1) The most annoying problem I ran into was trying to download the Mandriva 2007 DVD iso (as of this writing there is no CD iso available). I used the torrent file provided on Mandriva’s site, and used Ktorrent to download it. After burning the ISO, the bootable DVD would not boot. As it turns out, Ktorrent is buggy and loses chunks of the file. DO NOT USE Ktorrent to download the ISO. I suggest using either the official bittorent client, or rtorrent, both of which come with Mandriva 2007.0. Also, I tried downloading the ISO from various mirrors, but they all timed out before the download would complete. Maybe you will have better luck.

In the end I ended up upgrading by using urpmi and pointing it to the new 2007.1 repositories on the mirror sites. Do as follows:
a) Configure urpmi to point to a mirror with the 2007.1 repositories.
b) run urpmi –auto-select urpmi
c) run urpmi –auto-select
d) run urpmi –auto-select kernel
e) reboot and hope for the best

2) After I had upgraded, I ran into a problem where running the command ’su’ would not prompt me to enter a password and simply errored with ‘Invalid Password’. As it turns out, Mandriva updated su, as well as the file used by PAM. Fortunatly RPM made a backup of rpm. What you need to do is backup the existing /etc/pam/su, and then copy /etc/pam/su.rpmnew to /etc/pam/su. This fixed my problem.

3) The Ia Ora, and Galaxy KDE themes were missing and did not work. This threw me off because before I upgraded I was using the Galaxy2 theme. So after the upgrade when I booted into KDE all of a sudden the KDE title bars were missing and I thought there was a problem with X or KDE. As it turns out if you go into ‘Mandriva Start Button’ > ‘System’ > ‘Configuration’ > ‘Control Center’, then open up the ‘Apperance & Themes’ section, then select ‘Window Decorations’, you can select a different theme to get you up and running.

As of this writing, I’m still trying to figure out how to fix the missing Ia Ora and Galaxy themes, they are installed with the latest 2007.1 version, but just do not seem to work. I’ll update this once I find a solution.

*UPDATE* It turns out that the reason some themes were not showing up was because the 2007.1 upgrade set the video driver being used to a ‘generic’ driver, and I have an ATI radeon, also it set the resolution on my widscreen laptop monitor too high (1900 x something). I switched back to the proper video driver, and dropped my resolution back down to 1400×900 and this caused all the themes that were not working to start working again!

4) When starting and stopping the network using /etc/rc.d/init.d/network, I would get a bunch of errors like:
error: “Operation not permitted” reading key “net.ipv6.route.flush”
error: “Invalid argument” reading key “fs.binfmt_misc.register”

I believe this was caused because I never had IPV6 enabled, and I didn’t want to enable it since I don’t use it. After reading through the /etc/rc.d/init.d/network script, I found a line that checks to see if the file /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/init.ipv6-global is executable, and if it is it tries to run it. All you have to do is remove the execution bit from this file (or delete or remove the file all together) and these errors will go away. I did a ‘chmod a-x /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/init.ipv6-global’ and it fixed the problem.

5) When I would boot up my laptop, everything would start up except networking. I would have to manually run ‘/etc/rc.d/init.d/network start’ after logging in to to get networking to start up. As it turns out there was never a startup script placed in /etc/rc.d/rc5.d for the networking service. I ran the command ‘chkconfig network on’, and that fixed the problem by creating the startup script etc/rc.d/rc5.d/S10networking, I assume it also placed one in rc3.d but haven’t checked since I never enter run leve 3 on my laptop.

6) When powering off my laptop, I would get an error something like ‘no more processes at this run level’ and my laptop would not auto shutoff. I would have to hit the power button myself. This was caused by a conflict between apmd and acpi. I removed both apmd and acpi from the system (to do this just use the rpm -e command). I then used urpmi to re-add apmd and all is working again.

I’m sure there will be a few more annoyances that will arise, and I will post about them when I find them and fix them.

To sum it up, despite the recent speculation about whether or not RedHat will survive with competition coming from the Microsoft/Novell partnership and Oracle’s attempt at taking some of RedHat’s market, it seems RedHat is still holding strong and doing alright. I know alot of people thought this could be the start of the end of RedHat, with strong competition coming from two huge companies. However I think RedHat is almost a defacto standard in Enterprise Linux. I don’t feel alot of companies are going to switch or abandon RedHat for another ‘Enterprise’ level Linux distro. Why would they? RedHat works, it’s well supported and has good pay support. Most companies that are looking to pay for Linux support already have RedHat contracts which meet their needs, why go jumping ship to a new Enterprise venture which has yet to prove whether or not it will be successfull?

RedHat is also one of the biggest contributors to the success of Linux, as well as kernel patches and various other applications. I fail to see Oracle or Microsoft contributing to Linux the same way RedHat does should either one become a serious contender in the Enterprise distribution market. It would be a big loss to the Linux community should RedHat no longer exist. Would Linux survive? Of course! It would be a huge setback though.

With all that said, I don’t want to come off as a RedHat fan boy. I’m actually a Mandriva Linux fanboy, if you must know However I do administer and develop on RedHat Linux at my day job. I have to admit, that while I don’t like the idea of paying for a Linux distribution, in the Enterprise workplace where companies want the comfort of using an OS which a big company stand behind and supports, RedHat is the answer. It just works.

For those that are interested, IP blocks for all the countries in the world can be obtained at http://www.completewhois.com/statistics/data/ips-bycountry/rirstats and is kept up to date. Download the ‘cidr.txt’ files for the countries you want to block, and use the ‘Include’ directive inside of the blacklist config file for Shorewall. Of course you will have to properly configure Shorewall to use the blacklist, which I will leave as an excersize for the reader.

1. enter about:config in the address field
2. filter for mailto
3. make sure that “network.protocol-handler.external.mailto” is set to true (double-click to change).
4. Add a new preference:

• right-click on the window
• choose New, String
• prefence name is network.protocol-handler.app.mailto
• value is /path/to/thunderbird (if using another mail client other than thunderbird, enter the path to it here instead)

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