Older blog entries for Alphax (starting at number 7)

28 Oct 2006 (updated 30 Oct 2006 at 10:07 UTC) »
Installing SUSE 10.1 - or not
Having failed to complete installation for the third, fourth, fifth (honestly, I've lost count) time, I snapped and went into #suse on Freenode. The SNR is #suse is reasonably tolerable - not as good as #freenode-social, not as bad as #ubuntu - so I went off to play games for a while with the thought of reading the scrollback to see if anything interesting had happened.

So about an hour later, I read through everything that's been happening, and I see all this stuff about using smart instead of YaST and comments that "package management is horribly broken". And then I see that the in-channel bot's advice on 10.1 is the following:

For information regarding the issues most users experience with SuSE 10.1 and how you can fix them, Please read the conversation posted here: http://spinink.net/conversation-with-new-suse-user/

The summary is quite bleak:

Novell has done what may be irreparable damage to SuSE Linux by releasing 10.1 WAY before it was ready for public consumption. I understand the need to get 10.1 out so that they could work out issues with the new package management libraries before the release of SLED 10, but this does not excuse their actions. Novell was extremely slow to respond to these issues after the 10.1 release. In fact, I would argue that they were completely ignoring the giant pink elephant in the room. The motto for 10.1 should be 'Novell SuSE Linux 10.1, We Bring You In With XGL and Send You Packing with Our Package Management.'
In their defence, SUSE people like Marcus have replied to the effect of "well, we either release it with bugs, or don't release it at all". OK, I've studied project management. I understand where he's coming from. The problem is fixable, and openSUSE 10.2 will come out in December. Still sucks though...

Anyway, I think I might have solved the installation problem: not enough RAM. The install should work if I enable /swap during installation; if it doesn't, I'll install Kubuntu...

(Thanks to aka_druid and sPiN for identifying that and suggesting the fix, and thanks to sPiN for the article; now all I need to do is file the relevant bug against YaST to "enable swap during install if present" bang my head against a brick wall...)

Edit: Turns out swap was enabled. Maybe I just need more of it. Oh well, I'll get myself a Kubunutu ISO...

26 Oct 2006 (updated 26 Oct 2006 at 14:13 UTC) »

How to find a spammer

  1. Go to the user list, http://www.advogato.org/person/index.html?start= (past about 2800 should get you to uncertified people).
  2. Open every account page.
  3. Check for spam URLs and spammer certifications. Tag those you find.
  4. Go back to step 1 and hit "next page"; continue from step 2.

Spammers found so far: Waylon, vikrantambadey, s14joe16.

Update: Wow, that was fast. I'll throw in a few more: nbzhonglin, wanglf83, technoinfosys, s0651, lisssangel, ... I'm tired!

21 Oct 2006 (updated 26 Oct 2006 at 02:51 UTC) »

Advogato stripping URLs from my notes?

Well, that's odd. On my account page, the URLs in my "notes" section appear to have been stripped. They're still in the database, but they're not being rendered. Is it because I'm not certified, or what?

Edit: I'm now certified and links are working again. Hooray on both counts.

Wikimedia news

Wikibooks, Wiktionary and Wikiversity are all getting new logos; Wikiversity is a (relatively) new project which originated on Wikibooks and currently has a stylised mortarboard as its logo. You can read more at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Logo.

Meanwhile, I've been given another 3 jobs in various places: CheckUser on Wikimedia commons, CheckUser list admin, and English Wikipedia list admin. And I'm now a chanop on so many Wikimedia IRC channels that I can't remember them all. "The reward for a job well done is another three jobs" -- David Gerard.

Updating SUSE not recommended?

According to http://en.opensuse.org/Updating_SUSE_Linux, "Updating from one version to another is unsupported and may result in system inconsistencies. Performing distribution upgrades in the running system increases the risk of causing damage."

Does that mean that upgrading from 10.0 to 10.1 (a few packages at a time over dialup using YOU) is going to break my system?

Will I be able to resolve all of the dependency conflicts that YAST says will occur every time I think about updating a core package?

I just did some "translation" work over at lanchpad.net; translating English into Australian English. It would be nice if there was an option to copy the translations verbatim from another language...

In other news, I've decided that I'm not going to try to update to SUSE 10.1 until after exams, which is probably a good idea; finding the NVidia drivers and instructions on what to do with them was hard enough.

Well, Wikisource got a new logo; a stylized version of the old one. You can take a look at it here.

In other news, the SVN trunk of GPG now includes support for DSA2 keys. The good news: DSA is no longer limited to using SHA-1 or RIPEMD-160. The bad news: a DSA2 key still doesn't have a hash function firewall, and can only use a hash of length greater or equal to what it's designed for.

In other other news, I have exams. Damn.

The English Wikipedia hit 1,000,000 articles the other day. Hooray.

On a side note, I hit 1,000 article edits today. Also hooray.

26 Jan 2006 (updated 6 Feb 2006 at 13:37 UTC) »
New Wikisource logo

A new logo for Wikisource, a sister project of Wikipedia, is being decided. If you feel like designing one, go for it!

Edit: Updated page is here.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!