K-Squared Ramblings

Hear me!

A few minutes ago I was trying to fix sound on my Linux box. Nothing would play, until Katie heard it beep to notify me of a new Twitter message. I closed Twhirl and suddenly my music player worked. The song lined up? Vertical Horizon’s “All is Said and Done.” The first line of the song? “I need you to hear me.” That gave us both a good laugh.

I thought a major point of PulseAudio was to let applications share the sound card cleanly. *grumble* Sound worked fine before Fedora switched. I can’t even blame it on a bleeding-edge distribution, since from what I hear, Ubuntu has similar problems.

At least now I know (sort of) why it stopped again after applying the Complete guide to fix PulseAudio and video/audio VLC Media Player issues.

Cold Stone Fedora

• Smell of waffle cones from Cold Stone makes me wish I could eat there. Ice cream vs allergies. #
• Ran into one snafu w/Fedora11: xkb error popups every time I wake the computer from suspend. Resetting keyboard worked. #

Impressed by Smooth Fedora 11 Upgrade

A few days ago, my Linux desktop at work popped up a message saying that Fedora 11 was available, and asking whether I wanted to upgrade automatically. Well, I didn’t have time to deal with it then, and in the past when I’ve upgraded Fedora (either from a CD or from a downloaded image), it’s been a big production, what with running the installer, rebooting, installing updates, updating third-party repositories, and finally rebooting again after all the updates are installed.

So I put it off for a few days.

Today I decided to try it.

The automatic upgrade program is called preupgrade, presumably because it downloads everything you need in order to prepare for the upgrade. It downloads everything while your system is up and running, then sets it up so that when you reboot, it will launch the installer. It installs everything, makes the changes, then reboots into the newly upgraded system.

And then it’s done.

It’s network aware, and works through yum, so it will actually take into account both third-party repositories and anything that’s been updated since the new release. It actually went out to livna.org RPM Fusion and picked up the appropriate NVIDIA display drivers.

Download while you work. Reboot. Wait. Done.

The only snafu I ran into was that it removed my copy of the Flash plugin, but I think I was using the experimental 64-bit one anyway, so it’s not terribly surprising.

I get the impression that Ubuntu has had a similarly smooth upgrade process for a while. And after my experiences moving from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10, I was seriously considering jumping ship. (Hazards of living on the bleeding edge.) But it looks like I won’t have to.

Now I just have to find time to play around and see what’s new!

Cupcake, Fedora & Benadryl

• Cupcake has arrived! (Android 1.5 update for my phone) Now I just need time to try out the new stuff. #
• Oh, fun: Fedora 11 #linux is now coming out on June’s Microsoft Patch Day. #
• Real Life Comics on allergy medication. Oh, yes, I’ve been there. #

Pushing Daisies, WaMu, Bees, Ubuntu and Vortex

• Brian Fuller talks about the future of Pushing Daisies #
• WaMu building has taken down its sign. Giant Chase banner at street level. #
• Guy w/ sign by side of road: “Homeless kind soul stuck in vortex.” I get the 1st half, but WTF does “stuck in vortex” mean? Downward spiral? #
• Retweeting @ThisIsTrue: possible cause identified for honey bee colony collapse #
• Odd: If Ubuntu is the biggest desktop Linux out there, why is my torrent for 8.10 64bit idle? Fedora 10 64bit found 7 peers in 30 seconds. #

Upgrade Now or Later?

Hmm, Fedora #Linux 11 is in beta. Should I upgrade my home computer to Fedora 10, or just wait until June and skip one version? #

Transparent AIR

Hey, when did transparency start working on Adobe AIR on Linux? #

CentOS List Hijack

• Pissed off because some a-hole w/ a centos.org addr posted multiple copies of a racist antisemitic diatribe to the CentOS announcement list #
• CentOS sent an apology to lists. Said spammers forged the sender’s address to get past moderation. Look back, name doesn’t match address. #

Line Items for 2008-12-11: Twhirling

• Need to get voice back in shape. Can’t sing along to chorus of “Piano Man” at pitch. #
• So #Twhirl can’t connect to Twitter without updating, but the update won’t run on the latest AIR available for Linux… *headdesk* #
• Installed AIR and Twhirl on Windows box. Disturbed that the Flash plugin in a browser can DO that. #

Beta Than Expected

I haven’t been following the progress of Fedora 9 very closely (possibly because it took me until last month to finally upgrade my home PC to Fedora 8), but as the release date of April 29 May 13 approaches, I thought I’d take a look at the release notes for an overview of what’s new. Of course there’s the usual upgrades to the various desktop environments, including, finally, KDE4, but something that surprised me was the inclusion of Firefox 3 beta 5.

Admittedly, Linux distributions often include non-final software by necessity. Many open-source projects spend years in the 0.x state not because they don’t work well, but because the authors don’t feel that it’s complete yet. (Often, a project will take their checklist and build feature 1, stabilize it, add feature 2, stabilize that, etc. so that you get a program that’s a stable subset of the target. Off the top of my head, FreeRADIUS was quite stable long before it hit 1.0, and Clam AntiVirus has been quite usable despite the fact that its latest version is 0.93.)

Lately, though, there’s been a tendency toward sticking with the latest stable release, at least for projects that have reached that magical 1.0 number. Sometimes they go even further. Only a year and a half ago, Fedora planned to skip Firefox 2 and wait for version 3. (Clearly, they expected Firefox 3 would be out sooner!) So it was a surprise to see that this time, Fedora has decided to jump on the new version before it’s finished.

This is why you vote

The code name for Fedora 9 Linux has been chosen, and it’s going to be Sulphur. Because a foul-smelling rock associated with rotten eggs and depictions of Hell is just what we want to identify an operating system. (Actually, it might not be too far off for Windows Vista.)

Bathysphere was only 8 votes behind. Weird, but considerably cooler.

Oh, well. At least it’s not Mayonnaise or Chupacabra. And some of the other names on that list are considerably worse.

When digiKam Failed to Connect

In the decade I’ve been using Linux, it’s gone from something that required lots of technical know-how just to set up, to something that (in its major flavors) can auto-detect most hardware and provides friendly GUIs for most configuration tasks. But every once in a while, I have the kind of experience that would turn a new user off of Linux. Usually because Fedora has decided to change something during an update.

In this case, it was a digital camera problem. Since we bought our Canon PowerShot SD600 last December, I’ve used KDE’s digiKam to transfer and manage the photos. DigiKam detected the camera and accessed the photos right out of the box, no configuration needed beyond telling it to remember the model. But something changed in the last two weeks, and last night I started getting an error message: Failed to connect to the camera. Oddly enough, it could still detect the camera when it was connected. But it couldn’t display or download the images.

I searched all over, hitting dead end after dead end, until I got a hint that it was a permissions problem. Read the rest of this entry »

There Wolf

Fedora 8 has just been released, code-named “Werewolf.” As is tradition for this particular Linux distribution, the official release announcement is accompanied by an alternative, humorous announcement playing off the code name.

This time, the joke announcement is a song parody of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller.” And unlike a lot of really bad filk I’ve seen (online and otherwise), it’s surprisingly not bad (for all the subject matter is a bit odd. At least, from what I remember of the original song, it scans.

Double helping of Moonshine

A question over at the Comic Bloc Forums reminded me that I hadn’t gotten around to writing a full profile of the Impulse villain, White Lightning. Fortunately I had a full list of appearances already, so I was able to look up the answer to the question, but it felt like being caught totally unprepared. So yesterday I re-read all her appearances, and tonight I wrote up a profile of White Lightning.

Just for fun, I did some searches for her name. Mostly I came up with cars, horses, wax and, of course, booze. And an alpaca. Back to the booze, there was one point at which the character was mistakenly identified as as Moonshine (later explained away as an in-world mix-up, which would have made more sense if she hadn’t been the one calling herself the wrong name!)

Now the funny thing: the “…in pop culture” section in Wikipedia’s article on Moonshine reminded me that Fedora 7, which just came out last week and which I installed at work a few days ago, is codenamed Moonshine.

The only way the timing could have been more appropriate would be if I’d written the character bio the same day as the Linux release.

Fedora 7 problems with glint video driver

Just a warning for any Fedora Linux users preparing to upgrade to Fedora 7: Grab the Live CD first and make sure that all your hardware works properly. If not, see if the fix is available before you actually upgrade.

I upgraded a system with a Permedia 2 video card, which uses the glint drivers. The installer couldn’t launch the GUI, but I’ve run into that fairly often, so I just used the text-based installer without thinking much of it. The upgrade process itself went fine, but on booting into the new system, it was unable to launch X. I kept getting the following error: Read the rest of this entry »