Sexy Sexy Penguins

The latest and greatest Rawhide of Fedora has been put into an Alpha Release.  I downloaded both the LiveCD and the DVD isos yesterday, which took 15+ hours.

Just a reminder that Alpha means its not ready for your production box, so test it extensively and give feedback.  When the Beta comes out in March, I plan to move my lappy over.  Until then, I’ll just keep testing.

You can get yours from:

http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/9-Alpha/

A list of the upcoming features for Fedora 9 are available here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/9/

Cheers,

Clint

Tags: alpha, Fedora, rawhide

So its been a whole two days since I upgraded to Werewolf. I love it! Most everything works out of the box (OOTB), wireless, bluetooth, even suspend/resume seem to be possible for the first time!

But one of the oddities I encountered while upgrading was the names of the packages. Mind you, this is just my twisted mind being interested in some of the funny odd or strange package names I found while the yum upgrade was taking place.

So here’s the list anyway, with a short description of each. Enjoy:

• gwenhywfar - A multi-platform helper library for networking and security applications and libraries.
• meanwhile - Lotus Sametime session functionality.
• neon - An HTTP and WebDAV client library.
• coolkey - Linux Driver support for the CoolKey and CAC products.
• rarian - Designed as a replacement for scrollkeeper; A documentation meta-data library.
• openjade - An implementation of the ISO/IEC 10179:1996 standard DSSSL.
• sox - (Sound eXchange) is a sound file format converter.
• cadaver - A command-line WebDAV client.
• booty - Small python library for use with bootloader configuration.
• orca - A flexible, extensible, and powerful assistive technology.
• zenity - Lets you display Gtk+ dialog boxes from the command line and through shell scripts.
• eog - Eye of GNOME (EOG) is an image viewer.
• gok - Enables users to control their computer without relying on a standard keyboard or mouse, leveraging GNOME’s accessibility framework
• devilspie - A window-matching utility.*

This information was gathered using the command ‘rpm -qi <packagename>’.  This provided enough information to help understand at least the basics of each of these packages and whether to consider using them in the future.

The packages in italics above are packages that I consider interesting, and I plan to attempt to blog about each of them in turn as part of my POW series.

The devilspie package has a * which means that I’ve used this program before.  I quite enjoyed using the Devil’s Pie, and plan to take a look at it again in Fedora 8 as the previous package had some real limitations and lacked needed flexibility.

Please watch for the upcoming articles on these utilities.  Also, if there are packages that you found interesting during your upgrade, please comment and let me know what they are so I can learn and possibly use them as well.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: f8, packages, rawhide, rpm, upgrade, werewolf, Yum

And so the saga continues!

Transaction Summary
=============================================================================
Install     98 Package(s)
Update    1092 Package(s)
Remove       2 Package(s)

Total download size: 1.3 G
Is this ok [y/N]: y

Resulted in:

$ cat /etc/*release
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)
Fedora release 8 (Werewolf)

I did have a few problems, mostly things that were from non-fedora repositories. Once I cleared those up, all went well. Fedora 8 is beautiful.

A couple things to note. My ATI drivers seemed to stay in place and as horrible as ever for dual displays. I’m going to be trying xrandr as soon as I can find the open ATI drivers. Another is that I love to use vlc, but its in the livna repository and currently requires python 2.4, but Werewolf uses python 2.5. I guess I’ll have to get the src.rpm and rebuild it with python 2.5 as the requirement. I also noted that my mouse pad is currently not working, I’ll have to find out why the synaptics drivers stopped working.

Update: I’ve decided it might be useful to at least include a couple cool pictures of the new theme, so here you go.

Cheers,

Clint

Tags: f8, rawhide, upgrade, werewolf, yum update

Wish me luck. I’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade to werewolf tonight. After reading Max Spevack’s post about how to upgrade to Fedora 8, this post from Will Woods stating that Rawhide is now ready to go and of course the current code freeze for this Thursday’s release, I think its time to upgrade.

In fact, I plan for Fedora 9 to do this much earlier so I can help test the release. I post here and now to make sure that commit to helping the Fedora Project squash bugs for Fedora 9. I’ll accomplish this by installing it at Test 1 and actually report bugs as I find them.

Wish me luck with this upgrade and my future endeavors. I think its a good cause and a great way to get further involved with the community.

Cheers,

Herlo

Tags: f8, rawhide, upgrade, werewolf