dgoodwin's blog

Big day for those of us on the Satellite team here at Red Hat, after weeks of preparation our baby has finally been released to the community, re-branded as Spacewalk and under the GPLv2. The Spacewalk project will transition to being the upstream for all future versions of Satellite, and the primary location for our development from today forward. Satellite will continue on as our stable, quality assured, and officially supported solution for official Red Hat content. Spacewalk will be community driven and see features earlier, but will not be accompanied by the official support and testing that goes into Satellite. (see this comparison)

No idea what I'm talking about? Spacewalk is a Linux systems management solution which you can read all about here: http://spacewalk.redhat.com

If you're at all interested in the project please feel free to check out our wiki, sign up for either the mailing list or the devel mailing list, or stop by #spacewalk on freenode.

Development specific posts coming soon. (it may have something to do with PostgreSQL)

Hats off to the entire Satellite (now Spacewalk) team on a job well done!

As usual I got anxious and upgraded to Fedora 9 (beta) a couple weeks ago. This normally causes a few headaches, almost always involving the nvidia binary graphics drivers. (as the kernels seem to come too fast for the Livna repositories to keep up, although there appears to be some neat things in the works for auto-compiling kernel modules in F9) However I should have done some reading beforehand this time around because as it turns out Fedora 9 is currently using a pre-release of xorg 1.5 with some incompatible changes, and nvidia doesn't release drivers for un-released versions of xorg. From everything I've read it appears it just won't work unless you're willing to downgrade xorg and everything that comes with it.

The nv driver looks like rubbish with my hardware and won't get me up to the 1600x1200 resolution I'm used to so I did some experimenting with the nouveau. With a slight xorg.conf tweak I was able to get my full resolution but no 3d effects. Not a huge problem as I don't even use them normally, but I noticed a pretty brutal performance bug creeping up after a few hours of heavy X use. (6 second workspace changes, huge cpu spikes, etc) Filed a bug on the problem and got some good debugging suggestions, one of which actually clears the problem up (for awhile) without forcing you to restart X. (switching VT's and back)

Regardless I was missing that binary driver's performance and decided to install the Ubuntu Hardy Heron beta on my spare partition to see what they've been up too. I was a pretty happy Ubuntu user before getting hired at Red Hat almost a year and a half ago, but I switched to Fedora to get a feel for RPM based systems once the job began to look promising. Having run Debian/Ubuntu for about 8 years I was a bit of a reluctant convert and griped about the usual yum/rpm things, but quite simply I have been anything but lacking on my Fedora desktop this past year.

So having spent a good deal of time in Ubuntu the past few weeks, the thing I'm most surprised by is how little I have to say about it. Yes the install was easy and yes I had support for the binary nvidia driver and proprietary audio/video formats with very nice and informative prompts, but we're seriously talking about behavior you can replicate with Fedora without even hitting the command line in about 5 minutes. It seems to boot up a little quicker but regular desktop performance with both distros is just awesome. apt still rocks but I've come to realize that yum does a fine job, and slightly slower software installs really don't phase me in the least. Synaptic was always nice in Debian but I believe Fedora 9 has introduced PackageKit as the default graphical package manager and I really quite like this, both for what it is now and what I expect it will be. (very vibrant project) Ubuntu continues to look pretty good although largely the same, I'd give the clear edge for appearance to Fedora but everything's themed so in the end who really cares. The Ubuntu beta was drastically more crash happy on x86_64 than F9 was but I can't really blame either side for this in the beta stage.

That's really all that came to mind. Mostly the experiment just taught me that technically speaking, I can do everything I want to *very* easily with both distros, but I've gradually become more comfortable with Fedora. Over the last year I've gotten a glimpse into the people, infrastructure, and company that makes Fedora tick and I like what I see. I enjoyed this Fedora is the New Ubuntu post today and it sums things up pretty good. Things are happening in Fedora, big things that appear there first and elsewhere much later. Even with such aggressive development and integration, it's still all delivered on a platform that's remarkably stable and user friendly. Granted Canonical has nowhere near the resources Red Hat does to throw back into community contributions, and perhaps their contribution is just bringing Linux to so many people in such a well polished package. Red Hat however does have those resources, and they're putting them to good use. I have to agree that while Ubuntu is an excellent distribution, there is something to be said for Fedora's fostering a community of contributors rather than consumers.

Maybe it's Fedora and maybe it's just the influence of the people I work with, but it's the first distribution I felt inclined to get involved with and it wasn't hard to do. I always assumed that if I stopped working for Red Hat I'd be a Ubuntu user again within a week. I no longer think that's the case.

I'm leaning pretty heavily toward buying some kind of a Linux powered mobile internet device, but am having a terrible time deciding between the Asus EEE PC, the Nokia N810, and the slightly older but drastically less expensive N800.

I'm looking for something that'll mainly be used loafing around the house, but hopefully powerful enough that it'll be all I need when traveling. Working from home I can't stand the sight of my desk in the evenings and the laptop has become my wife's primary computer, so I'd like something casual to poke around the web myself. Typical usage would be:

• web browsing (mainly Google Reader)
• e-mail (GMail currently, but mutt if I can tear myself away from the curse of Google convenience)
• IRC (probably via terminal over ssh)
• light instant messaging
• occasional text editing
• audio (internet streams, perhaps some mp3 as well)
• video (mainly xvid encoded tv shows)

The Asus EEE PC strikes me as the most powerful. It's borderline full on laptop functionality for an extremely low price (considering). It should be able to do all the above and more. I like that it has an ethernet jack in addition to the wifi support, which neither of the Nokia's does. (although this would rarely be used) I also like that there's the option to install other Linux distributions down the road and easily flash back to the factory installed OS within seconds. The full laptop'ish layout strikes me as the most convenient for actually getting some work done. I can't type for long on a laptop keyboard due to pain in the wrists and I suspect this would be even worse, but for short periods of time it should get the job done. The EEE strikes me as the most capable for travel, taking this should do everything I'd need.

The Nokia N810 however has tremendous appeal. It packs the same resolution on a screen several inches smaller than the EEE, slide out thumb keypad, GPS (albeit with limited software functionality), and a very vibrant user community. I don't consider it as hackable in that I doubt I'll be experimenting with any Linux distributions on the thing, but the platform is very open for development and it sounds like great apps are being written for it. It looks spectacular, is much smaller than the others, and strikes me as the most convenient device to just pickup and use. It *looks* like it's powerful enough to play video content from some kind of storage medium, but I don't think it's quite as potent as the EEE. I'm not sure if it's powerful or comfortable enough to be the only device used while traveling, but if not it's extremely close. The biggest problem however is the price. I didn't make the cut for a developer discount and without that it's the most expensive device of them all at around $475 CDN. ($75 more than the EEE model I'm looking at, and $200-$275 more than the N800 from Dell)

So finally there's the N800, very similar to the N810 and about half the price. No hardware keyboard (the most enticing), no GPS, slightly larger, slightly less powerful, and not as readable outside. While the N810 has advantages they don't read like enough to justify the drastic price difference.

So all said I'm kind of leaning towards the N810, but it just seems too overpriced to commit right now. The Asus strikes me as the most practical choice of them all, it's easily small enough to carry around just about anywhere, but I'm not sure if I want an uber-small laptop or an even smaller pocket sized tablet. The N800 is attractive only in that it's almost as cool as the N810 for a much more reasonable price, but then maybe the best bet is to wait on the N810 to drop. (although that'll probably then be followed by a newer hipper device and the whole cycle repeats itself again)

Having a hard time making a decision on this one.

It was particularly dark and overcast in Nova Scotia today, so much so that I found myself breaking out my dark GTK theme to make things a little easier on the eyes. I actually find light themes very unpleasant when it's dark or overcast, similarly for darker themes when the sun is shining.

Inspired by the new time of day background changing in Fedora 8, jbowes / mizmo / cswiii / zeus and I got to discussing a Gnome applet that would push the concept a little further and make the entire desktop easier on the eyes depending not just on the time of day, but also the weather.

Initially thinking something like this:

1. Configure and save your Gnome themes just as you do today, optionally including your desktop wallpaper.
2. Use applet to select a morning / afternoon / evening theme configured previously. Could hopefully use the theme preview images found in the newer Gnome Appearance dialog.
3. Use applet to select an additional overcast theme that would override the time of day theme if you were within the morning or afternoon.
4. Provide configurable times for morning / afternoon / evening.
5. Allow arbitrary commands to be run on time of day or weather changes.
6. Provide a quick drop-down to explicitly choose a specific setting (morning / afternoon / evening / overcast) and either keep it until the next time/weather change, or stop changing automatically until the user says so.

cswiii had the awesome idea to optionally get xsnow running when it's snowing outside. This raises the issue of whether the applet should support more than just overcast conditions, and also snowing seems like something you'd like to kick in even if it was in the evening, whereas overcast you wouldn't.

The whole thing would have to remain simple and quick to configure, it's probably not something you'd want to devolve into some bizarre overcomplicated rules system you can do anything with.

Have to see how Fedora is changing backgrounds at times of day currently, I recall it was an XML file that something must be reading in and monitoring for the time change. (not sure what component does that yet as I don't believe it's a Gnome feature) Might be better to just leverage this work, or have the applet store it's settings in this file.

Thoughts comments suggestions? Seems like it might be a slightly useful desktop bling addition, and relatively easy to get off the ground.

Fedora 8 is now live. It's honestly the first distro I've used in my 10ish years with Linux that out of the box, actually looks pretty good. Check out what's new in the release notes.

As per previous posts I'm interested in getting Fedora to a point where live upgrades are supported and recommended. I did my live upgrade to the pre-Fedora 8 rawhide a week or two ago without too much trouble. Following the steps on the YumUpgradeFaq got me most of the way but today I pushed onward to do my final update to the actual Fedora 8 bits and ran into a bit of a snag with avahi.


file /etc/avahi/avahi-daemon.conf from install of avahi-0.6.21-6.fc8 conflicts with file from package avahi-0.6.17-1.fc7

rpm -qa | grep avahi showed me several versions installed and the fc7 one obviously shouldn't be. yum remove avahi-0.7.17-1.fc7 claimed success, yet the package remained installed. rpm -e avahi-0.7.17-1.fc7 would give me a scriptlet error. jbowes pointed me to rpm -e --noscripts avahi-0.7.17-1.fc7 which will get you past that problem.

Next up a similar problem with multilib. I think this has something to do with the dbus.i386 that must be removed for x86_64 users as per the instructions on the YumUpgradeFaq. At the time (pre-Fedora 8) this took away my firefox.i386 (IIRC). As of today, yum update wanted to reinstall the i386 firefox, which requires the i386 avahi, which has a file conflict with the installed x86_64 version.


file /usr/share/avahi/service-types.db from install of avahi-0.6.21-6.fc8 conflicts with file from package avahi-0.6.21-6.fc8


Took a little tinkering to get past this one but I chose to clobber it with rpm -i --replacefiles /var/cache/yum/fedora/packages/avahi-0.6.21-6.fc8.i386.rpm. I have no idea how safe that is so use at your own risk. I'm also not sure if these avahi problems are errors you'll get upgrading from F7 either, I suspect it's only going to hit people who went up to test 3 or rawhide in the weeks leading up to the release.

Thanks to all Fedora contributors!

Notes updated whenever I try a new Fedora version or discover a fix/workaround of some kind.

Fedora 8

Last tested with an i686 rawhide live cd from Oct 19 2007:

• Suspend/Resume: Suspend works fine, on resume the display lights up but nothing is visible. Ctrl + Alt + F1 and then Alt + F7 will get X back, but the text consoles never return. Worked well with Fedora 6 but has been broken ever since.
• Wireless: Wireless works out of the box with iwl3945. However, after a couple suspend resumes it eventually stops working, I seem to be able to suspend resume once successfully, the next time NetworkManager no longer sees any wireless networks. No combination of restarting network services or reloading kernel modules seems to be able to get my wlan0 back up.

  EDIT: Bryan Clark posted a workaround for this, the key part is the 10 second wait. He's also filed a bug with comments indicating the problem is fixed in NetworkManager upstream, so that should trickle down to us in Fedora 8 soon.

• Graphics: X comes up with the proper 'intel' driver, it even nails the rather odd 1440x990 resolution which previously required some hacking to get right. (no more 915resolution package needed). Compiz effects seem to work fine, although I get no window borders when I try this on my actual Fedora install that was upgrades from Core 6 -> 7 -> 8. Must be something left laying around.
• Sound: Works fine.
• Brightness & Volume Media Keys: Works fine.

Fedore Core 6

See Fedora Core 6 on the Dell Inspiron 640m.