Monthly Archives: December 2007

Fedora 8

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During this vacation, I upgraded to Fedora 8. Here are some gotchas and caveats I encountered:

  • Make sure you check the install image checksum. If first downloaded the installation DVD using BitTorrent. It took over a day and the file wound up corrupt. I had to download the image directly, which took only a couple of hours and worked fine. I’ve only tried to use BitTorrent for these Fedora updates, so I’m not sure whether it is inherently slow or I have it badly misconfigured; I do know it’s supposed to checksum the files to prevent corruption.

  • The Anaconda installer would not run off the DVD on the laptop. I read that the fix is to append the following to the kernel boot line:

    floppy.allowed_drive_mask=0 clocksource=acpi_pm

  • When attempting to initiate the install on my desktop (which I tackled before the laptop, so as to have one computer operational during the process), which has migrated over the years from customized RedHat through various incarnations of Fedora, I got an error saying that filesystems “should be specified by label, not by device name”. The fix is to rename, in fstab, /dev/hd... to /dev/sd...

  • When Anaconda was trying to resolve package dependencies, it would hang at 26%. Switching to tty3, I saw the message “No package matched to remove”. It turns out this is a bug in yum. The fix is to append the following to the kernel boot line:

    updates=http://katzj.fedorapeople.org/updates-f8-yumloop.img

  • I installed the Suspend2 (now TuxOnIce) kernel. I could not get it from mhensler’s repository, so I installed it from the livna repository instead. Hibernation works fine, but suspend-to-RAM is no longer working (I can’t resume, and often it seems as though the kernel is fine but the display does not turn on on resume). I am playing around with the sleep quirks to see wheter there’s some incantation that will resolve the problem, but no luck thus far. It’s a shame, too; it’s really useful to suspend at the touch of a button as I could with F7.

  • The official recommendation from Fedora is not to install the proprietary nVidia video driver, as it does not play well with the rest of the system in case you need to uninstall it later. Packaged drivers are available from livna, but they are compiled against the vanilla kernel and not the TuxOnIce kernel. I tried briefly to compile the proprietary nVidia driver against the TuxOnIce kernel, but the installer had problems finding the kernel sources. I suspect this is a book-keeping problem in yum or the repos (since the sources and headers are marked as installed), but I haven’t tracked this down yet.

  • At the application level, as always, I refer as needed to mjmwired for the installation of useful packages.

While the suspend-to-RAM issue is big demerit, the rest of the distribution is looking pretty good in use. I got updates of packages I use all the time, and a few things are more polished (such as the mail notification on the panel and the new gdm greeter).

A very goy Christmas

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Holiday at home

This year, I “celebrated” Christmas for the first time. No, none of the baby Jesus stuff; just a lot of good cheer and a little of the crass materialism.

Knox and I put up a Christmas tree. More of a shrub, really, since we wanted a live tree that we could plant in our garden afterwards. When we went to the store to get lights and ornaments, I felt so, so,… goy. It was alien to me, participating in customs of which I’d only been an observer.

The presents we got, we put under the tree. The lit menorah and the model train set rounded out the Noël tableau. The anticipation built with a handful of holiday parties, dinners with friends, and gift-giving of our own—and of course, the obligatory yuletide soundtrack.

Christmas Day arrived and we rushed downstairs, giddy like children in our bathrobes and hot chocolate. The presents were a delight! We called our family and then partook in that most central ritual of Christmas, dim-sum.

And then it snowed!

Gay Genetics

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You can look up studies on the genetics of homosexuality using the OMIM website. What jumps out of this collection of studies is that, for males, the genetic link appears to come through the mother (X chromosome) and that boys with older siblings are more likely to be gay. Interesting.

I learned about this through the NY Times Tierney lab. As seems to be the case every time I bother to look (is it sampling bias?), reader comments on newspaper blogs degenerate into the tangential, irrelevant, and specious. Sigh.