Patrick’s Blog(2)

Eons ago when I started to explore Linux and F/OSS as an enthousiastic newbie, I made the mistake, twice, of accidentally typing in:

[root@server ~]# rm -rf /

While what I actually wanted to do was:

[root@server ~]# rm -rf ./

The consequences of such a mistake are severe since you literally deleted the entire filesystem. To prevent this from happening there is a neat little trick:

[root@server ~]# touch — /-i

When you (accidentally) try to delete the root filesystem / you will be asked by the rm command to confirm your action. This way there is a safety that prevents you from deleting the root filesystem without any questions asked.

Thought I chip in too and let World+Dog know that Fedora Core 6 Test 1 has been released. The timing of the FC6 release could not be better. Or worse depending who you ask. The continuing delay of Vista and Office will create more space for Open Source software in general and the upcoming Fedora Core 6 release in particular. Throw in the humongous hardware requirements of Vista and… Well, let’s just say that it’s unlikely that business will shell out the big bucks on expensive new hardware just so they can run Microsoft’s latest and unproven concoction. It will be more likely that businesses will either stick with XP (according to Gartner) or migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation, Fedora Core 6 or one of the SUSE products etc. Whatever happens, the dynamics in the market will be fun to watch and perhaps we will even get a glimpse of competition in the desktop market. Wouldn’t that be nice for a change? I for one look forward to the new FC6 release. FC5 was a great step forward and the Fedora Core team has done an excellent job. Currently I don’t have any hardware available to try out Test 1. But as with previous releases like FC3, FC4 and FC5 I’ll probably do a fresh install of Fedora Core 6 Test 2 on my laptop and enjoy the ride till FC6 is released. Given the fabulous release that FC5 is today, how bad can a test cycle of FC6 be?

My laptop has 64 bit hardware and runs Fedora Core 5 (64 bit obviously). By itself this is not earth shattering news. That is, until I wanted to insert one of the contacts from my Evolution address book in an OpenOffice.org writer document. Something like a mail merge. This used to work fine on my FC4 box but not on my laptop. It took browsing through about 200 pages of output from stracing oobase to figure out that OpenOffice.org Base (the database component) could not find the proper libebook libraries. And why was that 64 bit part important? Well, because OpenOffice.org Base could not find the proper libebook libraries in /usr/lib/. Admittedly, it’s easy to forget that not all applications on FC5 are 64 bit. Fortunately, a quick install of the 32 bit libebook libraries solved the issue:

$ sudo yum install evolution-data-server.i386

$ sudo yum install evolution-data-server-devel.i386

Checking my blog tonight I noticed two things. One, it was in a desperate need of an upgrade. And two, those idiot spammers had found one posting that had comments turned on and spammed it straight into oblivion. Thanks to “Mass Edit” in WordPress they went straight to /dev/null. Anyway, the reason I checked my blog was that I had stumbled on a new blog client called Drivel. Definitely worth a try. Have a look for yourself here: http://www.dropline.net/drivel/. If this little posting actually makes it to the blog I may very well keep it up more frequently :-) Update: posting this message with Drivel worked very well. Guess I’ll keep them coming now.