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)