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Don’t know how I missed this one, but for all the love I’ve proclaimed for apt on Red Hat/Fedora, I never realized that the up2date agent could take an apt repository as a source (or yum for that matter). This is great from a desktop user’s perspective because it allows them to handle their own OS and software updates through the up2date tray icon while plugging into the same repository I would use from the command line.

If your apt sources list (/etc/apt/sources.list) looks something like this:

rpm http://host/whatever-dir/ architecture channel1 channel2

Then your up2date sources list (/etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources) would look like this:

apt whatever-label-you’d-like http://host whatever-dir/architecture channel1 channel2

The up2date sources list file has an example entry for apt as well as yum. Now if only they’d add apt or yum support to the Add/Remove Packages interface we’d be set!

I’ve used Windows Recovery Console a number of times, but never documented the cases. I recently had a Windows XP laptop that could not boot to Windows. It gave this error:

c:\windows\system32\config\system is either corrupt or missing

Here is how I fixed it…
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I had a Sun machine fall off the network for 10 minutes or so during a power outage the other day. Upon reboot the user that had been logged in during the outage attempted to log back in to the machine. However, they were preventing from doing so (CDE environment) and were presented with the error message dtsession: unable to start message server - exiting.

It turns out that ownership on a file named .TTauthority in the user’s home directory had changed to root, and the program attempting to access it, presumably ttauth, was unable to do so. It looks like this is a bug in the program that can result from a crash, and since ttauth is loaded when logging into the CDE environment the permission prevention prevents login altogether. Logging in remotely and removing the troublesome file fixes the problem.

I found this issue being discussed on the Sun support forums.

This has driven me crazy for months as I considered it a real usability hurdle to Linux desktop adoption and being able to supply my Linux users the best browser experience possible.

If you have an icon on your Linux desktop pointing to the Firefox binary, it will launch Firefox when you double-click the icon. However, if Firefox is already running when you click the icon, the binary will not check for an already running Firefox process and launch a new window or tab. Instead, it will launch the profile manager, assuming you are trying to start a new Firefox session (with unique profile information).

Fortunately someone tackled this issue in April on the Mozillazine message boards. Currently this problem is by design; the application is meant to work this way on Linux and doesn’t take a command line option otherwise. Its fixed by pointing your icon to call a script, which checks the current state of Firefox and then issues the appropriate command line options to either open a new tab or window (your choice) or launch the binary as is.

I’ve copied the script text into the extended body for this entry.

[addendum]

Firefox 0.9 RC1 makes this unnecessary.
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One of the things I like about working with computers is that no matter what level of reality you’re working with, it can always be peeled back to reveal something deeper. Perhaps those that write assembly might take issue with that statement, but there is always some sort of abstraction going on.

I digress. I just wanted to make a quick blurb this morning about hard and soft, or symbolic, links and ext3. The difference between the two (which I often confuse) is that the data a link points to will not be deleted unless all hard links are deleted that point to said data. This is useful if you want data accessible from two places but do not want to waste disk space by doing a copy. Hard links can also be useful in case you want a kind of check against the rm command. If you rm one of your hard links the data is still there until you rm them all.

Laserspeed is a provider of HP printer warranty service in the Princeton area. They’re located at 15k Princess Road which is the first left after the I95 overpass on the Princeton Pike. For HP printers purchased on contract with CMC you receive what’s known as a 1-year bench warranty. This means that should you require warranty covered repair within the year of included coverage, you have to bring the unit in to an authorized repair center or pay for them to come to you.

Long overdue, the Security Focus newsfeed has been added to the sidebar.