Fedora 12 in the house

I’ve got a fair amount of hardware around the house. So much in fact, that I’ve considered investing in one or more steel buildings to house it all. The upgrade bug bit me over the holidays, and I decided it was high time to upgrade to Fedora 12 on some of that hardware, since it’s F12 has been out a couple of months, and it looks pretty stable.

First up on the upgrade list was my son’s laptop. He’s got a pretty run-of-the-mill laptop, AMD single core processor, ATI x1000 series graphics, wireless, etc. His notebook has been used heavily (he frequently leaves it on all night playing music), and Fedora 10 reached it’s End Of Life just a few days ago.

I used preupgrade (a great utility) to do the upgrade. Everything downloaded and prepped fine until I rebooted to start the install proper. It turns out that his boot partition was a little small. I thought I could fix that without reading the instructions, and that was a mistake. When I went out and deleted all of the kernels, initrd, System.maps etc from the /boot directory, the installation continued just fine. The post-installation failed to properly put the grub.conf file in order, and therefore his laptop wouldn’t boot. I turned my attention away from the laptop and went on with upgrading my Compaq DL360. I figured I cold just copy the appropriate files from the DL360 once I got it installed.

The Compaq DL360 has had it’s RAID controller removed and an eSATA card installed. This allows me to boot off of a 1TB WD MyBook. I proceeded to use preupgrade to upgrade this box. This installation went fine until the reboot, at which time I got a message “/dev/sda1 not cleanly unmounted“. It seems that others have had this problem, but didn’t post the answer. I fought with this problem for HOURS, until I randomly tried changing the filesystem type from EXT2 to EXT3. The installation proceeded without a hitch. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the fsck in the installation, but someone should have a look at it. BTW, I posted my answer on linuxquestions.org, so maybe someone else can save a little time. I need to go looking for other instances of this question and post my answer there too….

Once I got the DL360 installed, I simply copied the boot files over to the laptop, and I had two Fedora 12 installs up and running in a few minutes. I got brazen and upgraded my main laptop after that (Lenovo Z60t). The only problem with that install was that my system partition was a bit small, so I had to aggressively delete files until the installation was happy with the free space. Hint: you can delete *all* of the locale files (most of which aren’t used) if you’re not planning on booting the box again until the installation is over.

Thank God for rescue disks!

Nexus One Officially Announced

Wow, it’s finally out. Most of the rumors were true, but there were a few interesting bits of the announcement though:

• Available on Verizon in Spring 2010
• It’s THIN! (Something that the G1 is NOT)
• Up to 7 hours of video playback? Awesome!
• 3.5mm Headphone jack. Another lesson learned by HTC
• Flash and Zoom on the camera
• 720 x 480 screen
• Noise canceling microphone

It’s a good phone. I’m sure it’s worth $529, but I was really hoping for the early rumored $199 price.

It’s solidly positioned as an iPhone competitor. Android has gone from 1 to 20+ phones in the past year, and there’s no way that iPhone can compete with the flood of phones (and other devices) running Android. This phone won’t necessarily unseat the iPhone, but Android will start to take big bites out of the iPhone market.

It’s interesting that the Google page for the Nexus One specifically says “Removable 1400 mAH battery”, which seems to be a direct jab at the iPhone. The battery on the Nexus One is easier to change than a humidifier filter, while the one in the iPhone requires you to swap out your phone. Ha!

MythTV / MPEG federation

I’ve been spinning up my MythTV system again. The hardware is modest, and I still need a good frontend solution. Currently, the configuration is as follows:

• DL360 Dual 800mhz processors (probably need to get an insurance quote on it since it’s so old)
• SiliconDust HDHomeRun dual HD tuner
• Hauppauge PVR-250 (Again, old hardware, but it works great) for analog cable
• WD 1TB MyBook E-Sata connected for storage
• Lenovo Z60t laptop for frontend
• E-Machines laptop for frontend

I’m booting the DL360 off of the Mybook, since it’s cheaper and more reliable than old SCSI drives. I bought a SATA card (3mb/sec PCI bus SATA cards are few and far between) to give my DL360 access to the MyBook. I’m impressed at how well the DL360 handles the rigors of digital recording. Since it’s got dual NICs, I’ve got a host route setup between it and the HDHomeRun to keep some of the traffic off of the rest of the network.

I had a bit of trouble getting digital channels off of the cable, and I’m currently running the HDHomeRun off of a home built HD antenna on just one tuner. This weekend I’ll pierce the exterior wall of my house and run the antenna outside. If the reception is good, I’ll probably just run both tuners of the HDHomeRun off of the antenna, and skip digital cable all together.

I sure wish we had TBS, CNN and ESPN over the air like they do in ATL. I wonder if I can find someone in ATL that will let me put a Myth backend in their house for grabbing some of the channels we don’t have in Birmingham.

Cherrypal cancels shipment on Africa

Cherrypal canceled my order and refunded my money (shipping included). All indications were that I would receive the laptop soon (I’ve been hoping for the last week). Looks like it was some kind of scam. Don’t deal with these people. Here is the chain of events.

• 15-Dec-2009 Ordered the Cherrypal Africa $99 laptop
• 16-Dec-2009 Cherrypal hacked
• 21-Dec-2009 Advised by Paypal that the order had shipped
• 04-Jan-2010 Advised by Paypal that Cherrypal had refunded my money (shipping and all)

It’s not like I asked for an auto insurance quote. I payed my money, and expected product in return. There’s something extremely fishy going on. I think that the “website hack” was just a ruse to give them an out.

Other fishiness:

• Payment processor was SugarRomance.com – an online dating service
• No mention of the processor in the laptop (some say MIPS, some say ARM)
• Direct response email from the owner about the site hack

Best Geek Christmas Present – SAF

Geeks are always playing with technology. The genesis of most of these is to make life better/faster/stronger for someone else, generally our family. So, this holiday season, show a genuine interest in one of those projects. Whether it be the home-brew DVR, new browser or OS. You’ll create tremendous happiness by increasing the Spousal Acceptance Factor.

Don’t Bring Your Hate Into My House

I’ve lived my entire life in Alabama. When I think of Alabama, I fondly consider lots of things

• Spending my childhood in the outdoors
• My family
• Boiled Peanuts
• Catfish
• Beaches
• Skynrd
• etc.

However, I was reminded recently that the hatred of the past is still alive and well. Some people in this state still embrace the racism that we’ve tried so hard to shed. It’s painful to hear and see, and if we allow it to continue, true healing will never come. I fear the putrid smell of ignorance is more widespread than just my state.

Many people think that racist rhetoric is confined to less educated people. The typical “redneck” comes to mind, with course language and appearance. This is a terrible misconception. In the past year, I’ve been subjected to racist speak from:

• Highly placed executives
• Dentists
• Marketing Professionals
• High School kids

How can there be anyone in this country that doesn’t know that racism is wrong? Our country was built on the backs of immigrants from all over the world. Yet, the small-minded among us continue to look askance at large groups of people simply because of their color or ethnicity.

My usual tact is to inform people that I don’t use that type of language, and don’t subscribe to the ideas that it embraces. This is obviously not working. From this day forward, racist talk, actions and ideas are grounds for dismissal from my life. You’ll be escorted to the door if you can’t accept the equality of human beings. If I’ve got anything of yours, be sure to get it before you show your ignorance and hatred, because I might not even answer the phone after that.

I’m not a saint. I was raised in this culture, but education and common sense have prevailed. I’m ashamed of the way I acted in my youth. It’s my duty to make sure that these actions and ideas don’t make it into the next generation. I’m making a stand – will you?

Converting Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS traces to GPX for OpenStreetMap

I have a Garmin Forerunner 305 that I bought to track all of my biking and running. It’s a nice unit (a little large) and had decent GPS, great heart rate functions, and great battery life. A little while after I bought the unit, I started doing some mapping for the OpenStreetMap.org project (blog at OpenGeoData.org). This unit turned out to be great for capturing traces for OpenStreetMap. Getting the GPS data off of the unit was challenging at first, but now that I’ve got the commands down, it’s pretty straightforward.