Bitwise.org

After waiting around for the URL redirect bug in Rhythmbox to get fixed in FC6, I decided to see what the problem was. After some investigation, I found that it had been fixed in 0.9.6 (FC6 uses 0.9.5 at time of writing). I had a look to see if an update was in testing, but I couldn't see anything. I saw that there was a 0.9.7 for FC7, but didn't want to go playing in that area. So, I decided to create my own package.

I took the src.rpm from FC6, updated the source with the vanilla tarball from Gnome and had a go. I had some issues with libgpod being < 0.4 and old Gnome dekstop integration stuff being dropped in 0.9.6 & 0.9.7.

Eventually, I made these:
Rhythmbox-0.9.7
Rhythmbox spec file (Bitwise)

WARNING: I've disabled iPod support because of dependency problems.
WARNING: I'm not an expert at this; use at your own risk.

Contact me at mcl if you have any comment.

I have a LiveJournal account for personal blogging. I've let it go stale as I was finding it tedious to update through the web-client and I didn't like the idea of downloading software onto my machine to update it. Browsing through the Fedora packages list, I found a few tools for updating blogs from the desktop. First I found BloGTK, then Gnome-Blogger, and finally Drivel. I've settled on Drivel as it provides good keyboard controlled access to the LiveJournal features.

I finally figured out how to get two TV tuner cards working in my Myth box. This might seem really obvious at first, but when one card isn't working properly, it becomes a litle more complicated.

Basically the fix is this: add the option parameter to the modules.conf, or in this case the cx88xx file in the modules.d directory. It looks like the following

# DV1000T, then Fusion
options cx88xx card=35,15

I have to do it this way, because the Fusion card isn't recognised. It doesn't seem to have a sub-PCI-id burned onto the card.

The fix is simple and kinda obvious when you look at how network cards deal with different options (speed, duplex, etc.) for the same module. But there really was nothing I found that just said it could be done for any module. I'm still not really sure that it can, but it would make sense if modules followed a template that allowed this behaviour.

Anyway, I hope this helps somebody out there with a similar problem.

It's that time of year again - another Fedora release means that I have to look at upgrading and/or re-installing my systems to the new release. My impression is that as soon as a new release is done, support tends to move onto it straight-away. So, there's not much point in hanging around on the old and busted version.

This time around, I really didn't feel like re-installing my main workstationfrom scratch. I'd had good success upgrading my work laptop from FC5 to FC6 using an update install, but it didn't translate to the workstation. I downloaded the DVD iso from the iiNet mirror and created an install DVD, but the update part of the install failed to recognise the existing installation. As I'd ignored the built-in fake-RAID controller and used software RAID instead, the installer became confused when it saw the disks. It didn't see the sRAID and LVM disks.

Still not wanting to do a scratch install, I opted for the YUM update method.This is pretty much problem-free, but leaves the system a little rough around the edges. I had to remove some packages that had 64 and 32-bit versions as it was causing problems with dependecy resolution. Post-upgrade, I've still had do things like remove OpenOffice.org and reinstall it. Pupplet doesn't seem to work properly and sound had to be played with so that ALSA knew the difference between the mic on my USB webcam, and the C8KS sound device.

I'm pretty happy with the result, but I may get the urge to buy two new disks and recreate the install from scratch. I'm pretty cautious about messing with my personal data, so I like to leave the data on the disks completely alone if possible. I might just wait until FC7 comes out :)

It happens to the best of us... The 40GB disk I have in the Ultra 10 decided to have a bad day, and took the server with it. I was fortunate in that the data were recoverable. I was able to re-install OpenBSD 3.6 on one of the original 4GB disks, and migrate the data over. I started with the mail server, as I needed it for some important emails coming to the bitwise.org accounts. I've only now gotten around to migrating the web-server files.