Just Another Illusion

The Horrors of Fedora 10 (Let the Flame Wars Begin)

2008-12-07T21:15:00.012-05:00

This is the single hardest post I've ever written. My distro of choice since Redhat 5.2 is gone from my computer. It's been replaced by Kubuntu. I down loaded the latest Fedora 10 64-bit DVD and went through the installation as normal. I ALWAYS do a fresh install on everything, except my home directory, which is in a separate partition.

I use the KDE4 gui because I really don't like Gnome. That's where my problems begin. I finish the install, and try to log in to KDE as a regular user the screen goes blank. The gears churn for a couple of seconds and the login screen returns. I'm like OK let's try it again, the same thing happen. I can log in as root, but not a normal user. I change the password, and reinstalled several times over the next 5 days.

I, at one point, installed Gnome, to see if I could log in normally. It WORKED! I could also, login on the command line and then execute startx to get to KDE as a regular user. This leads me to believe that Redhat/Fedora is trying to under mine KDE on their systems to render them unusable. In Fedora 9 they don't have enough time to get the KDE wireless working, soooo, we were stuck with the gnome version and they have now pasted on the gnome login to make things worse. They still had not fix it in 10.

My second complaint of Fedora 10, besides feeling like a redheaded bastard step child, is that as soon as, I opened Firefox I had less than 5 minutes before the screen would lockup. I ended up using Konqueror to track down answers to my problems. I even downloaded Centos 5.2 in hopes to install KDE4. That was a major project and the howto needs to be rewritten. The installer has some of the older Fedora bugs where it relabels an existing partition label by adding a "1" so / would be turned into /1. That's enough to piss off any admin.

I finally got so pissed off and so frustrated that I start looking at debian again. Started researching Ubuntu and Kubuntu and found out that the major reason to down load the DVD was for the language packs, plus I could get every program that I'm like to use online. I downloaded the Kubuntu install CD.

I've used Suse until the Microsoft deal. The day Novell did the press release, I stripped Suse off my laptop. I tried Gentoo on a Mac G3 laptop, Kubuntu a long time ago, and settled on Fedora 7 for my laptop then.

I was not prepared for how easy it to get my Broadcom wireless working, or my ATI graphics adapter working. A screen popped up and said some hard requiring proprietary drivers have been found. Do you want to activated them? Clicked the button and said "Hell YES!"

I plugged in my printer today, Kubuntu set it up. I didn't have to play with Cups,or do anything else to my machine besides plug in a usb cable. The card reader works without me having to edit any /etc files. If the Ubuntu server is this painless Redhat will have some real problems.

Veteran's Day 2008

2008-11-11T14:34:00.002-05:00

The Iraq war was started based on lies. I continues based on false assumptions and lies. It drains our government of resources, and psychologically tears down our culture. It, also, has been used to keep Blackwater, and Halliburton alive with no bid contracts. WE have been robbed blind by these companies and others.
While our troops can get basic survival items, like body armor. And 10% of $700 billion is going to bonuses for incompetent executives.

I support our troops. I support the soldiers that have refused to go back. I will not ever support the administration that put them there. Yes, Dick THIS DOES MEAN YOU TOO.

btw Has Dick Chaney ever read the Constitution? I have!

Huh?

2008-01-19T15:31:00.000-05:00

Since when does organic anything come in a spray can? Come on, when was the last time you saw a spray can growing in a tree.

Fedora 8 failed upgrade

2007-11-13T20:51:00.001-05:00

I install Fedora 8 on my laptop Saturday afternoon and evening. I still takes me forever to recover from a full install. The fact, I use 64-bit OS does not help. It was NOT my first choice, I tried to upgrade it 3 time before biting the the bullet. The installer appeared to lockup during each upgrade attempt. I've gotten a lot better at backing things up before blowing the harddrive away.

The first thing that really surprised me was the lack of programs that are accessable during the install. I was doing it off a DVD that was 3.7 gigs. That's a lot of space for so few programs. The other thing is I could not setup an NTFS mount during the partition setup. HUH? I could with Fedora 7. I hate Micro$oft as much as the next guy, but, not being able to setup a mount NTFS is taking it too far. So, I got everything setup I could for the installer, and left the installer to do its thing.

When I got back, my laptop had spit out the DVD and rebooted, and was ready for to get down to the real work. I found there was NO Thunderbird no x86_64 no i386. I use Thunderbird because there is an extention Xnotes. So I had to down load it . Next the only thing from Open Office 2.3 in the menu was calc, and it didn't work. So I uninstall and reinstall the 64-bit version, - it still didn't work. I down loaded the i386 with Java 16 from OpenOffice. It worked with No problem.

Finilly at 3 am, I started on the bane of my existence, getting the Broadcom 4306 wireless to work. I googled Fedora 8 and bcm43xx. Very little came up, except on NDISWrapper. The last thing I want on my machine. I poked around in /lib/modules/ and found b43. What? No wireless drivers for my 4306. After googling for 10 or 15 minutes I discovered that there is b43-fwcutter to go along with the b43 driver. OK, but,... why did Fedora ALSO load the bcm43xx-fwcutter as well? I did the b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o and reboot and logged into my Linksys 54GS.

There is still more stuff to configure, fix and figure out why it's not working. Subversion crashed inside Eclipse, I have not tried since the update. I just load cowsay today, so I can have fortune write out my signature every 5 minutes, and MySQL working, etc. You get the idea...

The Chinese have validated reincarnation

2007-08-30T00:38:00.001-04:00

Thats Right, as outrageous as it sound and as surreal as it sounds, it's true. To quote the story "According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is 'an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation.'" That's right! There are a lot of issues at work here and I thought the puppet at the top of our government was stupid. It proves that it's not just our government.

How, exactly, does one regulate reincarnation? The Chinese have a bozo that can do that? If you have to ask permission to do something, it must be real. Isn't this what they are working against? How do you prove one has reincarnated? What can they do to you for reincarnating without getting permission? Do you get to do it again?

It does tell us who's in control, and who would like to be in control. Shhhh! Don't tell Pat Robertson.

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For Harold

2007-07-24T22:28:00.001-04:00

My step-sister had an unassuming dog, that in the end was blind and deaf. He had chosen his name in one of her dreams, because she liked it. Harold he chose to have himself called was rescue from a shelter by someone who did not understand older dogs. If Harold was ignored he would go to sleep. He was a funny dog as lapsa's go, he would never walk in the grass, because, his legs were too short. There were no sidewalks where he lived, so he do his business in the street. Image all people who got out of their SUV's, and wonder why it smelled like crap. He love to escape and blindly go run across 4 lanes of traffic. He truly understood his power as a dog.

Harold died today 800 am. Rest in peace my friend and May the blessings be.

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When is English English.

2007-07-22T19:46:00.001-04:00

OK, kids more stuff I don't pretend to understand:

    All the people running around complaining about illegal immigrant. Four hundred years, the Indians had an illegal immigration problem. For that matter they still do, its US! We are still stealing from them too.

    I pretend to work with computers as a daily gig. Sometimes, I have to install software on said computers. One day the installer gave me a choice of languages, and under English, it said English, English UK, English Australian. This bothered me. Do Americans think they own the language? Did they steal it, like the land from the Indians? Don't the English own the English Language? It would make sense to me. Do we speak American, kind of a bastardized version of English? We could call it Freedom English, yeah, like Freedom Fries.

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Logic that eludes me:

2006-12-14T12:25:00.000-05:00

When I worked at an ALF for the extremely brain damaged, and I started to notice there were a lot of normal people doing really brain damaged stuff.

I work as a Systems Analyst for a sign company. It just a title, a misnomer at best, I do everything computer and non-computer related, as long as it is technical. So, we had a email server go down, the smtp portion was still functioning so an individual tried to e-mail me, to tell me the server was down.

Florida DOT has some serious problems as well. We are in the middle of a nearly dead attack and they want to start a two road projects. This by itself creates delays for miles. One place the drainage go backwards. This project is only 14 months behind schedule.

How about those folks who for no reason what so ever want to start breaking at green lights. It's like they want to see how many people have to stop at the red lights becuase of them. I always screaming "No stupid, the accellerator is on the right".

Then, there are inconsiderate bastards that let 5 cars out of a drive way during a green light leaving them just enough time to get through the green light. Man, those folks got some crappy Karma coming for their kindness.

Do I have to grow up?

2006-11-16T22:04:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I had to talk to my daughter about why you don't hit other people. In the back of my mind there was a nagging thought; for the last twenty years, I have talked about how I would like to beat crap out of the little so and so, etc.

Wisdom comes from strange sources, you just got to be open.

Two Years Ago...

2006-11-15T21:22:00.000-05:00

I just got done reading an article from July 2004 Linux Magazine entitled Back to the Future by Jason Perlow. Mr. Perlow makes several good points about 64-bit software at the time. Unfortunately, for us the same things he pointed out in July 2004 are still happening. The biggest one is a "64-bit web browser?" What is the purpose of a 64-bit mail client with plug-ins that do not exist?

How many 64-bit plug-ins are there? One, Two, maybe. I finally got so pissed off with the 64-bit version of Firefox, that redirected the /usr/bin/ to the 32-bit version. Ever try to load 64-bit extentions for Firefox or Thunderbird? They don't exist! I can understand some programs like Monodevelop or Eclipse may use the 64-bit Firefox code on a 64-bit desktop but, Thunderbird. Mr. Perlow writes that NO 64-bit plug-in type of archiecture can use 32-plug-ins.

It's stupid after 2 1/4 years we are having to install a 32-bit version of Java, Flashplayer, Real, etc. in a 32-bit Firefox to get things to work. I agree with Mr. Perlow, that if a 64-bit program is not fully supported with plug-ins then don't force us to use it by default. Let us use the 32-bit version. The music still sucks.

Just when you thought it was over

2006-11-15T20:47:00.000-05:00

For those of us who live in the 13th Congressionnal district of Florida, the whole Christine Jennings and Vern (who?) thing is just another example of a incompetent bid for power. I give you links from election day, and ask why Kathy Dent not been fired and jail. Here they are: The Video and Sarasota Florida Precinct 22 Incident Photos. Who thought Republicans were smart?

That's why it's Beta

2006-11-10T21:23:00.000-05:00

I when looking for a fix in Google for the Drivel Editor, because, after the switch Drivel is Br0k! Ninety percent of the comments were about: drivel (other peoples comments) and how much Blogger Beta sucks. Well read the title DUMB ASS. It's BETA! These are the same people who don't understand RTFM.

You either want to live out on the "Bleeding Edge" testing new stuff, or you can hang with the herd, but don't bitch. You as tester have taken the duty to find and report bugs etc. Do constructive criticism

First time to the Polls

2006-11-07T21:13:00.000-05:00

I took my 5 year old daughter to the polls with me, to watch the game we and the politicos play. I don't own a TV, but really "you don't need a weather man to know which way the wind blows" either. Thanks Bob! So, she missed all the BS, mudslinging, and mean spirited crap that goes on to be elected.

We got to the polling place 12 minutes early and stood in the rain and waited. I told her about the Constitution, and how voting is a right and a privilege that should not be taken lightly, while others gathered. She a little hyper, and I calmed her down. We went in, and being the first two people in, things didn't go as smoothly one would like. The woman verifying me had no idea how to swipe my drivers licence. I got my ballot and the little girl stood and watch me vote. We both collected the "I voted" stickers. We got in my car for me to take her to school. I ask her what she thought of the process. She said, "It wasn't very much fun."

We be back in two more years.

Gnome, KDE, Ubuntu, Fedora, and why all distros suck and are still better than Windoze

2006-11-05T20:07:00.000-05:00

I have been playing with rpm linux distros since Redhat 6.0 and Suse 7.0. I done a couple of limited projects with Debian (loaded a PA Risc 32 bit box, and an IDS, etc). So, with promise of Ubuntu would solve all the woes for my Compaq R4100, I started my intrepid journey.

At the same time I switch from KDE to Gnome. I don't get the flame wars that go on about which one is better... I load both support libs and use programs in both. They both suck for different reasons. Besides, I have work to do and a life to live, and I have not got the time to waste arguing about such trivial crap.

A friend of mine Joe and were talking about linux distros and specifically, the fact for me it was a pain to load Gnome 2.16 on to OpenSuSE 10.1 because there were no binaries. He lead me to believe that was the greatest thing since the discovery of DNA. That laptop would be able to do back flips, I could get rid of ndiswrapper for the bcm 4306 wirelss, and that stinking TI card reader would work. They didn't.

I don't get the Ubuntu craze. I load Ubuntu 6.10 while it was still in beta and ran it on my a laptop until 3 days after Fedora 6 came out. In fact, I tried everything to get my wireless to work and it NEVER did. This includes downloading the latest and greatest version of ndiswrapper and compiling and installing it. I had to reload the entire system after trying get fglrx to work. A big thank you goes out to ATI, for the painful install of their video drivers. If the system is work after they are installed. One other side note googleearth would not load... I could not install googleearth on ubuntu, even after I found it in a repository.

So, I returned to my roots Redhat, in the guise of Fedora. It took me three times to install Fedora 6. The first time the installer crashed. (That's a great way to instill confidence...) The second time it got through the install and hung on mounting the partitions. I realized the it could mount reiserfs formatted partitions on the First Boot. After downloading reisersf tools. I had to rewrite fstab to mount the reiser partitions. At least, ndiswrapper even though I have to boot my laptop everytime in interactive because the boot process locks up looking for info on eth1.

I got the ATI M200 work with the km_fglrx with no dri. I, now, a 128 meg video that use 32 meg. This single act made Google Earth stop strobing like a light in a disco. The driver from ATI needs libexpat.so.0.1. Fedora 6 is up to 5,0. SuSE, to their credit have a compat-expat1. You would think ATI would modernize, or are they writing drivers for SCO? Expat 1 has not been used since, Redhat 7. something. WTF?

Update: 11/22/2006 I found out that the reason my wireless would lockup the boot sequence was: /etc/modprobe.conf contained a definition for eth1 using the bcm43xx driver. So, I took that out. Then, I was still getting "IP information" for eth1 failure on boot. So, I fired up vi and changed wlan0 to eth1 in /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper.

It's always the stupid little stuff that gets ya'.

This is the best arguments for native only drivers that work.

This is an Enterprise OS?

2005-12-07T15:24:00.000-05:00

I normally work with a couple of Linux servers and support a large group of people on Windoze XP and 2000 at work. We have a new W2k3 Server Standard that was not displaying the memory properly .Guess who was asked to investigate. The machine in question is an xseries with 2 Xeon processors (4 can be installed) and 5 GB of memory. This is a pretty healthy machine for our operation.

The problem was that on boot it was showing 5GB, but, the OS only showed 3.12GB. So, after googling, searching M$ website, and read IBM's Redbook for Tuning Win2K3 Server on Xseries (the name may not be right). I discovered that the 32-bit version of Win2K3 only sees 3GB of memory unless the /PAE switch is used. If you have between 4GB and 16GB you should use the /PAE and /3GB switches, and more than 16GB leave off the /3GB switch. None this
applied to the Standard edition of Win2k3, because neither of the switches are suppose to work, when I put the /PAE switch into the boot.ini file and rebooted it saw 4GB. The /3GB switch still did not work. Win2k3 still reported 4GB of memory.

This whole scenario is why I would like to use a REAL Enterprise OS like Solaris, Linux, even VMS (it's old but, it works). I don't like having to play dumb games with the OS to get to report the correct information.

This is a great example of why I view Windoze as a buggie piece of crap. Don't ask me to cluster Xeon processors, because, I use OpenVMS.

What does Jesus think of Pat Robertson?

2005-11-13T16:39:00.000-05:00

Pat Robertson claims to be a member of the cloth, what cloth I don't know but a cloth. We before us is a man who by setting the example for us to live by advocated the murder of a foreign country's president by military action. He said of Hugo Chavez, “We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,” This is illegal under international law and our own laws. This was only exacerbated by the fact that the president of our country condoned it. So much for being a good Christian, George.

Pat Robertson also has attacked children's British characters for being gay. We would have thought that he would have learned from the Murphy Brown vs Dan Quale incident, but NOOOO! It should be noted that show is still on the air. With the brand of hate he attempts to spread, while telling us he speaks for Jesus and putting words in God's mouth, Pat Robertson is displaying the epitome of blasphemy in action.

What man of God would say this “I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city.” after the town rejected the teaching intelligent design.

I am surprised that God does not talk to Pat Robertson saying things “You better stop that or I going to smite your stupid ass.” I can see it from God's point of view, that would mean God really does talk to Pat .

My opinion is Pat Robertson should be extradited to Venezuela. That would mean one less idiot in a leadership role. At least then, Chavez has suggested that Pat Robertson can get psychological counselling.

Veteran's Day

2005-11-11T04:47:00.000-05:00

Veteran's Day brought back memory for me of the brave men and women of 10^th Mountain Division that I saw guarding a water tank that was flipped by a local nation driver. I was in the Army for 11 years and never saw the horrors of war. I spent six months in Somalia as a government contractor, One day our 5 ton wrecker was called because the accident. We got to the accident site in the valley south of our camp. Sand dunes surrounded the site on all sides and on top of the dunes were the soldiers spread out every 50 feet. They stood in a 120 degree weather in full amour helmets and weapons. I left the Dish three months after 10^th Mountain was pulled out.

This experience instilled in me that there are few reasons for war. Corporate greed, ego problems, and personal vendettas are not reasons to killing over a hundred thousand people and over two thousand of our own soldiers. The people who suffer the most are woman and children. They are subjected to diseases and starvation.

Now before you say I don't support our troops you are wrong. I don't support the godless arrogant oil men and the corporations who benefit from them being there.

To paraphrase Gill Scott-Heron, “Some people say they have seen Bush's face below that cesspool called 9/11.”

The Return of the Nearly Deads

2005-11-10T21:25:00.000-05:00

I live in Florida and about the end of October or the beginning of November we are subjected to a population influx of nearly deads. Nearly deads or ND's are very similar to the zombies from "Night of the Living Dead" except for four things. The first is they move much slower than the zombies. Second, they're much scarier. Third, there is some question to if they're alive or dead. Forth, they are ever where, they can not be escaped. The nearly deads are also the worlds oldest mall rats .

This event is mark by one the more popular sports here during the Winter, Geriatric Drag Racing. Geriatric Drag Racing is where 2 people in there Cadillacs with New York plates drive side by side at 20 mph in a 45 during rush hour. The drivers are so hunch backed that they look between the dashboard and the stearing wheel with coke bottle bottom glasses seeing who can drive slower. The thing we have not figured out is "How did these things get there vehicle down here from up north before the end of season at that speed?"

Another sport is Small Dog Begone, this involves be very unaware of your surrounding. Normally it takes place in a natural habitat that has alligators, and you take Fluffy on a walk along the bank next to the water. You watch a log slow drift over near Fluffy and suddenly the dog be gone.

There are bicycling lanes next to roads, but, there not usable unless you want to be a target. This time of year riding a bicycle is suicide. The nearly deads think the bicycle lane is for cars. Unfortunately thiers!

When one is truely luckly you shalom between the Cadillacs and Buicks. This way you practice your dodge ball reflexes as well as getting from point a to b. Watch out for that stay SUV.

After suffer through this cruelity that the natives are subjected to by the North's elderly for six months every winter, we should all move up north when we get old and drive real Slooooow.