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GRAFFITI -- February 02, 2004 thru February 08, 2004 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable.     About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.

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February 2, 2004

0716 - Good morning. To have watched five quarters of football over the course of the entire season, it was good to have watched a bit of league championship and a whole Super Bowl after all. A well fought football game, with a 4 seconds left winning kick. Much fun. So much so that there's nothing much to post other than what I put up yesterday morning and afternoon. We'll return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.

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Mon    TUESDAY    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
February 3, 2004

0845 - Good morning. I'm at work in Gaithersburg at a client site. I'm told that there's bad juju weather coming in, and they've closed schools all over the place. All I know is in my drive halfway around the metro area, we're experiencing a vicious light rain. Those light rains are dangerous to school children, you know - they might get wet.

I got and installed Sun's Java Desktop last night. Basically, it is SuSE ... 8.1, I think, with StarOffice 7 added. That in itself is a good thing - StarOffice 7 is nice, nicer than OOo, and it's got a large set of decent templates, along with all the proprietary fonts that you don't get on the standard Linux system. At first blush, I'm reasonably impressed. More on this later, I need to be working. Have a great day!

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February 4, 2004

1953 - Good evening. Not much room for a post today. I'm just now beginning to unwind properly from the drive home. This morning, the ride in was icy but things warmed up past freezing quickly. We're expecting another possible bout with sleet and such in about 24 hours. The weather-liars haven't quite made up what passes for their minds on this one yet.

We're building a backup box. I've adapted Rob Flickenger's ideas from Linux Server Hacks, to use rsync and multiple hard link trees to make incremental backups that each appear to be a full (and are restorable as such). One thing I adapted was this: There were a number of if directory exists, then move it to another related name type of actions in the script. So I modified that section thusly:

# ----- rotate the 31 middle daily snapshots
for NEWER in `seq 31 0`;
  do
    let OLDER=+1
    if [ -d /daily. ]; then \
       /daily. /daily.; \
    fi;
  done

It would have been boring and error prone to write 32 separate if statements. I feel good about that one. And yes, that's in BASH. So now we've got apparently full backups of all the important data, at four hour intervals for a day's worth, and 32 daily copies to encompass a month, and I can use that to restore the state of a file at any given day within that month (not finer grained than daily, though). That rocks.

If you haven't been keeping up, then you ought to go check out Marcia's page again real soon now. She's got updated material on Sally, a new page devoted to Lucy, and more stuff about her quilting, too.

Thanks for dropping by, I'll find something interesting to put up tomorrow, no doubt.

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Mon    Tues    Wed    THURSDAY    Fri    Sat    Sun   
February 5, 2004

0836 - Good morning. I finished reading Quicksilver last night, finally. My objections to the book were a bit different from those of other readers. In particular, people seem to forget that the Shaftoe clan figured prominently in Cryptonomicon as well. It does seem, though, that all of the time with Jack and Eliza could have been removed from the book, and Eliza's role leading up to her meetings with d'Aveaux (sp?) and her association with Leibnitz covered in a couple of flashbacks. Also, all of the letter writing late in the book slows the pacing dramatically at the same time as I'd expect things to be picking up towards some sort of climax. And ending on a stone surgery isn't very ... um ... nice, nor informative. I mean, we knew that Daniel would live, because at the beginning of the book, twenty years later, he's returning from America. Ah, well, it will be interesting to see how Stephenson brings some of these strands together again in the next book. And what is Enoch the Red, anyway. Is he just Lazarus Long all over again?

Last night I linked to Marcia because she has dog updates. You may want to drop by there sometime. Now I need to get to work on that backup box. Have a great day!

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February 6, 2004

0751 - It's very icy here. Some schools are closing, others on a two hour delay. This is, of course, down to the lawyers. Kids fall down all the time, but if one falls on his way to school, the lawyers will break the school district. What a bunch of idiots!

The latest Dean meme isn't very flattering - The article I read somewhere (There's 11 thousand links, I'll never find the one I read by accident) referred to his post-Iowa caucuses speach as "I have a scream". I think it's funny as hell. That's not the message that the campaign wants getting around, and it's certainly not how he really sounded in the context of the room he was working. Remember that he was holding a noise cancelling microphone... standing in the crowd, he could probably hardly be heard. But still, the media played that isolated clip about as often as they've almost shown Janet's breast again and again. On the other hand, Dean's speech has remixes available all over the web, something you just don't get with a breast.

Okay, time for me to get ready to brave the treacherous ice. Have a great Friday.

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February 7, 2004

1114 - Good morning. It's been a long week, and there's just one question I have. Can I turn off the string syntax highlighting in ANY program, for strings marked with a single quote? Here in Bluefish, every time I use a single quote in the possessive or contraction sense, the whole page re-paints as some things are marked as strings, and others unmarked. For instance, just past the Good Morning above, this text: 's been a long week, and there' is currently marked in green. All the rest of the "normal" text in this page is blue. The moment I use another single quote, as I'm about to do (well, just did), it turns the "normal" text black. When I use yet another single quote ... there, I've done it. Well, that closed another single quoted string, and ... sigh. It's just a pain in the ass. In general, I *like* syntax highlighting. It makes it easy for me to see where I'm going astray, especially typing early in the morning here, as I often do. But the distraction is outweighing the benefits, slowly but surely.

Over on LinuxMuse, Jackie asked how to change the graphical display manager and default desktop environment in Fedora Core. Here was my answer:

Fedora Core, huh? I *thought* I'd blown that away in my latest system remodel, so I set about installing Fedora Core into VMware to test this for you. Uh, bummer. I can't get the installer running in VMware. Sigh. So I go to install on real hardware, and the installer asks me if just want to update the FC installation on HDA5. Double Hmmm... OK, so I mounted that, checked settings, fstab, etc. Added a grub entry in my Gentoo boot tree and boom. FC is up and running. Now to your question:

Okay. For the single user, from the GDM screen, you can set KDE for the current login via the session selection at the bottom of the screen. On login, it says that for a permanent change, use the desktop switcher tool. That's found in Start Here --> Preferences --> More Preferences. There you can change the default session for the current user.

I assume that what you REALLY want is the system wide default session to be KDE. I'll also look at the KDM thing at the same time. Hey, what KINDS of problems does GDM give you that KDM won't?

Okay, all important system-wide settings in RH and RH-derived boxen are found in /etc/sysconfig, and possibly some stuff in /etc/X11/ or the /etc/init.d tree. So here we go.

[root@goldfedora sysconfig]# grep GNOME *
desktop:DESKTOP="GNOME"

A quick edit later:

[root@goldfedora sysconfig]# grep KDE *
desktop:DESKTOP="KDE"

Now to go after KDM

[root@goldfedora sysconfig]# cd /etc/X11
[root@goldfedora X11]# find . -type f -exec grep -H gdm {} \;
./prefdm:               preferred=gdm
 . . .

Okay, so /etc/X11/prefdm looks like a good starting point. Here's the key section in prefdm:

preferred=
if [ -f /etc/sysconfig/desktop ]; then
        . /etc/sysconfig/desktop
        if [ "" = GNOME ]; then
                preferred=gdm
        elif [ "" = KDE ]; then
                preferred=kdm
        elif [ "" = XDM ]; then
                preferred=xdm
        fi
fi

It appears that the change in /etc/sysconfig/desktop may effect both changes for us... not quite: That sets , but not , so let's go back and edit that...

[root@goldfedora X11]# cd /etc/sysconfig/
[root@goldfedora sysconfig]# vim desktop
 . . .
[root@goldfedora sysconfig]# cat desktop
DESKTOP="KDE"
DISPLAYMANAGER="KDE"

Now to test this theory...

Fedora Core now appears to be in the state of happiness you require, Jackie!

Happy Saturday.

We have fun over on LinuxMuse, at least for a slightly limited subset of the group Fun. You're welcome to join in. The more the merrier - right now it's been quiet for too long.

Sally's not feeling well. She lost her supper last night, and is pretty morose and panting. This morning she ate a little but seems dizzy and disoriented. The good news is this used to be a bi-weekly event, and this is only the second time it's happened since we got Lucy, back in early December. So our plan of having a companion for Sally to perk her up may have had some positive effects. I'd best wander downstairs and check on the poor little puppy now. So have a great day!

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February 8, 2004

1201 - Good morning... ahem. Afternoon, to be sure. Well, good news first. Sally appears to be over her periodic 24 hour buglet. What's going on there? I don't know, to be sure. She is old, and one day she'll go to the dog fields in the sky, where all the bunnies are slow. But in the meantime, we'll do our best to give her a happy life.

A notice from Bob Thompson ... Bob says his RoadRunner connection has been down almost completely since Wednesday. He's seeing packet loss in the 70 - 90% range, and seeing red over having to explain everything three squintillion times to each person he talks to at the non-support lines. The latest news is that there may be a tech out there today, so Bob and Barbara MAY be back online, getting email and posting. But we consider that to be a faint hope until it actually hatches.

I've used LVM a couple of times from Red Hat installations. LVM stands for Logical Volume Management. However, I'd never setup LVM manually, only by the RH install tools, which rather insulates one from the nuts and bolts. The question came up this week, why use an RH variant when building a JBOD setup. I replied, "Because I've never done LVM any other way, and don't want to perform my first experiments on your production hardware." Apparently that's a good answer, because I got a nod of acquiescence by way of response.

So in a Debian setup I've got running in VMware, I setup a pair of extra 2G virtual SCSI drives. Then following the LVM Howto on TLDP I marked those two drives as Physical Volumes, joined them together into a Volume Group, then created a single 4G Logical Volume. The logical volume can then be addressed and used by standard Linux filesystem tools. I made a Reiser filesystem on the volume, setup the mount points properly in /etc/fstab and everything just worked. Excellent, and a well written Howto is to thank for making this first pass as easy as pie. Now I know enough that if I had to, I could migrate the system we built at a customer site over to Debian, in a pinch.

The shopping is already done. But we noticed on the way home that the house numbers on the mailbox post are borked. So I am off to one of the mega-home-centers to pick up some new numbers, and get those up. I'd best be about it. Have a good Sunday.

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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.

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