The Fedora 17 “Beefy Miracle”

So, a new release of Fedora was set free just last week, the so-called “Beefy Miracle”. A couple of releases ago (or maybe last release), I had really thought I might wait at least a month after a release before upgrading. Turns out my curiosity got the best of me, and I went and upgraded my laptop mere days after the release. Fortunately, this release has been much much better right out of the box.
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Trying out the LibreOffice build

In case you haven’t heard, there was a little fork of the OpenOffice project not too long ago. They can explain the reasons for it a whole lot better than I can, so I’m not going to. Normally, I never built OpenOffice on Gentoo because I knew it would take a darn long time, and the pre-built 32-bit binaries worked well enough. With the fork, I decided to try it out anyway.
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Jumping on the Fedora 14 bandwagon

Fedora 14 was released just a day or two ago. I figured I’d be cutting-edge and upgrade on pretty much the day it came out. Of course, as with last time, I’m trying to do so on a laptop with little room for any more stuff. This time though, I tried as hard as I could to get preupgrade to work instead of doing a new install. The Free Space Issue /boot The first issue was, of course, the lack of free space, on both /boot and /.
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Got a Bus Pirate!

Update: The ModemManager rule should really only apply to the USB device, not the TTY. I updated the rule below to be a bit more specific. Around the end of July, I ordered a Bus Pirate from Seeed Studio. It took about a week to ship, which is pretty quick, I think. I picked it up from the post office on Tuesday. After opening the package and plugging it in, I was greeted with nice blinky lights, and my computer didn’t start smoking, so that was a good sign.
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Writing Invites with Scribus

So I recently had to create a whole bunch of invites. Not a huge number like a thousand, but more than enough that I didn’t want to make each one individually. Anyway, I decided to make them in Scribus. It’s semi-professional, and has grade-A output. After the fact, I’d say that it was a pretty good choice, except for a few annoying wrinkles. The Good On the good side, Scribus is really stringent about printing issues (though that wasn’t as much of a concern this time).
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Switching from Gentoo to Fedora

Round about last week, I switched my desktop from Gentoo to Fedora. It took a few days to get everything the way I wanted. But it only took that long because I had lots of data to backup and (selectively) restore, and I only worked in the evenings. Fortunately, a “re-install” is way less painful than Windows, since all you really need to keep is your home directory. I just don’t know how Windows users live through it, especially without all their programs in a convenient package manager.
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Upgrading to Fedora 13

Well, this didn’t go as smoothly as the live USB versions, mostly due to preupgrade. I don’t have a “standard” install, you might say. This is on a laptop that’s not mine and Fedora is not the primary OS. So it’s very space-constrained. I don’t even have the recommended 200MB (now the recommendation is a whopping 500MB) space for /boot. Personally, I think that’s a ridiculous amount of room to hold a kernel and initrd (even if they are generic), but that’s the default install size.
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Booting multiple Fedora images from USB

Well, I’ve been trying to boot Fedora from ISO, but haven’t exactly been successful. On the bug, you can see a possible fix, but it’s a bit complicated and requires messing with the image from an existing install. Instead, I figured out a way to do it that uses the extracted files. It’s pretty simple. First, mount the ISO and extract three files: the LiveOS image: squashfs.img and possibly osmin.
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Booting recovery images from USB

So, I’m still trying to figure out the Fedora boot, but in the meantime, I tried to figure out how to boot from a few recovery systems. First off, let’s try Parted Magic. This one is pretty simple since they provide a “USB” version. If you extract that, you’ll find a boot and a pmagic folder. Copy the pmagic folder to the USB drive. In boot/grub/grub.lst, you’ll find a whole bunch of boot options.
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