The Free Speech

Hmm… I had it all the time, but it only worked on Windows.

Its a Linksys USB54G, which does 802.11G. The only way I know of getting this working under Linux, was using ndiswrapper. Now I had it installed and configured earlier, but the load average peaked at 100%, with my laptop battery draining in no time. Now, I believe (I might be wrong) this was because of a continuous poll on the usb port to check if there were packets.

But the good news. Don’t know when this version got released, but apparently it fixes this problem.

I have been evaluating distributions over the past few days. Essentially, I have had a Debian system for quite a long time, and haven’t really played with the latest distributions for a long time now.

Last week I installed SuSE 9.2 on my laptop. I must say it wasn’t bad - not bad at all. Very professional in its looks and almost all of my hardware worked out of the box. I say almost because my Linksys USB wireless adapter didn’t get picked up. Not that I was surprised, but was just being a bit over optimistic. What struck me (in a bad way) was that SuSE, inspite of being a Novell product, doesn’t come with the Ximian (a part of Novell) Exchange Connector, nor with the RedCarpet package management tool, that can make installing it easy.

This week I installed the much talked about Ubuntu. Well, mixed reactions for this one. I must say beforehand that I am probably not among the target audience of the distribution. Its a very very desktop-oriented distro. Anyways, what I didn’t like about it, or in other words, what I didn’t know earlier, was it simply doesn’t give you a package selection choice. It is a Gnome based distro. Well, but as I said before, I am not necessarily the target audience of the distro, and secondly, the package selection of Ubuntu is quite good. What I really liked about it, was the non-availability of root account by default to the end-user. Instead, the default user, has full access via sudo, a la Mac OSX. Excellent stuff.

So am I sticking with Ubuntu? Don’t think so. As I write this, I am installing Debian again.

I often find that installing certain rpms corrupt the whole rpm database. Usually, a rpm --rebuilddb command fixes it, but sometimes, even this doesn’t work. The way to fix this is:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*
rpm -vv --rebuilddb


p. Stats on a Cobalt RAQ often stop updating. This is most likely because the Apache log files have grown too large, probably in hundreds of MBs. Under such conditions, the logs don’t rotate cleanly through cron, and obviously webalizer stops working.
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p. Lire is a wonderful log reporting tool released by LogReport. However, installing Lire may sometimes get too complicated for the novice sysadmin.

p. Here is a short tutorial I wrote that documents how to install and configure Lire.
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