Fedora 11

Download should take max a couple of days, paused all the other downloads, there are 130 odd seeders and 1368 leechers ! the ratio should stabilize with time . The risk with such early uptake is, it tends to be buggy, ideally one should wait till people have got their hands dirty with it, with their different architectures.

So whats the big deal with this version, nothing really , I have got all that I need,

Almost sorted out

This ought to have beean easier to fix, but it almost took a whole day. The idea was to hook up my laptop to my home network. To setup an ftp server on my home pc so that when ever I come home, I can access my movies and music on my home network from the laptop. Especially during summer when I sleep on the terrace, I would like to watch a movie available on the network while going to sleep. Or how about while going to sleep turning the volume up/down from the bed itself, I like to listen to the classics on my 5:1 speakers.

It wasnt difficult to layout the network , connected ISP cable to the router , connected my desktops through patch cords, was able tp ping all machiines. The next thing was to get the xdmcp working, which I have still not managed to , but with vnc working thats not a showstopper and there are some gdm bugs reported, so I will wait for the release of Fedora 11, to nail this down. vsftpd took a long time to get going, I kept on hitting the 550 cannot change directory error. Googling suggested SELINUX , messed up with the conf file . instead of settign the SELINUX = disabled, I set the SELINUX type to disabled. system then refused to start , managed to find the rescue disk and a few restarts later system was up and so was ftp.

Now internet is available on both my pcs , and laptop, files shared right across the network, I control xmms from my windows laptop, the next thing, why not a streaming server ?

This will be more or less the blueprint of the IT infrastructure in my house, You can walkin, connect to my wireless network, there is a switch lying around, just in case a multiplayer game is on someones mind !

VPN finally

Finally got the vpn working, vpnc doesnt work , open vpn didnt but oracle gdc client finally did . I was able to telnet to my linux box and open up bug.us.oracle.com. THis ought to have been straightforward but nevertheless all is well that ends well.. and isnt it the reason Linux is exciting, it just tickles you, you know you can make it work, but you have to work for it and the resources are right there in the internet.

Next pit stop get ORacle conferencing working here otherwise I have to vnc to my windows box in office :(

GPS and Linux

Requirements: Upload track data to the gps device, download teh track data . The first functionality is when I am planning to follow a particular route, the second one is more like where have I been wandering. So Google Earth need to be integrated, I believe it works out of the box in Linux , a little search tells me that I need gpsbabel and glandkarte

Btw do you see the screen shot, its one of the desktop candys "now also available in Linux" . It basically gives u a snapshot when you are toggling between windows using alt+tab.. Ohh one more thing , I got a new keyboard and mouse, my old ones have retired from service after a very productive 5 years of service, they will now be eligible for subsidized housing under the kitchen cabinet and are also free to join any other companies. And the new ones are Microsoft hardware at least here $soft is pretty standard they work seamlessly with Linux.

Will be posting updates once I get these configured.

Fedora 10 upgrade

This post is from a upgraded Fedora 10 box. How good this upgrade is will become more clear with time. For now things seem to be working pretty well.

An incident free upgrade , the boot loader is now graphical, I am not sure if I like it , I was more comfortable when the system used to spit its gut out with all the messages. it kinds of tells you what works and what doesnt.

It didnt break anything, It identified all the hardware correctly. All the codecs which installed in FC9 are still available.

Fedora 10 download

The last time when I upgraded to Fedora 9 , I experimented with the preupgrade utility they had and after all the downloads, when the upgrade actually started , power went of , leaving my partitions corrupted. Then I had to again download the DVD torrent and do a clean install.

This time around with Fedora 10 I dont see , dont want to use also the preupgrade thing, so downloading the torrent , just checkout the number od seeders and leechers on that torrent thats the power of the community , I intend to seed this torrent for as long as I can .

At these speeds the download is expected to complete by Saturday, anyways from Monday onwards I would be blogging from Fedora 10 :)

Sound Converter

You can always do this using lame, memcoder but its kind of difficult to remember the commands. SO I was looking at some simple to use GUI application. Came across Sound Converter which does its job pretty well. It can be installed thrugh AddRemove Software application.

I didnt have the Gstreamer libraries so initially mp3 encoding was disabled, but thats just an enter stroke away, some things are still not a click away in linux :)
yum install gstreamer-plugins-ugly.


Yum installs the libraries, and the UI is pretty simple to use
and then ... and then my friend Tchaikovsky rocks on my ipod :).
I love a bit of drama :)