Fedora experience

After more than two years since my last Fedora install, frustrated by Ubuntu's glitches,I reinstalled Fedora 13 on my laptop.
It was a pleasant surprise to see how much it evolved since my last contact with it.
The installation was smooth - from the live CD.
It recognized all my hardware including the elusive Toshiba bluetooth module
The graphics are a little childish in my opinion but they are somehow consistent and appealing. On the original installation I had no OpenOffice, flash or codecs -
but they were simple to add from third party repositories.

There were also a couple of other things that I learnt from Fedora:
1. The bluetooth problem on Toshiba is not coming from kernel but from the modules shipped by Cannonical in their distro. I have recompiled the kernel on Ubuntu with toshiba support and bluetooth started to work by default - so I do not need my Omnibook hacked bluetooth module.

2. The fonts are correctly rendered by Xft - the problem is in the Gnome themes - especially in Cannonical custom ones. Reverting to plain old Mist evrything looked better.

In the meanwhile I am trying to merge Plymouth 0.8.3 on 0.8.2-ubuntu and rebuild the package.

Free Monday

As the Penteost's Monday was free I took advantage and enjoyed a long lazy morning. So I've seen a nice animation - "Up".

The characters were funny and the story quite witty,although bitter-sweet sometimes.

The Book Of Eli

This is a not so good mix between "Mad Max", "The Road" and "Fahrenheit 451". I still wonder how two excellent actors as Oldman and Washington could accept the roles in it. As for Mila Kunis - well, it is still Jackie from "The 70's Show"

SWT/Eclipse

There is too much space around widgets in GTK version of Eclipse. I am trying to understand what is cause the bad SWT spacing. Windows/Mac looks better.
It is quite annoying the look and on my 1280x800 it consumes about 4 text lines on the screen

2004 - 2009 - IT press

Kind	2004	2010
Algorithms	1 (GInfo)	0
Professional IT	1 (NET Report)	0
General IT	4+ (PC Magazine, CHIP, Computerworld, PC Practic)	2
Gaming	2+ (Level, XtremPC)	2
Linux	1 (Linux Magazine)	0

In the meanwhile many other magazines have disappeared (Gazeta Matematica...).

What could be the cause of the extinction of those mags? Internet? Or the lack of interest into quality articles. 

In other countries those magazines survived and really thrived.

In Romania it seems that they had the same faith as the rest of the written culture...  

Strange new Vodafone APN

This is my wvdial.conf dialer.

[Dialer cartela]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"ip","tobe.vodafone.ro"
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Phone = *99***#
ISDN = 0
Password = vodafone
New PPPD = yes
Username = tobe.vodafone.ro
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0
Baud =  460800

Strangely Ubuntu's graphical network applet is unable to deal with this new APN while wvdial manages to make adial-up connection.

A la Roumanie

Recently our enlightened government announced 15% reduction of the pensions and 25% reduction of the salaries for the employees in the public sector.
They also announced that other tax facilities will be revoked (16% tax extemption for programmers, maternal help, ...). Hospitals and schools will be closed, lots of people will go in unemployment. The country is almost in the same situation as after a war.
I am not complaining... It could be worse. See the case of Korea in 1993. But the people there trusted the government and donated for the whole country. I really think that there are persons that would do the same here... but... we have nobody to trust on this world.

Going headless again

After the launch of Ubuntu 10.04 I decided that I have to upgrade to this LTS.
On laptop it was easy but on my server I had a problem. No keyboard and no screen were attached to it - so again I had to do a headless install.
Last time I made a hack with a USB stick but it was quite ugly.
Now I decided to do something cleaner.
The outcome was simple I modified the file isolinux/isolinux.cfg to accommodate aserial console. My file looks like:

serial 0 115200
console 0
prompt 1
timeout 30
default install
label install
  menu label ^Install Ubuntu Server
  kernel /install/vmlinuz
  append console=ttyS0,115200n8 file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-server.seed initrd=/install/initrd.gz quiet --
label minimal
  menu label Install ^Minimal Server
  kernel /install/vmlinuz
  append console=ttyS0,115200n8 file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-server-minimal.seed initrd=/install/initrd.gz quiet --
label minimalvm
  menu label Install Minimal ^VM
  kernel /install/vmlinuz
  append console=ttyS0,115200n8 file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu-server-minimalvm.seed initrd=/install/initrd.gz quiet --
label rescue
  menu label ^Rescue a broken system
  kernel /install/vmlinuz

With this modification in place I have rewrtten the CD and everything worked as a charm.

Movies evening

"Billy Elliot" 

I have seen a nice movie about passion and courage to escape. "Billy Elliot"'s cast simply stars. Jame Bell's and Gary Lewis's performances are stunning.

"Takva"

The transformation of the ascetic Muharrem to a ruthless man, from serenity to anger. Muharrem is always looking for God and try to act in His name... But the temptation is tormenting his life. A must see.