now what? Friday: July 13th - 2007

looks like it took about two and a half hours to take a backup of the important stuff. mind you, i did get stuck into some Phantom Hourglass and missed the odd ’skip/replace/cancel’ dialog, so that slowed things down a bit.

about half an hour to install. another half hour to do an update. another half hour to install some essential bits and bobs including evil nvidia drivers. then about another hour re-configuring stuff.

i’ve still not got my home set up properly. i’ve got to do KVM things and see if that breaks 3D stuff. there’s a load more stuff to re-install too – for example, the lack of mod_ssl explains why i can’t see the web site right now. restoring evolution email could still be a problem. and i’ve got to remember how i set up postfix.

so, hours of endless fun this evening. still, so far it’s working.

did i mention that beagle stopped misbehaving after a reboot. and now i doubt i’ll see it go wrong again. guess i’ll close that bug.

not on your life Thursday: July 12th - 2007

well, that didn’t help. so i’m off to re-install. i’d love to hang around here trying to debug the upgrade for the benefit of everyone else but i’m afraid i just haven’t got the time/energy/inclination for that right now.

maybe i’ll debug the upgrade process for F7-F8 … maybe it’ll be working by then.

upgrade? hmm. Thursday: July 12th - 2007

well, in general, i’m not loving this upgrade from FC6 to F7.

F7 i like. i’ve installed it on a few systems and i think it’s great. that’s why i’m starting to install it on more important desktops now.

i thought that maybe by now the upgrade process would be working smoothly and i wouldn’t need to do a fresh install.

i’ve upgraded two machines – one x86 and one x86_64. both have nvidia graphics cards and the livna nvidia drivers (plus a few livna packages for dvds etc). shouldn’t be the end of the world.

the x86 machine got upgraded using ‘yum upgrade’. it worked fairly well. took a long, long time (like five hours) and afterwards i couldn’t log in to my regular user account. had to log in as root and blat my old home directory. (rename old one. create new one from /etc/skel, login, gradually move the more important stuff from dead home to new home.) annoying.

the x86_64 machine is more important so i thought i’d be kind and upgrade from the DVD. nope – same result only worse. now gnome-terminal doesn’t work and running any 3d app crashes X. i’m guessing this nvidia driver is up to its old tricks.

i’m going to try going back to the nouveau 2d driver, uninstalling and re-installing the livna nvidia stuff. we’ll see if i can avoid re-installing.

ouch! my cpu just got hotter. Friday: June 29th - 2007

maybe this kind of thing was happening all the time before i had munin running, but now i can see it i’m annoyed. for the last few days whenever the system is idle the cpu gets maxed out.

a small script pinned down the culprit – beagled.

whatever could the matter be?!

gps goodness Monday: June 11th - 2007

ooooh. look what my new phone can do!

the fat boy Sunday: June 10th - 2007

i’m back under 15st (just!) for the first time in years. woot!

mkinitrd in FC6 Friday: June 8th - 2007

well, for today’s monumental nightmare moment i decided to upgrade my disks on my FC6 server. bought three new ones to supplement the existing ones.

the end result of lots of planning and plotting and fiddling with LVM was that i had (i believe) succesfully made a complete copy of my root filesystem onto a new logical volume in a new volume group on a new software raid device.

so, modify the grub.conf to point to the new logical volume, modify the fstab (on the new volume, not the old one!) to refer to itself. bingo, right?

nope. boot can’t see the new volume even though it was right there a minute ago.

boot to single user mode using the old volume. the new volume is right back where it’s meant to be!

after a lot of worried checking i find that it’s just that LVM can’t find the new volume group because the new raid device doesn’t exist in /dev during boot.

a bit of googling later and i see we need to update the initrd file.

back into single user mode. a few experiments to check i’ve understood things right and then (after taking a backup of the original file):

mkinitrd –fstab=/mnt/newroot/etc/fstab -f /boot/initrd-`uname -r`.img `uname -r`

more checks to see that the only difference between the two is the addition of the new raid device.

reboot. bingo. now i’m pleased to report:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/WideVG-WideLV 1.2T 397G 691G 37% /

*phew*

FC4 to F7 upgrade Friday: June 1st - 2007

right. well, it’s been a little while but i’ve got onto mugshot now and reading so many other blog posts has inspired me!

so i thought i’d mention that while testing for bug 240952 i came across an old desktop running FC4 and thought i’d try out an upgrade to F7RC2 … and it’s now working! the biggest problems i found were to do with weird config i’d been experimenting with years ago for which the servers are no longer around. here’s what happened…

after the upgrade dbus wouldn’t start – it appeared to hang forever. going ‘interactive’ and skipping that service (and NFS quotas and gkrellmd) i got to a login prompt but the login seemed to hang after entering a password. can you see a pattern yet?

i couldn’t. so i went to single user mode and tried running dbus manually and checking the logs. it was having trouble with LDAP because i’d been experimenting with an LDAP server (now gone) and the config was still there. i removed and re-installed nss_ldap to get the default config back but that didn’t get rid of the “nss_ldap: failed to bind to LDAP server” messages.

decided i must still have some LDAP stuff selected in system-config-authentication but couldn’t figure out how to drive it in text mode (if you type “system-config-authentication” it gives you more than one screen of help text but anything else, e.g. “system-config-authentication | more” says “cannot open display” ) but once i’d installed xorg-x11-drv-i810 and deleted /etc/X11/xorg.conf i could run xinit, gnome-panel, gnome-terminal and nautilus and at least fool myself into thinking the world was OK again.

then i checked system-config-authentication and switched off LDAP and Kerberos check boxes. reboot. success!

after that gdm wouldn’t start because there was an old /etc/gdm/custom.conf kicking around. moved that and gdm-restart’d .. more success!

finally, i couldn’t log in as me because i used to have nfs-mounted home dirs – so i had no home dir at all. rsync’d one from my current desktop …. bingo. fancy fading icons on login and everything!

just got to install a bunch of apps (only because the config i’ve copied from my regular workstation expects them to be there) and i’m good to go.

so the summary is:

• old (X11R6) gdm config shows up in /etc/gdm/custom.conf
• xorg-x11-drv-i810 not installed
• broken LDAP config causes dbus-daemon to hang forever on startup
• output of system-config-authentication in text mode is unhelpful

not bad! i’ll raise those as new bugs and we can see if anyone wants to look into them.

tomorrow (or possibly later today) i’ll try the upgrade from F7RC2 to F7 that people keep asking about on #fedora.

F7 FTW!

edit 1: just found another problem – /etc/ld.so.conf had an old X11R6 entry. removed that and did a ldconfig and now beryl is a happy bunny .. and so am i.

Hardware hackery – the cure for Wii depression Monday: December 11th - 2006

a while ago i finally got around to making a homebrew video projector out of a second-hand OHP and a second-hand LCD monitor.  when i showed it to my friend Sam he sent me a link to a site where another chap had melded together a 21″ LCD monitor and an A3 graphics tablet to create a huge touch-screen for, probably, less than £500 instead of the many thousands a ‘real’ one would cost.

well, on friday evening i was sooooooo annoyed about the lack of a Wii that i thought, sod it, i’ll do it.

i had a spare 15″ LCD screen and an old A5 wacom tablet.  the screen is an old IBM one and is quite big.  i thought maybe there’d be enough space in it to squeeze in the insides of the tablet … and there was!  easiest hack ever – just needed a bit of sticky tape to stop the back-plate of the tablet from shorting out the pcb of the screen.  job done!

obviously, the tablet doesn’t cover the whole screen area but using the TopX, TopY etc settings in xorg.conf you can line it up pretty well for about one third of the screen.  annoyingly, the GIMP appears to ignore those values and i haven’t got around to figuring out what to do about that yet.  but it’s pretty damn cool anyway!

i’ll put some pictures here soon.

Wiiiiiiiiii! Monday: December 11th - 2006

here’s a good wheeze – google (or whatever) for “blog” and “wiiiiiii” with varying numbers of ‘i’s.  there’s a lot of people feeling the same way!

so, i haven’t completely forgiven parcelforce (or “parcelfarce” as they seem to be known around other blogs) .. in fact, if i ever get around to it (so not then) i’ll write a proper complaint.  grumpy me.

saturday morning the games (apart from ‘play’) turned up .. at 7.25am!  eek.  so parcelforce is rubbish but the royal mail part of the business is still functioning excellently

i had a look online to see what experiences other people were having with parcelforce and wiis and decided it was worth going to their depot to see if i could get the thing.  took the bus to Cribbs and wandered around for a while trying to find the place.  eventually got there and waited (for 45 minutes) with two very talkative chaps and a few other extremely dissatisfied customers while a jolly employee hunted around for our packages.

rumour has it they were supposed to close at 12.30 but stayed there until 1.30pm to find our stuff, so at least one person was making an effort to help out.  and all our packages were found in the end.

(for what it’s worth, they said they didn’t know why it hadn’t been delivered but that it had been with an agency .. presumably they out-source to handle the Christmas rush.  humph!)

plugged it all in and played some Wii sports on saturday afternoon.  i was intending to go back out to the shops for some things but totally didn’t get round to it while i was trying to improve my baseball scores.  then fell asleep on the sofa.  oh, played a bit of ‘Beyond Good and Evil’ too.  now that could be quite good fun with the remote – if you could twirl it without throwing it everywhere.

played some more on sunday just before my mum came round.  got her playing golf – she loved it!  mind you, she’s spent several happy hours playing ‘Cooking Mama’ and the ‘Brain Training’ games on my DS too.  anyway, in the evening she got dad round too (they play lots of golf together) and they both beat me at wii golf!  they even both had a go at bowling too and seemed to enjoy that.  yay!

played the beginning of Zelda and Red Steel .. got killed in both.  a couple more rounds of boxing (my shoulders ache soooo much!) and off to bed.  i saw the weird bendy-wrist strangeness in red steel.  and the remote-based fighting in zelda seems a bit silly.  still, pretty cool.

‘Play’ turned up this morning at 9.30 so i now have two controllers.  we’ll see some multi-player action soon.  tennis, boxing and baseball i suppose.  oh, and whatever’s good in Play i suppose.

a bit annoyed that after lots of system updates i still don’t have a web browser, news or weather channels.  but, surprise surprise, the shopping channel is up and running.  buh.

made a couple of miis – well, i made one of me and mum made one of her.  good fun