rm-rf.ca

I've had this nagging desire for how I *want* cloud computing to manifest in my day to day life. I currently spend my workday on a desktop computer with a pile of storage, and then make use of an Android tablet for couch surfing and an Android phone when out of the house. I rent a small virtual private server for my web hosting needs, and make use of Amazon S3 for encrypted backups of about 10 gigs of my most critical personal data.

I've just submitted Fedora updates for a new tito release 0.4.0, packages are also available for EL6, F15, and F16 in the devel repo. (tito is a build tool for RPM based projects using git, more information available here)

0.4.0 contains some significant changes and new functionality that could use some explanation.

Mock Builds

Firstly tito can now use Fedora's mock tool to build packages locally for other OS/versions/architectures, theoretically anything mock can handle on your system. This is contrary to the normal behaviour of "tito build" where we just want to quickly spin up an RPM for the system in question, thus it doesn't really make sense to configure as the default builder for your project.

Just bundled up a long overdue release of Tito. (a build tool for RPM based projects using git.)

Changes include:

• Initial support for submitting builds through Fedora Git to all configured branches.
• Added support for bugzilla ID extraction from commit messages when generating a build system commit message.
• Added --dry-run option for building releases.
• Optional emails in changelog.
• Prompt to optionally modify CVS/git build system commit messages.
• Added --list-tags option to build command.
• Improved error reporting when spec file has errors.
• Added manpages for both CLI and config file. (except on EL5)
• Fixed several missing dependencies.
• Many other bugfixes.

Tito is a build tool for rpm based projects using git to help with tagging releases, building sources and rpms reliably, deploying test code as rpms, patching and building a downstream git project against some upstream, and building releases via Fedora CVS and Koji. For more information please see the main project page.

Changes in 0.2.0:

• Added tito tag --undo.
• Build test rpms with shorter filenames that can be easily upgraded.
• Added option to auto-install rpms after build.
• Added option to pass custom options to rpmbuild.
• Added tito-dev script to run directly from source.
• Better output after tagging.
• Display rpms built on successful completion.
• Bump versions in setup.py during tagging if possible.
• Added lib_dir setting for custom taggers/builders.
• Allow restricting build to a minimum version of tito.

Just a quick note on installing Fedora 12 on the wife's new Inspiron 15. She's been a Ubuntu user on her previous laptop for a year or so now as suspend/wireless problems just continually popped up after Fedora updates or upgrades, but with new hardware I figured it was time for another go.

Once installed it was awesome, full resolution (Intel graphics), working sound, working wireless (I sprung for the upgrade to Intel wireless which IMO pays off for anyone planning to run Linux), working webcam, and most impressive of all beautifully working suspend, all without doing anything. Really working nicely for her.

Perhaps for the first time ever, I've managed to upgrade Fedora with preupgrade. This was relatively without incident, just one irritating bug with /boot running out of disk space as preupgrade tries to store the 120M install image here on a partition that by default, is only 200M. Relatively painless workaround documented here. Preupgrade itself was quite neat in that the upgrade appears to be completely automated, aside from selecting the grub boot entry and confirming network details as part of the above workaround, I think the whole thing would have run to completion and rebooted without me being there at all. (which is nice as the machine is in my basement)

Upon reboot Eclipse would crash with a permission denied error, appears the upgrade re-enabled selinux. Fixable with "setsebool -P allow_execstack 1", and I'm going to try to keep selinux enabled this time for as long as possible.

Running basically the same thing since this weekend and loving it, it's also been pretty rock solid. In my opinion (DISCLAIMER: don't listen to me) the preview release is a great time to upgrade if you're anxious and a little bit savy. Release notes here, and you can get it here.

I couldn't stick with this setup for long but I had to take a photo before I scaled it back. The third display on the right was kinda hard on the neck, and two systems plus three LCDs generates a whole lot of heat in a very small office and summer is nearly here. (we hit 29 C here which is a good two if not three months ahead of schedule for Nova Scotia) I've now scaled back to just the two displays on the left hooked up to my desktop in a dual head configuration, and moved the workstation visible down to the basement.

While my initial attempt to get rolling with the Fedora 11 Beta was pretty rocky, one of the bugzilla's regarding Anaconda's inability to recognize my existing install for an upgrade got duped on another bug about an intermittent udev timeout. Indeed if at first Anaconda didn't realize it could upgrade my system, rebooting off the ISO corrected the problem, might take a few tries if you experience something similar.

New video card arrived today, an ATI Radeon HD 3650 with two DVI ports, but it's been quite a bit of trouble getting a fluid dual monitor setup working. I think most of the issues are related to my use of two different monitors, one a standard LCD capable of 1600x1200 and the other a widescreen LCD capable of 1680x1050.

Out of the box I think mirroring worked at a common resolution as is expected, but gnome-display-properties wouldn't do much for me without an xorg.conf in place so I had to generate one and then hack it up a bit. At some point this afternoon I had both displays in their native resolution, though on the "shorter" of the two the mouse would technically go off screen above or below (depending on how I had them arranged in gnome-display-properties), although the gnome panels displayed in the correct location. (which wasn't bad)