Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov … mammoth cave …

I have an account with Gmail (to use this email when I don\’t want to mess with my personal mail) and I use Firefox notifier to see if there are any new messages. Today my notifier stopped working giving me a Login Failure error while I am still able to login to my Gmail by going there directly :(

Strange :( I don\’t like when things stop working with no reason.

Many times I face the same discussion in forums, lists and in all other places about linux distributions and in particular, the question \”Which linux [distribution] is better?\”.

I\’ve been using linux for something like 3 years now and I have tried few different distros and still I am using Fedora one. There are many criterias which can influence the choice of preferred distro, among them one may find: choice of packages included in the distro, freshness of these packages, ease of installation, ease of updating, ease of administration, amount of configuration to be done after installation, beauty of GUI and anything else.

If you ask me what makes me use Fedora distro, I would answer that first of all it is a use. I am used to it and it seems that I know all major points about it. Second is the ease of installation and update of the system. Finally – look and feel.

Of course there a few things that I don\’t think much comfortable with like the choice of packages coming with distro, but this can be easily fixed due to the ease of update. I mean – every time I install Fedora I need to get APT installed and few things like mplayer, amarok, licq and some other, but overall there are not too many packages that I need to get and there is an easy way of doing it.

The major plus in Fedora is that it is RPM based (that means that the system can be maintained with almost no \”./configure && make && make install\”, it is easy to track dependences, it is easy add/update/delete software and it is widely supported.

So to kinda sum this up, if you doubt on which distro you should choose – first decide on what are the most critical criterias for you, then consider your habits (it is a bit difficult to switch from distro to distro if have used one for a while since on one hand everything is similar, but on the other hand there some small differences that can really drive you crazy all the time) and finally take a look around and see what other people a using for some time.

P.S.: and stop asking just plain question \”Which distro is better/the best?\” since it is too general. If you doubt and you still want to ask something like this – be more specific, giving a list of things you expect from the distro.

Today night I tried to install FC4 on my home PC and failed. Right after the boot prompt of the installation CD (after I press Enter to continue) I get kernel panic and a lot of crap on the screen.

After browsing the fedora buglist I found that many people have same problem (especially on Intel mainboards – the one I have). Guys even posted a screenshot here and here.

From the list of possible solutions:

• check your RAM first! (my works fine)
• try booting with \’pci=nosort text\’ options
• install bootloaded using older versions and then try to boot kernel from CD using bootloader installed on harddisk
• the most funny, but works in many cases: try to write some crap at the installation boot prompt when it first appears and after getting an error that such image is missing – press enter to boot default image.

I haven\’t tried any of the above, but I will definitely do when I get to my PC.

more info on this problem can be found here, here and here

I almost downloaded the Fedora Core 4 cds. Will be upgrading very soon.

I am using Squid proxy as a standard thing on firewalls to speed up web browsing for LANs, but I never tried to do something more with squid that default configuration + some securing with ACLs.

Today I came across SquidGuard which helps a lot if one need to restrict access by clients/domains/urls/expressions and it turned out to be quite a good software. Although I did only some basic configuration it seems to be quite fast and flexible with doing it\’s job.

Another tool that I have set up was Ad Zapping which main aim is to remove banners/ad popups/ad javascript and related stuff from the pages. The idea is common – it just replaces all the crap with transparent images, empty HTML pages and useless javascript files.

After setting everything up I decided to test the system and went to a couple of web sites like MSN, Hotmail and Yahoo – funny, but all of them look so empty without banners :)

Next thing to do with Squid is set some antivirus software for it.