Shadow LogsShadow LogsHowtos, guides, reviews, and news related to Linux, Open Source, and computing in general. Plus some misc stuff. Articles
Dag Wieers view on Mark's pledge for synchronized release
2008-05-18 07:29:00 Read it here: http://dag.wieers.com/blog/ubuntus-need-t o-catch-a-waveSo Mark's article is wishful thinking and hoping to ride the wave that Red Hat (and Novell) are funding. If he can use that same kernel, with the same backports, fixes and regressions tests, Ubuntu LTS does not need to do anything to support the same vendor hardware. Easy, but at the expense of both Novell and Red Hat.That explains why Mark wants 2 out of 3 Enterprise Linux distributions to enter his circle. I could imagine Novell and Mandrake joining forces to align the release cycle to try and take on Red Hat's 80% Enterprise Linux market share (sales, not necessarily install-base). There is hardly any benefit in Mark's proposal for Red Hat. - Izhar Firdaus - More About: View , Release , Pledge
Graphical memory usage map using gmemusage
2008-05-17 20:25:00 I am a heavy multitasker. I run a lots of apps at once.. sometimes to the point where this dual screen 22" + 14" setup still feels like I need more screen. However, screen space is not the primary problem, but RAM/Swap utilization instead. Its not unusual for me to have 95%+ RAM 90%+ swap (on a 1.2GB RAM with 1.2GB swap machine) utilization with all the apps I ran and freeing the RAM is kindof a tricky task.I usually use ps and top to detect apps that consume a lot of RAM and stop them. However, the values shown on the commands are hard to be quickly identified due to the scheme of Virtual, Shared, Resident, Swap does not show the values on how I would expect it to be.So I went googling and I found out about a very ancient tool ported from SGI IRIX called gmemusage. It shows a graphical representation of the memory consumption by apps running on the system in a quite useful display.Now I can efficiently find apps that uses lots of memory and free up my RAM without resorting to a reb... More About: Memory , Usage , Graphical
Fedora LiveUSB creation on Windows platform
2008-05-17 13:19:00 A great article about Luke Macken's LiveUSB-Creator on Lifehacker: http://lifehacker.com/391067/fedora-9-put s-your-desktop-on-a-usb-drive.Want source? : https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator/ The implementation in theory might be possible to create a Wubi-like installer for Fedora . Perhaps it will be possible some time in the future with this.Digg it!: http://digg.com/linux_unix/Linux_On_A_Sti ck_Fedora_9_Puts_Your_Desktop_on_a_USB_Dr ive - Izhar Firdaus - More About: Windows , Creation , Platform
When Ubuntu tries to be Fedora
2008-05-17 10:17:00 They struggled trying to keep the betas in control. Inclusion of too new , latest technologies caused breakage and other problems to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.Harald Hoyer wrote a good comment out of the responses to Mark Shuttleworth's post about synchronizing distro releases. Ubuntu should stay as they are. Its a good distro for me to recommend for those users who just want a JustWorks machine with no interest to contribute to FOSS world. Fedora development is admittedly way too fast for those type of users to bother. If Ubuntu tries to follow Fedora rapidness, that won't solve anything (except, maybe, open a way for grabbing the Fedora contributor/userbase to the Ubuntu side). Ubuntu has been a good player in trying to solve their bug #1. So, keep it that way. The Fedora path is too hostile for Ubuntu current target market. - Izhar Firdaus -
Stickers ~
2008-05-17 04:50:00 Thanks Nicu Buculei for the great Fedora Sticker KitTo MyOSS'ers, I just printed the stickers for giveaway. 23 in total.I'll bring them along on the next MyOSS Meetup (whenever that will be). - Izhar Firdaus - More About: Stickers
Me! Me!!!
2008-04-10 03:22:00 A Meme happening at Planet Fedora. I'm hopping in too~!.[izhar@hikari ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head179 vi112 python96 cd82 ls37 rpmbuild27 su27 locate23 ssh23 rpmlint22 diffI use vim and python more than cd and ls ?? Thats unexpected. - Izhar Firdaus -
12 YUM Tips and Tricks
2008-04-01 05:30:00 YUM Update Manager is the default package manager used in Fedora and Fedora derivatives. It is written in Python and have tonnes of features which average Joe might not know about. These additional features helps a lot on maintaining your system, improving your experience using the package manager and become more productive. Granted, yum depsolving and querying is quite slow compared with APT, but the flexibility and power yum grant to its users, its worth it.To my comrade, Surface, here, as you requested.Tips 1: Fastest MirrorThis is usually the very first yum plugin I install in a new Fedora deployment. What does it do?, well, the name tell it all. The plugin will time all the servers in the replied mirrorlist from mirrors.fedoraproject.org, and pick the one which is the fastest for you. Everything is done automagically, and considering its a YumCore class of plugin, it works with whatever GUI you use for yum.To install this plugin, useyum install yum-fastestmirrorUnlike APT which... More About: Tricks , Tips and Tricks
UTP Network Representation
2008-03-31 13:11:00 MPPUTP posted a post at their news blog about the DirectConnect file transfer is the one that affecting the Internet connection of UTP. And they showed this diagram Dear MPP, obviously you are taking this image blindly without checking at how the UTP network functions. Its either you are being tricked about the design, or the real UTP network design is really that severely flawed.Here, let me show you the map of the UTP network, from the the IP number point of view. I draw this map based on my experience analyzing the network structure of UTP to get around certain things to link up the UTPchat servers. How villages are separated, how stuff are being laid out. However, note that this map is mainly based on IP data and base routing only. I couldn't map VLANs and others lower level networking architecture because of the limitation of the access I have.Let begin with the overall layout, [Image 1]Opps ... like a web? .. oh yes it is... however, weblike doesnt mean bad. More redundant li... More About: Network
Genius: A gift?, or a curse?
2008-03-31 10:54:00 The news spreading around the net about Sufiah, a child prodigy 10 years ago who was accepted to Oxford at the age of 12, is now living in a pitiful life as a hooker.This is not the first time cases like this happens to Malaysian-born genius, previously, (I forgot his name), the boy who managed to fluently read when was 3 years old, is now, a drug addict. There are also some other similar happenings to people around me which I happened to see throughout my school life transfering from state to state with my family. What possibly have been the cause of this?. Why does these born-geniuses suddenly end up in a pathetic situation?. My opinion, its because of the people surrounding these geniuses and also the media. These gifted childs, are often the pride of their family and the people around them. Some family, or people around, being very proud of these childs, wanted to show the world about the child. And there came the media, news, gossips, and in a short time, these childs became we... More About: Curse , Gift , Genius
PIDA: An IDE which loves you!
2008-03-30 15:21:00 I discovered PIDA while reading around Fedora mailing lists (forgot which thread), and decided to try it out. yum'ed it from the Fedora repository, and launched it.My first impression - Coool!.. its gvim + version control + shell/terminal + customizable IDE, all in one!. I usually do development with very basic tools - gvim and a bunch of shells/terminals. I don't like most IDE because of the over-complexity of them. I do use geany or gedit once in a while when I want to have a bit of non-vim'ish behaviour of text editor. But PIDA, its a whole different level. It looks very promising to be my next best-friend.Not so long after, that I started using it for continuing my current project with Inigo, and quickly, it took over my daily use of gnome-terminal, and my frequent need to change directories and restart Zope. The basic version control feature it have is wonderful. Unlike Eclipse or other IDEs where it is quite hard to get flexibility on how the project is laid out because of ...
Catching up
2008-03-23 14:49:00 Catching up on stuff that happened this week:MAMPU Migrates Malaysian Government Agencies to OpenOffice/ODFMAMPU Migrates to OpenOffice.orgHooray to kaeru and OSCC!. This is a great success indeed.UTP-OSS meetup March 2008Our little special interest group in my University just held a meetup last friday. We haven't done any meetups for quite a while now and to my surprise, it looks like the number of really interested people have grown a lot. The turnout was approximately 20 people, and I can be sure at least 90% of them used linux in some point of their life and have some clue about OSS world. Compared to our previous big meetup which was mostly attended by uninformed people.Yondie presented his presentation from the last Ubuntu meetup and I share my experience working with an Inigo and how OSS economics works. IMO, this meetup was a great success and I hope those who are in UTP-OSS can continue this momentum and help building UTP-OSS reputation among UTP academician as a great kno...
Changing the default Display Manager
2008-02-29 03:48:00 I little discovery I found out a few days ago through /etc/X11/prefdm, but forgot to blog it. The default display manager in Fedora GNOME is GDM. But sometimes, you might want to switch to a different display manager such as KDM or XDM. One way of doing it is through removing the other DMs and only leave one DM intact. But thats ugly!. Theres an easy way to do it, which is through /etc/sysconfig/desktop. Create it if its not yet exist and add this line.DISPLAYMANAGER=KDEValid values are:DISPLAYMANAGER=GNOMEDISPLAYMANAGER=KD EDISPLAYMANAGER=WDMDISPLAYMANAGER=XDM - Izhar Firdaus - More About: Manager , Display , Changing
Fedora in NASA?!
2008-02-28 06:46:00 Jack Aboutboul wrote a great post about Fedora and RHEL in NASA.Read it here: Fedora on Final FrountierGreat to know this!. - Izhar Firdaus - More About: Nasa
Hacks: find_changed_rpms.py
2008-02-28 05:53:00 Sometimes, we might be facing certain problems which we could not find what might have caused it. One of the annoying cause is a broken file somewhere in the filesystem due to some reason. My practise, is that I regularly run rpm -Va to verify and list out broken or changed files. Then I would reinstall any rpm which I think have broken files. Now that I'm working, and being on rawhide, its rather tedious and time consuming to do this regularly. So I just wrote a python script for helping out with the extracting changed files list and querying which rpm the file belongs to.Those who interested to use it, you can grab it here: find_changed_rpms.py Usage: ./find_changed_rpms.py [OPTIONS] This script will automatically find for packages which one or more of its files does not match the information stored in the RPMdb. -h : show this menu -v : be verbose This script excludes packages which only have its config files changed and packages which its files only does not match the stored ... More About: Hacks
Tee'ing Python subprocess.Popen output
2008-02-28 04:11:00 A little hack for python coders out there who wanted to have a functionality similar to the unix's tee command for redirecting output to multiple places.import sysfrom subprocess import Popen,PIPEp = Popen(['put','command','and','arguments', 'here'],stdout=PIPE)while True: o = p.stdout.readline() if o == '' and p.poll() != None: break # the 'o' variable stores a line from the command's stdout # do anything u wish with the 'o' variable here # this loop will break once theres a blank output # from stdout and the subprocess have ended - Izhar Firdaus - More About: Python
Calling all Malaysian Fedora users and contributors
2008-02-26 14:27:00 Fedora presence in Malaysia is quite hidden from the general public. Fedora users in Malaysia are everywhere, but hard to find due to most of them being in their own, secluded, microcommunity. A number of small companies, government offices, organizations, have Fedora deployments in them with their own group of users, but they are hard to notice.Me and my comrades have just created and registered a channel in Freenode.net for our own Malaysian community. Come and join us at #fedora-my.We are also planning for a site for Fedora Malaysia in http://fedora.foss.org.my/ but our capacity is limited as all of us are quite busy with out current job. Yes, we are looking for more hands to help making this a reality.We are quite related to #MyOSS and Ubuntu-My usergroup. Together with FOSS-SM, we work together to spread FOSS love in Malaysia.I'll be waiting for you. ^-^ - Izhar Firdaus - More About: Fedora , Calling , Users
Eaten by Rawhide
2008-02-25 01:40:00 Got eaten by Rawhide after today update. Lots of GTK/GNOME app crashes while starting with this error (yeah, that includes 'gnome-session'). GDM not affected.This probably reflects a bug in the program.The error was 'BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)'. (Details: serial 22 error_code 3 request_code 2 minor_code 0) (Note to programmers: normally, X errors are reported asynchronously; that is, you will receive the error a while after causing it. To debug your program, run it with the --sync command line option to change this behavior. You can then get a meaningful backtrace from your debugger if you break on the gdk_x_error() function.)glad the basic KDE4 installed can run.Running 'rpm -Va' right now before assuming something wrong with any packages.Update:After reinstalling all packages that fails 'rpm -V', and downgraded some packages to the packages below, I managed to back login into GNOME. Some services like Gstreamer and gnome-settings-daemon still crashes/co...
Di Mana MyPapit?
2008-02-24 09:10:00 MyPapit is MISSING!!!!!. He supposed to come for today's Ubuntu-My meetup at UITM Shah Alam. Somehow, we lost contact with him.(Credits to yondie's post) - Izhar Firdaus - More About: Mana
Fedora - Ubuntu's more responsible older brother
2008-02-23 17:29:00 https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-ma rketing-list/2008-February/msg00370.htmlG reg DeKoenigsberg wrote:Here are some truths that I hold dear. I believe that they are *fundamental* truths of the Fedora project.1. It's not always easy to be true *free software* advocates. We take the good with the bad.2. The people we care most about are people who care about advancing the best of *free software*.3. Ubuntu is already catering to users who are willing to sacrifice freedom for the sake of *marginal* usability advantage. There's really no reason for us to follow them down that path. Will it cost us users? It certainly will. But we are *extremely* competitive with Ubuntu when it comes to *contributors* -- and it's *contributors* who change the world.Let Spaceman worry about being popular. Let's concern ourselves with being right, and being productive -- even when it's difficult."Fedora -- Ubuntu's more responsible older brother."Truly is!. This is what I usually do -> Typical ... More About: Brother
Why I wrote the open letter to rector
2008-02-21 17:13:00 My Open Letter to UTP Rector generated a lot of response from UTP, especially from the students.Some people asked me why I am doing this and why does it matters. So, here is my answer.I am quite a believer of Free Culture (read the manifesto: http://freeculture.org/manifesto/). I believe that technology must not be held back. I believe that through good utilization of technology, we can improve ourselves to a better community. I believe that information should be freely available for those who want it. I believe in an open medium for people to express their thoughts and without the fear of being attacked because of their opinion. While I am not a supporter of censorship, I neither protest it. I know certain things should be censored, but the rest, it should not be limited.Current situation in UTP, showing that the lost of the culture that I saw we once had during my early years in UTP. The lost of people who do things because of they believe its right. The lost of people who express... More About: Wrote , Open Letter
[Fedora-Ambassadors] Fedora 8 Announcement
2007-11-09 07:49:00 ========================================= =============================Fedora 8 Anno uncement On this autumn period where the best fruits are ripe, it comes thetime to harvest the new Fedora release.This new Fedora is named “Werewolf”, but fear not, as this releasewill bring you all the safety and stability that you could dream of.The main point of this new version is without any doubt SIMPLICITY.After 5 months of intense work, and in order to provide you the latesttechnologies, this new release will be for you as for us a major evolution.The major new features are (among others): Codeina :Fedora by default does not provide non-Free codecs. This is sometime aproblem for the end users who had to install them on their own. Codeinais created for this purpose, which is to help you to install the required codecs to helps you to listen to your MP3 or watch your movies, in a simple, legal way.PulseAudio : Fedora 8 includes the latest generation of sound server, PulseAudio.PulseAudio offer...
Red Hat Legal Speaks on Linking to 3rd Party Website/Repositories
2007-11-08 12:03:00 A great announcement @ Fedora-Marketing-List todayfedora-marketing-list/2007-November/ msg00079.htmlMore to read here : http://lwn.net/Articles/257559Linking to "third party repositories": Legal says that we can link, fromthe Fedora website, to third party repositories, so long as no one hasmade a critical assessment to determine that a patent or patents coverthe technology in question and no party has actually asserted theirpatents against the technology, we should be okay. Once we are on noticeof a claim of infringement or are aware of a competent assessment thatconcludes infringement is likely, we would need to take the link down orrun a serious risk of facing a claim for inducing infringement. Merelylinking would be highly unlikely to subject us to a claim of directinfringement. I asked about MP3, and it was stated that unless we arespecifically aware of the MP3 patent holders asserting a claim againstthe technology, we are still okay.This means that we can put a page up on the ... More About: Website , Party
HOWTO: Compiz Fusion in Fedora 8 'Werewolf'
2007-11-08 09:40:00 Fedora 8 'Werewolf' is just around the corner HERE!!. Lets get this started!CCSM should be in the updates repository already. If it havent, take it here ccsm-0.6.0-3.fc8.noarch.rpmNOTE: This howto assumes that compiz is already able to run on you hardware. If not, you might google for howto for that first. For NVidia users, install the Livna repositories an yum for kmod-nvidia and reboot. For ATI users, if your card is older than Radeon 9600, it should work out-of-the-box, if not, you will need to wait until ATI releases a new driver for kernel 2.6.23 and yum for kmod-fglrx from Livna after it has been released. Intel user (like me) cheer to yourself as it works out-of-the-box.Compiz & Compiz Fusion in Fedora 8Fedora 8 includes Compiz 0.6.2 on its release. However, Compiz Fusion packages are not included together in the default installation due to several reasons (one of it was libcompizconfig, ccsm, compizconfig-python packages got approved quite late) . Nevertheless, Compi... More About: Fedora , Howto
Fédora, 8th November, and Victorien Sardou
2007-11-07 15:31:00 A fun stuff from Fedora-ambassadors-list today2007-November /msg00008.html8th November is the anniversary of the death of Victorien Sard ou, a French dramatist of which one of his plays, Princess Fédora, is the origin of the name of Fedora hat.Image from wikipediaAnother fun fact: Werewolf, the Fedora 8 release name, consist of 8 letters. Fedora 8- 8th November--- Anniversary of the death of Victorien_Sardou----- Writer of the play, Princess Fédora- Werewolf--- 8 letter release name More About: Dora
MySpace?
2007-11-04 05:26:00 Just got myself a MySpace account. I'm not really a fond of Social Networking sites (except for LinkedIn and Mugshot) , but i'm curious bout the MySpace IM and what Mugshot offers for MySpace users. So, i simply created one account to play around with.Profile Page: http://www.myspace.com/kagesenshi_87.Add me if you wish. Just msg me @ MySpace telling me how u get the link to my profile so that i dont treat it as spam .. More About: Myspace
Ideas: Fedora AppDB
2007-10-29 01:06:00 This is just a post for me to jot down this idea before I forgot it.I'm currently exploring with TurboGears for a coursework project. Out of nowhere an idea came up about an application database for Fedora . Description as follow:Fedora Application DatabaseWhat it is? It is a web based application which contains description, screenshots and recommendations of applications from Fedora Package Collection. Use Case Bob is looking for some softwares to help out in his business. He browsed through pirut but could not decide on which application to use as the descriptions are vague and theres no preview about it. He open up his browser and goto the Fedora AppDB and browsed through the community-contributed descriptions and guides. Bob can now find what he wants. Bob is now happy. Nice features to haveScreenshotsPackage descriptionLinks to upstream webpagesComments/thread for the applicationsLeverage online-desktop's click-and-yum (not sure what it is really called) capabilityApplic... More About: Ideas
Werewolves Coming Near Us!!
2007-10-21 12:37:00 It might started its invasion from here. Then it raid into here. Just recently, its existence is confirmed!!. The creature is nearing our place!!, Sources said that it might reach us sooner than we can imagine and will cause a great Lycanthropy infestation under the moon. Transforming humans and gibbons into the Fearsome Beast of Moonshine. The Werewolf.Image taken from Mairin Duffy's post More About: Werewolves
Fedora Live Update SIG Announced
2007-10-20 20:03:00 At last, a SIG that will be working on supporting Live upgrades on Fedora .http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SIGs /LiveUpgradeAnno uncement @ Fedora-Devel-ListA toolbox suggestion for testers- a qemu image with a fully updated Fedora release N- a local mirror of rawhide of Fedora N + 1while is_testing_period: make_a_copy_of_the_qemu_image() yum_liveupgrade_to_Fedora_N_+_1() report_or_fix_bugs() sleep(1day) resync_rawhide_mirror():Plooking forward for this in F9 More About: Update
Whats New , and Whats Old - A little comparison between Ubuntu 7.10 new fea
More articles from this author:2007-10-20 06:52:00 Ubuntu 7.10 'Gutsy Gibbon' was just released a few days ago, and Fedora 8 just hit devel-freeze yesterday. With all the hype going all over the internet, one point annoys me - when some Ubuntu users claiming that some of the new features in Ubuntu are something Fedora does not have. Now, lets bust this myth. (This list might not be complete)Ubuntu 7.10 feature list was taken from : http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/releaseno tes/710tourGNOME 2.20Both Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 uses GNOME 2.20. Compiz FusionBoth Fedora 8 and Ubuntu 7.10 have Compiz 0.6.0 during its release. However, in Fedora 8, compiz will not be enabled by default , as there are several issues which still need to be fixed in Fedora's point of view, one of it is the Xv video support - patches are being developed by Red Hat developers in fixing the the X server and Xv and apply it upstream. Compiz is enabled by default in Ubuntu - with a hack patch applied in mplayer to allow Xv rendered properly on Mplayer only.In Ubu... More About: Ubuntu , Comparison 1, 2, 3 |
|
 |
|
 |
