Owens Li'll Rant on the Web

Hello world!

Looking for Owens Personal Homepage? This is not it.. This site is for technical articles and opinion, which I keep separate from my personal stuff, and fish (I like fish).

This is a permanent Work-in-Progress:

Things are never finished here and not everything works as advertised. …you have been warned!

Fedora 16 on Acer Aspire One (A110L)

I should warn that F16 has been giving me a lot of wireless network disconnects under high network load; and also that Gnome3 is either good or bad, depending on your POV. I quite like it but think it has unaddressed weaknesses and weird UI defaults.

I think this is complete; but YMMV.

Create bootable Live CD image on a USB stick.

I’m not giving instructions for this step here; the Fedora Site does a much better job of it than I can, all the info and downloads you need are there. Use the 32 bit Live CD image. If you see the boot starts but then you just get [... read more]

Handy Trick for Fedora 16 / Gnome 3 : Disable Suspend.

This is dead simple; Gnome 3 tries to impose Suspend on users as the only true way(tm) to de-power their system; hiding PowerOff behind a modifier key. If suspend fails on your Fedora 16 Machine this is a constant source of irritation.

In short, to avoid a minor rant, suspend is quite a problem area for Linux and is broken on many common chipsets and systems. I have 2 Desktop machines and a NetBook all running Fedora 16, and suspend is broken on all of them, I suspect many others have a similar level of breakage.

Fortunately; the system policy framework on Linux is good; allowing us to simply tell [... read more]

Fedora 14 on Acer Aspire One (A110L)

Obsolete! Fedora 14 is now so old that it is no longer provided or supported by the Fedora Project:

I did not do a Fedora 15 version of this guide; but there is now a Fedora 16 A110 guide!

I have F14 working beautifully on my Acer Aspire A110L (that’s the original model with the really slow 8Gb SSD drive); the purpose of this article is to show how.

There are other guides out there, a lot of the info and inspirations for this article came from them, but all of them also suffer from being either outdated, or full of weirdness. Here is my attempt at something properly [... read more]

MySQL (with InnoDB) backup for simple servers.

Note: Since I implemented this in our environment and wrote this post there have been newer versions of the tools I use released. I plan on upgrading that system soon to the latest versions; and will then adjust this posting. But for now you will probably have to adjust the tool versions (when specified) yourself. Owen, 17/12/2010

Well; the MySQL’ers seem to be as obscure as ever; making backup really, really hard, and being careful never to really explain how to do it safely. But very keen, no doubt, to maintain their salaries and/or sell you a product to do a backup. As they say “Obscurity is Job Security”.

Took [... read more]

mypodder on 64bit linux.

NOTE: I still see a bit of traffic to this post; so I thought I should add a warning: This post is a couple of years old and I stopped using Mypodder when I left my trusty Sansa Clip on a train.. Nowadays I use the pretty good podcast client in my smartphone; so I have no idea whether this still works and no real enthusiasm to test it. So: feel free to follow this if you want but if it goes wrong then sorry.. it’s unmaintained..

Ok, so it is a 64-bit incompatibility. The eternally useful mypodder application runs well on Windows and Linux in 32bit mode, but fails [... read more]