One piece of good news is the car was taken into the shop and I found out it wasn’t going to be the $1800 I thought it was going to be, it is going to be like $800-900. It would have been less if I had taken it in sooner since the rotors rusted badly.

The 2nd to last piece of good news is that I am moving to Atlanta at the end of this month for a new job and I am VERY excited.

The last piece of good news will have to wait, but soon, very very soon.

I wrote this bash script to properly extract the urls. Sure you could use regex to trim it down a bit, I just didn’t see the need to. It requires bash, wget, internet connection, and considering the number of mp3s a decent one at that **56k beware**.

I have another update I am going to post next week that will hopefully be great news but for now it is a big secret ;-D

Kubuntu fixes the Gnome problem, and well #1, I don’t really think I can piss on a distro for helping people use something that can get difficult. In slackware I have had problems with suspending not working as it does in Windows, but I have not bothered to work on that problem. In Ubuntu it works out of the box, as does all my hardware… with the exception of my modem. The first linux distro I ever used was Slackware, I love the name and I like how it works. A user has to really learn to use the system because it makes you learn. I once heard someone say “If you want to learn linux, use Slackware” and I feel it is a very true statement. You can of course learn Linux on any distro because it is linux, but GUIs and web interfaces don’t teach you the skills that in many cases are needed. If you have packages you are less likely to compile software. I cannot remember the exact details of the situation, but I remember sometime last year I had a horrible problem with a system, and I ended up having to mount multiple partitions and do a lot of tricky stuff in config files to fix the problem. Had I been a sole Ubuntu user, I might not have had those skills when I needed them.

Every distro has its place, and many are not for every user. I have been told, “slackware isn’t linux” or “slackware doesn’t have packages”, “slackware gives you nothing to get started with” and all of those comments came from people who havn’t really used Slackware. If you do a full install of Slackware you get a ton of packages. Linux Packages has a few thousand packages and they are all for Slackware. Sure, it isn’t the 23,000 available for Ubuntu and they don’t do dependancy checking, but dependancy checking it’s always a good thing. I have rarely ever installed a package on Slackware, I usually compile the software and very very rarely do I ever have any problems with a compile. As far as it not being linux, Slackware is the oldest existing linux distro and I seriously doubt that will be changing and it has stayed that way for a reason.

I plan to use Ubuntu, and I am going to install the new Kubuntu to see if I like KDE on Ubuntu or not. Gnome has improved since the last time I used it for more than 5 minutes, so I can probably deal with Gnome. Right now my laptop is quad booting Slackware, BackTrack, Windows XP, and Ubuntu. I have one free partition left that I will put Kubuntu on probably. So far the only OS I havn’t been able to multi-boot off the BackTrack LILO config is Fedora 7, which is a shame. What is also a shame is that my hard drive on the laptop isn’t larger, I would love to have 10 distros to boot to, just for fun….

I suggest you read this very well written article that was recently released about Slackware and Ubuntu, more slack though.

If you have learned that I collect a lot then you also know I am a Slackware lover so the last reason may seem a little strange to some. I love Slackware and always will, it was the first distribution I ever tried and always the one I go back to. I do have trouble deciding between Slackware and other distributions. I don’t even know why really, because package management is available in Slackware and RHEL based distributions along with Debian and so on. I used to have a lot to say about Red Hat despite knowing jack about anything they did. Most of my opinions were based on things I heard or the opinions of others. It was unfair to make judgments about Red Hat having never really used it or understanding their way of doing things, but it happened and I have at least been willing to learn more about Red Hat.

For the past few months I have had to work in Red Hat based environments (CentOS, RHEL) and I have enjoyed them very much. I am still a supporter of compiling software, but packages with dependency checking can be a huge help in a number of different scenarios. Compiling from source is fun, and you learn something every time you do it, but when you have a number of servers to update a `yum update` is a much more efficient way of keeping your environment up to date.

This last weekend I downloaded PCLinuxOS, Fedora 7, and OpenBSD. PCLinuxOS has a slogan, “The distro shopper stopper”, well I was not nearly as excited about PCLinuxOS as I was about Fedora. I installed Fedora in a virtual machine and without any involvement on my part the mouse would work between Windows and Fedora without having to escape the virtual machine. I assume Fedora ships with the tools to allow this and enables them based on the hardware it finds. There were just a number of small things that made Fedora enjoyable to work with. Other than Slackware, my use of Fedora was the best experience I have had with a Linux distro in a long time. Actually, that isn’t totally true, I really like SLAX and BackTrack, but they are Slackware based. CentOS was cool, but for a desktop environment Fedora is #2, with Slackware remaining at #1.

I installed OpenBSD this morning and spent a few minutes moving around. My goal was really to just get it installed to the point that I understand the process and feel confident doing that without a guide so that in the future I can spend a little more time with the system itself. The installation process was definitely different from anything I have ever done before. It was similar in many ways to installs involving fdisk, but I encountered processes I had never seen before. I have wanted to use OpenBSD for about 5 years, but never installed it until this morning; who know’s why I waited so long.

svn create /root/repo/config

svn co file:///root/repo/config /etc

cd /etc

svn add -N httpd/
svn add httpd/conf/
svn add httpd/conf.d/
svn add postfix/
svn add hosts
svn add hosts.deny
svn add hosts.allow
svn add php.d
svn add pear.conf
svn add my.cnf
svn add php.ini

svn commit

chmod 700 /root/repo/config

When adding the httpd directory you need to add the -N so that run, modules, and logs symlinks to not get added, then you add the conf and conf.d directories manually. The hosts files may seem strange, but if someone was to get in that might be a file they would want to modify. If it is modified you can simply do a svn status on the directory and see what has gone on. The last entry is so that only the root user can access any of the files. That means unless you are root or you can sudo you cannot check out or commit to that repository.

It might be a good idea to run a svn commit as a cron on the directory so any changes that are made will be updated and can be compared later. I would also recommend not adding any files that include passwords, for obvious reasons. If for some reason you submit a file with a password by accident run the svnadmin dump command, then do a search and replace in the dump file. After you have done that delete the repository on the server and create a new version off the dump file.

Download RPMs from repositories

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/4/centosplus/i386/RPMS/
http://www.clyde-family.org/el4/RPMS/

Test that you have all dependancies, anything after the “Preparing…” line is a conflict

rpm -ivh --test *.rpm

Check the what packages you have installed

rpm -qa | grep php

php-imap-4.3.9-3.22.5
php-odbc-4.3.9-3.22.5
php-4.3.9-3.22.5
php-gd-4.3.9-3.22.5
php-ldap-4.3.9-3.22.5
php-mysql-4.3.9-3.22.5
php-pear-4.3.9-3.22.5
php-domxml-4.3.9-3.22.5
php-mbstring-4.3.9-3.22.5
php-pgsql-4.3.9-3.22.5

rpm -qa | grep mysql

mysql-4.1.20-2.RHEL4.1
mysql-devel-4.1.20-2.RHEL4.1
mysql-server-4.1.20-2.RHEL4.1

Uninstall each package

sudo rpm -e --nodeps package-name

I also found this method but did not try it.

rpm -qa | grep -i php | grep 4.3.9 | xargs rpm -e -–nodeps

rpm -qa | grep -i mysql | grep 4.1.20 | xargs rpm -e -–nodeps

Then test one last time for conflicts

rpm -ivh --test *.rpm

Then install all rpms in the current directory

rpm -ivh *.rpm

The /etc/my.cnf.rpmsave file should be fine in most cases (I believe), but you will want to do a compare of /etc/php.ini and /etc/php.ini.rpmsave.

I am really happy to see all these awesome distributions that have been coming out that are centered around a certain purpose. Last night I created 5 virtual machines so I can separate my development from my desktop. I have a Python Dev, Ruby Dev, .net Dev, Linux Server, Junk testing box. So now I have a separate purpose for each one and I can limit the use to just that making my life a little easier…I think.

I have not spent much time with Ubuntu Desktop A) because it is Gnome and I don’t enjoy Gnome much and B) most of the applications have to be downloaded and I am unfortunately on dialup in my current location. I can’t forget reason C) Slackware is God