next desktop jump

Now Fedora 7 is out for couple of months, Fiesty Fawn was out even before that. So it was obvious that I would find something wrong with my Fedora 6 installations and convince myself to get bored of it.

I am the Redhat guy, and never could make myself like package management of other distros. But Ubuntu making so much noise and after reading Mark Shuttleworth's blog for a while, I couldn't avoid getting excited about Feisty Fawn. I gave it a first shot within 2-3 days of its release. But I found myself afraid of diving into the LVM configuration that Kubuntu-alternative installation CD offers. I didn't want to blow my existing LVs. I did some experiments in a virtual machine. Finally I braved myself into swallowing the pill. Seconds later I felt like choking when the system went into freeze at a screen after I chose to configure LVM. Thanks to the shell, I realized it wasn't frozen but was blocking. When I tailed the system logs, I found it was waiting for each volume to get discover and was waiting 30 seconds on each of them. With 7 volumes I could manage to steal a nap. Once it was done, it listed all LVs and rest of the things went smoothly. After entire installation the system booted just fine, without any video driver problems etc. Usual setup tasks (firefox, thunderbird,....) went fine. Liked the GUI on top of apt-get system. But wondered why it was giving some red colored "Bad install" errors during installation of some packages. It's dependencies might be failing, but couldn't find any straightforward error saying so. My biggest motivation for desktop switch was Beryl. But after spending an hour or so and following all instructions on forums, I still couldn't get beryl-manager and emerald-theme-manager to install. The repo that provided them didn't provide many dependencies that were needed. Big bummer! Never could find any repos that could satisfy those dependencies (and there were lot). I left it aside for a while and started installing gaim. Realized pidgin is the new name. The same story repeats. I couldn't install pidgin after spending some 10 minutes...... Thankfully I had my FC6 installation on one of the volumes, so I switched back.......


....enter Fedora 7. Installed it first day (or second?!). Everything went fine. But it wouldn't boot alright - giving me tons of Red "[Failed]" results for various services. I always have these problems office machines where NIS, NFS all doesn't work unless you do everything right. I was lucky with FC6 last time. But F7 got screwed. so back to FC6 for few days....

Since I can't reboot my office machine quite often (with so many things open all the time), it took till this week to me try again. My FC6 was very sluggish. The reason I found out was: my home directory was on the network drive. And our file server is overloaded nowadays. So I had decided to create local account and home directories next time. On Monday, I reinstalled F7 and didn't configure NIS at the installation time. Everything worked like a charm. No... Beryl won't work out of the box. But I knew what to do. It seems the stock NVidia driver that comes with F7 (nv) isn't sufficient (at least for the graphics card I have). But the additional steps I had to do were straightforward:
Goto Livna and install their RPM which automatically adds its repo address to your yum configuration.
Install kmod-nvidia using yum install. [Note: Do NOT install this RPM using rpm commandline, USE yum. More likely this driver is compiled with a newer linux kernel that the stock F7. So "yum install" will automatically do this upgrade, you might miss that out with manual rpm installation. I read some posts which messed up because of this]
Reboot (Now you should see nVidia logo before X starts)
Run Beryl-manager it should work.


........... So Fedora 7 gets my vote again this time.

I think Ubuntu is a nice system. Might be very user friendly, once it's installed. But it is still not good for power users (or at least not enough to lure RedHat power users to its camp). I wish just like kubuntu, xubuntu, they come up with "Pubuntu - Ubuntu for power users" - which has support for LVM management at installation time, etc.

P.S. Pidgin was a great find. It has awesome GUI compared to gaim.

The "Screen"

Thanks to a friend who introduced me to the screen utility about a year ago. It is a very fine utility for unix programmers/users who spend most of the time using CLIs. I would say it is a desktop virtualization solution applied to command line terminal. It is to the command prompt, what VNC is to the graphical desktop. To learn more follow the above link or google. It is installed on almost all linux distributions by default, so you can just start using it right away.

I was however slow in adopting it. Mainly because switching between the screens wasn't so quick. The screen command line utility gives an option of creating tabs in one screen and switching between them, but that meant mastering several key sequences. So I wrote my own wrapper script to do the job. Following is the code. Save it in a file and name it suitably (use a short name that's handy - I call it 'sc') and just execute it.

The code is available here

Here is a sample run:

jayesh@bluebox [~] sc --help
Usage: sc
Generates list of screens if available and gives a prompt
Valid commands to enter at prompt -->
new-<NEW_SCREEN> - creates a new screen with name NEW_SCREEN
                   and connects to it
[number]         - number is the index of the screen you want
                   to connect to
q                - quit

jayesh@bluebox [~] sc
Create new screen. Use the command 'new-'
>>new-root
[Now you can login as root on this user to do all administrative tasks]

..... 
[create bunch of other screens for others tasks you do -
 compiler,editor, etc.]

jayesh@bluebox [~] sc
0] compiler
1] root
2] editor
>> 1

[Now you connect to screen 1, where you are logged in as user. 
You don't have to enter root password again-n-again]

Suggestions are always welcome!

Nice review article on virtualization technologies

This one is pretty thorough analysis of status quo on Virtualization.

I liked this quote best...

"Between Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, XenSource, VMware and the scarcity of good benchmark data, it's going to be tricky for users to figure out which operating systems will deliver the best virtualization performance on whose version of which hypervisor."

Once again... a quote from 'Troy'

Everytime I watch Troy, I find some dialog worth blogging....

This one is from Achilles mother Thetis to him when he is deciding to leave for Troy...

"If you stay in Larisa......you will find peace.

You will find a wonderful woman.

You will have sons and daughters,and they will have children. And they will love you.
When you are gone,they will remember you.

But when your children are dead and their children after them...
...your name will be lost.



If you go to Troy......glory will be yours.

They will write stories about your
victories for thousands of years.

The world will remember your name.

But if you go to Troy......you will never come home.

For your glory walks hand in hand with your doom.

And I shall never see you again."

quotes from George Carlin

Here is the original post.

And here are the ones I liked very much:

* Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

* I put a dollar in a change machine. Nothing changed.

* No one knows what’s next, but everybody does it.

* I’ve never seen a homeless guy with a bottle of Gatorade.

* So far, this is the oldest I’ve been.