Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Open source software activity usually bumps up quite a lot before and during Christmas.  This time around I am waiting for:

• Fedora 10, which should be released today.
• WordPress 2.7, which should be released “some time in November“.
• Firefox 3.1, which is approaching its second beta.

What are your waiting for this year?

I have recently upgraded my laptop to Fedora 9.  Those of you who come often to this blog or follow me on Twitter, know that I’ve been waiting for this release like for nothing else.  Two technologies in particular - KDE 4 and Firefox 3 - were the center of my focus.  Of course, I could updated them separately and tried them earlier, but I wanted to follow the path of the distribution.

The upgrade itself went fast and easy.  But starting with the first reboot, I was getting more and more negative towards the new release.  While booting for the first time, I got two messages, notifying me that wpa_suppclient service and CUPS daemon failed to start.  While I don’t care much about printers, wireless connectivity is vital for me, so that was a bit discouraging.

The login screen.  It was changed quite a bit, and I didn’t like it much.  Logging in.  Somehow I ended up in Gnome, even though my desktop environment was KDE for the last 7 years or so.  Logout.  Switch into long awaited KDE 4.  From the first look it was beautiful, even though not quite for my tastes.  Surely, I’d need to reconfigure and change a few things. Not a problem for me at all - even more fun so.

[Read more →]

Fedora 9 is coming Real Soon Now ©. I mentioned before that I am desperately waiting for this release, since it brings KDE 4 and Firefox 3. One thing that I haven’t seen noticed anywhere until I read this interview is “preupgrade”. It sounds pretty cool:

By now, the “preupgrade” package should be available in updates-testing for Fedora 8. Enable the updates-testing repo and install it. It currently shows up as “Upgrade Fedora” in your Applications -> System menu.
From there, it’s very simple - follow the screens to choose what to upgrade to, wait for everything to download, hit “Reboot”, and the upgrade will begin!

Basically, what happens is that Fedora 9 installer is downloaded together with all the required packages, while you are still using Fedora 8. Once everything is in place, you can simply reboot and upgrade your system, without burning any CDs or DVDs or waiting for long downloads while having nothing to do.

A new version of my favorite Linux distribution has been released recently - Fedora 8.  I got my hands on the installation DVD (thanks bro!) and tried it straight away.

It didn’t go very well - the installation was hanging up during dependencies check.  I thought maybe it was something simple to fix and checked it with strace, which showed that the installation was looping constantly creating some temporary files and then removing them.  I tried to create these files by hand, but they were immediately removed.  I asked around on #fedora IRC channel, but it was over a weekend and it was rather empty.  No tips were given.

Then I came across Michael’s post that reminded me that I could do an upgrade using Yum package manager, bypassing the installation altogether.   Following the steps in the guide was simple and soon yum started downloading the new packages.  But my Internet connection is pretty slow, it would have taken me about two days just to get the files.   Not much fun to wait.  Instead I decided to copy files from the DVD to /var/cache/yum/fedora/packages/ directory and restart the upgrade process.  Now all I needed to download were the updates that were released since the distribution went public.

A couple of hours later I rebooted into Fedora 8, running the new tick-less kernel (the biggest reason for me to upgrade).  I also noticed that a few fonts packages were updated - fonts are sharper and cleaner.  NetworkManager was upgraded.  And a few other things improved.

I’ve heard a lot of people complaining about sound problems due to a new sound server, but I didn’t have a chance to test it yet.  Other than this though everything seems to be running just fine.

I smiled after reading this post.  It reminded me of the fact that in our office, designers use my laptop to test web sites on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.  We have two guys doing the designs, and one of the uses Windows Vista, which runs MSIE 7.  Another one uses, I think, Windows XP, but with MSIE upgraded to version 7 too.    I heard it’s possible to have several versions of Internet Explorer running on the same Windows installation, but nobody around here knows how to do it or cares enough to experiment.

But the funniest thing in this whole story is that my laptop is running on Fedora Linux.