software upgrades

Configuring Olga’s workstation

I’ve finished configuration of Olga’s workstation. Basically, everything was properly autodetected and configured. I just had to copy games highscores back to /var/lib/games and overwrite /etc/passwd*, /etc/group*, and /etc/shadow* with the network copy of the files. xmms-mp3 RPM had to be downloaded from FreshRPMS.net and installed on her box to fix back the MP3 playback. Couple of symlinks were missing – easily fixed too.

KDE started fine. Gnome though detected a problem with my NFS configuration. Apparently, last time when I upgraded a server from Red Hat Linux 6.2 to 7.2 nfs permissions were not set correctly on /var/lib/nfs which caused rpc.lockd to die misserably immidiately after it printed [OK] for start on the screen. rpc.lockd needs a writeable directory /var/lib/nfs/sm to work properly. The amusing part of it is that I found out about this on Google, which pointed me to an article about a guy who upgraded his Mandrake Linux from 8.0 to 9.1. Heh.

Another fixed needed to be done for Mozilla preferences, since Olga was using a newer version of Mozilla then the one shipped with Red Hat Linux 9. Understandable.

Anyway, the machine is up and running and Olga even likes it. Evolution was not interesting enough, OpenOffice is awaiting it’s turn. All games were checked. 3D OpenGL chess screensaver is configured to run now. Previously she used random rotation method for the choice of screensaver.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes.

Home network upgrade

Started to upgrade my home network to Red Hat Linux 9. My wife’s workstation seems to be the simpliest, so first it goes.

Everything went not as good as I hoped it would, so I had to reinstall the box from scratch. All configuration is left for later.

Getting ready for Red Hat Linux 8.0

My secondary workstation at the office finally got a fixed CD-ROM and a bigger hard drive. Immidiately downloaded Red Hat Beta (Limbo) and it now awaits testing. I just hope that I will install it before the final version of Red Hat Linux 8.0 will come out.

Random bits

Lots of small things today: monthly backups scheduled, inserted few fresh tapes into the cycle, played with Mutt 1.4 (found it much faster with opening/closing/sorting of mailboxes then 1.2), upgraded GeForce2 to the one with 64 MBytes of memory, revisited Subversion website (modern alternative to CVS), some other small fixes and updates.

Back to Red Hat Linux 7.2

I have decided to downgrade my DVD box to Red Hat 7.2. I am tired of fighting with the laggy picture and sound. 7.2 had it all nice. 7.3 broke it and I cannot find whether it’s the kernel, XFree, something else, or the combination. I’ve got to find those antique CDs. :)