I am a big fan of the LyX document processing system, especially for writing academic papers and DocBook stuff for conversion to HTML, PDF, man, ASCII text, and so forth. You can download an old RPM here (don’t forget to pick up that latex-xft-fonts package too). For people running the new Fedora Core 0.94, I have built a new and improved spec file for the package.

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p>Instructions:

• Download the LyX .src.rpm file and the latex-xft-fonts package.
• Make sure you have the xforms and qt-devel packages installed. See the LyX site for places to get xforms, since it doesn’t come with FC 0.94. (There are a number of other packages you need installed too, mostly TeX/tetex related. Installing the “Authoring and Publishing” package group in the Add/Remove Applications tool will take care of this.)
• Install latex-xft-fonts.
• Install the LyX .src.rpm, which will end up in your package building area. You shouldn’t be doing this as root, but if you are, that’s /usr/src/redhat.
• Replace the lyx.spec file with the one I’ve written, and then rebuild. When you’re done, install the new lyx-*.i386.rpm package that ends up in the RPMS/i386 subfolder of your package building tree.
• Have fun!

Red Hat Linux Tip o’ the Day:

You just burned a set of CD’s for the latest version of our favorite distro (RHL/Fedora) and you want to check whether they’re OK. Why wait until install time to check the MD5 values? Use the code from the anaconda-runtime package to do it.

First, install the anaconda-runtime package, which contains most of the code used to build the installer for the CD sets:

rpm -ivh /path/anaconda-runtime-*.i386.rpm

Then just use the checkisomd5 tool against the CD you burned:

/usr/lib/anaconda-runtime/checkisomd5 /dev/cdrom

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p>If there’s a problem, try burning again using a slower speed or a bigger ring buffer (the fs= option for cdrecord, for example). Have fun!

In a move designed to show their stalwart commitment to the open source community, Red Hat has folded their Red Hat Linux product into the new, rejuvenated Fedora Project. If you are looking for improvements in the Linux product space, get involved today! I’m going to try and work on the documentation project since I’m not much of a hardcore programmer.

Certainly everyone has been reading about Hurricane Isabel, and we of course were slightly affected as well. Our power was restored yesterday evening, just a little while before I arrived home from London. Despite losing a bunch of grocery items to the power outage, everything here is relatively peaceful. We had no damage to the house or other property, although we now have a couple of trees that need to be cut down.

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p>London was beautiful, and I had a fantastic time there. I will have some pictures and videos up shortly. I am going to try and get all my picture files updated this weekend before returning to work, and show off the very cool exhibits at Bletchley Park and the Tower of London. Eleya and I are seriously considering going to the UK for an extended vacation in November 2005, since our 10th wedding anniversary falls exactly on the 400th anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot.

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p>Please keep in your thoughts and prayers daily the thousands of men and women who serve and protect us both here and abroad. They risk their lives and futures so that we might enjoy freedom, which is the singular human right bought at so dear a cost.

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p>For surviving families of both victims and fallen heroes, may your grief be consoled on the shoulders of your friends, may your load be eased by the strong arms of your community, and may you find in your thoughts and in your dreams a peaceful and happy remembrance of your loved lost; a glimpse of a smiling face, the whisper of a soft voice, the touch of a warm hand.

I didn’t get a chance to post earlier this week, but our Sunday night CD release party was splendid. Many people showed up, including a few friends I didn’t expect and was terribly happy to see (you know who you are, M.K. and E.D.). The show went great… I had a small meltdown during one song but it seemed to last a lot longer to me than it apparently did in reality, which I found as I reviewed the videotape I made. At some point I’ll have clips available… along with the promised pics of my new bass.

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p>In the meantime, I heard this morning on the news that one of the telemarketing lobbying groups (for which one can easily substitute the name “slithering dungweasels”) is now claiming that the national “do-not-call” registry will eliminate around two million jobs. Now, I’m not a smart man, but I do play one on TV, and if there were 2,000,000 people employed full time in telemarketing, and the common axiom is true that every adult knows at least 200 other people, then every adult I know would know at least a couple people who were telemarketers. This sector would be comparable to the size of the entire Federal Government. Yet, astoundingly, this is not the case. Could it be that perhaps the lobbying groups are inflating these numbers to influence the current Administration to ignore the tremendous public outcry against their so-called “services”?

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p>Get a clue, you imbecilic, putrescent whiners. The first one you pick up should be the book where you learn what “service” means, and that if you want customers, the first lesson is NOT to piss them off. We don’t like you, we don’t like what you do, and we don’t want to hear from you. EVER.

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p>And now that I’ve got that off my chest, I would like to recommend that everyone go rent the first season of Six Feet Under, which is a brilliant piece of series television, probably the best ever until the next HBO series starts up. And don’t forget to pick up Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which even manages to outdo Fellowship of the Ring in every possible way, if you can believe it. You know you can’t wait for the big 4-disc set, you’ll just have to buy both like everyone else.

Friday night backing up Steve McWilliams at Zig’s was fun, although we made a plethora of boo-boo’s — mostly due to the fact that we had one practice before performance, after having not played Steve’s material for about a year now. It’s funny how your memory stack gets handled to make room for the stuff that is higher priority. Anyway, I don’t think it was really noticed that much, and it was fun to do some balls-out rock-and-roll. Then we were followed by yet another Generic Rock Cover Band. (sigh) Nice guys but their act needed some work.

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p>But more importantly is tonight’s big CD RELEASE PARTY with Leah Morgan! Here’s where to find us, the fun starts at 8:30pm:

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So I find out this morning that we are in the Pop Quiz feature in this week’s Washington CityPaper. Go check out our big-ass wit forthwith.

Bought some cool new duds yesterday for the big gig. Perhaps someone will bring a camera and take some good pictures. Also, I delivered Mom her new computer yesterday and took down the vintage 1997 Gateway POS she was running. I’m sure we can find a service to which she can donate it… It would probably make a half-decent public Internet station for a community lab, especially if you replaced the aging Windows O/S on it with Linux.

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p>Also I had a practice with Steve McWilliams on Saturday at my drummer (and main right-hand man) Rich’s house for a gig on Friday night at Zig’s. (By the way, Steve has no web site currently, but don’t bother googling him, because you’ll just get a lot of links for some other Steve who is apparently a bigtime pothead… which “our” Steve is definitely not.) The practice session went really well… Rich had hooked up this whole headphone-based mix so that we all played our modeling equipment (thanks, Line 6!) into the board, Rich played his drums in his isolation booth, and we all wore a set of cans to hear each other. If you were in the room it would be pretty funny, because you’d hear the faint jangling of unamplified guitars, the far-off sounds of Rich’s drums from his booth, and me and Steve singing at the top of our lungs.

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p>It really worked like a champ, and my bass never sounded so great! I really love it, and don’t let the fact that it’s a Peavey fool you. It’s one of a small batch of “Made in the USA” signature basses designed with ace session guy Tim Landers. This bass was made for me, it seems, and I fell in love with it when I first laid hands on it 5 years ago, and haven’t put it down since.