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Since upgrading to Fedora 21 I’ve noticed that boot time has taken longer.  It appears, from looking at systemd-analyse that mandb is the repeat culprit here.

As I can’t really see the point of running mandb on every boot (which would appear to the be case), I’ve remove the service from systemd by running:

  • systemctl disable mandb
  • systemctl mask mandb (not really required, just belt and braces)

And then created a simple cron in cron.daily:

#!/bin/sh

/usr/bin/mandb –quiet
EXITVALUE=$?
if [ $EXITVALUE != 0 ]; then
/usr/bin/logger -t mandb “ALERT exited abnormally with [$EXITVALUE]”
fi
exit 0

Appears to have helped the boot time so far.

There is a seemingly endless topic about Firefox putting ads in (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-November/204272.html).  The various camps in this disagreement can be summarised into:

  • Ad? Ads are evil, full stop
  • Might confuse end users into thinking Fedora endorses companies being advertised
  • Remove Firefox as default (though no suggestions as to what this should be have been made)
  • Mozilla have to get money from somewhere
  • Can this topic be closed now, before life get even shorter

Me? Well I guess I’m in the Mozilla need money from somewhere, as they do have people to pay.  I’m also a tad annoyed by the positioning of end users are easy to confuse idiots, as they are not.

image

I’m back doing some rpm packaging for Fedora after a little break.  Got 2 on the go, one of which is currently being reviewed.  Thing is, the reviewer brought up some good points which I’m addressing, but the documentation is all over the place.  Go here for systemd scriptlets info, so there for the latest standard and lets not forget the contradictions.

Is annoy for me, and I’ve be doing rpm packaging for quite a while, so I dread to thing how a new packager copes.  And this must waste the reviewers time as well because of the things that are overlooked.

It would be very helpful to have something like a flowchart that outlines the steps needed and links to information on those steps.  Personally I find the current wiki packaging details way too verbose, nice simple steps ensures no mistakes.  If more detailed is required that can be linked off somewhere else.

Just my 2c worth, but it is something I think needs to be addressed.

image

The latest package updates managed to break GDM for me.  Had this type of problem before on FC-19, and usually breaking out to a VT and running:

systemctl restart gdm

fixed it, or at least got it started.  But this time even that didn’t work.

From looking at journalctl -b I could see that gdm’s account had been expired.  OK thats odd, so I editing the /etc/shadow file (sorry, I’m old skool) and removed the expire.

Great, gdm account not longer locked, so GDM will start…….erm sorry not.

Bit of googleing and I see that accountsservices might be the issue here, so I ran:

yum downgrade accountsservice accountsservice-libs

And rebooted….hmmm, still not joy, so I tried breaking out to a VT and restarting GDM and….it works.

Very annoying problem that take too long to resolve.  Looks like this is a common issue, so I thought I should post the solution that worked for me

KDE Freezing on Fedora 19
This has only just started to happen so I can only assuming that this is an unhappy marriage of a Kernel upgrade that is annoying KDE. The underlying Linux system is fine, the usual CTRL-ALT-F2 switches into a console fine,...

KDE Freezing on Fedora 19

This has only just started to happen so I can only assuming that this is an unhappy marriage of a Kernel upgrade that is annoying KDE.  The underlying Linux system is fine, the usual CTRL-ALT-F2 switches into a console fine, and indeed when you do that it appears to resolve the issue.

The only solution I have found is to disable desktop effects, which so far seems to have stopped the freezing.  I may switch to Gnome to see if that suffers from this issue as well, in which case it would be Xorg issue, but there is nothing in the Xorg.0.log file so far, or indeed /var/log/messages.

Can survive without Desktop effects, but I know it’ll annoy me knowing that I had to do that.  So more digging to get to the bottom of this and then I’ll bugzilla this will all the details I’ve got.

Fedora Flock 2013

Been spending the last few days at the Fedora Flock conference here in Charleston.  This is the first Fedora event I’ve attended, and I’ve enjoyed it, though its a bit hot for an Englishman.

There have been many talks I enjoyed, but I think the SELinux, buildtools, Hack the Future and systemd talks where the ones I enjoyed the most.

With systemd, there still a fair amount of packages (~120) that require conversion, so I’m intended to help out when I get back to the UK.  For the changes required I’ll really need to be on my own.  For some reason that works for me better.

So, enjoyed this a lot and will definitely be there next time.

Finally got working version of ptpd for Fedora 18/19 and RHEL6.  Nice little package even if I say so myself.  First for Fedora, hopefully of any.

furples:

Steve Jobs, Norman Seeff

doctorwho:

Doctor Who’s David Tennant Guests on Star Wars: The Clone Wars - IGN

Star Wars: The Clone Wars has had several great guest stars over the years known for iconic roles in other popular genre franchises, including George Takei, Simon Pegg and Katee Sackhoff. But for the first time, a Doctor is coming to the series, as none other than David Tennant appears on this coming Saturday’s “A Test of Strength.”

The episode continues the story arc begun last week, as a group of young Jedi set out to build their first lightsabers. The former Doctor Who star will voice Huyang, a droid who is a crucial part of this journey.

When it came to getting Tennant to appear on The Clone Wars, Filoni remarked, “As a fan that has the privilege of playing in the Star Wars galaxy, I am always on the lookout for others who appreciate, and would enjoy, an opportunity to go on an adventure in George’s galaxy far, far away. When I heard the Doctor himself, David Tennant, was a fan of Star Wars I knew I had to find a way to get in contact with him to see if he would perform on The Clone Wars. The result was ‘Huyang,’ an ancient droid in the service of the Jedi Order, whose sole task in life has been overseeing the construction of lightsabers. I thought David was perfect for the part and he did not disappoint. He delivered a performance which impressed even the Master himself, George Lucas.”

(via doctorwho)

A tad scary this.  Over at The Hacker News they are reporting:

“Russian anti-virus company Doctor Web reported about the first cross-platform backdoor to run under Linux and Mac OS X identified as "BackDoor.Wirenet.1”. This malicious program designed to steals passwords entered by the user in Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Chromium, and passwords stored by such applications as Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, and Pidgin.

BackDoor.Wirenet.1 is the first-ever Trojan that can simultaneously work on these operating systems. BackDoor.Wirenet.1 is still under investigation.

At launch BackDoor.Wirenet.1 creates a copy in the user’s home directory. To interact with the command server located at 212.7.208.65, the malware uses a special encryption algorithm Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).“