Say hello to RedHat 9.0!
Mar. 15th, 2004 12:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gizaWell, it's been an exciting weekend! On Saturday morning, I was able to troubleshoot the CD booting problem that I had on Friday night. It turns out that I had forgotten to take my IDE tape drive off the bus as well. It was in the slave position on the primary IDE bus while the CD-ROM was in the slave position on the secondary IDE bus. My guess is that during the booting process the BIOS saw that that the tape drive was ATAPI, mistook it for a CD-ROM drive, and tried to boot off of it. Once I disconnected it, I was able to boot from CDs again.
My next task was to pop in a new hard drive [1] and install RedHat 9.0 on my machine. RH 9.0 is both good and bad. The good things are that GNUCash 1.8.1 [2] comes with it, and did a masterful job of importing my files from GNUCash 1.4.9 without any problems. The interface in X leaves a little to be desired, however. It's some red-headed step child of KDE and Gnome, and is somewhat sluggish. Another thing that REALLY pissed me off was that the version of XMMS that comes with it will not play MP3s. When you try to load one, a popup appears stating that RedHat 9.0 will not suppose them because of patent issues. Way to go, RedHat!
Saturday evening, once I became comfortable with the new setup, I went out and purchased a CD burner. Believe it or not, it was the first burner I've owned! I tested out burning a few CDs, and I found these quick and dirty cd burning instructions to be incredibly helpful. I was not amused at having to edit /etc/modules.conf, however. It's apparent that Linux still has a few ways to go before being "plug and play".
Last night,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pawslut was in town, so I went out to meet up with him and other furs for dinner at Buca Di Beppo! In attendence were bigtig, susandeer, unclekage [3], gideon_hoss, Ralkor (sp?), Ken and Lisa Sample, teaselbone, and beerhorse. We dined in a very disturbing room. Disturbing because it had pictures of Pope John Paul II all over the room. There was even a bust of him on the table. And the table itself had a second table on it which spun. This let the server set down food at one end of the table and it could be spun around to whoever wanted it. Oh, and pawslut introduced me to tequila! That was fun!
I spent most of Sunday at the office. I have a heavy workload coming up this week, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to get a head start on it. I did about 8 solid hours of programming and converting math-intensive Perl code to PHP code. Ugh. And I get to debug this code tomorrow. :-)
Upon coming home this evening, I got a chance to implement a backup strategy onto CD-Rs. Finally, solid state backups that I can easily transport off site! I did, however, discover that I need to do a better job of storing my e-mail. I currently stored sent and filed e-mails in a seperate folder depending upon what address I sent it from or what mailing list I sent it to. That's nice, but it makes it really difficult to say, extract all messages from 2003 and put them in another folder for archiving. So over the next few days I'll be researching some utilities to merge mail folders, extract messages based on date and other criteria. It should make it much easier to feed the messages into SpamProbe, too.
But for now, I think I'm off to bed, seeyas!
[1]When I upgrade to a new major version of a distribution, I've learned that it's safest to just remove the old hard drive and set it aside. Spend $50 on a new hard drive and install on that instead. This guarantees that no matter what sorts of problems you might have with the new system, if worst comes to worst, you can easily "roll back" to the previous versions of whatever you were using by putting the old hard drive back in.
[2]GnuCash is one cool piece of financial software! It's similar to Quicken, but it features true double-entry accounting. It allows you to do things like schedule recurring transactions and keep track of loans/mortgages that you might have. And hey, it's free!
[3]Yes, the cockroach finally has an LJ now!
My next task was to pop in a new hard drive [1] and install RedHat 9.0 on my machine. RH 9.0 is both good and bad. The good things are that GNUCash 1.8.1 [2] comes with it, and did a masterful job of importing my files from GNUCash 1.4.9 without any problems. The interface in X leaves a little to be desired, however. It's some red-headed step child of KDE and Gnome, and is somewhat sluggish. Another thing that REALLY pissed me off was that the version of XMMS that comes with it will not play MP3s. When you try to load one, a popup appears stating that RedHat 9.0 will not suppose them because of patent issues. Way to go, RedHat!
Saturday evening, once I became comfortable with the new setup, I went out and purchased a CD burner. Believe it or not, it was the first burner I've owned! I tested out burning a few CDs, and I found these quick and dirty cd burning instructions to be incredibly helpful. I was not amused at having to edit /etc/modules.conf, however. It's apparent that Linux still has a few ways to go before being "plug and play".
Last night,
pawslut was in town, so I went out to meet up with him and other furs for dinner at Buca Di Beppo! In attendence were bigtig, susandeer, unclekage [3], gideon_hoss, Ralkor (sp?), Ken and Lisa Sample, teaselbone, and beerhorse. We dined in a very disturbing room. Disturbing because it had pictures of Pope John Paul II all over the room. There was even a bust of him on the table. And the table itself had a second table on it which spun. This let the server set down food at one end of the table and it could be spun around to whoever wanted it. Oh, and pawslut introduced me to tequila! That was fun!I spent most of Sunday at the office. I have a heavy workload coming up this week, so I figured it wouldn't hurt to get a head start on it. I did about 8 solid hours of programming and converting math-intensive Perl code to PHP code. Ugh. And I get to debug this code tomorrow. :-)
Upon coming home this evening, I got a chance to implement a backup strategy onto CD-Rs. Finally, solid state backups that I can easily transport off site! I did, however, discover that I need to do a better job of storing my e-mail. I currently stored sent and filed e-mails in a seperate folder depending upon what address I sent it from or what mailing list I sent it to. That's nice, but it makes it really difficult to say, extract all messages from 2003 and put them in another folder for archiving. So over the next few days I'll be researching some utilities to merge mail folders, extract messages based on date and other criteria. It should make it much easier to feed the messages into SpamProbe, too.
But for now, I think I'm off to bed, seeyas!
[1]When I upgrade to a new major version of a distribution, I've learned that it's safest to just remove the old hard drive and set it aside. Spend $50 on a new hard drive and install on that instead. This guarantees that no matter what sorts of problems you might have with the new system, if worst comes to worst, you can easily "roll back" to the previous versions of whatever you were using by putting the old hard drive back in.
[2]GnuCash is one cool piece of financial software! It's similar to Quicken, but it features true double-entry accounting. It allows you to do things like schedule recurring transactions and keep track of loans/mortgages that you might have. And hey, it's free!
[3]Yes, the cockroach finally has an LJ now!
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RedHat 9.0 and XMMS
Date: 2004-03-15 08:04 am (UTC)Robert
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-15 03:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-15 03:52 pm (UTC)Re: RedHat 9.0 and XMMS
Date: 2004-03-15 03:56 pm (UTC)>of their existing settings carried across..
Um, how? Did they just install Mandrake on top of the existing ReHat installation? That sounds rather... risky. o.O
Re: RedHat 9.0 and XMMS
Date: 2004-03-15 04:05 pm (UTC)Robert
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-24 10:57 pm (UTC)I know you from TLK-L, don't know if you remember me, my name is Aristide.
Anyway... I recommend you try SuSE, it's a really fine distro, and for all of my hardware it's plug'n play, including external hard disks, DVD burner, digital camera, etc..
I would really never go anywhere near RedHat (or Fedora), for me it's always seemed like an accident waiting to happen :P
(no subject)
Date: 2004-03-24 11:29 pm (UTC)Thanks for the suggestion of SuSE, I'll check it out. I've been VERY unhappy with RH 9.0, but I'll save that gripe for a future LJ entry!