choose between a hundred different Desktop Environments (and that’s probably underestimated). To the less eccentric, there’s typically only two choices though: GNOME and KDE. As I said before, I’ve chose GNOME pretty early on, but I actually tried KDE first, since it was what I had used when I bought my SuSE 7.2 discs back in the day (I subsequently sold those discs on eBay, and gave up on Linux for about 2 years). KDE has always been the eye-catching option, but as I’m a bit of a minimalist, GNOME struck my fancy. It seemed easier to customize, and had a leaner feel overall.

Every once in a blue moon I’m tempted by the allure of KDE once more, and today was one of those days. I’ve been sick, and bored, so I started installing Gentoo (I’ve used Ubuntu for the last 5 years) in a virtual machine (it’s like taking a chunk of your hard drive and making a spare computer out of it). I wasn’t going to do much more than that, but then the bug bit me. So once I had everything else working, I started preparing to install KDE on Gentoo. It was going to install 3.5.9, but I had already tried that version, and wanted to check out version 4. I found a nicely done tutorial, and wanted to see everything that would be installed. That’s when it happened. It smacked me right in the face. I almost fell over. It wanted to install MySQL. MySQL is a full-fledged database application commonly found on servers. This is a Desktop system, running Desktop applications. What could possibly require MySQL?

It turns out that Akonadai, part of the PIM (personal information management) set of packages is the culprit. Apparently, some people have so much personal information (contacts, calendar data, email, etc.), that SQlite (the former choice) doesn’t cut it anymore. That just boggles my mind. Of course, it shouldn’t, when I’ve seen college presidents that have over twelve thousand emails (just in the Inbox), several thousand contacts, and calendars that could choke a hippo.

In KDE’s defense, at least they don’t require you to actually setup the mysql server. However, KDE will have to be pretty slick to convince me that the extra little bit of fat is worth the switch this time. I’ve always found it to be bloated, and adding extra icing just adds more calories.

Dear FedEx,
The lovely country selector you’ve implemented is broken. See, not everyone has the Arial font (yes, I use Linux, and Arial is a proprietary Windows font, so I’m out of luck there). This causes my browser to choose a different font that happens to be slightly larger than Arial. What happens next, is that the selection box doesn’t fit in the container you’ve made for it, and it gets hidden behind the map.

Oh, the map. Let’s click on that. So I did, and then the country selector for North America has a similar issue.

Ah, but I’m resourceful, and notice the link at the bottom that says, “If you are having trouble viewing this page, click here.” I’m from the United States, and it defaults to that since I’ve already tried North America from the map on the original page. Fantastic, except that there is no submit button, because your web designers were too smart for that, and made the page accept whatever value is chosen, except that you can’t select United States when it’s already selected.

Since I’d like to be able to use your website, I decided to try and give you some feedback. However, there’s no readily apparent way to do so. So I clicked the Customer Support link. I particularly like the part on the Customer Support page that says, “Just e-mail, write or call us at 1.800.GoFedEx 1.800.463.3339.” Hmm, I can call that, but I’m not sure how to send email to your phone, or especially how to get postal mail to your phone. I do realise that if I keep going down the page, I will find ‘Call or Write Us’ links for each department. If I’m lucky, I’ll pick a department that has an email address listed. But if I pick the relevant one (FedEx Ground), I’m out of luck right there.
All that to say, please fix your website so that I (and the growing number of linux users) can use it. Lest you think I’m a nut on the fringe, think of all the poor netbook users running Linux that can’t use your web site. Think of them, and repent of your ways…

Respectfully Yours,
Dissatisfied Customer

Earlier, I was reading how Facebook almost bought out Twitter. I know I’ve seen some people adamantly proclaim ‘Facebook is not Twitter’. Sure, but have you looked at the two side by side? Facebook is organized tweets. That said, I’m still not quite sure how it makes sense for Facebook to acquire Twitter, except that they can expand their already-established advertising network to another venue.
Otherwise, it seems a bit random for one social network to acquire something they already have. It makes even less sense when you look at how poorly run Twitter is. It seems like everytime I go to check on twitter, it’s broken in some way or another (like right now). Not that my preferred micro-blogging tool is perfect, but at least identi.ca is open-source, and that counts for quite a bit. I’ve also never seen it completely down like Twitter is right now, and it integrates nicely with Facebook status updates. Just in case you’re totally hooked on Twitter, Identi.ca even will cross-post to Twitter as well.

We had freezing rain the other day (maybe it was yesterday, but it seems like it’s been longer already), and it’s insane. I didn’t get to take Scooter out for a walk yesterday, because it was more insane, icy, and freezinger by the time I got home from work. Today, I decided to brave it anyway, and it was awesome. I found out I have a sled dog, because Scooter almost could have drug me along behind him the whole way. So I gave in and did a shuffle/run behind him. Naturally, if you’re running on ice, you’re sliding, and there’s where the shuffle comes in. I’m sure it was hilarious to watch, but we had fun anyway.
Of course, I can’t write something without mentioning technology. Chrome is slick. Seriously, check it out.

I couldn’t resist using the tired-out reference about in-laws being outlaws. And captured on camera (not in jail). For shame…

Anyway, back in September, Amanda’s parents came to visit. We took them out to Makoshika (the largest state park in Montana), and got some great pictures. We finally bought a new card reader so that I could upload them. I also found some great pictures of Scooter that hadn’t been posted, so there’s some new stuff in the ‘Scooter’ gallery as well.

There are also a couple of the new house in Glendive. There will surely be more in the not too distant future, but that’s all we’ve got for now.

Lastly, if anyone ever needs to edit EXIF information on a photo (it’s the extra information your camera stores about when the picture was taken, what camera was used, exposure, etc.) and you’re using Linux, try out mapivi. It’s not the fanciest program in the world, but it works, and has an option to make ‘relative’ adjustments to the date a picture was taken. This can be quite useful if you have 40 pictures that were taken after your camera was without power and you forgot to reset the date.

Ok, real quick for posterity:

After my last two posts I was getting an odd error, that I thought might be related to the Wordpress + Livejournal cross-posting plugin I use. The important part said it was error 32300, that it was a transport error, and that it had not recieved code 200 (which is how a server tells your browser that everything is just peachy). A quick search didn’t turn up anything too useful, so I was a bit stuck. I had, however, just upgraded my wordpress install to 2.6.3, and thought that might be related. I went into the settings for the Livejournal Crossposter, and saved (didn’t make any changes). Went back to the last two posts, and saved those, and everything was indeed peachy again.

UPDATE: must have been a fluke, because I’m getting the error on another post, and I seem to remember it having something to do with how much livejournal allows you to post at a certain time. Guess I’ll have to repost the last post in the morning.