Rubénerd!

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!

As an early Christmas present, our Optus home ADSL connection has decided to throttle us down for no good reason. After cruising at a paltry 3012kbps for a few weeks, we're now hovering between 100-320kbps. Rebooting the modem does nothing other than make us wait between 1-2 hours for it to re-establish a connection.

I looked up some old bills, and confirmed we got faster speeds from our SingTel ISDN connection in 1997, when I was 11. Hollow jokes aside, me thinks I'll be on hold with Optus for much of tomorrow to establish what's going on.

Maybe this is just a ploy to make their Optus 3G network seem better around Earlwood. Sneaky.

Running a fresh XAMPP install on Fedora 17 this morning, I kept getting this error. I even RTFM!

I can't guarantee if this will work for you, but I re-extracted the archive with the -p to preserve file permissions:

# xvpfz xampp-linux-1.8.1.tar.gz -C /opt

Now MySQL in XAMPP starts:

# /opt/lampp/lampp start
Starting XAMPP for Linux 1.8.1...
XAMPP: Starting Apache with SSL (and PHP5)...
XAMPP: Starting MySQL...
XAMPP: Starting ProFTPD...
XAMPP for Linux started.

I'm thinking I should have a separate blog for tips like this. My neglected university hosted site, perhaps?

As an aside, the XAMPP icon in this post is by anekdamian on DeviantART. Much nicer than the default icon.

XAMPP is currently only availably as 32 bit application. Please use a 32 bit compatibility library for your system.

Aaaaaaaah!

The problem

We've all seen that famously misspelled error message when attempting to install XAMPP on our 64 bit desktop Linux machines. I wonder how many people using XAMPP are still on 32 bit? I suppose enough to justify keeping it 32 bit. Speaking of which, this Kingston biscuit is falling to bits. Munch munch.

Here's the install scenario that will result in that error.

# tar xzvf xampp-linux-[version].tar.gz -O /opt
# cd /opt
# ./lampp start

Chemists have solutions

Other guides I've come across ask you to install a slew of things, and changing the launch script. For me on Fedora 17 x86_64, I was able to run it just by installing this:

# yum install glibc.i686

This also pulls in nss-softokn-freebl.i686.

Now you can run XAMPP without modification:

# tar -C /opt
 sudo ./lampp start
XAMPP: SELinux is activated. Making XAMPP fit SELinux...
Starting XAMPP for Linux 1.8.1...
XAMPP: Starting Apache with SSL (and PHP5)...
XAMPP: Starting MySQL...
XAMPP: Starting ProFTPD...
XAMPP for Linux started.

If QEMU 1.0 fails to build on Mac OS X (as I described on Sunday), you may be attempting to do it on a case-insensitive file system, like I just tried to do!

If you're installing QEMU on a case-insensitive file system, you'll need to modify the ./fpu/softfloat.h header file. Apply the patch from here, or simply open the file and add the following lines:

56 typedef uint8_t flag;
57 typedef uint8_t uint8;
58 typedef int8_t int8;
59 #ifndef _AIX
60 #if !(defined(__APPLE__) && defined(_UINT16))
61 typedef int uint16;
62 #endif
63 typedef int int16;
64 #endif

It should build without problems now, you unsigned integer you.

Given previous OS X upgrade experience, I decided to hold off from upgrading to Lion until 10.7.1 was released this time around. Alas, despite doing this there are still several issues severe enough to warrant me downgrading back to Snow Leopard until they're addressed.

But that makes no sense, you're a Mac fanboi!!1!!one!

So what are they?

1. Lion has been the first release of Mac OS X where my machine has been noticeably slower since upgrading. Applications take fewer “dock bounces” to launch, but more time. Scrolling is sluggish and key repeat rates are slower. Most maddening of all though are context menus: the current record is a whopping six seconds before they appear after a mouse click. OS/2 Warp 4.5 running on my 120MHz Toshiba Libretto displays menus faster than my Mac Pro with Lion does.

2. The Finder doesn't seem to have a memory leak, but it routinely chews up 70 to 90% of a single CPU core on idle. Killing it or force quitting drastically speeds up the machine, though only temporarily.

3. I have custom icons for my mounted volumes and drives so I can see at a glance which I'm working with. Lion's Finder sidebar replaces these with uniform drive icons in the same monochrome style as iTunes 10. From a glance, individual drives are now indistinguishable.

4. While I can appreciate Apple’s intention to make automatic backups and revision control easier for people, technically proficient users already have their own tools for this, and the lack of an option to disable this is frustrating. I suspect its responsible for some of the reduced performance and greater hard drive utilisation.

5. Related to this new feature, the removal of the one-step "Save As" and replacing it with the two-step "Duplicate" then "Save" function is one of the most maddening changes I’ve ever encountered in an OS upgrade. It was driving me so crazy, I gave up using Lion’s built in applications such as Preview and TextEdit entirely, and wrote symbolic links to redirect to other applications should I accidentally launch them!

6. After Mac OS pioneered the commercial GUI with a simple resize handle in the bottom corner of windows to change their size, Lion finally caught the all-edges-resize disease. It’s visually distracting having cursors constantly changing as I move them across the screen, and it increases the chance of changing windows by accident. To me, this was more of a feature to appease Windows-switchers than something useful, though I suppose I could get used to it. In KDE I overcame it by having all my windows full screen by default ;).

7. DigitalColor Meter.app only shows decimal RGB now, not hex. Why remove this?

Cue Arnold Schwarzenegger reference

One of the good things about Apple on the desktop is they tend to listen to our concerns. When Leopard came out, they quickly headed our cries for folder icons in our stacks, and opaque menu bars. There's nothing here that can't be fixed, provided we all keep giving them feedback. Not that it helped for some of these features given we voiced our concerns before the GM, but still...

In the meantime, it's back to Snow Leopard for me until at least the performance and reliability issues are addressed. 10.7.4 perhaps?

I've been a heavy del.icio.us user since 2004, and apparently I'm the only one who hasn't suffered problems with the latest changes since AVOS bought the service. Tech pundits are practically screaming; presumably to generate some press and links. Touché.

Thanks to Murid Rahha for the awesome del.icio.us icon. One could say it's...

UPDATE: I spoke too soon, a substantial number of my tags are gone. Touché... again.

The UTS campus network started getting patchy around lunch time, and by early evening it was slow enough to be largely useless. My poor Cisco tutor instructed us in class to use "best effort" to access our online course material ;).

As of 22:00 AEST, it seems their network problems have spilled over to their internet facing site. I hope they can get it fixed soon.

This morning Rubénerd.com blew its web hosting bandwidth limit. Frantic, I emailed Net Logistics and despite it being a Sunday morning in Sydney, within 20 minutes they allocated extra bandwidth, and upgraded me to one of their newer plans. That's customers service!

Checking through my server logs, over 32GiB of transfer was blown in five days due to one image request from apps.facebook.com. Needless to say, I'll be finally adding hotlinking protection to .htaccess.

I'll be posting details tomorrow once I’ve done more research. In the meantime, thank you to Alex Paulson and all of you on Google+ and Twitter for letting me know :).

Two machines I've installed the Xfce spin of Fedora 15 on hang after logging in with GDM after the second boot. I haven't the foggiest idea why, but creating a new account fixes it.

In a nutshell, after logging in with GDM on the second boot, the Xfce desktop loads including the panels, but then the system freezes. The cursor can still be moved, but all clicks are ignored.

On a hunch, I...

1. used the classic CTRL+ALT+F2 just before GDM starts to bypass xorg
2. logged in as root
3. created a new account separate from the one created during installation
4. rebooted and logged in with the new account in GDM

Multiple restarts later, and Xfce is working just fine.

This leads me to believe that for some reason on my hardware (a homebrew MSI system and a ThinkPad X40) the Xfce preference files are somehow corrupted when being installed. By creating a new account those files are necessarily recreated when Xfce is started from that account, and those files are free of the bugs. I have no proof of this, but its all I can think of right now.

I use FreeBSD and Arch Linux on some systems because I like building things from scratch, but for getting up and running with full drive encryption, SELinux and [generally] graphics hardware, nothing gets up and running quicker than Fedora, from my experience. Of course by seeding design decisions to someone else, it also means tracking down the reason for bugs like this is harder, though I suppose one could level the same arguments against Mac OS X or Windows even more so.