From Fedora to Debian

I upgraded from Fedora 7 to Fedora 8 without problems… ’till the day mplayer doesn’t run anymore. A very competent guy from Red Hat who’s working at our office told me to use livna repos … I told him about how upset I feel about livna repos vs. freshrpms repos, they both does not run very well together

I believe him and I try livna repos… then begins the show: hal-daemons stops, autorun needs hal-daemon… and don’t want to remember that hell. I know what to do: to get disable livna, also freshrpms, uninstall and reinstall hal-daemon (just in case it helps) and so on,…

Since I have been a Red Hat devoted users since Red Hat 7.2 (passing through all Red Hats 8.0, 9s, and Fedoras) I thought some other distro deserves a chance… so I keep my home and I install Debian. I also keep a server running CentOS, if you don’t know it, try it.
I’ll post more in a not too distant future but my first impression is that everything is clean, well organized, a little bit more fast, and quite different, I mean, there’s no /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ or apache configuration file is under /etc/apache2/... and also their start up script is different but, time to learn, which is always good to keep us alive

Yet with up2date in Fedora, WTF!

At ending of October I was suffering this error when I try to make yum update and I answer yes in order to install all that yum purposes to me:

Running rpm_check_debug
ERROR with rpm_check_debug vs depsolve:
Package up2date needs python(abi) = 2.4, this is not available.
Package rhnlib needs python(abi) = 2.4, this is not available.
Complete!

It has been easy at the end… as you may see, that messages shows that my Fedora has yet installed a up2date package. Since I really don’t use at all I took it out by typing: yum erase up2date and so on…
But the questions are two:

  1. Why are there an up2date package in Fedora? a legacy question comming fron the ancient RedHat 8 and 9 ages?
  2. How many others useless packages do I have installed?

So I was thinking all around this stuff I two mini-projects come to my mind:

  • Writte a couple of scripts that retrieves what packages do I have ordered by use: I have no idea if there’s some method to retrieve package use frequency, but as I’ve just say it’s just an idea, let’s see if it possible or it isn’t…
  • Writte a couple of scripts that retrieves for every single package what other packages depends on it and viceversa, by the way, I’ve imagine the reports writed under some xml strict DTD so may open it in a browser or read from some other script or import it in a database

Save bandwith with squid in five minutes

I received the Redhat Magazine in my inbox, recently I’ve read an article about how to start up a squid in five minutes.

Since I know good it runs I must recommend you give squid a chance. If you have a company -little, middle or big company- it would save you quite bandwith. If you’re a home user but your network has more than just one computer it will save you too bandwith.

Saving bandwith it’s very important thing:

  1. user time experience
  2. you just download from the network what has changed and let squid to do the rest of the job

By the way, squid has changed their website. Now it’s a little bit more easy to find what you’re looking for. For instance: squid configuration examples, or general squid documentation, or The General Squid Guide

Easy to help Fedora 7

No news about Fedora Project: there’s a new version, they switched from Fedora Core to Fedora (since there’s no separation between a core and other repositories) and also there’re more and more exciting news:

but what I think its really useful for all of you it’s to use smolt.

If you wanna help free software easily and you’re running Fedora and you’re a non tech profile then you can do this:

  1. become root on you machine and type “yum install smolt”
  2. type “smoltSendProfile”

easy, isn’t it?

This instrucions were copied from Fedora announce list about Fedora Hardware Profiler and by doing this you’re sending an anonymous email to enrich the Smolt Project Result.

Learning wifi with Fedora Core 6

I’ve to confess I feel myself a little bit older for some stuff … but curiosity has been a strong force inside me.

Since I bought my brand new wrt54g-l for SoHo use I’m testing a couple of wi-fi cards.

A lot of people has wi-fi cards that they don’t use. Nowadays laptops has wi-fi inside them so it’s easy to find wi-fi cards that had fall into disuse. There’s a great chance for me to experiment with them without expend a buck.

I’ve tryed out an atheros wi-fi (thank you Nacho) and now I’m testing a U.S. Robotics. The U.S.Robotics belongs to Pablo who is helping me further than letting me his card, he has quite deep wi-fi knowledge (and also he’s a real Red Hat BOFH).

The atheros card is fairly well recognised by Fedora Core 6, you just need to insert into you pcmcia slot and type lspci then it appears. I’ve let it go by now ’cause even you cand find atheros wi-fi driver my first attempt shows that as far as I know a driver compilation was required for the atheros card.

I’m too lazy to compile it, keep myself worried about when a new dirvers appears, and re-compile it if needed. I want an easy to keep up to date driver, and easy to install wifi card ’cause I deeply believe Linux is mature for that I just have to search for it.

As long as Pablo is a wifi fan (and a hardware trasher) he offers me to test their U.S. Robotics. Well here I finish ’cause I’m on the task right now. By now, is a slightly different, forget lspci command. You put the card into your laptop slot and type pccard ident, Fedora shows something like that:

Socket 0:
  product info: "U.S. Robotics", "IEEE 802.11b PC-CARD", "Version 01.02", ""
  manfid: 0x0156, 0x0002
  function: 6 (network)



Here I stop. Next comming posts will talk about my succes or failure with U.S. Robotics. While I was browsing looking for some info about all that stuff I’ve found a pdf quite long in my opinion about wifi cards and how to identify them (look at point 6.5) and that pdf comes from a HP guy! nice stuff.