More like retrograde.

I decided to make sure my Gnome audio muting problem wasn’t related to a firmware problem, so I decided to get the latest BIOS update from Dell. Just another example of how an upgrade can cause more problems than it might fix.

Anyway, I upgraded my system BIOS from A07 to A11. I should have known the prospects weren’t good when I discovered that the BIOS upgrade utility requires a 32-bit Windows environment to run. But hey, no problem! I’ll grab a Windows drive out of another laptop, boot from that, and install the upgrade.

That process made sense and worked out great, or so I thought. Then, I rebooted with my Foresight Linux drive, and found an unusable area from right to left and 5/8″ down from the top of the display which was filled black with red symbols where there had previously just been desktop.

Oh yeah, another tiny issue — there was no visible X Windows cursor either. But on closer inspection, the trackpad actually worked. By moving the mouse, I would eventually glide over a desktop item and select it. I never could seem to launch it though. Selecting a menu item also never worked, so I had little option but to simply power down to get out of an unusable environment.

Tomorrow, I’m going to try flashing the back to A08 to see if I can correct this. Googling for this reveals that there are others who have experienced similar issues running Linux on D505’s with this BIOS revision. Seems like A09 has issues too, and I can’t find A07.

Other than the fact that this one purports to keep up with Gnome software releases, there’s no particular reason I picked foresight over any other distro. So far though, I haven’t been disappointed. The resulting “out of the box” product is far better than Fedora’s.

The installed Evolution/ldap packages can actually connect to Exchange 2003, and it required none of the tedious steps I’ve had to go through in the past.  I probably spent 2 minutes or less compared to hours. It took far longer to sync my Inbox than it did to configure Evolution.

I haven’t located either a Gnome panel, or menu for the command line yet. Then again, I didn’t even have time to look for the actual binary,  /usr/libexec/mini_commander_applet…

One minor issue I’ve run into — anaconda couldn’t determine the display type on my Dell D505 laptop and apparently defaulted to SVGA mode at 800×600. Unfortunately,  the graphical installation  screens require a higher resolution. I did a text-based install instead, which worked fine. Once X was installed, it managed to prove the video card just fine. The Gnome desktop environment looks just as you’d expect.

Also, the master speaker volume is on mute for some reason.

The system already reports 12 new updates, so I’ll be interested to see how Conary works.

I’ve had it with Fedora.

First off, installing from the Live CD, requires either repartitioning, or installing to free space on a drive. Upgrading a previous install is not an option.

Then installing from DVD media, allows you to custom partition your drive. However, if you leave the existing partition table intact and try to install, the installation quits if it determines a package is already installed. I’m not sure how the package is the same between FC6 and FC8, or if the installer is actually looking at individual files or libraries and finding software I had previously updated manually. I’m also not motivated to find out.

Honetly, the whole thing is as bad as Microsoft in terms of constant updates. Just today, pup reported 12 more — that’s on top of the 1 for firefox, and the 121+ post installation updates.

Their rpm’s might or might not be current, but how can you tell? Their versions, features and fixes are frequently (almost always?) different from those of the software developers. So at the end of the day, this is just exactly what you get from Microsoft updates — canned binaries you have to install based on faith.

As for firefox, Fedora even delivers this and all of its updates as rpms. Firefox’s internal updates don’t work in thes version. To make matters worse, you can’t even easily install the stock version from mozilla.org anymore because there is no libstdc++5 in the FC8 distribution anymore.

Add all of that to lack of mp3 support, no xmms, no Evolution Exchange support without recompiling, no Windows audio codecs, no ethereal, and difficulties installing VMWare workstation with the supplied kernel. I write all this and wonder why I even bothered in the first place.

Don’t even get me started on SELinux…

A personal favorite of mine for music playback. Antiquated, I realize, but I like the simplicity and flexiblity the plugins provide. It’s not even part of FC (as of FC8) anymore. Here are the steps I used to get it installed and working.

Hey, at least Fedora is consistent. Still no mp3 support out of the box, just a lame explanation of how it’s not open and how ogg and flac are better. Guess we better start looking for that portable flac player and re-encode all our music…

Also no Exchange support in Evolution, which matters to me, but probably no one else. Fortunately, I’ve already been down this path. Check the main page for details on how to build in this support.

Also what happened to libstdc++5? This is required to install Mozilla’s firefox, but the Fedora firefox rpm installs fine and doesn’t require it.

But on the good side, they seem to be keeping up with Gnome updates.

Installed tarballs in the following order with:

./configure –prefix=/usr –mandir=/usr/share/man –infodir=/usr/share/info

libmad-0.15.1b.tar.gz

libid3tag-0.15.1b.tar.gz

libao-0.8.8.tar.gz

normalize-0.7.7.tar.bz2

audio_burn-0.0.9.tar.gz

The default configure options built everything except the normalize xmms volume control plugin. I don’t know why and I didn’t spend any time trying to find out – at least yet…

Periodically, I have problems connecting to our Exchange server using Evolution. I’m not really sure what causes it but it appears to be a problem retrieving new messages. The message I get in the GUI is that “Evolution lost the connection to the Exchange backend server.” Restarting Evolution does not correct the problem, not noes rebooting the system entirely.

Fortunately, I can correct the problem with the following procedure.

Close Evolution, and in a shell, execute the following:

evolution –force-shutdown

cd ~/.evolution/mail/exchange

rm -fR *

No matter, what RedHat release, no matter what version of VMWare, I’ve never had a problem getting workstation installed and running. Even if that meant building the modules for the latest kernel I’d compiled and installed. Until Workstation6 and FC6 that is…

Probably has to do with the newer version of glibc that is part of FC6. Anyway, FC6 is not a “supported” OS, so getting it installed requires a 3rd-party patch. Here is what VMWare has to say about it.
Here is the process I used to get it working.

Here is a step by step procedure for installing Evolution from source code.

Included are the solutions for problems with the Exchange GAL and the GNOME clock applet.

Quickly create a bootable DOS CD for ghosting systems using mkisofs with the following one line command:

mkisofs -r -b doscdbt.img -c boot.cat -V GHOSTBT -o ghostbt.iso ghost1 ./doscdbt.img

boot.cat does not need to exist prior to running this.

Create the boot image file by inserting a bootable DOS floppy and running this command:

dd bs=1440 if=/dev/fd0 of=doscdbt.img

Finally, burn the disk with:

cdrecord ghostbt.iso