Rubénerd!

And now for something, completely different.

If you're seeing the above error, chances are you haven't got enough memory!

While attempting to install from CentOS-6.3-i386-minimal.iso, both VirtualBox and Parallels Desktop independently produced this error, regardless of the type of installation chosen. I suspect given this mailing list thread, this is due to a bug in the Anaconda installer not being able to use swap space.

Increasing the allocated virtual memory from 128MiB (which I'd chosen to match a VPS) to 192MiB replaced the above errors with an insufficient RAM error message, which was far more useful.

512MiB solved the problem. Boom!

I knew how this worked in FreeBSD, and fortunately it works in the Red Hat world as well. First, make a backup of your existing timezone file, the create a symbolic link to your timezone. I've seen people copying the file instead, but I feel safer linking.

# mv /etc/localtime /etc/localtime.back
# ln -s /usr/share/zoneinfo/Singapore /etc/localtime

I'm tempted to set my timezone to Reykjavík, it's HOT in Sydney today. Nagato Yuki has the right idea. A-heh-hem.

UPDATE: @dai1311 on Twitter says that this also works on Arch Linux. Incidentally, his avatar is of Yuki!

Speaking of short blog posts today, setting up a VPS this evening I noticed a CentOS favicon appearing in Nautilus on my local machine. A Fedora tip of the hat to a somewhat related distribution?

I might look into this. Icons are pretty. I like icons. Having them appear to represent an SFTP session is wild!

While Polly is understandably optimised for Ubuntu, it runs well enough on Fedora to still be my favourite multi-column Twitter client! Here's the quickest way to get it running.

Getting the source

Polly doesn't ship with an RPM, but we can install it ourselves without too much trouble. Head to their Launchpad download site and download the latest source tarball. As of writing, the latest is:

Polly-0.93.4 (pre-alpha 3.4).tar.gz

Dependencies

The tarball's README list dependencies for Ubuntu, but it didn't take long to find their Fedora equivilents.

Ubuntu	Fedora
python-gtk2	pygtk2
python-dbus	dbus-python
python-xdg	pyxdg
python-notify	notify-python
python-oauth2	python-oauth2
python-gconf	gnome-python2-gconf
python-socksipy	python-SocksiPy
python-httplib2	python-httplib2
python-pycurl	python-pycurl
python-numpy	numpy
python-keyring	python-keyring
python-gtkspell	gnome-python2-gtkspell

And here they are on a single line to make installing easier. Depending on which spin you're running, you may already have most of these.

# yum install pygtk2 dbus-python pyxdg notify-python python-oauth2 gnome-python2-gconf python-SocksiPy python-httplib2 python-pycurl numpy python-keyring gnome-python2-gtkspell

These also bring in several dependencies, including:

atlas, gnome-python2-extras, gtkspell, libgfortran, python-nose

Installing

Now it's just a matter of extracting the tarball, and running the install script.

% tar xzvf "Polly-0.93.4 (pre-alpha 3.4).tar.gz"
% cd "Polly-0.93.4 (pre-alpha 3.4)"
# ./install

Restarting gconfd-2

If Polly works now, you're done! Add your accounts, and tweet away!

Even with the latest alpha versions, Polly still refuses to load on any of my Fedora machines unless I restart gconfd-2 before I run it the first time. According to the GConf site, the safest way to do this (other than outright killing it) is:

gconftool-2 --shutdown

The friendly Polly developers I've talked to on Twitter expressed surprise that this was still needed. This leads me to believe it's a localised Fedora issue, which means when I research this further I'll be filing a support ticket with them, and not Polly. We'll see.