Well the saga continues. I suspect there will be a three as I get all software installed and mention tips and tweaks. III may not be named as such, I may just do a series of articles on little things that I’ve changed. At this hour I’ve got the KDE desktop for Mandriva 2006 up and running and am as I type letting more software install. I’ve had a few bumps along the way and let me tell you about them. First was the bad md5sum on the first disk image… my fault. I expected bittorrent to have checked it and made sure it was correct, but apparently that failed. Again, my fault.
Category: Linux
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Mandriva 2006 upgrade on Inspiron 8000 laptop saga Part I
I had a chance today to start the upgrade process for Mandriva 2006 on my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8000). Now, let’s see…. a bit of background. Mandriva (Mandrive/Mandrake) has been my favorite distro since converting to linux several years back (around Mandrake 8.1 or 8.2) I’ve had it running on the laptop since then and was up to 10.1 official (if I remember correctly). The last upgrade I did, I just setup the install sources in urpmi and did urpmi –auto-select –auto from the command line and off it went. In short order I had a fresh upgraded system. Today was not to be so smooth.
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Mandriva 2006 review
Madpengiun now has a review up of Mandriva 2006. I’m still hoping soon to have time to sit down and upgrade on at least the laptop. The biggest problem the reviewer had was (slow?) performance under KDE which he suspected could be hardware specific. Overall it sounds like things are VERY well done, it looks like a nice interactive firewall, a la zonealarm is in there which the reviewer was pleased with.
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Some links to purchase linux boxed set installs
OK, truth be told linux is usually thought of as a download for free and install operating system and there are LOT’s of ways to do that. But it is also available for purchase at various places, from the different distributions web sites.
Also, these are links to the product pages at Amazon. They have a new link style that I was curious to test out and see what it looked like.
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Apache2 ( apache webserver ) not restarting
This is an error I’ve run into a few times. It’s rare enough that the second time I saw it, I had a vague memory that it had happened before. The third time though (was within the last week) I remembered and even remembered where the file was located to solve it. Here’s the problem….
As far as I know this is an apache2 problem, not prior.
Apache is not running. You try to start apache and receive the message…Cannot allocate shared memory: (17)File exists apache
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Running Windows Applications in Linux another look at Wine
Recently I did a post on the release of version 5 of Crossover Office which is a commercially supported variation of the wine project. In fact, it’s very similar, the only exceptions I know of are the neater installer for software and paid support. Anyway, I’ve got a project I’ve been working on that I’ve used cxoffice quite a bit in to run a particular application that isn’t directly available on linux (there are alternatives but none that work exactly the same way… more on that in a future post…) Anyway, it got me thinking and I visited the wine site and found that 0.9.1 has now been released. I checked the wine version on my desktop and decided to upgrade to the newest plain vanilla wine release and see how well it does….
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Firefox 1.5 RC3
News is coming out that Mozilla Firefox 1.5 RC3 is now available. There’s coverage at mozillazine.org. From the comments there may be a few bugs to work out still, although I’ve just skimmed. I’m not sure if those comments are from people that have tried RC3, or are asking if a bug has been fixed since RC2.
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VNC or Tightvnc for remote pc access
I was surprised to do a search and find that I haven’t mentioned tightvnc before (or even merely VNC as a useful tool.) Ok – here’s the scenario, you need a way to get remote pc access, or remotely view a desktop, maybe it’s a Windows machine and you’re using a Mac? Or Maybe it’s a Mac and you have a linux desktop? Or a Linux server from a Windows machine? Most of the time in the Windows to Windows remote control area the choice becomes either Remote Desktop, or PCAnywhere. There are other options though. One that I’m particularly found of is TightVNC, which is an implementation of the VNC protocol (VNC stands for Virtual Network Computing).
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Part 2 of the Mandrake or Mandriva 2006 review
I’m still not used to the name Mandriva, Mandrake is just what I remember… anyway, mandrake.tips.4.free.fr has the second part of their mandriva 2006 review up. It sounds as though in the last week the iso’s of the free edition are now publicly available as well. This time around special attention is paid to hardware support, and multimedia capabilites focusing on image handling/editing software.
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Top 10 linux sysadmin utilites
There is an interesting article at Linux.com on the top ten administrator utilities in linux. Titled “My sysadmin toolbox” it goes into some detail on some of the good standby’s that if you’re interested in learning command line linux, you ought to take a look at. The one that I hesitate on is pwgen which is a utility for generating random passwords. I’ve always read that if you can create the password with a program, it can be broken the sameway. However, I bet the passwords generated with pwgen are better than those that most users pick out (fred or mynewcar for example…)