PCI modem recommendation?Dear Lazyweb, I need a PCI fax/modem for my office Frankenbox. This one at Newegg has at least one review that says it works but if you can confirm or recommend another — preferably something supported by an in-kernel driver — I’d appreciate it. |
And about that turkey…Since I’m in the mood for tip-giving… I hope everyone in the US had a wonderful Thanksgiving however you chose to celebrate it. We had my mom and stepdad over for a nice family dinner with all the requisites, including a lot of home-made goodies from my wonderful wife (fresh biscuits from scratch, sweet potato casserole, etc.) and several scrumptious pies. The turkey, which was my job, turned out great. I use Alton Brown’s recipe for brining (as I do every year), doubling it for the 20-pound turkey (fresh, no additives!) we cook. It’s basically a solution of OJ, kosher salt, bay leaves, peppercorns, and broth used to help the meat absorb moisture and break down some of the tougher protein chains. I also add about 1/2 cup of minced garlic for extra zing. The turkey soaks overnight in a freshly cleaned 5 gallon bucket with enough ice to keep it well below 40 F. Around lunchtime — or midday since I usually skip lunch on Thanksgiving as if that will make up for dinner — I take it out, pat it dry, rub the whole birrd down with canola oil, and put it into a preheated oven at 500 F for about 30 minutes. (At that temperature the oil sometimes generates a wee bit of smoke so it’s good to keep the windows open.) Then I take the bird out, cover the breast with a big heavy tinfoil triangle, put in a meat thermometer, and pop it back in at 325-350 F for a few hours. For a 20-pound bird, another 3 hours 15 minutes was perfect. For a 15-pound bird, usually 2:15-2:30 will suffice. Always check the temperature at the thickest part of the breast and the thigh — 161 F in the breast and about 180 F in the thigh means everything’s just about perfect. I cover the whole thing with heavy tinfoil after it comes out and let it sit for about 20-25 minutes to finish the carry-over cooking, and then it’s carving time. We served it with a nice Chilean pinot noir which goes very well with poultry. Yummy! And as I said at dinner during the toast, I have much to appreciate and for which to be grateful this year. An overwhelmingly favorable change of jobs, a wonderful wife and two great kids who support me through it all, and my mom’s steady return to health… all good things. To all my Fedora friends, regardless of whether you celebrated this particular holiday, I hope you and your families will continue to have much to be thankful for in the coming year, too. |
Back in play, No. 2.Well, one migration just wasn’t enough for me this weekend apparently. My friend (and ace author/Asterisk guru extraordinaire) Jared gave me a new mobo that I could transplant into my desktop system, which had been running an old AthlonXP 1800+ on an Asus mobo. The new one is a Gigabyte mobo with an Athlon64 3000+! (Overgenerosity is one of Jared’s many faults.) I transplanted another 2 GB of RAM onto the new mobo for a total of 3 GB, and then performed all the physical parts of the procedure (tearing my hands up minimally in the process). Everything was fine upon booting up to the point when I got a very interesting error, saying that the UUID for the new root volume wasn’t found. Normally GRUB references the new root volume with a “UUID=” parameter, meaning that it should be virtually impossible to attach any additional storage device and have it override your normal root volume. That was a great change from back when I was doing forensic work and we had to take special precautions. You wouldn’t want to connect a working copy of evidence in the field and then inadvertently write to it because it has the same label as your normal root volume. (Nowadays there are hardware write blockers, but back when I started doing that kind of work over a decade ago they didn’t exist.) So anyway, back to my point, which is that the system wasn’t finding my UUID. I booted off a F10 install disc in rescue mode and could easily see that the UUID for the root volume was fine, and agreed with GRUB, which told me that for some reason the system wasn’t recognizing the LVM setup in my system. The rescue disc had no problem recognizing and mounting my volumes under /mnt/sysimage as usual. I’m not sure why that kernel module wouldn’t be loading properly during the boot process, or why else my LVM setup wouldn’t be recognized — but it could easily have something to do with the brand new IDE controller my drive was using on the new mobo. To fix it, first I chrooted to the mounted system:
Then I rebuilt the initial RAMdisk. I’m lazy and hate having to remember the mkinitrd command line for this, so I cheated and just ran the new-kernel-pkg command as shown in the kernel’s %postinstall scriptlets. I’m sure this was overdoing it, but part of that process is re-running mkinitrd, so I figured what the heck.
That gave me the command I needed under %postinstall:
After a few minutes the command finished, and just in case that process changed the inodes (and possibly the location) for the kernel and the initial RAMdisk, I decided to rerun the GRUB installer too:
Then I used the exit command to get out of the chroot environment, and exit again to reboot. Voila, the machine now started up fine and I was ready to rock and roll. Of course it’s not lost on me that I have a 64-bit capable CPU now, so I really want to blow away the system and use 64-bit Fedora, but I’ll get to that when I get to it. The really funny thing about all this was that right after I finished all that and started writing this blog post, FedEx showed up at my door with my new replacement Dell XPS M1330 laptop! UPDATE: Whoops, copied the wrong scriptlet above, which would not have fixed the problem but actually made it worse. |
Back in play.The Red Hat corporate help desk kindly sent me a new laptop for temporary use until I get the replacement for my XPS M1330 from Dell. The loaner was a 32-bit machine, and my old drive was 64-bit, so rather than bother with a hard disk transplant, which would mean reinstalling the system, I decided to move my data from my old laptop hard disk (which survived just fine) to the new system, and figured I might as well document it for newer folks who might not know how to do it cleanly. Keep reading “below the fold” to find out what I did and why. |
Followed by a lot of wind sprints.Just a heads up: I will probably be out of pocket most of the next few days. For those of you who didn’t know, Thursday is a US holiday, and Friday is a paid holiday at Red Hat where I work. Combine that with a weekend, family, good food, and the incredibly successful release of Fedora 10, and you have a recipe for some relaxation away from the keyboard. I’ll probably check email a couple times over the course of the weekend but will likely defer most stuff until Monday. |
How about that desktop?I figured while I’m in a super-bloggy mood today I’d add this tidbit. Someone asked me a question about what might be missing from distributions like Fedora that would help it reach more users. This question isn’t new and I’ve given the subject a lot of thought over the last few years (even before being the project leader). Red Hat and Fedora already invest a huge amount of time in desktop tech. We work upstream to make sure that ALL free software desktops are compelling, not just Fedora. When someone else has a compelling desktop in their free community distro, it means our work has been worthwhile. Often people bring this point up in response to Fedora’s stance on software freedom. We believe strongly in software freedom, and that including proprietary software actively undermines our goals. We also have a goal of complete global freedom of reuse and redistribution, an objective with which proprietary software also often conflicts. We also believe in choice and that’s why we make it easy for third parties to provide very simple ways for people to get those technologies on their own in places where it’s free and legal. |
FUDCon and gifting.I had a couple tidbits to pass along on the day after release, neither of which directly concerns Fedora 10 itself.
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Brief digression, No. 15.Today is full of Fedora 10 press, but I thought it was worth pointing out that there’s a nice general interview with Pacific Connection out now as well. I did this interview back around the end of September, in time for Fedora’s happy fifth birthday. (That was good cake!) Quite a number of the questions that were asked are general ones about how Fedora works, and might be of interest to new Ambassadors or other people interested in promoting Fedora. Hope it’s useful to you. |
Worsed than damned lies?A word about statistics: Fedora continues to be completely open and transparent about the ways we gather statistics and the ways we present them. We don’t document these statistics for purposes of competition, but because we believe our community and our sponsors are invested and interested in knowing some of the end results of the work they do in Fedora. We also use these statistics to help us construct and refine additional community-building strategies and initiatives, which are themselves also openly and transparently produced. In particular, there are statistics available which show the number of unique IP addresses that have checked in for updates for each of our distributions from Fedora Core 6 up through Fedora 9 and current Rawhide (and soon, Fedora 10). Although totaling those numbers is interesting, it is not meant to indicate a measure of users, only a total number of connections to repositories. No one in Fedora claims a specific number of users based on these statistics. We do know that each of our releases tends to be installed on machines located at 3 to 4 million unique IP addresses. Any one IP address, though, could represent:
Obviously this makes determining the total install base of Fedora across all releases somewhat difficult. We understand completely that IP address counting is not a scientifically valid way of determining a total number of users. That’s why we don’t claim a number of users from these counts; we only present them as what they are, sums of unique IP addresses. Anyone who’s ever heard me speak to this issue knows it’s never been my intention, nor interesting at all to me, to debate over user statistics. I am extremely satisfied that we have a geometrically (in some cases exponentially) growing number of account holders, contributors, and Ambassadors involved in Fedora, all of which numbers we can openly and transparently document. This is far more compelling for the community, I think, than simply throwing large round numbers about, especially when those numbers aren’t supported by completely open, transparent, and documented recording and reporting methods. Our leadership position, I believe, is based on the total contributions our community makes to the entire free and open source software ecosystem, through our continuing, unwavering policy of upstream collaboration, and our continual efforts to lower barriers to contribution across the entire project. NOTE: This is a refinement of a post I made earlier to the fedora-marketing-list, in response to some inferences people have made with which I don’t agree. I’m refraining from naming names not to lend those inferences credence, but because I think they were made with good intentions. While I think it’s important that people understand the truth about these numbers, I don’t wish to hurt anyone’s feelings. Treat all statistics statements with caution unless you can see them backed up with facts and methodologies. |
