Just a small notice this time, I am a bit late, however the first Beta release of Fedora Core 9 was released!

Although I’ve already mentioned which features appeal the most to me in Fedora Core 9, I hadn’t noticed the changes being made to Anaconda. Frequent readers of this blog remember my initial problems with Anaconda, so I’m please to see some progress going on.

One of the most interesting features, to me, is the ability to resize ext2, ex3 and NTFS (!) partitions. The latter being the most interesting for people installing Fedora Core 9 alongside Windows (which I don’t ;-)).

Be sure to grab it and report any problems you find!

Update: Removed the core part, core and extras repositories were merged ever since Fedora 7. I hadn’t realized the effect that this had on the name yet.. *sigh*

I recently released PHP4 RPM’s for CentOS 5, claiming they worked fine alongside the stock PHP5 that comes with CentOS 5.

Okey, that wasn’t entirely true. I had forgotten about php-pear! If you install php (stock version) alongsides my RPM’s you would get some errors, this has been resolved

After a few days of playing around with my RPM’s, I’ve finally managed to have a php4-pear RPM to work fine alongside php delivered by CentOS. Below an example of my results:

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In my earlier post regarding KDE 4.0 on Fedora Core, I said that I achieved running KDE4 by running an early release of Fedora Core 9 (rawhide). For the people interested, there is an official pre-release of Fedora Core 9 available!

I would definitely recommend people to grab it and give it a glimpse! Don’t forget to fill a bug report if you find anything!

As some of you visiting this blog have noticed, currently the RPM’s I made for PHP aren’t available in any yum repository, making you have to check our blog every time for updates. Although I’m quite happy to have you visiting our blog more often, things really should be easier

I’ll take you through the steps I took to setup the yum repository for labcoding.com; with my next PHP update I’ll repost the instructions on enabling this repository (as described below).

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I’ve been using Apache for quite some time, having many custom scripts that do chores for me. Recently I was asked to install Apache on a machine, a few yum installs and some editing of the Apache vhost files later I was all set.

Because the site being served by Apache started to grow I noticed that the log files got big, I had completely forgotten to have a script rotate the log files!

At the office we simply have a script that has been doing just that since Apache 1.x, this script also runs fine with Apache 2.x. Because I never use office related scripts anywhere outside the office, I decided to look around and encountered rotatelogs which is included with Apache 2.x.

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In most cases Sendmail is the default MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) for many systems (like with CentOS), it can however be hard to configure or maintain (although it has improved over the last years).

I myself prefer to use postfix for various reasons.

Postfix describes itself as “Postfix attempts to be fast, easy to administer, and secure. The outside has a definite Sendmail-ish flavor, but the inside is completely different.”

Postfix can be easily installed and configured, just follow the steps ahead.

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I’m sure most of you are familier with CVS and Subversion (a compelling replacement for CVS), the latter being a version control system I’ve had some great experiences with. Both CVS and Subversion are Centralised SCM’s (Source Control Management), today I encountered Mercurial which is a Distributed SCM.

To get our terms straight, let me just explain the differences between a Centralised CSM and a Distributed CSM.

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I’m pretty sure all the other WordPress bloggers out there noticed the shiny bar in their WordPress admin panels, announcing the release of Wordpress 2.3.2, about 18 days ago.

If there is one thing I hate at the moment, it’s having to upgrade my blog while I’ve done custom modifications and copy all those files by hand. To save all you other folks some hastle, I’ve looked at the actual changes and the adjusted files. Based on my findings I’ve created a simple bash script that updates your blog (and makes a backup before doing so ;))

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I’m sure you’ve heard about it, KDE 4.0 has been released!

I can honestly say it looks damn sweet! Unfortunately I quickly learned that KDE 4.0 wouldn’t make it into Fedora 8, it will be made available in Fedora 9 which is scheduled for an April 2008 launch.

If you’re adventurous like me and don’t like to wait that long, here is what you could do.

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As I promised yesterday, the RPM’s (i386) for PHP4 can now be downloaded for your convienence.

You can find the SRPM along with the RPM’s. The SRPM was slightly updated since yesterday to fix a small glitch I encountered when trying to build a eAccelerator RPM for CentOS 5.

NOTE: None of the RPM’s are signed at this time, in a while i’ll setup a repository where you will find these files. Obviously those will be signed then.

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As of CentOS 5 you’ll get PHP 5 rpm binaries, if for some reason your old applications aren’t PHP5 compliant yet, this might cause you some difficulties.

Even though PHP4 has it’s EOL as of 31-12-2007, the needed security updates will be done until 2008-08-08. This in my opinion could be a reason to at least make it possible to run PHP4 on CentOS 5. I myself really recommend upgrading to PHP5, it’s just matter of time…

I’ll walk through the process of building PHP4, which is quite a pain (as with any PHP release). If for some reason you wouldn’t want to do it yourself, i’ll try to post the binaries along at some point.

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At the office we use Pound as a reverse proxy for Microsoft Exchange 2007 (and previously Microsoft Exchange 2003). This has been working fine with Exchange 2003, but with Exchange 2007 we were having some challenges.

Basicly when you would use Internet Explorer to log into OWA, you would most likely get a 500 Internal server error. In for instance Firefox, it would always work just fine. We did have this problem with Exchange 2003, but less frequent.

The Pound logfiles would show something along the lines of:
Dec 16 15:00:39 proxy pound: e500 can’t read header
Dec 16 15:00:39 proxy pound: response error read from 192.168.123.123:80: Succes

This is very simular to this old post on the Pound mailing list.

I asked 2 colleages of mine to look into this challenge and they managed to find the solution, the next is all thanks to them! Kudos to those guys, I would just like to share it with the rest of the world

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So, you’ve got Fedora Core 8 installed, it all looks pretty sweet and you start browsing the internet. You quickly notice that there are quite a few things that don’t work out of the box, like for instance Flash or Java. A shame you think, let’s play some MP3’s then. You click an MP3 and Amarok fires up, then you get the notice it doesn’t support MP3… doh.

Time to get your FC8 box up to date so you don’t have any limitations!

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It’s that time of the year again, a new version of Fedora Core has been released :). I’m dedicating my 20Mbit line now, to get that baby so I can install it later on. While I’m waiting on that, I might as well share some of my first glance thoughts.

I must say that it looks pretty darn good at first glance, as with every new version there are some changes worth mentioning:

• Gnome 2.2.0 and the new Nodoka theme
• Online Desktop
  I have to say this feature suprises me, I’m still not very fond of the whole online desktop idea.The things I have stored on my ‘private desktop’ should stay there, although perhaps I’m still too paranoid in that section. I purpose that I will at least try it, I’m ignorant enough to use Gmail, so…
• KDE 3.5.8
• Xfce 4.4.1 I’m pro Xfce
• Wireless support improved through NetworkManager 0.7, I’ve already seen some positive feedback
• PulseAudio is enabled (and installed) by default, no experience with that yet.
• CodecBuddy, CodecBuddy is supposed to help people pick open format codecs in stead of patented technology. Personally I’d rather have it so they had a “CodedBuddy” being a program that gives me the option to easily install many ‘patented’ technologies at my own risk…
• Compiz Fusion, way out of my video cards league for now…
• IcedTea, the direct effect of Sun Microsystems releasing their JDK as open source earlier this year.
• OpenOffice.org 2.3
• Eclipse 3.3
• And many more improvements like for instance improved support for Bluetooth devices, power management, better security features, new graphical firewall tool, Kiosk functionality through SELinux, secure remote management for Xen/KVM/QEMU and performance improvement to Yum/Pirut/Pup (Wonder if this is related to Daniel’s excellent C metadata parser for yum..).

You can grab the latest version from the Fedora Project website, wait until I’m done though