Well, that was pretty successful (see 2005/06/17). The place was positively rammed, and the current estimate is that we pulled in about £700 (US$1,240). Not bad for six hours work, eh?
June 2005 Archives
Some progress on the Fedora Core 4 front...
I yum installed gcc4, and tried it out on the software I install from source. These are the results:
- Linux kernel (2.6.12) OK
- MPlayer (Current CVS) OK
- Fluxbox (0.9.13) OK
- Xine (1.0.1) FAILED
So, I'm just waiting for Xine to compile with gcc4, and I'm good to go. How long this may take is anyone's guess.
I yum installed gcc4, and tried it out on the software I install from source. These are the results:
- Linux kernel (2.6.12) OK
- MPlayer (Current CVS) OK
- Fluxbox (0.9.13) OK
- Xine (1.0.1) FAILED
So, I'm just waiting for Xine to compile with gcc4, and I'm good to go. How long this may take is anyone's guess.
Much bizarreness. After (years?) of my Netgear DG834 router performing faultlessly, last night it decided it didn't want to play any more: it started rebooting every two minutes whenever the ADSL was connected.
I'm inclined to think this wasn't a random occurrence, as the data light on the ADSL port was receiving packets just before each reboot even when no local machines were plugged in, so methinks there was denial of service attack.
A quick trip (well, not so quick really with the router rebooting all the time) to to the Netgear site and a new firmware version later and everything's A-OK again. There is, however, nothing in the firmware changelogs between version 1.5 and version 2.10 to indicate that a problem like this has been fixed.
A ninja security fix, perhaps?
Sadly, the router logs were wiped out by the reboot, so I never did get to see exactly what was going on. Not that the logs are much use anyway...
I'm inclined to think this wasn't a random occurrence, as the data light on the ADSL port was receiving packets just before each reboot even when no local machines were plugged in, so methinks there was denial of service attack.
A quick trip (well, not so quick really with the router rebooting all the time) to to the Netgear site and a new firmware version later and everything's A-OK again. There is, however, nothing in the firmware changelogs between version 1.5 and version 2.10 to indicate that a problem like this has been fixed.
A ninja security fix, perhaps?
Sadly, the router logs were wiped out by the reboot, so I never did get to see exactly what was going on. Not that the logs are much use anyway...
I'm DJing at a charity type do in Nude on Ashton Lane on the 26th (that's a Sunday). It'll cost you £3 to get in, but it's for a good cause. Reach out and grab me if you want a ticket.
So, I installed Fedora Core 4 a couple of days ago.
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And then I uninstalled it.
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It turns out that GCC 4 is very particular about what it likes to compile. XdTV refused to compile, as did my custom kernel. This isn't strictly speaking a showstopper, but I would have lost the ability to watch TV on my PC. Somewhat bizarrely, using GCC 3.2 from the compat RPMs also failed on both the kernel and XdTV, so I had no option but to reinstall Core 3.
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The reason I originally installed FC4 was to try to get GCJ to compile some Java apps I created a while ago, but the same compiler errors I was getting previously appeared again, so that was a bit of a disappointment too (I'm using some syntax particular to Sun's Java 5, so this is to be expected).
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To be fair, none of this is RedHat's fault - GCC4 is very new, and most apps will still be catching up, so I'll have another go if the kernel changelog has anything about GCC4 fixes, and I can find a TV app which isn't TVTime and which compiles.
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As it turns out, all this was to my advantage anyway, as I did a 'network install' using the 'minimal' installation option when I reinstalled FC3, and added just the packages I need through YUM. This has reclaimed a lot of hard drive space, as I was able to completely dispense with KDE and a lot of other things which had been included as dependencies for apps I don't use any more.
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Also, the GTK theme in FC4 is very nice, so I'll <EM>have to</EM> install it at some point. I especially like the progress bars...
So, it appears Apple are moving to x86 (specifically Intel) processors. This saddens me slightly - the PowerPC chip which is currently used in Macs is a good design. Shame IBM couldn't get it to run at the speeds they promised. There are some people who are saying that this move will be detrimental to Linux, which is why I'm posting this.
It's complete rubbish.
People buy Macs for the Mac experience, and that experience is OSX.
Right now no one buys a desktop Mac, brand spanking new, then puts Linux on it. There's no point. You can get your hardware cheaper, and faster, from Dell; and slap a copy of <insert favourite Linux distro here> on it for a lot less hard earned, so Linux users don't buy Macs at the moment anyway. No loss there.
Dvorak's (oh so predictable) opinion that development for Linux will drop off as people flock to OSX is bunk as well. Steve Jobs has stated that OSX will only run on Apple hardware, so there's going to be a limited number of OSX-x86's around in the first place. That's beside the point, though. Hackers code for Linux because of what Linux is: free [speech|beer], powerful, and portable. OSX is only one of those things (or maybe none, depending on who you ask). The underlying machine architecture is of no importance.
Nope.
Nothing will change. People who want Macs will buy Macs and run OSX. People who want Windows will buy cheap Dells and beige boxen, and run Windows. And people who want Linux will buy whatever the hell they like, and run Linux.
It's complete rubbish.
People buy Macs for the Mac experience, and that experience is OSX.
Right now no one buys a desktop Mac, brand spanking new, then puts Linux on it. There's no point. You can get your hardware cheaper, and faster, from Dell; and slap a copy of <insert favourite Linux distro here> on it for a lot less hard earned, so Linux users don't buy Macs at the moment anyway. No loss there.
Dvorak's (oh so predictable) opinion that development for Linux will drop off as people flock to OSX is bunk as well. Steve Jobs has stated that OSX will only run on Apple hardware, so there's going to be a limited number of OSX-x86's around in the first place. That's beside the point, though. Hackers code for Linux because of what Linux is: free [speech|beer], powerful, and portable. OSX is only one of those things (or maybe none, depending on who you ask). The underlying machine architecture is of no importance.
Nope.
Nothing will change. People who want Macs will buy Macs and run OSX. People who want Windows will buy cheap Dells and beige boxen, and run Windows. And people who want Linux will buy whatever the hell they like, and run Linux.
