Sexy Sexy Penguins

Wish me luck. I’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade to werewolf tonight. After reading Max Spevack’s post about how to upgrade to Fedora 8, this post from Will Woods stating that Rawhide is now ready to go and of course the current code freeze for this Thursday’s release, I think its time to upgrade.

In fact, I plan for Fedora 9 to do this much earlier so I can help test the release. I post here and now to make sure that commit to helping the Fedora Project squash bugs for Fedora 9. I’ll accomplish this by installing it at Test 1 and actually report bugs as I find them.

Wish me luck with this upgrade and my future endeavors. I think its a good cause and a great way to get further involved with the community.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: f8, rawhide, upgrade, werewolf

Yes, that’s right folks. I’m looking for a new image to adorn the top of my blog. I’ve got this pretty new theme (not shown on my site yet) but it needs a fresh new coat of penguin love.

So I thought I’d share with the community and see if anyone could come up with a new image for my blog. The general idea is it has to go with my blog title “Sexy Sexy Penguins”. I’m imagining a few “very attractive” penguins or something related in that way. To help generate some interest in helping me with my sexy penguins search, I might offer a bit of a reward, say $50 to the winner.

To help you in your search, I’m planning on using this theme. There could be slight adjustments, but the image should be in several desirable formats, including banner, screensaver, and a any others that might seem useful. The main reason I am doing this is to motivate myself into blogging more, both for your benefit, but also for mine.

Fedora-Tutorials needs a face lift, help the Sexy Sexy Penguin(s) come to life! Thank you all for enjoying my posts, I plan on providing much more in the near future.

Cheers,

Herlo

One of the coolest new things coming out for Fedora 8, the Gnome Online Desktop! Its an amazing device, provides a simple interface for working with the new web world in which we live.

It reminds me a bit of spotlight for Mac, but this thing has much more. With all of the web integration it has, including google docs, calendar, last.fm, digg and more, you can’t pass up the opportunity to try out this amazing desktop.

I’ve attached an ogg/vorbis screencast of some of my interaction with it in Fedora 8 Test 3. Although it claims to be just a demo, it sure looks good!

onlinedesktop-screencast - 23MB (could take a while)

Cheers,

Herlo

Oh joy, I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Fedora 7 on my laptop. I was really nervous because my previous experience upgrading from Fedora Core 5 to FC6 was harrowing at best. Lots of errors and other junk happened back then.

But this…. this –was flawless. So simple, so easy. My grandma could install it its that simple. I was so impressed! So blown away at the improved upgradeability that has been made in Anaconda using yum.

I upgraded using the Fedora 7 DVD. I literally chose upgrade, followed the prompts and a short while later, I was told the installation was complete and to reboot. Being the geek that I am, I poked around while the upgrade was taking place. Nothing looked strange, no errors, nothing. Just a perfect upgrade.

My fears were unfounded. In my previous upgrade, I ran into problems with LVM. No issues here whatsoever. It was just awesome!

I rebooted my machine and waited for the kernel to boot. Here is where I found the first quirk, it tried to boot FC6 and failed. Obviously they need to clean up just a little more, but this was easily remedied by choosing the Fedora 7 boot option from GRuB. And yes, I removed the option from the grub.conf (menu.lst)

Literally 45 seconds later and I was at the login screen. Wow!! That was fast! My boot time in FC6 was over 2 minutes. Fedora 7 cut more than half the time off!

Have you seen the login screen? If not, its very pretty. Here’s a screenshot:

Its just so beautiful! I love the fact that you can interact with the login window (gdm) with your mouse and choose your user. Linux on the desktop is well on its way up and love being a part of the revolution!

What about the other features. Oh, right! Let’s get to them.

After logging in, I was psyched to see that my network card, the Intel ipw3945, worked out of the box. I have never been able to regularly use NetworkManager and nm-applet, but Fedora 7 fixed that too. Boy do I love the simplicity of it all. My networking is now so easy to set up.

Another tool that has been included is the new Pidgin. Previously named GAIM but because of legal pressures from AOL, was forced to change their name. Seems odd I’d be talking about this, but I just thought the logo was cool.

I also like the fact that I can build my own LiveCD without much effort. Try out revisor today, you’ll have your very own LiveCD you can give away, tweaked the way you want.

There are many more features of Fedora 7 available, including Fast User Switching, Dynamic Kernel Ticks, new and improved NetworkManager and Multi-Display hotplugging with the new Xorg Server 1.3.

Have a look around at the new Fedora 7 today and enjoy all that it has to offer…

Cheers,

Herlo

I’ve debated this for some time. How long should it be to be notified of an instant message (IM), or private message (PM), or someone saying your name in internet relay chat (IRC)? I’ve still not answered this question, but I’ve got at least a tool that will help you when irssi receives a message directly to you.

This tool was first described to me here. And I blogged about it in this previous post. The general idea is to set up an irssi script that will write out data to a file. That file, in turn was read by the tail command over ssh and a notification window would appear anytime a new message was sent directly to you.

That capability hasn’t changed. Instead, I’m trying to improve how that is done. In the old way, a persistent ssh connection was needed to tail the file on the remote machine running irssi. This caused headaches and problems; some were easy to deal with, others much harder. I think for the most part, I’ve addressed these issues.

What does the new script do you ask? Well, the perl part from the original hasn’t changed, the other script have changed, however. Its been divided up into two scripts in fact. The original script irssi-script.sh now obtains the flat file written by the irssi perl plugin using a cron job that runs every minute. The new file fnotify.sh will run every 10 seconds and check to see if the flat file has been downloaded. Once it detects a new file, it will display the contents of that file as messages using the notify-send tool.

All of the scripts are available from my svn repository at http://www.herlo.org/fnotify. Please feel free to check it out as its set up for anonymous checkout.

I’ve provided a README and an INSTALL file which should help you get the script set up for you. Please send an email to clints At UToS . OrG or comment here on the blog with any questions and I’ll happily try to help.

Back to my original question. How long should it take? Will you let me know?  Currently, this script can take as long as 1 minute 10 seconds to send notification of a message.  Is this too long?

Thank you,

Herlo

As of 8 AM MDT, Fedora 7 is available!

There are several to choose from so choose wisely. This Fedora is one of the largest undertakings by the Fedora Project. Here are just a few things you’ll get with Fedora 7:

• CD Creation Tools - Build your own custom Fedora CD/DVD with its own rpms and cateogories
• Live CD for both GNOME and KDE - Something cool to give away to somebody who has never tried Linux. Or use it for rescuing a machine.
• KVM Virtualization - A new way to make multiple operating systems run on your box.
• Tickless Kernel - Better power consumption for laptops.
• Extended wireless functionality - My wireless card will work now, yea!!!

There are many more than what are listed here. Go out and get your Fedora 7 today. There are two ways you can get the release, one by internet:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Distribution/Download — Currently, down. Keep trying!
http://torrent.fedoraproject.org - Currently working.

Or you can come to the release party tonight, where I’ll be demonstrating (hopefully) many of these cool features. You can find that announcement:

http://www.utos.org/2007/05/29/utah-open-source-the-open-source-technology-center-and-fedora-7/

And the map to the event:

http://tinyurl.com/25394b

Hope to see you with your sparkling new Fedora 7 box very soon.

Cheers,

Herlo

So pretty, so very pretty!

At least the install is quite pretty. The new look and feel of Fedora 7 is definitely nice. I did, however notice a couple things that I didn’t like. It wasn’t immediately obvious how to pass commands on the Anaconda boot line.  After a little looking around, I discovered that hitting the tab key will allow you to edit the boot line.

One device standard to rule them all

It’s been a long time coming and now Fedora 7 is running the 2.6.20 kernel with libata activated, all of the hard drives on my systems will now be referred to as a consistent /dev/sd. No more /dev/hd! Isn’t that great! This will definitely come in handy when writing kickstart files and mounting drives.

Fastest ‘user switching’ in town!

Although it broke a little for me, it was easy to switch from user clints to another user quite easily. It only took about 3 seconds and I had to enter the password for my other users. In addition, there are some glitches in the switching back and forth.

Let’s see what they give us tomorrow

Tomorrow is the release of Fedora 7 Test 3. I expect big improvements over Test 2. Go ahead and get the new release. It should be announced anytime now. Download the Test 3 release tomorrow (hopefully) at http://torrent.fedoraproject.org/.

Cheers,

Herlo

Hi all.

As the founder of the Utah Open Source Conference and one of its biggest proponents.  I just wanted to mention that if you hadn’t already seen the post from the Utah Open Source Planet, you will have now.

I am looking forwared to reading all of the outlines coming in over the next month.  Big things are afoot and much will happen in the coming days.  We anticipate a good load of submissions so get yours in early.

Lots of fun stuff will be presented we are sure, and choosing the presenters will be a lot of fun and I am sure looking forward to reviewing many outlines.

If you have anything, anything you want to talk about that relates even a little bit to Open Source in Utah, please submit it today.  You only have until the end of April to do so.

Cheers,

Herlo