I’ve established a good reputation with being careless with restarting services. For those that can’t afford a second of downtime, you can check if your configuration is sane. This ensures your service won’t go down longer than expected while you look for that syntax error:

apachectl -t

I remember running across that before but forgot how to do it. Found it again while trying to trim down Apache’s Fancy Indexing.

Update: Ha ha! Silly me. I was going to add this to the init script so that it won’t restart if the syntax check failed. It turns out that it’s already in the script under the reload function (I’m using CEntOS).

• The built-in Desktop Effects control in F7/FC6 uses Compiz. So starting Beryl Manager will mess up everything.
• When rotating the cube the back side is removed. A cylinder is better as described here.
• Is there a way to make the menubars transparent (like in Vista)?

Bash: Execute a command every X seconds. Forever.
while(true); do your-command && sleep X; done

I accidentally switched my laptop to suspend to RAM last night and when I reached home, it safely woke up. I thought an update fixed it but when I tried again this morning, it didn’t work again. By the way, ACPI works better now (the screen actually switches off instead of a black display with the backlight still on).

liquidat posted a workaround. Let me summarize it.

A kernel panic happens when the machine goes to resume. The error is caused by a bug in the Firewire Open Host Controller Interface (fw_ohci). This may be an isolated case for other users so you might need to test it by issuing modprobe -r -v --first-time fw_ohci and suspending then resuming the machine. If the machine was able to resume, then fw_ohci is the cause.

The workaround is to append SUSPEND_MODULES="fw_ohci fw_core" to /etc/pm/config.d/unload_modules (many thanks to Alex Tucker and liquidat).

Click here

There are other ways to install Fedora 7 if you don’t have a DVD drive. I’m cheap enough to keep an old laptop with only a CD-ROM drive yet foolish enough to buy a 60GB iPod. In this entry, I’ll share how I worked around to getting Fedora 7 installed.

I tried two of the installation methods. First I tried a network install. This took a lot of time and the minimal boot loader doesn’t show the status of the download. You can hit alt+F3 and see more messages but that barely helped. I tried to download the portion of the mirror that was needed but majority of the mirrors were slow.

This is not the first time where I tried a network install. I tried it before with openSUSE and had the same problems, ending up with downloading the ISOs. I was first hesitant to try this but I thought that a DS3 line will work compared to 512kbps DSL.

The second method I tried was from a hard drive. I first tried it with a USB enclosure with an NTFS-formatted drive but it seems that the boot loader had this problem with mounting the partition. But that didn’t stop me from giving up. I still have my FAT32-formatted iPod and the boot loader was able to mount it.

That’s pretty much it. Here’s what I did in 5 steps (plus other options for your configuration) to reach the welcome screen.

1. Download a minimal boot loader (either the CD ISO image or the bootable USB image; check if your computer can boot from a USB device, the safest way is to burn the minimal ~7MB CD ISO).
2. Download the DVD image via BitTorrent and copy it to a self-managed iPod or an external FAT32-formatted hard disk. Do not rename the image file and remember where you copied it. As an alternative, you can also store it in a FAT32 partition that you will not format during the installation.
3. Restart your computer and boot with the minimal installer.
4. Choose “Hard Drive” as the installation source.
5. Provide the path where the image is stored. If you’re having a hard time locating it, you can refer to the sample table in this page.

It’ll be smooth sailing once anaconda, the installation program, loads properly. Stay tuned for my post-installation assessment.

I was searching for a package earlier and bumped into Beryl. I installed it, restarted then to my surprise, it worked!!!

I’m still trying to figure out the configuration. It still has some bugs and quirks but it’s nothing major like X crashing. It could be just the excitement, but I feel like text looks smoother now.

For those who haven’t heard of Beryl, check out the video clip below (sorry, couldn’t find one that was short and didn’t focus too much on the cube).

After much anticipation and letdowns, Moonshine is finally out!! Get it through the torrents (highly recommended) or the public mirrors. Release notes are over here (I just found out that fast user switching is now possible).

I have two problems. First, the computer I use to burn discs and backup my files is still broken. Second, there are no CD spins. Anybody with an external DVD drive that I can borrow?

Here’s a little peek for you.

Click to embiggen

I have this urge to post it now. I was supposed to include it for tomorrow’s bookmarks but this one deserves its own post.

I don’t want to ruin your day with my boring geeky explanation so I’ll just grab what they wrote about this.

With LINA, a single executable written and compiled for Linux can be run with native look and feel on Windows, Mac OS X, and UNIX operating systems.

Cool, eh? Here‘s their website if you want to know more.

In other open source news, FSF wants Google to share the changes they made to Linux (via Fake Steve Jobs). I think GPL is too restrictive and sometimes the FSF folks take it a bit too far. But I guess that’s okay. It’s some sort of protection. I hope all goes well.

I was hoping the by the time I woke up, I can start downloading the ISOs. But when I checked the schedule, they moved it again to next week (the 31st).

I’m a bit disappointed but that’s okay because the computer that I’ll use to backup my files is broken. I was just hoping to get a peek at the new startup screen and default wallpaper.

More disappointment while writing this. I broke my own excitement by searching for the previews. It now looks less evil and more child-friendly (because of the OLPC Project?). I like FC6′s appearance better. Gnome looks a little bit slicker though.

There is nothing else to expect but a couple of improvements. Maybe I expected too much (new init and/or faster bootup). This is just a bad week.

There is good news but it doesn’t benefit me. The PS3 is officially supported.