Welcome to my world

UPDATE – Adobe have finally released Flash player 9 for Linux. Read more

If you’re still struggling on with Flash player 7 for Linux, you might like to know that Adobe have released Player 9 for Linux. It’s still in beta, but I’ve been using it for a while and haven’t had any problem. The installer’s isn’t as clean as an rpm, but give it a try!

Installation:

cd ~
wget http://www.adobe.com/go/fp9_update_b2_installer_linuxplugin
tar xvfz FP9_plugin_beta*.tar.gz
cd flash-player-plugin*
su - (or sudo -s)
cp libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/

Good luck!

If you want to run IE on linux, take a look at IEs4Linux. It’s very easy to install, just type the following as a normal user:

wget http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/downloads/ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
tar zxvf ies4linux-latest.tar.gz
cd ies4linux-*
./ies4linux


Max Spevack (Fedora Project Leader) yesterday announced some interesting stats about FC6. According to Max, since its release about 3 weeks ago, 300,000 unique IP addresses have checked for any updates to FC6. Wow! That’s at least 12,500 new installs per day!! Kinda pisses on DistroWatch’s stats! Oh and on a personal note… Take that Ubuntu boys!

Detailed stats are at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/ZodStats and you can read the whole release on fedora-announce-list.

Take a look at this!

[root@dyn89 yum]# pwd
/var/cache/yum
[root@dyn89 yum]# du -sh *
1.8M atrpms
6.1M core
5.3M development
11M extras
36K flash
84K jpackage-fedora
2.2M jpackage-generic
192K jpackage-generic-nonfree
848K livna
2.8M updates
176K updates-sourceThat’s 30Mb of crappy yum cache

Now take a look at this:

[root@dyn89 cache]# yum clean all
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Cleaning up Everything
[root@dyn89 cache]# du -sh * 1.8M atrpms
12K core
5.3M development
12K extras
12K flash
84K jpackage-fedora
2.2M jpackage-generic
192K jpackage-generic-nonfree
12K livna
12K updates
176K updates-source9.6M much healthier

It nice to see something are just buried and not forgotten, Like corrupt RPM databases. A few years ago this was a common problem (common to me anyway!). The problem occurs either when two rpm process try and write to the rpm database in /var/lib/rpm or an impatient operator (like me) hits ctrl-c too many times.

When this happens, you rpm process (e.g. the rpm command or yum) would just hang. So why am I talking about this if the problem was fixed ages ago? Well it seem with the new funky yum-updatesd that’s included with FC6 is causing some problems.
You can see if your effected but running this command:

rpm -qa

If you get no output then you’ve screwed your databases. Here’s how to fix it.

1. Firstly su or sudo in to root
   su -
2. Clear your rpm caches
   rm -v /var/lib/rpm/__*
3. Now run the rebuild command
   rpm -vv --rebuilddb

You now gets some lovely healthy output showing you everything ok. It should look something like this:

D: adding 11 entries to Filemd5s index.
D: read h# 770 Header V3 DSA signature: OK, key ID 4f2a6fd2
D: +++ h# 1084 Header V3 DSA signature: OK, key ID 4f2a6fd2
D: adding "gimp-print-utils" to Name index.
D: adding 2 entries to Basenames index.
D: adding "Applications/Publishing" to Group index.
D: adding 12 entries to Requirename index.
D: adding "gimp-print-utils" to Providename index.
D: adding 2 entries to Dirnames index.
D: adding 12 entries to Requireversion index.
D: adding "4.2.7-22" to Provideversion index.
D: adding 1 entries to Installtid index.
D: adding 1 entries to Sigmd5 index.
D: adding "0beb1e4759ef5a92206941d9f0c9a52e0d546a2c" to Sha1header index.

You should now be able to install or upgrade using yum.