This Old Blog

Linux Mint 16 RC VM running Java 7 u45, Apache ServiceMix 4.5.3, and Google Chrome 31 I've installed two more Linux VMs on my little ol' Windows 8.1 notebook using VMware Player 6.0.1. They're Linux Mint 16 RC and Fedora 20 Beta. No need to clog the entry with numerous installation screen captures from both; if you've worked with either Linux Mint 15 or Fedora 19, then there's little if any difference between the two. The primary reasons for moving up to the next release are the software updates. I installed both with the Cinnamon alternative desktop. From a personal perspective I prefer Linux Mint 16's Cinnamon over Fedora's because of Mint's leaner window decorations. When I can change the desktop wallpaper and be done with personalizing for productive use I call that a small personal victory. That happened with Mint, but I still wanted to find a way to narrow the rather large window top, and paradoxically, widen the rest of the window borders ...

Fedora 19 virtualized on my Windows 8 desktop It's been a while since I commented about Linux. I've been very busy with my career changes as well as learning a new set of skills associated with that career change, including some travel. My use of Linux has settled down as a super-application that runs on top of my Windows 8 system (running on the Samsung Series 7 Chronos). I have four distributions installed these days; Fedora 19, Linux Mint 15, CentOS 5 and CentOS 6. The CentOS installations are there primarily as my final testing sandboxes for RHEL 5 and 6, respectively. Otherwise I do my leading testing and development on Mint and Fedora, usually in that order. Here's a quick rundown of my experiences and observations to date running Linux in this way. Linux Mint 15 . By far and away the cleanest and easiest to work with. Its gcc and clang/llvm installations aren't up-to-date with the latest and greatest as the versions installed on Fedora, so if I really ...

Playing a bit with Fedora 19 after morning chores and before I head out for some late morning errands. The performance of the desktop is reasonable but not blazing fast, which is to be expected on a VM. It's Good Enough for what I want to accomplish, which is functionality. If I need performance and if the application isn't Linux-specific then I'll move it over to Windows 8, shut everything down that isn't necessary, and run it on an OS running on bare silicon. I decided to install Netbeans 7.3.1 on this VM to see how it performs. So far it's usable. In addition to Java support I also installed support for C++ (see why below). I'm also going to install Scala support as well to mirror how I have Netbeans 7.3.1 installed on Windows 8. After further investigation I've discovered that the version of Java being pushed by Fedora 19 is Java 7 update 25, which is the current Oracle release. I may (I say may) uninstall the Oracle version and go with the version...

Logged in and getting ready to do something... dangerous? Fedora 19 hit the bricks sometime Tuesday, 2 July. And I dutifully downloaded yet another DVD ISO (at around 4.2GB) of the latest release and installed it in a VMware Player virtual machine. I've trimmed the number of Linux VMs I carry around these days to just two; Fedora and Linux Mint. And when I was ready to install Fedora 19, I blew away Fedora 18. I don't bother to keep any older releases anymore, and make no attempt to upgrade any older releases either. I was pleasantly surprised this time around with how Fedora looked and installed, for the most part. I'll explain what few things I didn't like as I come to them. And this time, I'm going to do something I haven't done in a long time; I'm going to display a series of screen captures to illustrate my points. One of the very first pleasant surprises to great me was at first boot. Fedora 19 has provided a very clean, very professional lang...

Fedora 18 was officially released yesterday after a long troubled gestation period. I downloaded the DVD ISO from the Ga Tech mirror and burned it to physical media before heading home. I also had done the same with openSUSE 12.2. I had picked up a Seagate 500GB 7200 RPM notebook drive for around $70 at a local Best Buy. I was fully prepared to go home and install either one of those on my wife's prior white MacBook 4,1. After putting in the new drive I first tried to install Fedora 18. It would never boot on the MacBook, instead dumping me out at a raw grub prompt. I tried several different ways to boot Fedora 18 on that MacBook, but gave up and installed openSUSE 12.2 instead. The openSUSE install was mostly successful, in that I was able to get it onto the hard disk and have it boot afterwords. But after an hour of just moving around in the environment, I pulled out the old Snow Leopard DVD and installed a fresh copy of Mac OS X on the notebook. After picking up all the up...

Well, I'm back to Fedora 17. I've learned a lot these past two days, and I managed to get WiFi working. You know what the problem was? Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? The bloody external switch was off. Yes, off. When I bothered to look at the side of the notebook and saw the state of the switch I could have screamed. I had basically forgotten that it was even there. I looked at my E6510 that runs Windows 7 Enterprise, and yes, the switch enables WiFi. And of course it works. But the switch on the side of the E6510 I've been installing various Linux distributions on, it was disabled (red showing on the switch). As soon as I turned it on the WiFi icon changed state on the panel. And it found all the local WiFi hotspots. And I was able to log in just like I log in for every device in this house, from Windows notebook to Apple Macbook to smartphone and all the various Barnes & Noble tablets. And WiFi under Fedora 17 on the E6510 with Centrino 6300 WiFi ...

Fedora 17 base install with Gnome 3 before a massive update I spent the majority of last week at an integration event. Part of the toolkit I took with me was a Dell Latitude E6510 with RHEL 6.3 installed. Running on top of that was VMware Player to host several VMs that ran additional systems as part of the event. I'd also installed Google's exfat driver to support a 64GB SDXC card and additional drivers from EPEL to support a 500GB LaCie external drive formated as NTFS. It was a decent enough system, and certainly supported the integration event to a very successful conclusion. When I got back home, however, I wanted a more advanced kernel on the notebook, one that had a chance of supporting the E6510's wifi wireless chipset. The older driver under RHEL couldn't see it (or I never saw it with the tools), so I installed Fedora 17 to get at least the drivers installed. Sure enough, dmesg logs that the Intel wifi chipset was found and enabled on boot: [ 5.40642...

There's an place at the intersection of East Colonial and North Ferncreek called Ice Cold Auto Air . They've been there so long (since 1964) they've become something of a landmark. Right under their sign they have this heavily customized VW minibus which has been painted up in various color schemes for years. Recently it was given yet another paint job and given something of a name. It's now called "Penguin Power." It looks all cute and interesting from the outside, but a quick peek into the interior tells a slightly different tale. The panels are missing from inside the doors. The dash had been reconstructed from "home brew" materials, and spray painted interesting shades. Wires dangle from beneath the dash and some feed directly through the front sheet metal to the lights outside. Some of the interior material is torn, exposing yellow filler foam. The interior looks like it's usable, but it's definitely not the kind of vehicle you...

Well, I gave it the old college try and tried to create an up-to-date Mono development environment on top of my aging Fedora 14 installation. I should have know better , considering how many times in the past I've beaten myself bloody with some specific feature of Linux. It all started innocently enough. I cloned a copy of Mono from their git repository and built it without any issues. I wrote a number of increasingly complex C# applications to test the compiler and runtime. No problems were encountered. But I noticed I couldn't compile or run any GUI applications. Complimenting that was a lack of MonoDevelop 3 , the Mono/C# development IDE. When I started to dig into how to build and run that particular tool, I ran into problems. Fedora 14, released November 2010, is running Gnome 2.32. Fedora 14 is the last Fedora release to run Gnome 2. Fedora moved to Gnome 3 starting with version 15, and that's one important reason why I stayed with Fedora 14 and continue to stay ...

It's been a while since I touched my personal Android 4 repository hosted on my aging Latitude D630 and its Fedora 14 installation. I started hosting (and building) Android 4 just to get the experience in handling that particular project, as well as creating my own version of ICL to run on my Nook Color (Encore). The directions were initially written for CyanogenMod 7.x (Gingerbread) but are still pretty accurate (for the most part) for CyanogenMod 9.x (Ice Cream Sandwich). The only problem being the following: After performing repo sync (which is what I started with this time), during the build process, I ran into a build-halting error where libjackpal-androidterm4.so could not be found. Sure enough I didn't have that, just the earlier libjackpal-androidterm3.so. Looking around a bit on the internets I found the solution: right before build cd into cm/vendor and execute get-prebuilts . This will unpack term.apk and give you the correct library to build against. DO NOT d...

Earlier today I discovered Cinnamon, an alternative desktop environment for those who are not quite happy with Gnome 3. The site contains instructions for installing the two packages necessary for Fedora 16 and Fedora 17. Once installed I found the desktop much more to my liking. In particular it was nice to have something as simple as the off switch on the main menu panel. I was able to find the icon for Chrome and simply drag it to the left panel side. I was also able to add a desktop switcher. Cinnamon is configurable and allows for both a lower and upper panel. I tried this classic layout but discovered that the lower panel was inoperative. I switched it back to the simpler single lower panel.

I installed a second instance of Fedora 17 this time with the KDE desktop just as I had threatened to do yesterday. Same M.O.: a virtual machine instance using VMware Player 4.0.3 on a RHEL 6.2 host. This time the installation ran without a hitch. Just like Fedora 17 Gnome I had to install from the live desktop ISO then add gcc and kernel-devel. Perl was already a part of the installation. With the basic tools in place I installed the VMware extensions which allowed for seamless integration of the virtual desktop with the host's desktop. As usual I also added google-chrome-stable to pick up Google Chrome 19. The KDE 4 desktop is the absolute antithesis of the Gnome 3 desktop, to the point where I wished some of the Gnome 3 austerity would rub off on KDE. But I'd rather have too much than Gnome's too little, so I'm willing to leave well enough alone and be very very careful what I wish for. As you can see above the desktop framework has plenty of 3D styled effects a...

Along with the rest of the Linux world I installed a copy of Fedora 17 to sort of kick the virtual tires and drive it a short distance to see how it runs. As is usual for me these days I installed a copy in VMware Player 4.0.3 hosted on a workstation running RHEL 6.2. Maybe it was a case of the stupids, but it took two attempts to successfully install Fedora 17. The first time something I did screwed up the filesystem and it panicked when it couldn't find the kernel on boot. Because of heavy traffic on the Fedora web site I wound up installing the live desktop because I couldn't download the full DVD. I completed the installation by adding and removing certain bits. Basically, what I altered was immediately updated the installation with 87 packages, including the kernel added perl, gcc, kernel-devel, xrdp, google-chrome-stable Once all that was done I installed the VMware extensions. I had to add perl, gcc and kernel-devel to support the building of the VMware extension k...

Fedora 16 with Gnome 3 desktop, Firefox 12 Fedora 16 with Gnome 3 desktop. Terminal has "fake transparency" enabled. A few days ago I wrote about my experiences with Ubuntu 12.04 vs Ubuntu 11.10. After giving 24 hours to think it over, I've decided to drop all Ubuntu support in the lab. We're pretty much a Redhat shop,using RHEL 6.2, filling in with Fedora and CentOS as needed. The key to this is what do my sponsors use, and it turns out that for official deployment when they use Linux they use RHEL or CentOS, while the developers pretty much use Fedora (I use Fedora). I wish Ubuntu the best of luck, but I doubt it will show back up, either on regular computing platforms or portable devices such as tablets. If anything we've adapted Android as our small device OS, as have all sponsors who use Android. The other portable device OS they use is iOS and certain Apple devices, but only in very narrow niches. My favorite Fedora release by far has been Fedora 14...

It was only a matter of time before the siren's call lured me to install the source for Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS, Android 4) and attempt to create my own version for my Nook Color. There are two links I've been following to install ICS from its git repository and then building from the repository. I need to list several caveats before we go much futher; I am a complete novice (otherwise known as "a noob") when it comes to the use of git[1] and building Android. So I'm depending on a lot of hand-holding at this point in time, meaning reading lots of xda forum threads and wiki pages to piece together a process that works with my Fedora setup. My Dell Latitude D630 isn't some awesome build machine. It's now considered a modest little notebook powered by an Intel Core 2 Duo T7700 processor running at 2.4GHz. It took a long time to pull the git repository, and it's going to take a long time to build the project. Right now as I type this the system load is ...