עברית בפדורה 11

כאשר שוחררה פדורה 11, כל מי שניגש לדף הראשי בעברית היה משוכנע ששוב דחו את מועד השחרור.

זוהי כמובן אשמתו של עבדכם הנאמן שמצא זמן לעדכן את התרגום רק עתה.

ובאותו נושא, חנוכת הגרסה החדשה של מערכת התרגום היא הזדמנות מצויינת להזכיר שיש עוד עבודה ומתנדבים אף פעם לא מיותרים. כמה הערות:

• אם אתם עסוקים בתרגום של פרוייקטים במעלה הזרם, התעלמו מבקשתי. תמשיכו לעזור לתומר במוזילה, לדיאגו ב-KDE לאנשי אופן-ולכל שאר האנשים הטובים שבזכותם נמנעת עבודה כפולה ומיותרת בכל ההפצות.
• עדיין אינכם מתרגמים? נו למה אתם מחכים? גם מעט תרגום סולל את הדרך להרבה אנשים, אז קדימה לעבודה.
  
• אם אתם משתתפים בפרוייקט תוכנה חופשית, אולי תרצו לחבר אותו למערכת Transifex של פדורה. כל התרגומים של המערכת יוכנסו ישירות למערכת ניהול הגרסאות בה אתם משתמשים (git, svn, mercurial, וכו'). העקרון המנחה בפדורה הוא לא ליצור פיצול מהפרוייקט במעלה הזרם אלא להזין אותו ישירות -- זה נכון גם לקוד וגם לתרגומים.

אז באיזה מרכיב אתם מתחילים?

Me too

OK, I surrendered...
Fedora Elections

Hardware woes, a day in a life

An advanture in (literally) many pieces...

• It starts with power-on problems:

• This morning, my main computer went bust. It hanged, and after trying to reboot it, simply refused to turn-on.
• Taking the power-cord off, wait a minute for it to cool, nothing (not even the fans).
• OK, it's a power-supply -- that's simple, I had a spare one.
• Few minutes later (open the case, find the spare): Hmmm... the old spare has only a big flat motherboard connector. The installed one had also another small rectangular one. So the spare is older than I need...
• No problem, a quick drive to a local store (and buy food for the cat on the way), leave 130 NIS (~37$) at the store and got even nicer PS (with big down facing fan).
  

• The power-supply is fixed:
• Connected it to the MB, tested power-button, fans are moving, good, problem solved.
  
• Yeh, sure... the PS is good, but the motherboard looks dead -- no beep, no signal to monitor.
• Disconnected all disks, removed an unnecessary card, repeat -- the same.
• So it looks like the MoBo is a goner as well.

• Let's get a new MoBo:
• Went to an even more local store (identity hidden to protect the guilty).
• Asked for a replacement (for Pentium 4, 3Ghz), turns out it would cost 400 NIS (more than a 115$).
• Maybe it's better to simply buy a new MoBo+CPU+Ram and have an upgrade? I've always wanted an Intel Core 2 Duo (yes, kvm here we come ;-)
  
• The seller shows me several options. I insist on an Intel chipset (free drivers) and he tries to sell me an Intel board, with Intel graphics chipset (yay) but some obscure Realtek Gigabit adapter. That's not what I want. He tries to convince me that "everybody" use Realtek network chips and that it's my only way (I don't really like that).
• He got busy with more important customers and I quickly went to the first store. Back to original plan (A replacement MoBo).
• They only had a single model of those 478 socket type boards. Some noname with a SiS chipset (Oouuch) for ~300 NIS. Problem: this board has no Sata. No-Problem: they have a 45 NIS Sata/Pata adapter. The seller reminded me about the thermal paste for the CPU (an extra 10 NIS) -- all totalling 364 NIS (~100 $) including VAT (some 25% less than the first guy wanted for a similar Mobo).
• Back to home, reconnect quickly. I don't have an extra connector for some old PATA drivers I had (Sata convertor occupies its location). Nevermind, they are old backups. I'll look at this later.
  
• Test. Good. Now we are stuck in GRUB!
  
• Groovy adventures:
• You see, due to the Sata/Pata flip-flop, drives changed positions and that killed grub.
  
• That's should be one rescue CD away...
• Boot old Knoppix (3.8.2) twice, no way, bad media.
• In my CD pack I also had an old RIP, booted, it has "Boot to GRUB in it's menu" Yeh.
• Doesn't work. Tested other menu item. Looks like bad media. Again? No it cannot be the drive. It must be old media.
• Next is Fedora-8-KDE-Live. This boots OK.
  
• As expected grub-install doesn't like to be run from the wrong root directory. A little more work:

  vgscan; vgchange -a y VolGroup00; mount /dev/Volgroup/fc8_slash /mnt/root

• Now chroot into /mnt/root, grub-install still doesn't like me. Nevermind -- run grub and from the prompt use setup.
• Took me few tests to get this right (set the "root" directive, before "setup") but finally it's done without errors.
• Boot to the new system
• And you thought it would be that easy...
• Grub boots the kernel... "No Volume groups found"....."panic"
• OK, so maybe putting '/' in a VG wasn't the smartest idea, but what's the problem?
• Could it be that my games with grub somehow thrashed the VG partition? cannot be.
• Boot in a hurry back to Fedora-Live, vgdisplay shows everything is OK (Pheeeuuuu). Maybe the stupid machine remember this VG was somewhere else? Check with vgdisplay -- no, everything looks fine with the new location.
• OK, another test -- vgexport and vgimport again -- that should erase all previous memories of old location. Boot again... Same problem. Few more flip-flops like that and than it hits me -- it must be the stupid initrd.
• Yes, the error message wasn't during the kernel boot but shortly afterwards when Fedora runs "nash".
• Boot again to Fedora-Live, chroot again, mkinitrd, boot again...
• Now the stupid beast tries to mount /dev/root without any reference to VG's and panics right away. That's an improvement (I've saved the old initrd) since it proves this is where the problem is located.
• Boot again to Fedora-Live, now configure networking and STFW a bit for more details. Looks like I'm OK, but some options should be passed to do it right.
• I decide to go the easy way: chroot to the OS and rpmquery --scripts kernel to see how the post install script runs mkinitrd. Well, they do it via new-kernel-pkg.
• Now that's nice:

  new-kernel-pkg --mkinitrd --depmod --update 2.6.24.3-34.fc8

• Boot to an almost working OS.
• Final tidbits:
• Network won't come up because /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 bind the interface to the HWADDR -- fix it (and I maintain also /etc/ethers, so fix it as well).
• Update time on the MoBo -- I did during one of the boots to Fedora-Live: system-config-date, select the timezone, exit and then

  ntpdate 0.fedora.pool.ntp.org; hwclock -u -w

• No swap. The swap used to be on one of the old PATA devices I had. The main VG is full, but its physical disk is not, so: fdisk, create new partition, another VG (bad for performance, but who cares now...), a new LV in this VG, mkswap, update /etc/fstab and we are done.
• Audio: system-config-soundcard does not know to unload the previous intel drivers (who loaded them anyway? maybe /etc/modprobe.conf, but they are not there anymore). An easy one -- fuser /dev/snd/*, kill them all (pulseaudio, arts, amarok, kmix), rmmod recursively like an idiot (rmmod/modprobe could have a usefull recursive option...). Rerun system-config-soundcard. No sound. Easy. Speaker cable was out. Still no sound. Easy. Mixers were at zero volume. Now everything is good.

• Final thoughts:
• Damage:
• Hardware costs: ~500-550 NIS
• Lost work day
• Frustration, frustration, frustration...
• Root partition in a VG comes with some complexities (and some conveniences as well).
  
• Boot from arbitrary disks is hindered by:
• Grub
• Initrd

That's all folks, it's been a long day.

OLPC

I got late to the lecure at the Haifa Linux Club. However, it was worth the effort.
Zvi Devir gave an excelent talk about the project and the highlight was
that the talk was given on a real OLPC machine (through a VNC to another laptop
connected to an overhead projector).

After the talk we had a few minutes to play with the beast (well, as very small beast ;-)
and take some photos.

It was quite impressive. Excelent screen resolution (better than Zvi's own laptop),
A very nice builtin camera (the blur in photo is due to my out-of-focus shot).
There was a really nice music "activity" called Tamtam and the small speakers were audible.

Yes, I want to be a kid again...