Site With The Lamp

Last few days, my computers have been without their covers - what with all the reinstallations/upgrades etc, etc. During this time I noticed that the hard dives get unbearable hot. I was using a couple of hard drive coolers but recently found that their fans had been completely toasted. In one of even the fan blades were falling off. Fans definitely isn’t the way to go if you want to preserve the life of your hard drives. I did suffer a hard drive failure recently and most definitely want to preserve their lives. I thought of spinning them down when not in use. And came across spindown

sg3_utils is supposedly the only dependency but when I tried to compile it, there was an error

This was recitified by installing libstdc++-devel but even then after installation the daemon wouldn’t start. I reckon this might have something to do with upstart - that notoriously badly documented replacement for init in Fedora 9.

Starting spindownd daemon… /etc/init.d/spindown: line 91: start-stop-daemon: command not found

To solve this problem, I had to manually edit the init scripts. If you want a copy, drop me a line.

After that bait and switch the other day, I was left with the prospect of having to make three different installation of Fedora. There was no way, I could wiggle out of the first one. The machine that was sent to the office needed fedora and that was a straight forward installation. After the first few clicks, I just forgot about it and let it run it’s course.

The second machine which, was to be my new desktop was more of a problem. I sure as hell didn’t want to install fedora on it again but I felt i should at least do an upgrade because the hard drives that would be connected to the new mother board contain only a 32 bit version of Fedora 9. It’s even slightly more complicated than that because the mother board I initially used on it has to go back to the file/media server. Otherwise I have to go through all the tedius steps of configuring the Nvidia VGA driver, mythtv and the tv tuner card.

So I had no choice but to upgrade. But when the installer got to that stage (upgrade existing installer) it choked; said couldn’t upgrade a 32 bit installation to 64 bit. You have to reinstall. I was very reluctant to format and install (had to do that several times over the past few months). The installer advised me not to but I went ahead anyway. The upgrade completed but I ran into trouble after boot up. Gnome desktop wouldn’t start up. KDE would start up but very slowly.

I then had to update both gnome and KDE. Even then I noticed that they wouldn’t start up at times it seems to happen randomly. Occasionally when that happens I see this message:

Could not start ksmserver. Check your installation.

I haven’t found a solution for that (google doesn’t have anything on it)

The office needed a new machine. We ordered a new machine (E7200 Core 2 Duo 2.53 Ghz, 2GB RAM, Asus Mobo). We waited a week. It didn’t get here. We waited another week, still didn’t get here. Don’t want to change the supplier either. So I did a bait and switch. Well not exactly, I donated my machine to the office.

The machine itself is rather old but it’s the ax that a wood cutter has been using for a long , long time. He changed the handle once, then a few years later he changed the ax head. The machine I had was also like that. It was a P4 2.0 Ghz with 1GB Ram and a rather cheap mother board. The casing had been with me for a long long time and showed it’s age. But I like this machine and this is what has been working as my desktop for ever so long. I have a much more powerfull machine (E 2180 2.0 Ghz , 2Gb RAM, Asus Mobo ) working as my file server.

What I did was rip everything out of the casing - including the power supply from both my desktop and the file server. Then I switched the too. The old P4 went into the new casing (a high quality asus casing) and into the cheap one went the Asus Mother boad ,the 2180 VGA cards etc etc but not the hard drives. Those I put aside.

So in the end I had an old machine in a new casing. Into this I installed Fedora 9 - i386 - the hard drive was a spare hard drive. I had taken out the other two drives which contained my OS and Data. These I plugged into the asus motherboard. Now I think you are suitably confused, so let me explain that again.

The new Asus casing has an old mother board + old cpu + a spare hard drive. The old casing has the Asus mother board and dual core CPU that used to be my file server. Into it also went the hard drives (with OS intact) taken out of my old desktop. Got it?

When the machine that was supposed to have been delivered days ago is finally ready, I will pay for it out of my own pocket , bring it home and set up a new file and media server on it. Into it will go the drives taken out of the file server that I just ripped up.

I am seeing these messages when plugging in a Huawei CDMA phone with it’s TI USB cable. I reckoned this might have something to do with my recent hard drive corruption and figured I ought to update my fuse packages. Unfortunately it didn’t quite work out.

--> Running transaction check
---> Package fuse.i386 0:2.7.4-8_10.fc9 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: fuse-kmdl-2.7.4-8_10.fc9 for package: fuse
--> Running transaction check
---> Package fuse-kmdl-2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686 0:2.7.4-8_10.fc9 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686 for package: fuse-kmdl-2.6.26.3-29.fc9
--> Processing Dependency: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686 for package: fuse-kmdl-2.6.26.3-29.fc9
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
fuse-kmdl-2.6.26.3-29.fc9-2.7.4-8_10.fc9.i686 from atrpms has depsolving problems
  --> Missing Dependency: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686 is needed by package fuse-kmdl-2.6.26.3-29.fc9-2.7.4-8_10.fc9.i686 (atrpms)
Error: Missing Dependency: /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26.3-29.fc9.i686 is needed by package fuse-kmdl-2.6.26.3-29.fc9-2.7.4-8_10.fc9.i686 (atrpms)

I reckoned that updating the kernel ought to fix it. Thanks to my new Lanka Bell Wimax connection, these big updates are no longer the painfull tasks they used to be. Unfortunately the update moved the kernel to 2.6.26.5-45 in fact looking at the /boot/ folder I see that the previous version is 2.6.25-14 still higher than the number that yum is looking for.

All this is because of a conflict between the Atrpms repo and the fedora updates repo. Looking even more closely I see that I do have a version of fuse installed. So I decided to forget all this and to manually create a group named fuse. Well it did make that particular error message go away, but I am not anywhere close to using this phone on my linux box.

I am not trying to setup a dialup connection. I aim to use my linux box as an answering machine.