bobpeers -> blog

I installed some software in Fedora 12 using PackageKit and after the install was complete this message box appeared, not all that useful! Plus it fails to run the package even when clicking on ‘Run’.

I don’t understand why there are both gnome-appearance-properties and gnome-display-properties. I think that gnome-display-properties should just be another tab on the gnome-appearance-properties.

Since you can open the gnome-appearance-properties using the context menu from the desktop I really think that you should be able to change the display properties at the same time (plus coming from Windows it’s the expected behaviour).

Plus I think it’s overkill having an extra menu entry just to change the screen resolution.

While we’re reducing the menu clutter I can’t see why gnome-screensaver-preferences can’t also be included as an extra tab. I think for most people changing all settings to-do with the screen and desktop in one place makes sense.

In an attempt to fix the slow booting problem I have with Fedora 12 running in a virtual machine I decided to compile the latest stable kernel, 2.6.32.

Compiling went fine but I cannot get it to boot as it hangs at the line ‘Creating initial device nodes’. There’s plenty of people with the same problem it seems, but no solution that works for me. I’ve compiled many kernels before and never had a booting problem so this is pretty annoying, maybe it’s because it’s the first 64bit kernel I’ve tried compiling.

One thing that puzzles me is why Linux (specifically Fedora) doesn’t have native support for NTLM proxy servers. The Gnome proxy settings do allow for authenticated proxies but if you are stuck behind a Microsoft ISA server then you are out of luck.

Actually this isn’t quite correct as you can download ntlmaps and then set your proxy setting to point to this which then authenticates your connections.

But I don’t understand why this can’t be included as standard. It occurred to me that there could be licensing issues but Firefox does have native support and that’s open source (even though the license is different, Mozilla Public License vs GPL V2).

Yesterday I had a problem with the shared folders when running 64bit Fedora 12 in Virtualbox. When I ran the command to mount the share

# mount -t vboxsf sharename mountpoint

it just returned the error ‘command not found’. It turns out the the command is actually a symlink called /sbin/mount.vboxsf that points to /usr/lib/VBoxGuestAdditions/mount.vboxsf.

My symlink was broken due to the fact that on 64bit systems the program is actuallly located in /usr/lib64/VBoxGuestAdditions/mount.vboxsf. To fix I simply deleted and recreated the symlink to point to the correct location.

# cd /sbin
# rm mount.vboxsf
# ln -s /usr/lib64/VBoxGuestAdditions/mount.vboxsf mount.vboxsf

I have the 64 bit version of Fedora 12 installed into a virtual machine and the boot times are terrible. By terrible I mean anywhere from 45 seconds to just over a minute.

I’ve cut the starting services right back to the basics and set it to autologin but it still takes ages. It seems that even getting to udev takes considerably longer than it used to, plus there’s a very noticeable delay before X starts and the desktop is displayed.

For comparison my Fedora 11 machine (32 bit) running the same services regularly boot in 23 to 30 seconds.

It could be to do with the virtual machine since I has to create an xorg.conf due to a problem with Virtualbox guest additions and Fedora 12 but I doubt that’s the sole cause. I did read a bug report about probing for the floppy drive but that’s not my problem.

I’ll just hope that either a new version of Virtualbox or a future Fedora 12 update fixes this.

After trying Google Chrome OS I moved onto Fedora 12 in Virtualbox. As always it installed fine and in no time I was at the default Fedora 12 desktop. Next step was to install the guest additions to allow for screen resizing and seamless modes.

After installing and rebooting, my X server wouldn’t start. I dropped into a virtual terminal only to see that Xorg could not find any screens to use (Fedora 12 has no xorg.conf, it use HAL to detect the displays instead). This happens in both 32 and 64 bit versions.

It seems this is a general problem that can be fixed by creating your own xorg.conf with the required settings. The second link I provided has the fix.

I haven’t tried it myself yet but hopefully a new version of Virtualbox will soon fix the problem. It did occur to me that it would be nice if there were an easy way to uninstall guest additions to fix problem like this, at least then I could make a temporary fix to investigate the problem.

Well like many people this weekend I was busy downloading and installing the Google Chrome OS VMWare image file.

It’s easy to use the file in Virtualbox using these instructions from Tech Crunch.

But also like many other people I was getting nowhere trying to log in using my Google Account username and password. The errors indicates that it’s a network problem so the comments suggest using bridged networking instead of NAT but that made no difference for me.

Finally I found a post telling me to use chronos as the username and a blank password, bingo now I could log in. When logged in found my networking was fine and it makes no difference at all if I use bridged or NAT, both work fine.

One final point is that the default keyboard is set to US so if you’re keyboard is set differently (mine is DA for Denmark) be aware of this.

I’ll leave most of the obvious comments on Chrome OS to others, as there’s plenty been said on the subject. But for those that dismiss the OS I think it’s way too early for that.

I may not want it on my main computer tomorrow but combine it with a new laptop running an ARM processor,16 GB flash drive and another year or so of development as well as an asking price that undercuts current netbooks by miles (maybe $100 in the US) and I think there will be a huge market.

There’s a rather strange difference between using C#.NET and C++.NET when using a parameter query to insert a TimeStamp into an MS Access database (field type Date/Time).

The following C# code works perfectly.

OleDbCommand cmd = new OleDbCommand();
cmd.Parameters.Add("@login_timestamp", OleDbType.DBTimeStamp).Value = DateTime.Now.ToString();
cmd.CommandText = "insert into myTable values (?)";

However when converting the same code to C++ you cannot just use OleDbType::DBTimeStamp as this results in an error when inserting the data, instead you have to use OleDbType::Date so the code looks like this.

OleDbCommand ^cmd;
cmd=gcnew OleDbCommand();
cmd->Parameters->Add("@login_timestamp", OleDbType::Date)->Value = DateTime::Now;
cmd->CommandText = "insert into myTable values (?)";

If you have logrotate running on Apache log files or your IIS server creates a new log every day then you end up with a bunch of logs that have a similar name format. If you want AWStats to process a large number of these without you having to manually join them (using cat on Linux machines) then you should use the included file called logresolvemerge.pl included with AWStats.

To use this simply use this line in you config file.

LogFile="/usr/share/awstats/tools/logresolvemerge.pl /home/iis_logs/iis_logs/ex* |"

Here I’m using logresolvemerge to join my IIS log files in the format exYYMMDD.log. This line will feed all the log files from oldest to newest to AWStats so it can process them. It works incredibly well and is very fast.