Back From the Blogging Dead

Hi campers, remember me?

Been a while since I blogged, I’m afraid that I’m really not one of those daily diary sort of people, it usually takes the promise of greenbacks to get my literary juices flowing. Still, it’s been too long, so I thought I’d drop a note to let you know what’s new in the Linux part of my life.

I’ve been installing Fedora Core 6 a lot lately (on my laptop, and on two servers at work.) I love FC6 once it’s installed, and it’s pretty pretty easy to install, even if you’re doing something exotic like a software RAID or LVM. However, what it seriously needs work with is handling errors during install. The typical reaction of FC6 to an install problem (be it bad media, or a hardware glitch) is to either hang completely or give some spazzy and unhelpful error message. One of the key premises of an installation user interface is that it should give you some idea on how long a given operation should take. On one of the two server installs, we were left on a screen for more than an hour before we decided it had in fact hung, and restarted.

In MythTV land, I’ve been playing with the Silicon Dust HDHomeRun, an embedded Linux device with two digital tuners. You just point MythTV at it as a tuning device, and you suddenly have two new tuners available. It only handles unencrypted digital content, but it captured HD stuff just fine. Unfortunately, MythTV doesn’t have the horsepower to play back 1080i HD content, although my Windows box can play the same file just fine. Another Thing To Look Into for the Linux folks, I’ll have to ask my friends at X.org why it’s so.

In the “Articles I’ve Written Elsewhere” category, I have a piece in Computer Power User (also know as CPU) on authoring DVDs under Linux. It’s a subscriber only site, but if you happen to subscribe to CPU, have at it.

Over on my personal blog, I’m starting to chronicle what is going to be a major life change for me, getting a band put around my stomach. If you’re into that kind of thing, clicky the linking. Other than an occasional mention, I’ll spare you here.

Yours hopefully more frequently,

James