Great Fire Wall

The Berlin Wall has been torn down. When will the Great Fire Wall?

Switched to Arch Linux Finally

I have been using various Linux distros since 1998. These are the distros I have used in the past.

1. Slackware
2. RedHat
3. Gentoo
4. Fedora

Gentoo is a good distro, as I used to run FreeBSD for quite a while. Being tired of building everything from source code and dealing with those emerge switches, I decided to move on to a binary distribution. Fedora has been working pretty well for me and has been my major OS at home. However, I find it more and more frustrating to use Fedora because:

• Some dependencies are just ridiculous. For example, when you do yum install @kde-desktop, you will notice that yum wants to install xfce4-notifyd, which obviously doesn’t make sense to me.
• Yum does a pretty good job at installing new programs. It sorts out all the required dependencies and installs them for you flawlessly. Now, what if you want to remove the program? That’s a pain in the a$$ simply because yum doesn’t remove the program and its dependencies that are not used by any other program on the system. There is a little yum-utils package available but its functionalities are just nominal. When the program you want to remove has 100 dependencies, I gurantee you will be frustrated.

I also tried Ubuntu on and off about 3-4 times. None lasted more than 1 week. I just don’t know why I dislike Ubuntu.

I hate to switch Linux distro but this time I think I have to. This stupid yum thing basically scares me off trying new programs without the worry that I may not be able to completely get rid of all the installed dependencies. After googling around, my attention was drawn to Arch Linux. I’ve heard good stories about Arch and it is made in Canada! OK. I decided to give it a try.

Everything went smoothly and its pacman is simply what I am looking for. It is written in C, so the speed is lightning fast. It can handle the removal of dependencies flawlessly and efficiently. And it starts from a minimal system. You don’t have to trim down a heavy installation such as Ubuntu. You simply add what you need on top of the minimal system.

I was a Gnome user for years and the recently KDE 4.x series is really nice and user friendly. After Arch was installed, I loaded KDE 4.4 on it and it just worked like charm.

Another thing I like Arch is its rich documenation. Its wiki site has a lot of HOWTO articles.

Anyways, there’s still a lot to learn about Arch since I just switched to it last night. Keep up the good job, Arch Linux team!

ia32 libs for Android SDK on Fedora 12 x86_64

By default, Fedora x86_64 distribution doesn’t come with a handy pacakge as Ubuntu does, ie. ia32-libs. In order to run 32-bit applications on a 64bit Fedora, you will have to figure out what libs are required and install them manually. Unfortunately, Android SDK is one of the 32-bit applications that I really want to run on my Fedora.

 

After spending some time googling around, the best result I could find is this link. Although it was written for Fedora11, many people reported that it is still working for Fedora 12. However, I don’t think we need that many 32-bit libs for Android SDK to function. Therefore, I went ahead, did some research and came up with the following list of libs required for Android SDK 2.0 on Fedora 12 x86_64.

 

alsa-lib.i686
audiofile.i686
directfb.i686
esound-libs.i686
expat.i686
freetype-freeworld.i686
glibc.i686
libdrm.i686            
libgcc.i686
libjpeg.i686           
libpng.i686            
libselinux.i686        
libstdc++.i686
libsysfs.i686          
libv4l.i686            
libvncserver.i686      
libX11.i686
libXau.i686
libxcb.i686
libXdamage.i686        
libXdmcp.i686
libXext.i686           
libXfixes.i686         
libXxf86vm.i686        
lzo-minilzo.i686       
mesa-dri-drivers.i686  
mesa-libGL.i686        
ncurses-libs.i686
nss-softokn-freebl.i686
SDL.i686
tslib.i686  
zlib.i686

 

You can save the libs into Fedora-ia32.txt and execute this command as root:

 

# yum install -y $(< Fedora-ia32.txt)

 

It works fine for me and hopefully it will work for you as well. 🙂

 

 

 

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Building a Shed #4

Building a Shed #3

• Walls framed;
• Ridge installed;
• Rafters installed

 

Going to apply the plywood sheathing.

Building a Shed #2

Over the weekend, 800KG cement was poured into 8 post holes of 4 feet deep. 6 4x4x12 posts were buried.

 

Going to finish the floor this weekend.

 

Building a Shed #1

As I bought more and more tools, storage space becomes a problem in the garage. Lawn mower, spreader, water hoses and a lot of garden tools + numerous tools for cars, I decided to build a shed in the backyard.

Last year, I built a fence and this year, I’ll leverage what I have learned from that exercise to build a 8×12 shed by myself. After doing a lot of researches, I decided to use the build 9 concrete pillars into the soil to support the shed. There are many options out there and I just feel this is the most reliable and stable way for my shed.

Over the weekend, my father-in-law managed to dig 4 holes with 4-ft deep with the remaining 5 being worked on throughout this week. There are many rocks underneath and that problem great slowed down our digging effort.

With the hole going deeper and deeper, we are facing 2 major hurdles.

1. How to take out the soil?
2. How to loosen the soil?

Fortunately, we found creative ways to fix 2 major problems.

1. we use a rice scoop extended by a plastic stick to scoop out the soil;
2. we use a big rock to bang on a wooden ice chipper to scarify the soil.

With these 2 inventions, the efficiency was great improved by our 175%!!

This is what the shed is supposed to look like.

Toronto OpenSolaris User Group has been created!

Hey OpenSolaris Fans in the GTA,

 

A OSUG, Toronto OpenSolaris User Group,  has been created at http://opensolaris.org/os/project/torosug/. Join and have fun!!

Interesting use of BE on OpenSolaris

Michal Pryc from Sun posted his latest experiement in his blog article that you can actually copy a BE from another computer to your local, activate it and boot it locally. Theoretically, you don’t have to reinstall your machine at all even if your computer cannot boot at all as you can always use a Live CD to boot your machine. This is really amazing. I really love ZFS + OpenSolaris! 🙂