Things n' Stuff Thoughts about the universe in general

Its time to update an old post about updates: Fedora 7 is again rather old, with the current Fedora being at 12, and 13 is right around the corner, but We’re still with CentOS 5 (I hear that RedHat is deep into beta with their next version – 6 but when it comes out is anyone’s guess).

In the mean time, if you want to run something a bit more modern maybe you’d want to upgrade your CentOS installation to Fedora 12 which can be considered pretty stable after a few months on the market. The reasons for the change may be numerous – maybe you need to run the latest subversion (with better merge tracking) or a new version of Ruby. Either way, if upgrading from CentOS 5 to Fedora 7 was a pain, guess how it is more the two years later?

Before we get to the action itself, I would be remiss if I would not recommend you to reconsider what you are about to do – this is a challenging exercise for many system admins and can sometimes end badly. I do not guarantee anything and if it breaks you get to keep both parts. Often its much faster and easier to just go to the server, stick a Fedora 12 DVD in the slot, reboot and let the DVD upgrade your system¹. That being said, this is fun if you’re into that sort of thing, so if you’re still with me, lets dive in!

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1. another safer options would be to upgrade to Fedora 7 using the instruction in the previous article linked above, and then use Fedora’s preupgrade tool to upgrade to Fedora 8, then to fedora 10, and from there to Fedora 12, though this procedure will also require physical access to the machine and multiple reboots and multiple long downloads [↩]

One of the most annoying issues with Linux’s graphical system (and any UN*X), is that if you have some keys setup for switching the keyboard layout – when using two or more keyboard layouts, such as for writing English and Hebrew – then that key combination cannot be used in any other keyboard shortcut.

Its most annoyingly present when setting the keyboard layout switching command to ALT+SHIFT (like in MS-Windows), then you can’t do any keyboard shortcut that has ALT+SHIFT in it – such as ALT+SHIFT+TAB to move to the previous window.

Well, finally there is a solution! As detailed in FreeDesktop.org’s Bugzilla and Ubuntu’s Launchpad , and thanks to Ilya Murav’jov we now have a patch to solve this ancient X11 problem.

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Ripping off Linux Outlaws title for episode 122, here is my review of GNOME’s upcoming desktop shell. Promised to be the pinnacle of the much talked about GNOME 3.0 release (which was happening and then not happening and then happening again) that is currently scheduled for September of 2010 (though no GTK+ 3.0, as far as I understand).

The new GNOME shell is, off the bat, pretty awesome – it is a completely new and refreshing approach to the desktop (checkout the screenshots in the link).
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Google have declared a new programming language – Go. Contrary to how the title might read, this post is not a tirade about the abundance of programming language – I just like this sort of expressions (and Google could have easily named Go as YAPL instead 😉 ). On the contrary – I’m all for a large selection of good programming language to choose from, and a programming language coming from there, like any other Google product released, definitely warrants a more serious test then what I can offer in this rather quick post.

But I actually found out about Go from a friend that asked about it, didn’t mention Google, and gave me a link to the home page at GoLang.org where Google is not mentioned. So my review below was not influenced by any Google hype, and on the face of it, after reading through about half of the tutorial and a couple of other documents, I don’t like it.

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This question is probably one of the most debatable in programming, ever, and I wasn’t much surprised to find it also on Stack Overflow¹.

Actually, I wasn’t surprised to find about a dozen different questions in the same gist, but here is the one that I really liked, especially some of the more interesting answers: How many lines should a method typically have?.

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1. The best programming questions and answers site – if you’re a programmer by trade or hobby and you’re not familiar with Stack Overflow, then go register. [↩]

Here is another script I wrote for work and I thought it will be interesting enough to share:

Say you want to check which JAR files (or ZIP files for that matter, as Java ARchive files are just ZIP files with a different extension) contain files that contain some text. grep is the obvious answer, but how to grep files in JARs?

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Sometimes the Java community, or more specifically the people that write Java open source software, drive me nuts!

For the past couple of week I’ve been trying to build a new version for the Jetty package based on the current Jetty6 package from JPackage¹, and in the process combating its hellish dependency tree and the way open source Java projects build opon each other in a complicated, confusing and often circular manner.

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1. an excellent excellent project that is operated by talented people in what I can only guess is what little free time they have [↩]

I’ve been a long time listener of the Linux Action Show by the duo behind what eventually became the Jupiter Broadcasting project. And quite frankly – I’m a fan: while I’m not a YouTube watcher (I don’t have enough free time in front of a screen) I’m registered to all their audio feeds and like most of what Bryan and Chris and co. are doing.

That being said, when they announced that the Linux Action Show is no more shall be from hence forth known as The Computer Action Show I was a little apprehensive – Bryan and Chris have grown quite a bit judgmental and critic of the whole open source/free software community at large, and often lashed out at companies and organizations that “hurt the open source community”, not by acting against FL/OSS but by not doing things in very specific ways that Bryan and Chris felt would be better for FL/OSS adoption in the general populace.

So when they announced this very serious change I felt that this is the final step in that saga and Jupiter Broadcasting is not going to air a Linux/Free Software show any more. After listening to the rest of that first episode, I decided its not going to be that big of a change – more of shifting attention towards general computing and technology stuff, which I like – so no harm done. I did wish that the new direction means they’d lay off a bit from bashing the free software community.

Boy was I mistaken. The second Computer Action Show episode released this week introduced a whole new level of bashing the FSF, and I can’t stay silent on that. I have a lot more to say but in the interest of bringing the discussion close to the source, I’m saying it on Jupiter Broadcasting’s blog. If you’re interested in this kind of (anti-)evangelism, I’d recommend listening to the show (where they also cover a lot of other interesting stuff, like the Nokia N900 which is going to be awesome) and then take a part in the discussion here.

Last thing – Chris and Bryan, if you’re reading this – don’t take it too hard. I think you guys are great and you do an excellent work with your shows. Keep being awesome, and I just wish you’d stop being so negative of the people that are doing the work – and yes, the FSF are also doing some good work even if its not always very public.

Well, they don’t work for me – haven’t worked since Firefox 2, I think.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about then its about the ability of web pages to define keyboard shortcuts to access and enable features on the web page using the keyboard instead of the mouse. Common actions are to focus text edit boxes or to trigger links directly.

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A system administrator in my company recently approached me with a problem – how to shutdown multiple Linux servers at the same time from a central location. Apparently this is something that people in the MS-Windows world use all kinds of applications, like the Remote Shutdown Tool from Microsoft (though I don’t understand how they handle the authentication – this tools doesn’t seem to require any authentication so it appears that any person with network access can shutdown any computer).

Anyway, apparently searching the web for “Linux remote shutdown” yields no useful results (or so I’ve been told), but frankly – when you have standard UN*X tools at your fingertips, a remote shutdown tool is simply typing ssh root@server shutdown -r now at your local console. But still, for people who want a “tool” – read on.

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