Fedora 9 Desktop

Back in 2003 I was starting to seriously get into Linux. I found myself in sink or swim when my old computer died and my new computer with Windows XP wouldn’t recognize the network card. At that time I installed Red Hat 9 (dual booted with the XP) thinking I had nothing to loose, and with no Internet and a broken backup, nothing better to do. Red Hat 9 not only installed smoothly, it picked up the Network Card that XP wouldn’t recognize. I’ve been a huge Red Hat fan ever since. But immediately following Red Hat 9 were the Fedora and Fedora Core Distros. For a long time, things were never quite the same. In fact, I still have Fedora Core 4 on that old server because of all the effort I put into getting it to run smoothly (not that I have ever done less with Windows). Tonight I installed Fedora 9 on my primary Laptop. The good days of Red Hat are back!

The initial install led me to believe that I would have to do some tweaking, as I’ve had to in the past, in order to get the wireless card working. I had to plug the laptop into the wired network in order to get a few extras during the install. It was also useful for setting up the NTP server and sending Red Hat my Hardware configuration. As one who usually uses older hardware, I want to encourage Red Hat to build in the best possible support for my machines. As soon as the install completed I went to see about setting up the wireless. It was already there! A quick connection to my network and we were downloading the latest updates. At the same time I plugged in my USB drive and started restoring my backups. Incidentally, Fedora 9 (and the Fedora 8 before this) recognize the 8GB Scandisk that I’ve been using without a hitch. For some reason my Mac won’t recognize it (I haven’t eliminated the possibility of a broken USB drive) and my XP laptop has to go through a long, involved, though mostly automated process before I can use it there.

The next step of course is to add a few things. I used Yum to quickly install Thunderbird, Wireshark, Ruby, and Filezilla for starts. We also customized the look and feel very nicely. It was then off to get the essential in Firefox Addons: Web Developer, Firebug, Yslow, Adblock Plus, Show IP,  the Clear Cache Button, All-in-One Sidebar. The Sidebar is on trial. I’m not sure it’s worth the reduced view-space. I then adjusted Firefox to never save passwords, always show the tab bar, and set http://www.google.com/linux as the start-up page.

Everything that bugged me about Fedora 8 is gone. I had some trouble with window borders when I turned on my desktop effects. No sign of that now. As much as I’ve hated Yum in the past, it’s working smoother than ever. When I installed the additional programs I guessed the name of most of them. No problem. They all installed beautifully.

The few grips that I have really have nothing to do with Fedora. I wish Gnome came with an auto Desktop Changer. I’ve been looking up a few alternative options online that look promising. And we may yet have another go at Emerald.

I also need to setup this little machine to play movies. As most Linux people probably know, the codecs for playing DVD are proprietary and often cost money. As such Fedora doesn’t include them by default. I’ll need to look up the free alternatives. That will come later today. My Mac Mini is still my first choice for movie playing anyway.

Finally there is the matter of upgrading between releases. I didn’t do that between Fedora 8 and Fedora 9. Things degenerated a bit towards the end with Fedora 8. But I’m quite optimistic about the eventual move from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10.

So, this means I shall be breaking down and buying and external DVD drive to plug into my Fedora 4 server. As smoothly as this has gone, I now have no qualms about updating that machine. Also, in hte past my first choice for newbies has been Ubuntu. I hate it with a passion, but it’s easy for those who don’t know what they’re doing. No more! As far as I’m concerned, Fedora is back on top. As such we will probably back up Kristen’s box tonight and move her over. Kristen is keen on this. Could be my own infectious enthusiasm.

I’ve never been much of a programmer, but I do decent enough writing and debugging PHP and Java, and I’ve recently fallen in love with Python. PHP has a huge fan base, so Googling for any problem usually has good results. Java has Java Doc, which makes it pretty darn easy to look up anything you need to do. Python was so easy to get started with that I wrote several of my Operating Systems assignments after only 4 chapters of reading, with 40 lines of code, versus my classmates who were averaging 250 lines of code.

And then there’s Ruby on Rails. I’ve been loath to try it. It seems over-hyped and largely used by people who can’t get their paths correct, much less properly use an MVC environment. But I’ve heard from several people how easy it was to use, and after trying out Cake PHP, I have been looking for a decent MVC environment. Initial assessment: Rails bites. Or is bytes? I’ve been messing with several online web tutorials. So far none of them are encouraging. I’ve seen several that help you create your first Hello World app, but don’t explain anything about it. My favorite, billed as the quickest possible way to get from install to Hello World:

alias rails_hello_world='rails hello && cd hello && ./script/generate controller welcome hello && echo "Hello World" > app/views/welcome/hello.html.erb && ./script/server -d && firefox 0.0.0.0:3000/welcome/hello'

And no explanation. Yeah, that’s useful. I’ve managed to get Rails running on my server, nice little Congrats screen and everything. Here’s the sad thing, when I look at Rails and the basic commands to get stuff set up, they make a lot of sense. But I’m really frustrated with the things that don’t make sense. For example, one aspect of the above code,

./script/generate controller welcome hello

When I initially ran a command along the lines of the above, I received a nice output that made a lot of sense considering the MVC framework. But I initally ran it with just one variable. And the tutorial I was going through at the time then provided a few lines of code and said, vioala, Hello World. Only that didn’t work. I’m pretty sure I need some view stuff first. So I went back to another tutorial which invoked multiple variables, like the above command, but with no explanation. I’m having a real hard time getting an idea of what is supposed to work, and why. Admittedly my frustration tolerance is a little low right now. And bad docs and tutorials does not make a bad language or environment. Sadest part is, I’m no good a documentation myself. So even if I do manage to get this all figured out, I don’t know that I’ll be able to do much better.

So anyone know of a good tutorial, preferably set in a Unix environment?

I have had aspirations to actually write more on this blog. I have a few lines of what was supposed to be a post on my trip to Hawaii, and I had planned on a nice, long stint about the Provo Freedom festival. But I have aspirations to do a lot of things that never seem to get done. I have a partialy built table-top aeroponics unit out in a lego bucket in the living room; my scorpions finally have proper dirt, but are still awaiting cool plants, etc. But this blogging thing, I’m not quite sure what to do about it. My orginal plan was to make it one part journal and one part rough-draft documentation for the many projects I aspire to complete.

The problem with using it as a journal is that I’m a very private person and there are things I don’t want the whole world to see. Really, there are things I just don’t want certain people to see. But keeping a journal is important to me. Last year President Eyring gave a talk on keeping a journal. Whenever prophets and general authorities give talks in conference I do try to apply what they are saying to my life, no matter what, but Elder Eyring’s talk was one of those that hits you in the heart and gives you that extra twinge of guilt/resolve. Guilt that you haven’t been doing whatever they are talking about, and resolve to do better. This is especially notable because it hit me at a point in conference when my attention span was waning a bit. As I said, this was last year, and a few entries in a blog that has not been properly backed up does not a journal make. Especially since I’m not even blogging about things that I don’t mind everyone seeing.

As for the projects, as usual, I’m just a slacker. I’m not sure how other people do it. It seems like my friends and co-workers have seen all the latest movies, faithfully watch more TV shows than I new existed, keep up with facebook and online gaming (they also know more games than I ever knew existed), run families, read books, and still manage to keep learning about all the complexities of the computer world. How are you doing that?! Me, I have trouble convincing my body not to sleep ten hours a day, eating regularly, keeping my room in the clean-if-cluttered category, watering my plants and feeding my critters. I usually get to work no more than five minutes late and barely manage to make my quotas. That’s about what it comes down to right now for me. I want to do so much more but I’m struggling with just the basics. Reading is just about gone right now in my life, except for the reading I do to prepare for my sunday lessons; I watch too much TV but it from the conversations around me, it at least seems like I watch almost nothing compared to some; I gave up most computer games years ago; I don’t think I facebook very much (feed the virtual dog, send plants, play a few brain games) and I don’t have nearly enough time for the people in my life or the projects I want to be doing.

I’m almost out of the blogging time I’ve alotted myself tonight, so in my next post I hope to list some of the things I am working on, and maybe set some reasonable timelines for working on them. Maybe, just maybe, I can start managing my aspirations so that I can complete a few.