Archive for the 'Linux' Category

Linux has taken its time to get established on the desktop, but over the past twelve months I’ve been seeing it all over the place.

My wireless router is Linux-based, and even admits as much on the packaging. My Nokia N800 internet tablet runs Linux too.

Wal-mart has been selling a budget PC that runs Linux, and Asus is offering the Eee-PC budget Linux laptop. The one-laptop-per-child project runs Linux too.

My kids often berate me for running a strange operating system which makes it hard for them to use the same software as their schoolfriends. They were as surprised as I was, on a ThomsonFly flight last year, to watch the seat-back entertainment system booting up and proudly announcing that it was running Red Hat Linux 9.

But what startled me even more than that was the February 2008 issue of MacFormat magazine. As usual, it includes a DVD. And what should be on the DVD but Fedora Linux! Here’s how they explain it:

Linux on your Mac? Yes please. Don’t fancy getting Leopard? Then why not try Fedora? It’s a free Linux-based OS that can be used in conjunction with Parallels Desktop for Mac (which is also available on the DVD).

Yep. Linux has arrived.

I found Fedora Core 6 on a cover-DVD of Linux Magazine, which saved me having to download it using BitTorrent. The upgrade apparently went smoothly, although it surprised me that it took an hour and a half. I do have a lot of packages installed though.

On rebooting I was unable to bring up KDE. It displayed a message “Can’t load kde-base” then gave me a blank screen. No keys were responding except good old control-alt-backspace, which kills the X server.

I then brought up Gnome, from which I ran pup (the package updater) which downloaded and installed a whole load of upgrades. One more reboot and KDE worked just fine.

With this upgrade, I now have a rhythmbox bug that affects systems with more than one CD drive. If I try to play a CD in the first drive, rhythmbox detects it and offers for me to play it - but it won’t play if I click the Play button. If I eject the CD and put it into the second CD drive, the Play button works just fine. But if I start with the CD in the second drive, I need to move it to the first drive to play the tracks that were identified while it was in the second drive. At least I have a workaround until this bug is fixed.

Fonts have changed in Fedora Core 6. The default sans serif font is crisper and more readable than every, although I think the default serif font has slightly reduced readability.

A big plus is that most applications seem more responsive - in particular there is a big improvement with Firefox 1.5.0.8.

After upgrading to Fedora Core 5, the mplayer media player works fine but displays a message “Failed to open ~/.mplayer/default.sub”.

A posting by ndhskp suggested to create an empty default.sub file, and that indeed got rid of the error message. Somehow, I think mplayer should have worked out how to resolve this itself.

I decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 4 to 5. After downloading the ISO and burning it to DVD, I made a full backup and booted the DVD to upgrade.

Most of the upgrade went fairly smoothly. The only real nuisance was that Fedora Core 5 includes version 8.1.3 of the PostgresQL databse, which can’t read the database format used by PostgreSQL 8.0.7 in Fedora Core 4.

The Fedora release notes do mention this, although they can be interpreted to imply that you can convert your data after you upgrade. This isn’t the case, so I installed PostgresQL 8.0.7 from source, exported the data, reinstalled 8.1.3 and imported the data.

That sorted everything out.