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It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and I thought now is a good time for me to post some useful information. I just recently updated my Mandriva 2007.0 to 2007.1 Spring Free. I’ve ran into several problem which I wish I had known about before getting into it as it has caused me several headaches. I will make a list below with the solutions I’ve found, and hopefully it will help others out too!

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.

It’s been 1 week since my nose surgery. I went to the doctor today for the 1 week checkup, and get the packing out of my nose, and stitching cut. There is a big improvment, and I feel 95% better, though things are still a little sore. Anyway, it was totally worth the 1 week of pain.

Thats all for now.

When I was around 10 years old I used to play baseball. I manage to catch a ball to the face and proceeded to bust up my mouth, teeth and break my nose. 17 years later (today) I finally got my nose fixed. This morning I went into surgery to have some corrective surgery and staighten out my septum and open up my nasal passages which were constricted. I’m in pain, and I look like a freaking alien! My nose is all swollen and I got all these bandages and ice pack over my nose and face!

I’m hoping I’ll look normal again soon, in the mean time, wish me luck!

Yesterday I wake up, get dressed and head out to my car to drive to work. When I get to my car I realize the driver side door is cracked open and I start thinking what an idiot I am for not shutting the door the night before. I open the door and look inside and my car is a mess, contents of the glove box all over the place. At first I think to myself ‘damn I need to start cleaning this bad boy a little more often’, then it hits me. Some ***hole has broken into my car! At first I was scared that they stole my toolbox which was in the trunk from the last time I used it. There is hundereds of dollars worth of tools in it. Luckily they were either too weak to pick it up (its really heavy) or they are idiots and left it there not knowing the true value. It turns out the only things they stole was some crap stereo I bought 4 years ago and my XM satellite reciever, which was also worth $1short of nothing (they left the antenna and all the perifials though, which actually cost me more than the reciever, go figure). In the end, the guys took the time to break into my car and steal the least valuable items they possibly could have. Congratulations, you walked away with about $40 worth of crap, and the head unit may short out on you (it had been acting funny), I only hope that it catches your car on fire. Here’s a hint, if you wanted a really nice strereo system, you were less than 100 feet from one, of course there is no way you could have gotten to it.

The only thing that does annoy me is that they also took the control panel to the A/C and heater, which was attached to the install kit for the stereo. Of course that piece is also worth next to nothing, but good luck with it, the vents always closed when the air turned on, and the A/C button only worked some of the time. Enjoy the summer!

One good thing that came out of all this is that it reaffirmed my decision to only drive in-expensive cars as daily drivers and buy in-expensive crap for my daily driver. This way when people feel the urge to break in, they get nothing but crap. Of course I do have alot of nice stuff, but I don’t keep in places that make it easy to steal.

A few years ago, out of boredom I decided to see if I could implement a very simple and basic web server in C++. I was successfull and the resulting product is available in my Projects section. This past week I have, for what ever reason, been inspired to pick up the project and continue it. I’ll be releasing a new and improved version hopefull soon, version 0.5. More details to follow ….

I have a delimma, one that has been tormenting me for a while now. I can’t seem to come to a resolution on my own, so I’ve decided to come to you, my fan base (a very small fan base, I know, but a fan base none the less) to help me make a very important decision in my life.

Here’s the delimma.

I have 2 cars I love and work on, a 1998 Dodge Viper, and a 1972 Pontiac GTO. I only have time and money to work on 1 at a time. I can not decide which to work on first. Every day that passes I change my mind about this. I will be setting up a poll shortly and let you, the reader and official member of the AskRyan.com fan base, decide for me which car gets tender loving care first.

You are probably asking yourself ‘why do I care?’ The truth is, I realize you probably don’t and I’d be surprised if I got more than 0 responses. However I’m going to do it anyway and you are going to like it.

Today, I realized something. The easter bunny is scary.

Some people don’t like clowns. Some people think Santa clause is scary. I can see thier concerns. However, I don’t think many people put thought into the dangers of the Easter Bunny. Let’s analyze him:

- He’s a 6ft tall walking rabbit
- He has 2 sharp protruding teeth, which he is always showing through his menacing smile
- He decorates and hides eggs for little children.
- Rabbits don’t lay eggs.
- Where do the eggs come from? They come from the chickens! What kind of deal did the chickens make with the Easter Bunny?
- If you were tasked with decorating and hiding eggs to small children all over the world, would you be happy and running around with a big furry smile on your face? I think not. So why is the Easter Bunny happy? Shouldn’t he be bitter?
- When you see the easter bunny up close, and he talks, what do you notice? He has no facial expressions. His mouth does not move. Eyes are staring back at you from within his mouth. THAT IS SCARY.

Now, lets pretend for just one minute tha the Easter Bunny is indeed not real. Maybe that makes him less scary ….

No, not at all. If anything it’s worse. Now you are dealing with a full grown adult who’s sole purpose is to dress up in a costume to do all the things I mentioned above.The thoughts that go through that person’s head can not be pleasant.

The Easter Bunny is scary.

I know this post is a little late. Unfortunatley my server crashed over the holiday weekend, and I wasn’t able to reboot it until today.

So anyway, HAPPY NEW YEAR to everyone. Hopefully this year is better than all the previous!

I thought I’d write a quick post in regards to an article I just read on CNN.com.

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.