Category: Geek Stuff

Upgrading to Fedora Core 5

After having successsfully upgraded my spared Dell box to Fedora Core 5, I messed up the boot partition and had to do it all over again. So I decided I might as well document it here since the processs wasn’t quite as smooth as one’d hope.

UPGRADING FEDORA CORE 4 TO CORE 5 USING YUM
1. First, make sure

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yum

is up to date. If you are going to upgrade your system with it, you might as well make sure the tool is up to pars.

me@localhost$

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yum -y upgrade yum

This is going to download a bunch of other stuff other than

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yum

. So be patient.

2a. Next, make sure sure your

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kernel

is up to date as well. Or else when you upgrade to FC5, it will throw a bunch of errors like this:

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Error: Package initscripts needs kernel < 2.6.12, this is not available.
  Error: Package kudzu needs kernel < 2.6.13, this is not available.

So here we go:

me@localhost$

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 yum -y upgrade kernel

For multi-CPU systems, do the following instead:
me@localhost$

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yum -y upgrade kernel-smp

2b. Just to be on the safe side, some packages may need to be removed before upgrading. This script should tell you what needs to go:

me@localhost$

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perl -ne 'print "$1\n" if ((/Error: Missing Dependency:.*is needed by package (.*)$/) || (/Error: Package (.*?) needs.*, this is not available./))' /tmp/yum_upgrade | sort | uniq

3. Reboot. Make sure you boot into the latest

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kernel

or else you are going to have the same problems as I mentioned before.

4a. Now delete any old

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kernels

you have still on your system. First, let’s see what’s there:

me@localhost$

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rpm -q kernel kernel-smp kernel-devel kernel-smp-devel | sort

4b. Delete old

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kernels

:

me@localhost$

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rpm -e kernel-version-number

I read somewhere that you should delete

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kernels

by using

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rpm

since it also tidies up your bootloader file for you.

Optional: Update

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rpm

packages:

me@localhost$

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rpm --rebuilddb

5. Now we are ready to get the FC5 upgrade package:

me@localhost$

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rpm -Uvh <a href="http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm" target="_blank">http://download.fedora
.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/5/i386/os
/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-5-5.noarch.rpm</a> (this code wraps for cosmetic reasons. But you should copy/paste this as if it's one unbroken line.)

6. Finally. Show time. Let’s upgrade this puppy…

me@localhost$

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yum -y upgrade

Now sit tight and wait. This could take a while depending on your Internet connection. It took me roughly 5-7 hours on a moderately fast DSL.

7. Once everything is downloaded and installed, reboot.

8. It’s probably a good idea to keep your old

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kernels

. But I deleted my FC4 kernels.

INSTALLING VMWARE 5.5.1.x
Nothing is EVER easy on Linux. The same assumption (and proof) goes to updating VMWare after the FC5 upgrade. VMWare complained about not being able to find “the directory of C header files”. To resolve this problem, you must download the

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<a href="http://ftp.cvut.cz/vmware/vmware-any-any-update101.tar.gz" target="_blank">vmware-any-any-update101.tar.gz</a>

and run it. Everything will hum just fine after this update is applied to VMWare.

Much thanks to: brandonhutchinson.com and LinuxSky.com (Simplified Chinese only)

Daily Rant

On the way back from lunch to class today, NPR had an interesting program about how infants/children often imitate adults in what they do and pattern their own behaviors after the adults. The program was interesting except this one caller kept on going with her story and her experiences… etc. I mean, often these call-ins are interesting. But I really HATE it when a caller just monopolizes the show by talking and talking and talking… Idiots!… I hated it so much that I stopped listening the program and started reading a book instead.

In other news, the PERL class I am taking is pretty kick-ass. I don’t think I can learn quite as much on my own in a 2-day period. I like these short and intensive classes where we blast through a whole quarter’s worth of material in 4 days! We’ll be covering Regular Expressions this afternoon… which is something I’d been dying to master… and now I have a chance to…

Artsy Past

After having putting off reorganizing my CD binders for months, I finally decided to go ahead and consolidate all my data CDs, separating all the PC discs from my Mac disks. But while I was going through THAT, I realized I actually had more than half a dozen backup CDs of my art and design works from back in college. So then I decided I might as well consolidate all of THAT as well… Ah~ how I miss creating art.

So I threw away a bunch of discs, made DVDs where I could to save space. But I was saddened that one of my Houdini project backup CDs was corrupted (damn cheap CDRs). So on my DVDR, I decided to make 2 copies of the consolidated backup files. Murdza once told me he actually made backups, and then backups of backups, and then backups of backups of backups…. He kept one copy in his fire-proof safe and another at the bank (or so I remember)…. I should probably revisit those files every couple of years and reburn them just in case…

The Blast from the Past

Being in the web development business, it’s plain impossible to develop sites without having to check your work in Internet Explorer for bugs (not that my code is buggy, but that Internet Explorer rendering engines are simply not compliant to standards). So I finally broke down, booted up my Fedora Core 4 Linux on my 6-year-old Dell (running dual Pentium 3 @ 450Mhz!), fussed with VMWare and finally managed to install Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Oh, how I dreaded having to touch Windows again having stayed away from it for almost a year and a half. Just the installation of Windows 2000 felt like playing with Mac OS 9 again… So primitive and ancient. I especially “loved” the restarts after each service pack, patches to service packs and then hotfixes to the patches that were originally released to fix the service packs… etc. I wasted an entire evening just installing and patching Windows in VMWare. Nothing says “I love my life” like wasting time installing Windows OS!

The upside, though, is that I can perhaps install Internet Explorer 7 beta to see what the fuss is all about (yoohoo! Tabbed browsing… only 2 years late!)…. And then maybe if I feel adventurous enough, I’ll even download Windows Vista Public Beta and try to install it in VMWare (which I doubt will even install given that both the host and guest hardware are pretty damn old… even if by some miracle Vista installs, it’d probably take a few hours just to boot up… ha!).

I hope this is the last time I’ll have to deal with installing Windows ever again…

When Bacteria Stick

It’s crazy how nature never stops coming up with stuff that just stumps the best scientists of the day…

The bacterium Caulobacter crescentus uses the toughest glue on Earth to stick to river rocks, and now scientists are trying to figure out how to produce the stuff.

The adhesive can withstand an enormous amount of stress, equal to the force felt by a quarter with more than three cars piled on top of it. That’s two to three times more force than the best retail glues can handle.

The single-celled bacterium uses sugar molecules to stay put in rivers, streams, and water pipes, a new study found. It’s not clear how the glue actually works, however, but researchers presume some special proteins must be attached to the sugars.

“There are obvious applications since this adhesive works on wet surfaces,” said study leader Yves Brun, an Indiana University bacteriologist. “One possibility would be as a biodegradable surgical adhesive.”

Engineers could use the superior stickum too, Brun and colleagues say.

But making it has proved challenging. Like a mess of chewing gum, the gunk globs to everything, including the tools used to create it.

“We tried washing the glue off,” Brun said. “It didn’t work.”

Nuts!

Even though the scientists don’t know why it’s working the way it is working, I am glad they didn’t retreat to “Creationism” and give up….

WordPress “Anti-Spam Image” Plugin

After having installed a couple of blog spam quarantine solutions, I finally decided it’s time to stop the spam bots to even have a chance to waste the server resource. So I went ahead and installed Anti-Spam Image plugin. Don’t get me wrong, I think Sebastian’s advise to install Spam Karma was an excellet idea (I only wished I’d listened sooner), but I hate the fact that those spam messages even got a chance to live in the database and waste my server’s resource to process them… Hopefully Anti-Spam Image will at least cut down on the spams from spam bots so that I can just deal with the less annoying spams manually…

I, Woz

It’s always inspiring to read about great people and their great stories. In Steve Wozniak’s case, it’s interesting to see how HP has stayed a stubborn and old-fashioned company since the 70s. HP could have been Apple (and there’d never be an Apple), but it screwed up…. Not that they’ll ever admit that they regret passing on Woz’s designs for the original Apple I and Apple II, but it’s pretty clear that some company cultures stink and will always stay that way…

China’s RedBerry

Excerpt from an article:

On the eve of its long-delayed China launch, BlackBerry is facing a sudden challenge from a cheaper Chinese rival called, unapologetically, RedBerry.

The new service, aimed squarely at BlackBerry, was launched this month by China Unicom Ltd., the state-controlled telecommunications giant that ranks as China’s second-biggest mobile operator.

The new RedBerry service could pose a major challenge to Research in Motion Ltd., which is planning to launch BlackBerry in China by the end of next month. Its China launch has been delayed by two years of negotiations and regulatory obstacles, and RedBerry has now been introduced ahead of it.

Wow… Sweet! Chinese businessmen’s got to be one of the most “innovative” and “honest” people in the world… Innovative in stealing and coming up with original names for products they stole and honest in having no shame in doing it. I look forward to having such a great country and people to lead the world into the next century. I get excited just thinking about it! Woohoo!

Safari Still Unbearable

After ditching Firefox for Safari less than 48 hours ago, I am back using Firefox again. Safari’s memory leak was simply unbearable. After doing some surfing on how to boost both Safari and Firefox’s performance as well as reduce potential for memory leaks, I came across this nifty command line to check leaks:

For Safari, in the command prompt, run

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cosmo:~ zzz$ leaks Safari
Process 16320: 296847 nodes malloced for 47252 KB
Process 16320: 56 leaks for 6176 total leaked bytes.
.
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(lines and lines or error codes)

For Firefox, run

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cosmo:~ zzz$ leaks firefox-bin
Process 16320: 309998 nodes malloced for 47750 KB
Process 16320: 111 leaks for 3440 total leaked bytes.
.
.
.
(lines and lines of error codes)

When

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leaks Safari

was executed, the error codes ran for pages and pages in the command prompt. It was so long that the command prompt’s buffer ran out of memory (and only after I piped the errors to a text file did I find out that the error code generated a 20MB plain text file!!). And that was after I launched Safari fresh with 10 tabs. In comparison, Firefox’s error code was only a few mouse scrolls away. On top of that, after only having used Safari for less than 12 hours yesterday, I watched it gobbling up almost 200MB of RAM where as in Firefox, I can go on for days with keep the memory occupancy at less than 135MB. Again, this was all with about 10 tabs opened simultanously at all times.

After I decided to quit Safari (again), I closed the windows one by one after transfering all the pages to Firefox. And it gave me this error:

The following world leaks were detected (the check is done when all browser windows are closed):

2 WebView objects, 1 WebFrame object, 1 WebDataSource object, 1 WebFrameView object, 1 WebHTMLRepresentation object, 1 WebBridge object, 2 JavaScript interpreters.

Please write a bug report about this, along with reproducible steps if possible.

Safari Leaks

Supposedly Finder and almost everything else leaks memory as well… But I am surprised the OS holds up so well after having gone weeks (sometimes months) without a reboot… I wonder how XP and/or other OSes and their Desktops/X hold up against leaks. But I have never heard of Linux having to restart from crashes or bad memory leaks. And OSX has been pretty stable for the past 3.5 years in various versions I have been using. So Windows must just suck more then?

Argh… memory leaks are annoying…

Switching Back to Safari

I finally have had it with Firefox and its crawling speed on page loads, long page scrolls and other user interface issues. So I made the switch back to Safari again. Having used a crowded UI like Firefox’s, using Safari again is like taking a vacation from all the “interface noise”. Safari’s interface is clean and snappy. I do miss a couple of Firefox’s features though, namely “search as you type” and “AdBlocker”. Safari has a very cruel “search as you type” feature (even that, I think was from a plugin I installed).

Speaking of Safari, Carl sent me a site that compares Camino to Firefox and their differences. It’s an interesting read. Maybe I will give Camino a shot again when I am tired of Safari in a few months… But what I am really looking forward to is Apple’s next new OS and all the possibilities it holds (Safari 3.0, Mail 3.0 and other cool stuff).
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Chee-hoi and I were emailing back and forth on how he thinks Apple/Mac OSX are just pieces of crap. I was surprised that at this day and age, there are still people out to trash talk Apple even when the most critical of Apple/Mac geeks are making the switch to Mac OSX. Sure, us Mac users do seem a bit cocky at times, but it’s just so hard to grasp how some people can be so stubborn about trying new things when Windows is just so behind on almost every feature it has to offer! Worst yet, most people who trash talk Apple/Mac OSX haven’t even used a Mac for any meaningful period of time!

I think I am qualified to trash talk Windows and non-Apple hardware in general because I had been a hardcore user of “the other side” for so long (I have owned PCs before! Shame on me). I was even a systems administrator for them for years (to a point where I knew more than Dell’s tech support… well, not that they know anything anyway)!

But I took the flame bait myself. I only have myself to blame…

Blogs as Stocks

I stumbled upon Blog Stock Market the other day which uses a set of metrics to vaulate websites/blogs as if they were corporations with real market shares… WiredAtom fared “ok” considering it has about 0.00001 % of the market share (yoohoo!). And apparently, my “blogshare” is available for trading.

Care to buy some blogshares of WiredAtom? 😉

WiredAtom blogshare

Another pretty crazy site (thanks, Carl) of the week was Alexaholic. It (somehow) compares traffic of any 2 given (or 5) sites by showing you a series of graphics and charts. It turns out that my humble little dinky site fares pretty well to my former employer’s corporate site! Dang…

Alexaholic traffic comparison