smert.net

Fairly recently I have updated my laptop to the latest Fedora Core. I also have several other Linux distributions on this laptop as well. I use the Grub installer from SuSE, since the GFX menu works across all of the menus I have. After installing Fedora I didn’t do much afterwards and I pretty much have had my laptop off for over a week. Today, I felt like finishing up and reinstalling Grub from the SuSE partition. I booted into SuSE and ran grub-install which completed successfully. I rebooted to boot into Fedora but I got a “Error 2: unknown file or directory type”. I thought maybe the partition wasn’t cleanly unmounted.

Read more

Yesterday I finished up a project I was working on that I wrote in PHP. I created it on a Linux machine and I needed to test it on Windows. On the Windows system I tested it using the latest version of WAMP. I had it all setup ready to go when I got a nasty error message Fatal error: Call to undefined function money_format(). I thought it was rather strange but I figured that I didn’t have the correct PHP extension enabled. After looking for such a extension, I started to think about it more and realized that it wasn’t apart of an extension. I took a look at the manual for money_format and found that the function doesn’t exist on Windows.

Note: The function money_format() is only defined if the system has strfmon capabilities. For example, Windows does not, so money_format() is undefined in Windows.

Read more

Recently there has been a serious security vulnerability with OpenSSL/SSH keys generated on Debian based systems. Since I use Ubuntu at home I wanted to check to see if any of my keys needed to be regenerated. I wasn’t sure if they update automatically regenerated them for you or just checked the keys against the blacklist. Since there are many applications that generate keys I thought it would be best to manually verify them. For more insight into the problem I’ve quoted the Metasploit article found here.

Read more

While initially setting up a kickstart installation on CentOS I needed to add additional repositories without having to worry about them overwriting base packages. Thankfully there are two options priorities and protectbase. Since I was only adding one extra repository that would conflict with anything (rpmforge) I used protectbase. It is really easy to setup all you need to do is add protect = 1 to the yum repositories that you want to protect located in /etc/yum.repos.d. Now everything works great and I don’t have to worry about a 3rd party RPMs effecting the stability of the base OS. I always assumed the process would be the same for RHEL too but this was a bad assumption.

Read more

In my current state of addiction I’ve been rocking out with my plastic guitar with the 5 brightly colored buttons. Guitar Hero 3 has been causing me to procrastinate a lot more over the last month than usual. It wasn’t until about a week ago that I found out about Frets on Fire. It is a guitar hero like game that you play using your keyboard (created in Python). You can create your own songs to play and even import the songs from the first three Guitar Hero games. After playing it for a while I wanted to use my GH3 guitar but I wasn’t sure if I could even do that. It turns out that yes, you can use the guitar under Linux and even Windows.

Read more

Recently I’ve bought another PC which I’ve started using in place of my laptop while I am at home. I’ve decided to switch my laptop back to a machine for testing. I like trying other Linux distributions and I don’t care for testing them out using virtualization. Once I get a feel for it on a actual machine it is a lot easier to test and revert to a previous state using VMware Server or VirtualBox. Since I’m using it for testing again I decided to put several distributions back on it. At one time many months ago I had installed Windows XP (with Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit which is now called Windows SteadyState), Windows Vista, FreeBSD, CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, OpenSuSE, Slackware and Ubuntu. That didn’t last long because I was actually using that computer and I didn’t want to make major changes to it when newer versions of the distributions came out.

Read more

Yesterday I received my Everex TC2502 Green gPC. I paid a whopping $200 for the PC which included a mouse, keyboard and a small pair of speakers. Windows doesn’t come on this PC there is a fairly new Linux distribution called gOS that comes preinstalled. Sadly I missed the UPS man and I had to wait until he came back today. After it arrived I quickly opened it and started setting it up. The first thing I noticed was the fact that the PC is very light in comparison to my Sony Vaio. The next thing I noticed is that my mouse didn’t have a ball Further inspection reviled that the small plastic cover broke. Specifically the two tiny pieces that once twisted into place actually hold it together. I ended up using a few pieces of Scotch Tape to hold it together.

Read more

I can’t say how happy this makes me! You can read the actual articles from Digg, Reuters, Salt Lake Tribune, Information Week or any of the other sources from Google news. SCO didn’t acquire any ownership from the deal with Novell. SCO can’t sue IBM because they don’t have any standing. Novell on the other hand does have standing to sue IBM but Novell directed SCO to waive all rights in regard to this. Also it is important to note the following.

Read more