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by Weiqi Gao.
Original Post: Printers That Just Worked, And Other Stories
Feed Title: Weiqi Gao's Weblog
Feed URL: http://www.weiqigao.com/blog/rss.xml
Feed Description: Sharing My Experience...
Last week was computer music chair week. I installed Fedora Core 4 on gao-2006, moved all my stuff from gao-2004 to gao-2006, installed Windows 2000 Pro in gao-2004 and moved all of my daughter's stuff from hal-2001 to gao-2004.
I already told you about my one day encounter with Ubuntu 5.10. I switched back to my old friend Fedora Core 4 after that. I finally turned gao-2004 over to my daughter yesterday evening.
Here's a few stories that I want to tell.
No printer configuration needed for FC4
Usually one would expect that some network printer configuration is needed after installing a new OS. Not for Fedora Core 4. It recognized the two printers I have on the home network and configured them appropriately. Immediately after the OS install, I can just open up Firefox and print to both the HP LaserJet 1100 on an Fedora Core 3 box and the HP Photosmart 7350 on the Mac mini.
Moving a Subversion repository
I hosted my Subversion repository on gao-2004, and needed to move it to gao-2006. With the default backend storage system change (from Berkeley db based to file system based) for Subversion that happen between FC3 and FC4, I expected that I need to at least read a lot of documentation and perform a fair amount of experimentation.
It turn out that that is not the case, for two reasons. One, the backend storage system is an implementation detail of Subversion and is mostly hidden behind the Subversion user interface. The detail leaked through only in terms file permission problems. BTW, Pragmatic Version Control Using Subversion helped a lot in the process, even though one of its recipes no longer applies in the fsfs world.
The Pragmatic Subversion book contains a recipe that contains some "group sticky bit" trickery (p.151) that is no longer needed because svnadmin create already does it for you.
Here weiqi is the user who will access the repo through the svn+ssh protocol, and svn is a group that contains all Subversion users.
Moving a WordPress weblog
I haven't done too much with the WordPress blog I created 122 days ago. But instead of throwing it away, I thought it a good opportunity to test how easy it is to move the blog over.
It indeed it easy. All I have to do is to move the MySQL database and the /var/www/html/wordpress directory from one computer to another:
[root@gao-2004] # mysqladmin -p --add-drop-tables wordpress > /mnt1/wordpress.mysqldump
[root@gao-2004] # cd /var/www/html
[root@gao-2004] # tar cf /mnt1/wordpress-files.tar wordpress
[root@gao-2006] # mysqladmin -p create wordpress
[root@gao-2006] # mysql -p wordpress < /mnt1/wordpress.mysqldump
[root@gao-2006] # mysql -p
Enter password:
[...]
> grant usage on *.* to weiqi identified by password
> grant delete, select, insert, update on wordpress.* to weiqi
[root@gao-2006] # cd /var/www/html
[root@gao-2006] # tar xf /mnt1/wordpress-files.tar
where weiqi/password is the username/password pair I gave to WordPress when I did the five minutes install back then.
I never thought the migration of email client data could be this hard. I use Evolution, the default email client for Fedora Core (and Red Hat Linux before it). There is a ~/.evolution directory and it seems to contain my emails.
Just copy the ~/.evolution directory to the new machine and everything will be taken care of, right? After all, Mozilla, Firefox, Thunderbird all work that way.
Wrong! It turns out Evolution also saves some of its settings elsewhere that is not obvious to the casual user.
When I started Evolution on gao-2006, the first-use dialog popped up. I recreated all of my email accounts. Fortunately for me, once I'm in Evolution proper, all of my old email messages showed up.
Windows installation remains to be a pain
Compared to how smoothly the Fedora Core installation went, Windows installation remains to be a major pain. Nothing is improved since I last performed this magic 704 days ago.
My main complaints:
The trickling in of updates. Windows Update first told me I I have to get IE6. Only after the reboot did it tell me that I also need IE6 SP1. And only after another reboot did I learn that I also need IE6 SPI security update KB45423, or whatever.
Everything is a separate download. Red Hat need to do a Windows distribution—"Here's 20 DVDs for your Red Hat Windows distribution. It includes all the cool programs that you can download from the internet. Just install it, and turn on the Red Hat update agent."
There are too many reboots that I have to perform to get everything installed.
Microsoft Office installation is down right ridiculous! I've done the installation several times too many to render the online activation not working. So I have to call an 888 telephone number and speak with a voice response program:
Very pleasant synthetic female voice: Now read the first set of numbers
Me: six-three-five-nine-zero-eight
Voice: Do you want to repeat it? If you don't want to repeat it, simply say "move on."
Me: Move on.
Voice: All right. read the next set of numbers
Me: nine-zero-five-three-seven-six
[...]
Voice: We are almost done. Now read the last set of numbers
[...]
It took me six minutes to go through the registration process.
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