Mandriva 2008.1

There hasn't been any post for quite a while, although I have been taming the penguin quite well :)

The nasty bug with rpm has finally been solved. It turned out to be some kernel problem. The unofficial solution was to reboot under the old 2.6.17 and rebuild the db. If that still doesn't work for you, you should continue reporting it at the Mandriva Bugzilla.

So I have been having a real stable system for a few months, and today I was really surprised to find out that the first alpha version of 2008.1 has been released. That was incredibly fast compared to the delay in 2008.0. It comes with KDE 4 RC2 that everyone has been longing for. Recently I've heard that KDE 4 not only had a better look & feel and cool new features, but it also provided better performance too :)

Time to update to the new version and see how it works :)

Migrating to 2008.0

Mandriva 2008.0 official was out last week, so time for me to start migrating to it :)

Downloaded the 3-CD isos, burned them with k3b, and I was ready to go.

To my experience, the installer hasn't been improved any since beta 1. It was still incredibly slow. Froze for a few minutes trying to determine the package list. And the estimated time for upgrading was 4 hours! While the packages were installed, I needed to switch the CDs dozens of times - guess things would be easier if I had a DVD burner, but really not everyone has one.

Finally, after about 1 hour and a half, installation finished. I was taken to the configuration screen. Having installed Linux many times, it didn't take long for me to finish setting everything up and ready for the first boot of the new system.

On the first boot, I wasn't surprised to see the lilo bootloader in text mode instead of the nice graphical one. It has been removed since 2007.1, and there's no chance for it to come back in 2008.0, I guess :P

I was then taken to the login screen. Well, it was quite nice with a new fancy theme. I logged into KDE, my favourite desktop environment. And... things go black and I was taken back to the login screen. Wtf???

Good thing I have fluxbox installed as an alternative desktop. Logged in without any problem, I started wandering the wilderness to find the solution to my problems. Found the following lines in my kdm.log:

Backtrace:
0: /etc/X11/X(xf86SigHandler+0x85) [0x80c46e5]
1: [0xffffe420]
2: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so(ExaOffscreenMarkUsed+0x69) [0xb7aa70b9]
3: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so(exaDoMigration+0x597) [0xb7aa6ff7]
4: /usr/lib/xorg/modules//libexa.so [0xb7aa46d6]
5: /etc/X11/X(miFillGeneralPoly+0x4f5) [0x812ad85]
6: /etc/X11/X(miFillPolygon+0x62) [0x812a322]
7: /etc/X11/X [0x8174f82]
8: /etc/X11/X(ProcFillPoly+0x10a) [0x808666a]
9: /etc/X11/X [0x81532bd]
10: /etc/X11/X(Dispatch+0x1af) [0x8089d6f]
11: /etc/X11/X(main+0x465) [0x8071025]
12: /lib/i686/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe0) [0xb7c9bf90]
13: /etc/X11/X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0x1e5) [0x80703a1]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11.  Server aborting

While roaming around finding the solution, I noticed that X crashed even when I start other gtk-based applications like rpmdrake, harddrake, GIMP, ekiga. Totally lost, I posted my problem at http://forum.mandriva.com, hoping that anyone there could provide any idea that could help me solve the problem.

Life without everyday applications was a real pain. While trying to fix the problem, I ran into another nasty bug with rpm:

error: Runnning db->verify ...
rpmdb: PANIC: fatal region error detected; run recovery
error: db4 error(-30975) from dbenv->open: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run database recovery

This nasty bug is being tracked down by pixel at http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=32547. If you stumble upon it, be sure to report the bug there and help us identify the problem. In the meantime, you can use the following commands to fix the rpm database temporarily:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
rpm --rebuilddb

Have been messing with my penguin box for so long, I didn't have any trouble getting into sleep that night, and luckily without any nightmares :P

Waking up the next morning, I decided to jump into the official mandriva irc channel at irc://irc.freenode.net/#mandriva and had a nice chat with the guys there. Finally, after gathering all the relevant ideas, I decided to replace the xorg.conf file with the old one I backed up months ago. Fortunately, this completely solved the problem!

So it turned out that x have been misconfigured somehow. I wonder if it was me who picked the wrong video card/monitor/keyboard/mouse..., or the hardware detection wasn't good enough - never had this problem before. Anyway, I had enough problems with x that I wouldn't want to compare the 2 config files to find out which line was causing the all the troubles.

Time to give the damn penguin a real torture now :P

Waiting for 2008

Hey guys,

2008.0 was scheduled to be released on 27 September, but there were so many critical bugs that it hasn't been out yet. That's no surprise to me as there have been so many delays to the older versions. A bit disappointed, but I'd rather wait than getting an unstable release.

In the meantime I'll tell you how I could move the big DVD isos from one computer to another with just a 2GB USB flash. It's really easy with the following wonderful linux (or rather, unix) commands:

- split: This command helps you split a file into smaller files of equal sizes. The most important option is -b which specifies the file size, with the following multiplier suffixes: b for 512, k for 1K, m for 1 Meg. The beta2 DVD iso was 3.1GB, so I splitted it into 2 files of 1600M each:

split -b 1600m mandriva-linux-2008.0-free-beta2.i586.iso

This command will produce 2 files named xaa and xab.

- cat: Not only help you view the file content, this command also joins files together. It is pretty easy to use:

cat xaa xab > mandriva-linux-2008.0-free-beta2.i586.iso

With just 2 commands you can probably get everything. But as the files are pretty big you should use checksums to make sure there's no error in transmission. Linux provides 2 common checksum tools: md5sum and sha1sum. md5sum is faster and enough for everyday use.

PS. There's this really cool sourceforge project that provides ports of many common unix tools for Windows: http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/. Long live the penguin empire :D

Taming the penguin - Part 3

You know, I had Mandriva 2007, but I still wanted to get the latest packages, especially KDE, the best desktop environment out there. In Mandriva, this can be done easily with a single command:

urpmi task-kde

Once again things didn't go on so well - that's the thing I hate the most about Mandriva betas. As an experienced Mandriva user, I logged into failsafe trying to start KDE from text mode and debug the problem. Here's the important command sequence:

xinit
startkde &

From the error output I found out that the arts package was missing. I installed it and voila, the system booted smoothly :)

Now I can live happily until the official 2008.0 release comes out - hopefully before October :)

Taming the penguin - Part 2

Hey, it's me again.

Last time after installing Mandriva 2007, I tried to upgrade to 2008 beta 1 again. And once again things screwed up. Being on a slow connection I had no other choice other than switching back to 2007. So basically I'm on 2007 now.

The next day the Mandriva community released 2008 beta 2. So I grabbed the DVD iso. Too scared to upgrade the whole system yet so I planned to keep it for individual package upgrading. I don't have a DVD burner, but there's no need for it actually. In Linux you can mount an iso without the need for a virtual CD/DVD drive. The command is:

mount -o loop -t iso9660 /mnt/data/images/mandriva-linux-2008.0-free-beta2.i586.iso /mnt/2008/

You can make the system mount the iso automatically by adding the following line to /etc/fstab:

/mnt/data/images/mandriva-linux-2008.0-free-beta2.i586.iso /mnt/2008 iso966 0 ro,loop,auto 0 0

And here's the command to add it to the urpmi source:

urpmi.addmedia --distrib 2008 /mnt/2008/i586/
rpm --import /mnt/2008/i586/media/media_info/pubkey1

There's a cool game added to 2007 that I really enjoyed: Super Tux (haven't noticed it until now :P) Basically it is similar to the famous Super Mario Bros series with nicer graphics and the most important thing is that it is freely available. Not just that you can get it for free, you can also use the level editor to create new levels, or if you are familiar with c++ programming in *nix you can edit the source code to add more cool features :)

As a member of the @ generation, which browser do you use? A sad fact is that although the Internet has been around for many years all the browsers out there are still immature. Internet Explorer (aka Exploder) is a piece of crap. Firefox, the currently dominating browser is a big mem eater. Other browsers like Opera, Konqueror, Netscape, Safari don't provide as good plugins. And none handles applets/flash loading very well. People always claimed applets/flash suck because they freeze their browsers but the real truth is that the browsers really sucked.

I used to have 3 browsers installed on my Linux box: Firefox, Konqueror and Opera. Now I have to install Opera on my fresh system again. Having grabbed the latest rpm from http://www.opera.com, installing was easy with urpmi. Unfortunately, on startup, the fonts were so badly broken that I could not read even a damn word.

After some research, I found out that the problem was that Opera was using 100dpi fonts while they had not been installed on my system. xorg-x11-100dpi-fonts was what I need :)

That's it for now. Stay tuned for the next chapter :P

Still taming the damn penguin

Been experiencing the best and worst things you can see in the IT world :D
Well, I've been trying to enlarge my Linux partition. There are 2 ways to do it: creating another partition for /home or a fresh install. I decided to do a fresh install because I wanted to fix some trivial problem with KDE sound (but later on it turned out to be a bad choice :().
Since Windows was crappy I decided to do a fresh reinstall for it too. The sucker could not boot from slave drive, so I had to install it to the master drive. On the secondary drive I had 30GB for Linux and 45GB for data.
After backing up the data, I got myself a 3-CD version of Mandriva 2008 beta 1. Installation went smooth, the only thing that annoyed me was that I had to switch too often between CDs - they should have distributed the packages cleverer :P
As all packages have been installed, I was taken to the configuration screen. To my surprise, there was no graphical lilo bootloader, and although I could choose grub-graphic, it still complained that some packages were missing. So I had no choice but to choose lilo-text as the bootloader.
The text version was really awful. As I logged into the system, I found myself in IceWM. There were no KDE nor fluxbox although I was sure that I had choosen to install them.
OK, I'm no fan of Gnome, I didn't install it either, and IceWM really sucked. Also I noticed that the 3-CD version was much smaller than the DVD one. Unfortunately I don't have a DVD burner, and the DVD image was too big for my damn connection. Therefore I decided to switch back to 2007 and wait for the official version later this year...

(To be continued)

Problem with KDE sound

Is KDE your favourite desktop environment? I'm using it because it's much cooler than Gnome :P
As a penguin tamer, I always read the cool Linux articles by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols. One of my favourite was his article titled "Little Red Riding Tux meets the Big Bad Wolf". The podcast was so cool that I wanted to make it my KDE startup theme so that I can hear it everytime I start my Linux box ;)
Unfortunately, for some weird reason, KDE just refused to play it :P Maybe because of the file being stored in mp3 format. What's even worse, it caused my sound driver to stop working -.- And for some weird reason, even when I reseted the sound theme to default, sometimes the old config still popped out of nowhere.
Care less about the KDE config bug :P Atm all I need is a way to get my sound working without having to restart KDE. A simple solution is to restart the sound driver. As I am using alsa, the command is

service alsa restart

That's it for now! Have fun taming your penguin guys ;)

Welcome :)

Welcome to my new blog - Penguin tamer :)

Why create another blog, while I already have (a very nice) one? :D Well, as you already know, I have a penguin at home :) Although I have been a skillful Tiger tamer for a few years, taming the penguin is still a challenge for me. Mostly because since I started going to prison (aka work :D), I don't have much time with the penguin anymore. And as the penguin is surely more powerful than the other competitors from M$ and Mac, more effort is needed in order to control him :)

Some info about my penguin:
- Distro: Mandriva 2007 Beta 2
- Kernel: 2.6.17-3mdv
- Desktop: KDE 3.5.4, fluxbox 0.9.15
(More will be added later)

I'm just above the beginner level so anything I post will be inaccurate/incomplete. Please feel free to add comments/suggestions :)