Monthly Archives: June 2007

Top 10 Things That ZMD Is Doing While “Waking Up”

Posted by Julian Dunn on June 13, 2007
Linux / No Comments
10 Ordering CDs from Bill Gates’ Amazon.com wishlist just like RRDtool claims to do when running configure.
9 Booting Windows XP and running CHKDSK.
8 Defragmenting /usr/lib so that Mono can run more efficiently.
7 Converting your /var partition from ext3 to FAT-16.
6 Drawing the Windows “flying folders” in the background.
5 Downloading patches from the RedHat Network and then pretending them came from Novell.
4 Installing IPX/SPX for Linux and registering with any eDirectory servers it can find.
3 Launching Python for Windows to run the old version of rug that didn’t suck (as badly).
2 Upgrading the TCP/IP stack on your computer to support Web 2.0.

And the number one thing ZMD is doing while waking up:

1 Downloading YUM and creating YUM repositories so that when you throw ZMD out the window in frustration, you can still update your software.

SDF celebrates 20 year anniversary

Posted by Julian Dunn on June 11, 2007
UNIX / No Comments

On June 16th, SDF Public Access UNIX system will celebrate its 20th anniversary!

Twenty years ago, SDF-1 was a 300 bps dialup BBS running on an Apple ][e computer system, and has evolved over time into a twelve node DEC Alpha cluster running the NetBSD operating system. SDF users, of which I am one (keymaker@), pride themselves on the fact that theirs is one of the last bastions of “the real INTERNET”, out of the reach and scope of the commercialism and advertising of the DOT COM entities. I recall fondly the days before commercial traffic was permitted on the NSFNet, and oftentimes wish that we could return to those days when everyone knew their proverbial neighbours.

If you’re interested in SDF, lifetime membership is very affordable at $36. You can find out more information about SDF here. You won’t find any fancy Web 2.0 widgets, but you can definitely still use Gopher 1.0!

fixing Adobe Acrobat Reader’s “expr: syntax error” message

Posted by Julian Dunn on June 07, 2007
Linux / 1 Comment

I just upgraded to Fedora (no longer “Core”) 7 and decided to finally install Adobe Acrobat Reader for Linux. Normally I’ve used the built-in “Document Viewer”, but I needed to fill in a PDF form, and only Reader will allow you to do that.

Upon installing Reader, I found it would loop forever, printing expr: syntax error on the screen. Fortunately, someone has already solved this problem:

Fix Adobe Acrobat Reader’s “expr: syntax error” message

Now it works perfectly. Thanks, Javier Arturo Rodríguez!

There are a few other annoyances with Fedora 7. One is that Azureus crashes right after startup using the Sun JVM 1.6.0_01 (Update 1). I’m also getting a strange BUG: warning on system startup which apparently has been fixed in CVS.

I also had to perform an upgrade using Yum instead of booting off the installation CD and doing a binary upgrade, because my system has a Highpoint 1740 SATA RAID adapter and a driver disk is not yet available from Highpoint for this. My procedure for upgrading using Yum and keeping the system functional was as follows:

  1. Upgrade using the procedure described in the Yum Upgrade FAQ as above. This involved a lot of manual dependency munging, specifically me having to massage an upgrade of mkinitrd and nash manually.
  2. Build the Highpoint rr174x driver for the new kernel and install it into the initrd. This involved a magic incantation of the sort cd /usr/src/rr174x-linux-src-1.02/product/rr174x/linux/ && make install KERNELDIR=/usr/src/kernels/2.6.21-1.3194.fc7-x86_64.
  3. Resolve .rpmsave/.rpmnew conflicts (basically mergemaster for Linux)
  4. Fix up /boot/grub/grub.conf to make sure the new kernel is there (for some reason it wasn’t)
  5. Comment out old /dev/hd*-format devices in /etc/fstab because Fedora has switched to using libata entirely, so even old PATA devices now use the /dev/sd* notation.
  6. Reboot and cross fingers.
  7. Fix up disk device names in /etc/fstab with the new sd* name.
  8. Reconfigure samba so girlfriend can access MP3s again. :-)

Altogether, not the most painful upgrade I’ve done, but I would have preferred to do the binary upgrade using the installer CD. Only if Highpoint would release its drivers as open source and then they could be incorporated into the kernel tree…