Does anybody check out Instructables? It’s a site where people post their ‘How Tos’ for just about anything you can think of. There are some pretty strange ones too, but this computer mouse instructable has got to be one of the more unusual ones I’ve seen.
Guaranteed to freak a few people out.
Edging to the Mac side
I really, really want to get one of the new iMacs especially after seeing some of the uber-spiffy things OS X Leopard can do, but I’m less than enthused about the circa 2006 hardware specs. Then again, considering the circa 2001 hardware I’m using now, a new iMac would be a huge improvement. And it would look really good on my desk. ATI HD 2600 with 256 MB video RAM though? Is that enough for Leopard?
And seriously, WTF is up with charging $700 to go from 2 GB up to 4 GB of DDR2 RAM? You can buy like 14 GB of memory for that much retail.
Still saving up for a new computer for next year. Whether it will be Mac or something else is still up in the air.
It’s too bad I can’t just buy OS X to run on a computer I put together myself.
RAM good
Fedora 8 Test 3 runs much better with at least 512MB of RAM out of the box. It’s an absolute slug with anything less. Methinks Fedora’s starting to bloat a little.
Upgrading Fedora sans DVD
The Fedora LiveCD image is pretty cool for new installations but as I’ve discovered, not much good for upgrading an existing Fedora. Fedora’s done away with the CD ISO images (probably a good thing, since Fedora 6 consisted of 5 CD ISO images) and only makes DVD images available now. Since my desktop doesn’t have a DVD burner or reader, I thought I was going to be stuck. After doing a bit of research and experimenting, I’ve come up with a procedure that let me upgrade my desktop from Fedora 8 Test 2 to Test 3 that seems to have worked. It’s based on this message from fedora-list.
Disclaimer: The following steps worked fine for me on my system. Since it was a relatively minor upgrade from one test version to another, I’ve encountered very little breakage (so far). You may have to adjust things a little to get it to work on yours. YMMV.
- Download the Fedora ISO for your architecture
- Mount the ISO using the loopback device:
mount iso_filename /mnt/Fedora -t iso9660 -o loop
replacing iso_filename with the filename of the Fedora ISO you just downloaded - Create the directory /boot/Fedora and copy the contents of /mnt/Fedora/isolinux there
- Add the following to /etc/grub.conf (add it to the end of the file):
title Fedora root (hd0,0) kernel /Fedora/vmlinuz initrd /Fedora/initrd.img
- Copy the ISO image to another computer and mount it to some location as in Step 2 (I used Fedora in my home directory). I had to do this step because I couldn’t get the upgrade process to find the DVD image on the local hard drive. I think it may have had to do with the image being on an LVM partition. If you don’t have any LVM partitions, you may be able to skip this step.
- Create an NFS export for the mounted Fedora image you just created.
- Reboot and select the Fedora boot profile. If all goes well, the computer should boot up using the new Fedora image and the upgrade process should kick off.
- Follow the prompts to the point where it asks where the Fedora disk image is
- Select the NFS option and provide the host and full path information to where you mounted the ISO on the remote computer (from Step 5).
- At this point the upgrade should proceed as if you were upgrading from a physical DVD
If anybody knows a better way, feel free to enlighten me.
10 years of /.
In Internet time, Slashdot is the great grand-daddy of all the techie news sites. This month /. is marking its 10 year anniversary with locally organized gatherings all over the place. Almost makes me feel old to think that I’ve been reading /. for nearly all of those 10 years.
The local gathering of /.ers is set up for Terri’s Sports Bar on James Island on Oct 20 at 8PM. Should be fun to meet other /.ers around here. Go sign up and let the rest of us know if you’re coming.