Linux Neophyte

Well, they’ve finally done it! Fedora fixed the kernel problem that was simply driving me mad. Back in November, I posted about Fedora Core 6 – SATA & CIFS Problems which led to painfully slow boot times on my office OptiPlex system.

If you’re suffering from this garbage at startup:

ata1: port is slow to respond, please be patient
ata1: port failed to respond (30 secs)
ata1: SRST failed (status 0xFF)
ata1: SRST failed (err_mask=0x100)
ata1: softreset failed, retrying in 5 secs

Then all you need to do is perform a standard update (su -c 'yum update') and restart the machine. The 2.6.19-1.2895.fc6 kernel will fix it.

Now that the issue is resolved, Fedora doesn’t feel broken to me anymore. JOY!

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, FC6, Fedora, Hardware, RPM

The first non-beta version of Flash 9 for Linux is out, you can download the installer from Adobe’s site. I downloaded the tar.gz installer and had no problem whatsoever installing it. The instructions are on the download page, and all you’ll need to know before hand is where your browsers are installed to. To find out, you can use the package management tools included in your distro.

Fedora:

rpm -ql firefox

This query will give you a lot of information (you might want to pipe it to less). What you want to zero in on is the directory that is referenced most, on my system it’s /usr/lib/firefox-1.5.0.9/. You’ll notice a lot of references to /usr/share/ and can pretty much ignore them. That directory holds icons, .desktop files and other shared objects.

I did the same for SeaMonkey (rpm -ql seamonkey), the install location for the current version of the monkey is /usr/lib/seamonkey-1.0.7/.

Ubuntu:

dpkg -L firefox

That’s another command that will hand you TONS of information. Again, I only care about the installation directory, I know from using Ubuntu that the standard application install location is /usr/lib/[installdir]. So to clean up the output, I used grep to filter out the data I don’t need (you could do the same on the Fedora example above).

dpkg -L firefox |grep /usr/lib

That gave me something that looked like:

/usr/lib
/usr/lib/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox/firefox
/usr/lib/firefox/libgfxpsshar.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgkgfx.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgtkembedmoz.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libgtkxtbin.so
/usr/lib/firefox/libjsj.so
[snip]

From that I can see that Ubuntu installs Firefox to /usr/lib/firefox.

I also use SeaMonkey on Ubuntu, but I had to manually install it. For that reason, dpkg has no clue as to where the software is. I chose to install it to /usr/local/seamonkey, which is the location that the SeaMonkey installer suggests. I just keep that in the back of my mind or I could enter a locate seamonkey. That will return a lot of hits as well and will look something like:

/usr/bin/seamonkey
/usr/local/seamonkey
/usr/local/seamonkey/install.log
/usr/local/seamonkey/registry
/usr/local/seamonkey/libplds4.so
/usr/local/seamonkey/libxpcom.so
/usr/local/seamonkey/libmozz.so
[snip]

Now that I know where my browsers are installed to, I can run the Flash installer and give it the correct path to each browser when asked.

written by M@ \\ tags: Apps, CLI, Console, DPKG, Fedora, Firefox, Flash, Mozilla, RPM, Ubuntu