I am trying out a new theme for this blog. I made it more black-and-white. Also I think it is more consistent with my other more technical pages. I will be revamping the style-sheets and layout on those as well.

In case anyone is wondering, I wrote it from scratch so it may still look a little odd in some browsers. I’d appreciate anyone using less popular browsers to let me know if it looks odd, especially Opera and Webkit/Safari users.

Comments/opinions welcome.

Posted in: Miscellaneous,

Can you feel the burn of “Sulphur” ?

After an unfortunate 2 week delay the Fedora project just announced the release of Fedora 9. Fedora has always been known to be the latest and greatest and this release is no different, rough edges and all. A great deal of hard work has been done to put this all together.

The highlights from the Release Summary:

Desktop

• GNOME 2.22 - many added functions, improvements
• KDE 4.0.3 - the highly anticipated KDE4!
• XFCE 4.4.2 - now in it’s own LiveSpin as well, just like KDE and GNOME
• Online Desktop - providing a desktop experience designed around online services

Administration/Hardware/System

• Network Manager - major improvements for wireless network management, mobile broadband, GSM, CDMA as well as Ad-Hoc networking
• Bluetooth - devices and tools now have better graphical and system integration
• Laptops - users benefit from the “quirks” feature in HAL, including better suspend/resume and multimedia keyboard support
• PackageKit - An easy to use tool for updating.
• YUM - performance improvements.
• Xorg 7.4/X Server 1.5 (almost) - Major updates to X including faster startup and shutdown (unfortunately not quite complete but should be updated soon)
• Upstart - Originally from Ubuntu, this will eventually replace the old init system leading to faster bootup time

Graphics/Multimedia

• GNOME Cheese - a webcam photo and video creation utility
• PulseAudio - updated and now default

Java

• OpenJDK - A switch from IcedTea. Closer alignment with Sun Open Source Java

SoftwareUpdates

• Firefox 3.0 (almost) - Not quite complete but massive improvements over Firefox 2
• Eclipse 3.3.1
• Perl 5.10 - many improvements
• OpenOffice 2.4 - many new features
• Kernel 2.6.25

Installer (Anaconda)

• More flexibility in installation
• Partition Resizing - A very welcome option to allow resizing EXT2/EXT3/NTFS partitions before installation (esp when dual booting with that other OS)
• Rescue Mode - improved now with FirstAidKit

You can download Fedora 9 using the standard mirrors or using the Torrent (recommended).

Please user the Fedora-List mailing list or any of the forums for help. I have published my Personal Fedora 9 Installation Guide which should provide people with some hints for people eager to try it out. Lots more to do!

Fedora 9 as I have examined for a few weeks now is definitely far more polished than the past releases. I am sure people will like it! A more thorough examination to follow. Till then …

… I hope you like the smell of Sulphur.

Posted in: Distributions, F9, Fedora,

I have a 4yr old Athlon-XP machine which I use as a Media Center/Home Theater PC. It is running RedHat 8.0 (heavily modified) with a Hauppauge PVR-250, MPlayer and some simple/buggy front end. Seeing as I designed it at the end of 2003, quite a bit of software is out of date.

The most critical componets are the ivtv driver that runs the PVR-250 and MPlayer. I won’t update the ivtv because I built it for a 2.4.24 kernel and I had to write my own recording application and my own scheduler daemon for recording TV. So as with all interdependent software - its easy to break something.

My MPlayer has been giving a great deal of trouble recently. It is running version 1.0pre5 which I beleive was released in 2004(?). Some of the MPEG2 recordings from the PVR-250 have some issues during playback. I’m hoping the problem will go away with an updated MPlayer, although I know I will get improvement with ivtv, but I can’t afford to do that.

The last “released” version of MPlayer was 1.0RC2. There are no available packages for RedHat 8, so I used my MPlayer compile guide. Since MPlayer only recently supported a GTK2 gui I chose to use a GTK1 gui since that’s what I had in Redhat 8. Virtually everything else was properly autodetected. So my configure step looked like this (quite simple):

[root@proteus MPlayer-1.0rc2]# ./configure --enable-gui \
--enable-largefiles \
--enable-gtk1

Unfortunately the make step (the compiling) broke with this error:

In file included from /usr/include/netdb.h:28,
                 from network.h:16,
                 from stream.h:65,
                 from stream_dvd.c:32:
/usr/include/netinet/in.h:259: parse error before '(' token
/usr/include/netinet/in.h:259: parse error before "__u32"
/usr/include/netinet/in.h:260: parse error before '(' token
/usr/include/netinet/in.h:260: parse error before "__u16"
/usr/include/netinet/in.h:262: parse error before '(' token
/usr/include/netinet/in.h:262: parse error before "__u32"
/usr/include/netinet/in.h:264: parse error before '(' token
/usr/include/netinet/in.h:264: parse error before "__u16"
stream_dvd.c: In function `dvd_parse_chapter_range':
stream_dvd.c:168: warning: passing arg 2 of `strtol' from incompatible pointer type
make[1]: *** [stream_dvd.o] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/root/dvr/mm/mplayer/MPlayer-1.0rc2/stream'
make: *** [stream/stream.a] Error 2

I hunted through the mplayer-users mailing list and found out that this is a problem with a Redhat being very old and basically no longer support. Someone suggested doing the following.

Edit /usr/include/netinet/in.h and at line 259, add following:

//mjm - to compile for MPlayerRC2
#undef ntohl
#undef ntohs
#undef htonl
#undef htons
//mjm

Then I was able to rerun the make. Then I reverted the file back to its original.

Some other things: I did also update to the latest release of XviD. I’m pretty sure that the ancient version of Xine is probably broken as well, but since I only used that to play DVD’s, I’d much rather use my Samsung DVD Player.

I know that RedHat 8 is forever out of date, so I’m updating the system to CentOS, but that’s been quite troublesome, more on that later.

Posted in: Multimedia, Red Hat,

A frequently asked question is: Where can I find a specific older version of Fedora? The correct answer is: If you CANNOT find it on the official Fedora Mirror List, then chances are it is too old and not supported.

Unless you need an older version for some very specific task, I strongly recommend that you use a recent version of Fedora.

To find an older version, start by going through the mirrors to see if you can find a site that is physically closer to you (for faster downloads). If you cannot find the version on a mirror, try downloading from Redhat’s site (below).

Some things to note:

• If a DVD image is not available try to generate your own DVD from CD’s.
• The SRPM ISO images are for source code and not useful for running and/or installing.
• The follow links could be removed at any point in the future.
• The rescue-CD is not needed for installing/running but maybe helpful to boot or fix an existing installation.
• Since you need to download each ISO individually, make sure to verify the MD5SUM or SHA1SUM.

Download Links:

Fedora Version	Architecture	Install CD’s	Rescue-CD	DVD
Fedora Core 1	i386	3
	x86_64	3
Fedora Core 2	i386	4	yes	yes
	x86_64	4		yes
Fedora Core 3	i386	4	yes	yes
	x86_64	4		yes
Fedora Core 4	i386	4	yes	yes
	x86_64	5	yes	yes
	ppc	5		yes
Fedora Core 5	i386	5	yes	yes
	x86_64	5	yes	yes
	ppc	5	yes	yes
Fedora Core 6	i386	5	yes	yes
	x86_64	6	yes	yes
	ppc	6	yes	yes

Fedora 7 and newer no longer use “Core” as part of the release name.

Fedora Version	Architecture	Media Type
Fedora 7	i386	DVD + Rescue CD
	i386	Live CD
	x86_64	DVD + Rescue CD
	x86_64	Live DVD
	ppc	DVD + Rescue CD
Fedora 8	i386	DVD + Rescue CD
	i686	Live CD
	x86_64	DVD + Rescue CD
	x86_64	Live DVD
	ppc	DVD + Rescue CD
	ppc	Live CD
Fedora 9	i386	DVD, 6-CD Set
	i686	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	x86_64	DVD, 7-CD Set
	x86_64	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	ppc	DVD, 7-CD Set
Fedora 10	i386	DVD, 6-CD Set
	i686	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	x86_64	DVD, 6-CD Set
	x86_64	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	ppc	DVD, 7-CD Set
Fedora 11	i386	DVD, 6-CD Set
	i686	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	x86_64	DVD, 6-CD Set
	x86_64	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	ppc	DVD, 7-CD Set
Fedora 12	i386	DVD, 5-CD Set
	i686	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	x86_64	DVD, 5-CD Set
	x86_64	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	ppc	DVD, 6-CD Set
Fedora 13	i386	DVD, 5-CD Set
	i686	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	x86_64	DVD, 5-CD Set
	x86_64	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
Fedora 14	i386	DVD, 5-CD Set
	i686	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)
	x86_64	DVD, 5-CD Set
	x86_64	Live CDs (Gnome, KDE)

Related: Fedora Public Mirror List How to download Fedora

Older versions of CentOS can be found here: https://vault.centos.org/

UPDATE: 10/04/2008 - Updated all links to archives.fedoraproject.org

UPDATE: 03/31/2009 - Updated for Fedora 7 and later. No installation CD sets are available.

UPDATE: 02/22/2010 - Added Fedora 9 and 10.

UPDATE: 03/23/2012 - Added Fedora 11-14.

Posted in: Distributions, F10, F7, F8, F9, FC4, FC5, FC6, Fedora,

Just for fun … inspired by the Fedora bloggers.

# history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head

On my Fedora 8 box:

481 ls
297 cd
54 vim
24 rm
17 du
12 sudo
12 mv
9 who
9 screen
9 find

On my CentOS 5.1 box:

344 ls
234 cd
54 sudo
29 vim
23 rpm
22 ./annoying_app_i_cant_get_to_work_on_centos5
18 ./configure
16 pwd
15 wget
15 scp

On my web server:

378 ls
213 cd
130 vim
47 grep
39 exit
37 cat
30 diff
14 cp
10 who
9 rm

Bonus points for anyone who can point out interesting things…

Posted in: Fedora, Fun, Miscellaneous,