The thought was to implement a wiki for the development team. Simple enough.

Decided on MediaWiki. Check out the requirements. The latest PHP and MySQL were required.

The wrinkle is that the UNIX server is Red Hat Enterprise 4. An upgrade you say ? Well the problem is that neither the downtime or time required to get the upgrade done are available. Since its the development back end.

Put it on the Windows server ? Feasible. Lots of good WAMP stacks available. The problem is that most are designed as development environments. Additionally MediaWiki requires a couple of UNIX utilities. There are good Windows versions. However some additional work would be required in getting it configured to use them.

Seek an alternative. Well there is that Mac Mini spare at home. Only the problem is that its Tiger on a G4. Its got a use by date ticking closer every day. Its got the same issue that the RHEL4 server has. Eventually it’ll end of life.

Another option is to repurpose an old machine. Put on the latest version of Fedora since thats what I prefer.

Its the fact that Open Source projects are predicated on the latest and greatest stack. As they should be.

The upshot is that hardware should be generic. Allowing as many options as possible. In the case of Apple, the premium paid means that the buyer darn well better run OS X. Why else buy one. However it can be repurposed should the need arise since its now Intel based.

So here is to old leftovers.

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Attended Google Developer Day. Along with a significant proportion of local and interstate developers.

Three streams of crunchy API goodness. There were a number of American accents floating around which was great. Google are definitely making a commitment to developers and producing solid tools.

Enlightened self interest.

Well run and organised. I attended the introductory talks and flitted between the in-depth ones. Most of the talks are available on youtube and the documentation is around for study.

Caught up with some folks. Chatted with some new people. All up it was a great day.

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As ever. My time is becoming more and more precious. I’ve had three defunct computers sitting in the study for years.

This was my last attempt to revive one of them into a usable Linux box. Each one refused to boot the Ubuntu disk I picked up at LCA. The final indignity was the cd burner eating the CD. Its now sitting on the floor spared until I can prise the disk from its maw.

Two of the three towers have been donated to the local computer charity. The last will have a similar fate soon. Suddenly theres so much room.

I don’t ask a lot from computers. Why do they vex me so ? Linux is supposed to be a breeze at repurposing old computers.

Desktops are commodity items. Laptops are nearing so. Perhaps its time for a Macbook. I just need something to develop on. I want it to natively run Linux / Unix so I don’t have to wrestle with kludges.

I’d even consider VMWare running Linux on Windows.

For the moment I’ll stick with xamp (for PHP and MySQL) since it works.

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Day two consisted of wall to wall PostgreSQL mini confs. Very informative. I’m liking it more than MySQL it seems.

Chris Blizzards talk about Firefox and the OLPC gave me insight into the aims of each of these products. Both are looking to make a fundamental change to how people live. Firefox by enabling a better browser experience. OLPC by offering deprived countries a means to bridge the digital divide. Its a noble effort.

I personally think there are a huge number of issues that need to be solved before this works. Not the least of which is these countries need educators who are computer literate. There was a sample OLPC on display. I don’t quite understand peoples desire to own one when its designed for a very specific audience.

To break the monotony I went along to the Moodle talk. Its a perfect example of open source business success. The core development and software is freely available. Revenue is derived from implementation, training and certification. Plus its an Australian product.

Day three was the first official day of papers. Andrew Tanenbaum’s talk on Minix was great. Addressing the issue of software bloat both as features and sheer code volume.

The UAV talk was very cool. Two New Zealand engineers built an open source UAV as their thesis. They plan to build a self piloting version to cross the Tasman next. Amazing.

Jonathon Oxer‘s talk about scripting and external control systems was inspirational. He hacked off the shelf controllers to enable computer control via the serial port during the talk. Even soldiered stuff on the spot. The very definition of a hacker. Doing cool stuff by thinking outside the normal.

All up two full days of talks that have my brain working overtime.

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Attended the first day of linux.conf.au. This year is in Sydney at the University of NSW. Good timing since my last contract ended the two weeks before.

This is my old uni. Haven’t really set foot on the campus for well over fifteen years. Having done a bachelors and masters there I was very familiar with it. Its changed quite a bit since I was there last.

A lot more covered walkways. Whole new levels like the one under Matthews plaza. Coffee carts and more coffee shops.

Registration was a formality. Simply picking up a conference badge and bag. Very well organised. The bag is a nifty satchel bag although not big enough to squeeze the laptop into. However I don’t feel a need for the laptop so I’ll most likely leave it home.

The 7 team have lit up most of the campus with a wi-fi network. So the notebook would be handy if I did bring it. I might content myself with a good book, the Nintendo DS and the Nano to save on load. Pity the Opera browser for the DS isn’t available yet.

Unfortunately I had to go to an interview in the afternoon. So I missed some of the mini conferences that I wanted to attend.

The MySQL confs I went to were very good. Quite informative since I’m a relative MySQL newb.

Chatted to a few folks. A solid female contingent is readily visible which is great. I think it leavens the boyish behaviour. Apparently one in ten attendees is female. There is a whole stream of topics dedicated to the fairer gender.

Laptops of all varieties abounded. A good percentage of Macs. Hmmmm. What to buy next ?

Looking forward to another four more days of Linux goodness.

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Been mucking with Core 6 some more. This is the first time I’ve had hardware incompatibilities. My setup isn’t all that way out. AMD64 X2 4200, Gigabyte K8N-SLI, 1 Gb RAM, 6600GT, one IDE and one SATA hard drive.

To get the install to work. I needed to turn off the SATA raid functions in the motherboard. Appears that the el cheapo Sil SATA / raid controller is causing it problems. So I finished the install and turned the SATA back on to use the extra partitions under Windows.

Following morning X won’t start up. Nearest I figure is its aborting before X starts on boot up.

I’d burnt another copy of Core 5 and planned to revert. Decided to Turn SATA off and X comes up fine.

Chased up the logs but nothing reported. Going to have to consult the forums and sites. Certainly highlights the hardware incompatibilities that can creep in.

Luckily I have the laptop to fall back on during the meantime.

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Finally got around to installing Fedora Core 6. Five was a solid system although I haven’t used Fedora as my workstation since about version 2.

Decided I wanted to play with the fancy new graphics effects. Huge mistake. Somehow there is an issue with installing the official Nvidia drivers. Did allot of searching around but found no definitive answers. So on and off I’ve wasted a day and did who knows how many installations.

Since I’m really wanting to web development work I’ve thrown in the towel for the moment.

Whats really bugging me is that the Fedora dev team have decided no Firefox 2 for me. Its really quite presumptuous of them to decide that version 1.5 is sufficient to my needs and not providing Firefox 2 rpms in their repositories. Last I recall Linux and Open Source was about freedom of choice.

Linux has positively thrived in the last few years. However I can’t help but think that its become excessively complex and rife with idealogical issues. But its free and I should get involved if it irks me that much.

Enough of the whinging. Onto the serious work.

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My initial install of Fedora Core 5 was screwed up. SE Linux seemed not to respond to instructions and finds across the entire file system came back with linkage errors. Samba seemed to have gone missing despite configs being there.

Having downloaded Ubuntu 6.06 I thought I’d give it a whirl.

My system is a vanilla AMD64 3000+ on a Gigabyte NForce4 motherboard. A gig of RAM and two 120Gb IDE disks. So nothing unusual.

However Ubuntu install failed in a number of areas. First to come up on the analog video port. No biggie. Switched across to the DVI.

Second but biggest problem was that it kept failing to partition or create the root filesystem. Custom partitioning failed to create the nominated partitions. Then switched to automatic partitioning of free space. This seemed to work until it tried creating the file systems.

Third (minor) was that the system time kept coming up incorrectly during the install. I think it was expecting the hardware clock to be running GMT.

So went back to Core 5. Installed through fine. As before it handled the 6600GT and the 24″ screen. No brainer. I’ve read that Ubuntu has problems configuring the 6600GT during install.

At this point in time, I just want a solid distro which installs quickly with the least pain. The rest I’d sort out as I go.

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Woohoo !!! Core 5 has finally been released. Downloaded the AMD64 DVD iso overnight.

Installed it last night. Despite the reports of problems with NForce4 motherboards and NVidia cards. I had no problems. All installed smoothly.

Rebooted. Ran through ancillary setup. It prompted me for secondary login creation. Detected the 6600GT and the 2405FPW. Set it for 1920×1200. This was my biggest bugbear in FC4. All the mucking with X configuration to get the default resolution. Then having to do it again when a new kernel dropped. It kind of put me off using it.

The new version of Gnome is ultrafast. Teh snappy^tm in fact. The new default desktop is extremely purty. The pleasure has returned. The new layout is clean and neat. I likes alot.

I’d been tinkering with Ubuntu the last couple of weeks. I’m not big on the default brown theme. But I can’t argue with the ease of use. Will give Dapper a run when its out. I can see why people like Ubuntu.

Sweet !!!!! Showin’ ya the love Fedora people. Keep it up.

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Yay. Linux.conf.au 2007 has been announced as being in Sydney.

I’ve avidly followed the various blogs and sites on this local conference for the last couple of years. But I’ve not got my act together to actually go. Not even when it was down in Canberra.

Apparently its one of only two yearly conferences that Linus attends (for what thats worth as he only attends).

I’ll definitely attend the Sydney one as its planned for Sydney Uni. Cool.

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The first update of a new Fedora install is always fun. Especially as I install everything. Can you say “Dependency clashes” ?

This time it was some rpms requiring a later kernel than the installed one. Easy enough to fix. Update to the latest kernel first.

Then there was a clash between two kde libraries. I prefer Gnome but like to dabble on the other side every now and then. This required using the except flag on yum to exclude the less necessary one. In this case it was a language localisation.

A gigabyte or so later. Its done. I’ve switched to Livna instead of freshrpms. Just for a change.

See easy peasy.

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Before you say “What the ?”. Its an open source non linear video editing package for pretty much everything – Windows, OS X, Linux. Apparently the package is named after its author.

Source is available for platforms where a binary doesn’t exist. It looks the goods with the ability to do key framing, compositing, titling, effects and renderfarm capability. Collaborative work is catered for with asset management, control and communication.

Will be testing it out over the next couple of weeks. I’m that much closer to making a complete move to Linux if it works as advertised.

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I’ve been mucking with Fedora Core 4 after doing an upgrade from 3. Everything has pretty much worked fine.

I usually fire up yum or apt do an update however all the alternate repositories seem to not be updated for Core 4 at the moment. There seem to be some dependency issues with the Core 4 rpms that are around. apt-get and multimedia apps (with sound) seem to have some dependency problems.

The guys who manage the repositories do a great job and provide a terrific service. I’m sure they’ll be sorting this out quickly.

Just issuing this as a heads up. I’ve had to use the default Fedora ones for the moment.

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Hopped onto a torrent link and downloaded the DVD iso of the new Fedora Core 4.

The Linux box is upgrading as we speak.

This is the future. Here and now. The way software is supposed to be.

During that I was trying to calm a freaked out Inspiron 700M. It was throwing a BSOD at me. Complaining about a change in hardware when all I did was plug the 8 cell battery in.

Was forced to threaten it with an XP repair. That settled it down. This wasn’t the first time too.

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Installed Fedora Core 3 on the Linux box on Friday evening.

It was an upgrade from a DVD image. Firstly its good to be back on a single disk for the install. Verifying 4 CDs was getting to be a hassle. Not to mention having to swap CDs.

Secondly the upgrade went without a hitch. The two things I had to do was to remove a duplicate rpm and update the apt repository list to use freshrpms Core 3 archive.

There was over a gigs worth of updates so I left it running overnight. Come the morning everything ran fine.

Easy peasy. Lemon squeezy.

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Yay ! Linux is great. There’s something new almost every day.

The full Fedora Core 3 has finished beta testing. Available for download for the last few days.

Time to upgrade all my Linux boxes again.

Addendum:
This includes the 64bit version of Fedora Core 3. $940 for an AMD64 3000+ system you say. Hmmm.

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As per usual. I needed some extra disk space on the Linux box.

I’d added heaps of disks under Windows. Yet never done so under Linux. I’d done lots of installs and upgrades to machines but never needed to muck with disk partitioning and file system creation beyond initial installs.

Well that all changed.

Got the disk in and it was recognised by hardware.

Googleing left me a mishmash of the usual Linux online docs. About as useful as man pages. These provide a solid detail of what a command does but not the overall framework.

Then I stumbled onto Linuxplanet’s very helpful guide. It also details adding an existing disk with information already on it.

The tricky part for me was understanding the device naming conventions, making the filesystem and how to mount said filesystem.

Add this to the newbie files.

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I’m upgrading from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 2 on my work computer.

Crossed fingers that it works. I left the system munching on disk 2 as it was getting late.

The main catastrophe was going from Redhat 8 to 9. X windows and the window managers freaked completely. Necessitating a complete reinstall.

Redhat 9 to Core 1 was pretty painless. The only confusion was updating apt-get and yum configs to use the appropriate repositories.

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