Gnome 3.0 ARRRH!#"§$#!!!

Rant and perhaps solution

I finallly reinstalled fedora. So now I have a completely new Fedora version and I am not amused. Really not amused. First I had trouble with Grub, then I had trouble with the DNS and finally I had to curse against gnome 3.0. Or is it only unity... I am not sure. I do not rant. But this time, I am more than annoyed. I would not say I am pissed off. But nearly. I keep asking myself: why? Why? Why?

First of all Grub... Actually I did not want to reinstall the boot directory from Grub. I wanted to be able to use my old fedora if I needed it. But that did not really work. So I let the new fedora (or I should say anaconda, overwrite the boot loader).

Then, for some reason the DNS was not configured and I had to reconfigure it per hand. Why ?

Finally, how is gnome 3.0 supposed to be used. Why can't I create my desktop icons ? Why can't I add launchers to the panel or the desktop. My computer is supposed to be used. I do not care really how it looks.

I just found the solution in this post for at least some of my problems

Conversion m4a to MP3

I needed to convert a few m4a files to mp3. After looking in Internet. I found a nice way working with fedora (see this thread):

$> faad -o songfile.wav songfile.m4a
$> lame songfile.wav songfile.mp3
$> rm songfile.wav

Note that the command faad differs a little from the one given in the thread, but man faad did not seem to offer the way given in the thread.

So I performed a small bash command script:

$> for a in m4a-files/*.m4a ; do filename=`basename "$a"`; faad -o ess.wav "$filename" ; lame ess.wav `basename "$filename" .m4a `.mp3; done ; rm ess.wav

if faad2 and lame are not on your system, they can be installed from rpmfusion using:

root $> yum -y install lame faad2

Fedora 11 installed

I installed Fedora 11. I still need to see what the differences are and see which software I need to install this time. The advantage of only updating (which did not really work for me from version 9 to 10).

The main new things seems to be that livna has more or less been replaced by rpmfusion. So I still have to see whether I can still install all the software I need for my own pleasure.

I will probably comment in this entry.

To install linux I used the CD from PCWELT Linux 5/2009.

LVM and partitioning

My computer is partitioned in the way that the /boot partition is under ext3 outside the lvm. But the '/' partition is under an lvm partition. In that way I can easily resize and create new partition. I used a new partition so that I should be able to come back to my older linux version, though I have not tested that yet.

One of the important change in fedora 11 (and perhaps fed 10) is the use of ext4.

One of my colleague is somewhat sceptical of the use of partitioning though I must say with lvm it is a real pleasure, but OMMV (our mileage may vary).

Ctrl+ Alt+ Backspace

In the new version of Xorg, the default configuration does not allow you to kill the X server with the keys: Ctrl+ Alt+ Backspace. Whether I find that good or not. Well I ain't so sure.

Desktop background

I really like the new background for the desktop. I suppose I might keep it some time. I really like the birds. Though searching with google there seems to be a lot of cool backgrounds: e.g http://www.wallpaperlinux.com/v/Fedora/Fedora+11+Linxu+Wallpaper+Fedora+11+Desktop+Background.jpg.html

CD automount

I have a small problem withe the auto mount for CDs. It does not seem to be working. I am not sure of the reason.

Installing RPM fusion

See: http://rpmfusion.org/Configuration/.

At least using RPM fusion I can install: mplayer and vlc. I will have to see whether I can also play wmv, mpeg and avis just as I wish. It seems to be the case.

Updating would have been better?

With these things you never know. But I wonder whether I would not have rather updated the distribution instead of installing a new version. I am still not finished.

Fedora and chkconfig

I was having some troubles with the starting up of my linux box. Now these problems are solved or at least I hope so :-). The problem seemed to lie with haldaemon or messagebus. After reading a bug description for my problem on bugzilla, I had the solution. (see the bugzilla bug page for bug : 444410). The priorities of some services in runlevel 5 had to be corrected. this can be performed using: $ /sbin/chkconfig --level 5 resetpriorities with being the service's name, e.g NetworkManager, messagebus, ...

java problem with browser

I noticed again that the java applet were not working correctly in firefox. I looked for the solution since I knew I once had solved the problem. But I could not find it easily again. After I tried to start the ControlPanel from the jre, an error occured:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /usr/java/jre1.6.0_03/lib/i386/libdeploy.so: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I installed the compatibility libraries ( after calling yum provides libstdc++.so.5. Once installed, java applets were working just fine.

Reinstalling Fedora 8

After having Ubuntu on my disk for something like a week. I wanted to try reinstalling Fedora 8 from scratch, in order to notice the differences better. After having created a new fedora live CD, I installed fedora.

1. back up from the data I had from the debian.
2. Partitioning
1. create a boot partition
2. create LVM partition
3. create some useful partitions in the LVM partition
1. root partition
2. home partition
4. let anaconda install every thing
5. reboot
6. complete the necessary information after first boot