Category Archives: Administrative

Technical Difficulties

I got in all right last night, but my laptop’s hard drive is dying (wish I’d known that before I left–I would have brought my other one). I’m posting this from work, but won’t be able to do much of that, so posting may be light this week, until I get back to Florida Friday night.

Busy

The carpenters are here today with some final cabinet installation issues, and the pool pump died, so I’ve been pulling the old one, finding a new one, and replacing it, before the summer mustard algae in south Florida crawls over the coping, creeps into our bedroom and smothers us in our slumber.

Fedora Update Update (Part N)

For those few of you who are fascinated/horrified by my computer travails, here’s the current status.

After removing Open Office and a Fortran compiler to resolve some otherwise unresolvable (at least by me) dependency issues, I finished the upgrade from Fedora Core 3 to Core 4 via yum update (at least I think I did–how do I know?). I rebooted, and it rebooted. I haven’t attempted to reinstall Open Office yet, so I don’t know if that will work, but flush with seeming victory over the machine, I decided to push my luck and go from Core 4 to Core 5.

Continue reading Fedora Update Update (Part N)

Missing Dependencies

Latest update on the Fedora upgrade saga:

Error: missing dep: libebook.so.8 for pkg openoffice.org
Error: missing dep: libedataserver.so.3 for pkg openoffice.org
Error: missing dep: libdb_cxx-4.2.so for pkg openoffice.org-libs
Error: missing dep: /lib/security/pam_loginuid.so for pkg openssh-server
Error: missing dep: gcc for pkg gcc-g77

Why is yum telling me this? Why doesn’t it just go out get the packages and fix it?

[Update about 11:15 AM EDT]

Continue reading Missing Dependencies

Still Slogging Through Fedora Issues

OK, I’ve copied /var, but I can’t kill X so that I can unmount it–I’ve knocked off all the other processes, but gdmgreeter, etc. keep coming back like zombies.

How do I put a stake through its heart (at least long enough to umount /var), without a reboot at a lower sysinit level (because I’m still afraid to reboot given the partial update of yum)?

Fedora Partition Overcapacity Update

OK, per the suggestion in comments here, I decided to see just what it was that was filling up the /var partition. Here it is:

##########################################

[root@linux-station ~]# du -s /var/*
12 /var/account
773872 /var/cache
16 /var/crash
28 /var/db
16 /var/empty
60 /var/gdm
56716 /var/lib
8 /var/local
128 /var/lock
86208 /var/log
448 /var/lost+found
4 /var/mail
232 /var/named
8 /var/nis
8 /var/opt
8 /var/preserve
340 /var/run
72480 /var/spool
8 /var/tmp
8 /var/tux
13936 /var/www
24 /var/yp

#################################

I can live without the contents of cache, right?

Well, maybe not:

[root@linux-station ~]# du -s /var/cache/*
80 /var/cache/alchemist
472 /var/cache/gstreamer-0.8
1344 /var/cache/man
8 /var/cache/mod_proxy
8 /var/cache/mod_ssl
384 /var/cache/samba
771568 /var/cache/yum

#######################################

Note that it’s all cache/yum. Does that mean that if I blow it away, my ongoing yum upgrade gets clobbered? Getting rid of logs will help a little, but I suspect that the yum cache will quickly fill up the available space if I give it any. What now?