Tale of two hard drives

My replacement (SATAII) drive is exhibiting strange behaviour.

I installed Fedora 10, and customized it in exactly the same manner as my remaining IDE drive. The difference?

CUPS works flawlessly on my IDE with SELinux enabled and set to Permissive. On the other, CUPS is being blocked from creating files. I tried "enabling" all of the SAMBA options to no effect. Currently SELinux on that drive has been disabled.

If I ever have time, will investigate this mystery.

Other than that, not much to report on. It's hard for me to blog every week when nothing's really changed.

As for SBR600, last week we (as a class) compiled some packages while measuring system activity.

Hard drive dead

Well, it was bound to happen. My old IDE hard drive from way back (actually, 2nd semester) died today. I'm currently updating and customizing Fedora 10.

Will have to complete the process next week (Feb.9).

Here's hoping my remaining IDE drive lasts for the rest of the semester!

New prm created from cups-pdf

Using the cups-pdf package, I modified the original source code to attempt dynamic output directory usage. So far it hasn't worked.

However, the source and binary do build using rpmbuild -ba.
Testing the source and binary rpm's using rpmlint produces 2 error messages regarding file permissions. I downloaded the official source rpm and tested with rpmlint, getting the exact same error message.

Testing with "mock" worked, as the binary rpm did build from the source.

Made my first RPM

Took a long time.

First I tried using a template Spec file, but "rpmbuild" failed on "Source0". After considerable reading, troubleshooting and pondering, figured out the right URL format to allow download of source from the SourceForge site.

Then I was stuck in the middle of the %prep stage. Rpmbuild was trying to change the working directory to something based on the versioning scheme I used. However, since the original source uses a different version number, the build would stop. Once I used the same version number as the source, it worked.

The source RPM is here:filezilla-3.1.5.1-1.fc10.src.rpm

Fedora re-installed, finally found a package that doesn't break it

I downloaded the latest FileZilla (client) source. Created "make" files using the "configure" script and compiled the executable. Testing shows that it works.

The main challenge was trying to find the package dependencies based on names that often didn't match those on the repositories. There also some packages not documented that needed to be installed, as "autoconf" 'configure' script would halt when certain libraries were not found.

ATI driver + latest Xorg = frustration

Looks like I'll have to wait for ATI to update their driver.

I've installed the open JDK 1.6, does anyone know if it's just the Sun releases repackaged for Fedora?

I'm also going to test tomcat/JSP, see how it runs. In the past it's been a bit of a wrestling match to get Fedora and tomcat to play nice.

Next on the "to do" list:
- apache configuration
- php & mysql installation
- Flash SDK installation and first demo

Why Flash?
It's notoriously buggy on Linux platforms and very crash prone. Thus a good litmus test for Fedora 10.

Fedora testing update...

Spent a lot of time on Friday trying to get some games to run on Fedora 10. After a while I realized that the ATI driver didn't install properly. So I went ahead with my SBR600 related tasks. Downloaded and compiled NLED using 'make'.

Did a search on SourceForge, but there are thousands of projects, and no direct way to search for one that uses 'autoconf'. So what am I supposed to do?

Funny thing, when I got home I remembered running into the same ATI driver problem on my home pc. Then recalled that SELinux needs to be disabled in order for the driver installer to function normally. I'm very sure that's all I need to do, so on Monday I'll re-install the driver and test some games.

So far I'm pleased with the overall stability of Fedora 10. Firefox crashed once, but on any OS that happens once in a while anyway.