darkness

I’m running out of titles for my entries. I’m also spending a lot of time getting my FC4 box where I want it to be.

I turned off “Use mmap” in the ALSA output plug-in for BMP and it no longer randomly stops playing until I pause/unpause. I think I am getting little hiccups, but I can’t say for sure whether that’s some resource issue on my PC or an actual software problem. It’s all kind of academic, though, because once I packaged bmp-docklet and found that it crashed as soon as I tried to hide BMP, I kicked BMP to the curb and installed the Dag FC3 RPMs for xmms-mp3 and xmms-status-plugin, along with XMMS from Extras. Notification area is a bit uglier now, and I can definitely now tell that XMMS doesn’t use GTK2, but at least I can play a fucking MP3.

dmesg shows some messages from agpgart saying my card is in “0x” mode. (As opposed to 1x or 2x.) I wonder what significance I should attach to that. I’ll cross that road when I start playing games on this box.

Firefox crashed a couple more times. Maybe you could say “it’s the Tab Mix extension,” but should an extension be able to crash Firefox? I guess I need to slap gdb on it.

The previously mentioned Beep Media Player is now randomly stopping during playback. Hitting play makes it go on (the display shows that it’s playing already, though… even though there’s no sound coming out) or a pause/play combo. It seems to happen whenever I do things in… Firefox. Which, to my knowledge, makes no sounds. I think I’m using a bmp-mp3 package from FreshRPMS but it might be Dag. Maybe I just need to go back to XMMS. Progress? What’s that, now?

fam-devel has been replaced by gamin-devel. I found this out when going to build maildrop. yum list fam-devel doesn’t list gamin-devel, but yum install fam-devel installs gamin-devel. Maybe this is a reason to “don’t list, just try installing.”

Fedora Extras has Pyzor and (I think; looking for the incantation to test SpamAssassin) Razor. No DCC. I am unconcerned. (Oh, http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/TestingInstallation is your friend. spamassassin -D < /usr/share/doc/spamassassin-*/sample-spam.txt and read the (ahem) spam from that.)

I think I just horked my system pretty hard by holding down the print screen key, which is bound to GNOME’s “take screenshot” action. I can’t get my panel menu to come up. Metacity doesn’t look like it’s handing out focus to anyone. I had to close about 10 gnome-screenshots. Oh, hold on, it’s more fun than that: no keys seem to really be working. SSH in, chvt 1, and keyboard works fine, so it’s X. killall metacity brought me back to life. Maybe the GNOME keyboard shortcuts dialog somehow got stuck in “grab” mode or something. For fun I set the scroll lock key to Metacity “move window.”

The clamav-server package really just installs the skeleton you need to make your own ClamAV service. The RPM says you should have a separate ClamAV service (read: init script, config, user, clamd process) for each service that needs ClamAV. I find this kind of needlessly complex. I just like having clamd running so every e-mail I get doesn’t have to spawn a whole new ClamAV process. Maybe I misunderstand how things work, or overestimate the pain I will feel from loading ClamAV again and again. On the off chance I haven’t committed either of these mistakes, though, why not ship a clamav-default-server package or something, that has a simple configuration for use on workstations where people don’t need this complexity? I’ll assume there’s something I don’t know/don’t understand going on here. freshclam is also bitching about a missing /etc/clamd.conf that I don’t know anything about.

Thank god GNOME took out the easily-found “new mail” applet. I think it was deprecated in favor of Evolution, which of course you’re using instead of mutt, right? Right. But in case you’re a filthy mutt-using communist, there is apparently mailnotify. “Where’s the package?” you say, noting that there’s no mailnotify package in Extras, et al. Turns out they cunningly named the package mail-notification! yum search mailnotify picked it up in the URL. This is all starting to feel kind of absurd. What was wrong with mailnotify as a package name, to conform with the upstream name? At least the included README.FEDORA file notes that I have to restart my session (which I interpret as “logout and back in”) before I can actually use mail-notification. Also, you don’t add it like a normal panel app; instead, menu->Internet->Mail Notification, and tell it to start at gnome login. My notification area has a bit of a gap on it that I can’t get rid of.

Oh. No. That’s the mail notification applet. I have new mail. The notification area icon has shrunk to some odd column a couple pixels wide. Excellent. Restart it, and it seems to be working fine now. I expect it will break at next login, in the same manner.

When using mv to move my old SSH host keys back to /etc/ssh I got errors to the tune of warning: security context not preserved. I was moving off of NFS, so I suppose the files’ security contexts weren’t saved in the move to/from NFS. After I moved them over, fixfiles check /etc/ssh reported problems (that is, it had output). So I did fixfiles restore /etc/ssh and all was well again (fixfiles check /etc/ssh now had no output).

The high point of my Fedora experience always seems to be yum. It Just Works, and I’ll say these days it’s working faster than in, say, FC2 (what I’m upgrading from). I could swear it installs RPMs faster than rpm -Uvh somehow.