Well, I ended up installing a fresh copy of Fedora 9 this morning.  Didn’t take long at all.  I didn’t have the patients to try and figure out why my xserver wouldn’t work after my upgrade from Werewolf to Sulphur.  When I got home yesterday I reinstalled my video card drivers, for my nVidia GeForce 8600 GT, but that didn’t fix the problem.  Oh well, the good thing is I’m back up and running with the latest version of Fedora - so now I just have to remount my DATA partition and restore my home directory.

There were some cool moments yesterday, such as: playing with Gparted and understanding this whole LVM thing a little better, understanding that I have a gigantic hard drive and if I move stuff around it’s going to take a long time to do things like that.  I also, finally, exposed my to Firefly (the television series, that got canceled) through Hulu.com.  I heard about hulu from some podcast and then I heard rave reviews from My ExtraLife Radio.  So; I tried it again (I signed up the first time, but didn’t do anything with it) and it is totally awesome.  I have the first season of Firefly que’d up and ready to watch.

Firefly Review

I want to do a full review of this series, but I’m only going to give a quick synopsis.  I’m very late to the game of watching this show - lots of scifi folks have raved about this series and are really upset that it got canceled and crappy shows like Battlestar Galactica is still running strong.

The show reminds me of a Japanese anime titled Cowboy Bebop.  To be honest I think it’s a total rip from that show, but they changed the story to fit American actors.  It’s done very well though - I really like the show and some of the dialog reminds me of the same kind of dialog you’ll find in Cowboy Bebop.  Very cool show - I look forward to watching more of it.

So last night I finally decided to upgrade my home desktop from Fedora 8: Werewolf (best name ever) to Fedora 9: Sulphur. My main reasoning was to get Banshee 1.0 installed and have a happier podcasting life. Lukily for me I have a seperate partition to store my data and I backed up my /home directory. Not all the files just the ones I thought were important, which included most of the [dot][files/folders].

I had a headache that night too, but I was determined to get this newer version running. After I took care of my family duties (kids, wife, blah blah) - I jumped on my machine and verified the ISO file I downloaded about a week after the release of Sulphur. Everything went well, I burned it to a DVD at 2.4x speed. Awh did it hurt to click “Burn” at that speed, but I found other stuff to do. Once it was finished I rebooted and started the process.

It took a long time to upgrade, so I went downstairs and watched some South Park with my brother. It was around 1:00 AM when I decided to go to bed. The process was almost finished, but I didn’t have any energy left to complete the process.

In the morning I saw the beautiful “congratulations” screen and rebooted the machine. The first thing that shows you something is wrong is I didn’t get a neat little splash screen while the processes were loading. I’ve learned that that has something to do with Xserver. It then tried to give me a login screen, but kept blinking out. I clicked the <ENTER> key and I saw a text login. All signs that Xserver is not running. I logged in, typed “startx”, waited, and recieved this error message:

giving up
xinit: Connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to Xserver
xinit: No such process (errno 3): server error.

Yah, no one likes to see those kind of messages. I’m researching it now on Fedora Forums. I do have a nVidia GeForce 8600 GT video card AND I am using their propritary drivers (no luck with Lvina). So stay tuned for more adventures in me messing things up!

I am experiencing a deafening silience when it comes to the audio on my Fedora box.  As of this article being published I can not hear audio playing on my computer.  Such as:

• MP3s, Oggs
• YouTube, Hulu, and Flash-based player

Ironically when I do a “Soundcard Detection” it does find it, I hear the test audio.  I can even hear my recording that I just created in Audacity.  I am at a lotal lost.

Banshee 1.0

I think it started when I tried to install the lastest rave of audio players, Banshee 1.0.  I’m running Fedora 8, I’m a linux noob, so I checked my respositories and it had a version 0.13.  YUM search, YUM install all produced a non-1.0 version.  So; I downloaded the source file and tried to ./configure, make, make install.  Not to my surprise I had a dependency issue.  I did a search in my program manager and then google.com for any direction.  I’d find the library file and install THAT from source.  For the next hour or so it was rince and repeat.  Evey time I executed ./configure, I kept falling into a depenency issue.

For some of them I installed by source, but Fedora still didn’t recognize that it was installed.

Over the past couple of months - I’ve picked up that any library or program that comes stock with the distro you will find in /usr folder.  Anything you install afterwards should go into the /usr/local folder.  In there it has a “src”, “share”, and a “lib” folder.  So I could move my source files to /usr/local/src and compile them from there.  I would also install precomipled programs, such as Fire fox into the /usr/local/share/applications folder.

Well basically the system wouldn’t look into the /usr/local/lib folder to see that library I just install resides there.  I ended up on my LUG’s mailing list for some answers.  They pointed me into the right direction, but I STILL had other dependency issues.  It was not a pretty site.  Ironically; my older IBM Thinkpad R40 laptop is running Fedora 9 and I did “YUM install banshee” and it installed version 1.0 without any issues.  Hmmm, I might need to upgrade my desktop.

Overall; YUM seems to be a better route of installing programs, I just need to understand how to work it.  I still haven’t figured out the problem - I don’t know where to start.  This sucks!

I’ve created a new category called “Linuxapade” - from the multilingual word “escapade“.  I wanted to see if I can document my adventures with the wonderful, yet frustrating, yet rewarding world of linux.  It’s a mad house over here, almost like going on a seven day adventure to the land of nowhere and you learn to build fire by your self, hunt for your food, enjoy the kill and the feast.  In this case you’re actually forced to learn how an operating system works and hardware, etc.  It doesn’t do it for you like Windows or MAC.  There are some automated features that work out-of-the-box, but if it starts to break you have no choice, but to find a solution - no matter how many hours it’ll take you to first understand how this device is supposed to work.

What is Flock?  I don’t know… ha-ha.  Seriously; I’m not too clear, but I found it on my RSS feed today from LinuxInsider.  So far it looks great.  It’s a web browser targeted to users of social networks, heh - that’s me!  You can have a side tab with your friends from different networks and you can even click n drag pictures to them to quickly share. Sounds like fun.  It’s based on Firefox (win win) so I’ll try it when I get home.

You can find more information from Flock’s web site.

I saw this on a post from Fresh Ubuntu podcast. You gotta love linux programmers. I’m a big fan of ordering pizza online. The problem is the closest Dominos, in my area, keeps screwing up the orders. Besides that - this video is awesome and I’m going to install it just to try it out.

Here’s the site to download the application: www.beigerecords.com/cory/pizza_party/

I saw a video posted on WoW Insider and I thought it was very cool. Wide screen is something new you don’t see with online videos. I don’t know what Vimeo is, but so far I love their video player and widescreen.

Rant: Here’s my ordeal with this horrible error, at least to a noob in linux, like myself.  I couldn’t figure out why I was getting this error.  When I opened Evolution I would get a pop-up saying “Summary and folder mismatch, even after a sync”.  I thought it was my mail stored on my server, I have 4 pop accounts and I ended up deleting all the old emails 500+ each (Yeah I’m a pack rat).  It was literally driving me crazy because it wanted to redownload ALL my old emails.

Well after all that foolishness I finally figured out the solution.  Most sites I visited stated the same solution to the problem, go into the ~/.evolution/mail/local/ and delete any file that had .ev-summary relating to the pop-up error.  So; if your inbox was giving you the problem then you would delete Inbox.ev-summary.

My problem was even after I deleted that file I was still getting the issue.  After a couple days of pulling my hair out of my head…  Finally I ended up looking at the directory through gnome-terminal and I saw an extra file that’s not visible in a GUI file browser.  It ended witha  tilda (~), Inbox.ev-summary~.

I’ve noticed in linux that any file ending with a tilda is treated like a backup file, it’s also hidden to the naked eye.

Once I removed that file - everything was back to status quo.  What a trip!  I’ve been on forums, mailing lists - you name it.  I haven’t properly checked my mail in Evolution within the past couple days.  I’m glad that’s all over with!  Linux rocks!

I’m a bit confused by the methods people go about reporting news now-a-days. I’m probably late to the game, but it seems that everyone is stealing, borrowing, whatever from each other and you have to dig down into 2 or 3 levels of blogs in order to get the one true article that was written about the subject.

I forgot how I found it, but the title “Ubunut 8.04 vs. Fedora 9″ caught my eye. I followed it to www.OSnews.com to read a small excerpt of a much bigger story found elsewhere. How long has this been going on? I remember when I first started reading GoogleNews, I noticed that they would have an intro sentence and the real story was somewhere else. That trend (whether started by Google or not) is the norm sharing stories.

I use GoogleReader and it’s amazing how all these supposed news web sites are basically fancy portals to the real news web sites.