Server Update

\"RedHatI have one place where I want to update RedHat Linux 9 to something newer like Fedora Core N and at this point I am full of fear :(

Currently the server is handling:

And the mystery for me are the next set of question:

  • To which release of Fedora to update?
  • How to update (cd update/cd clean install/apt-get distr-upgrage/anything else)?
  • Should I leave the same soft or should I replace something (like Exim -> Postfix, IMAPd -> Cyrus IMAP)?
  • What problems may occur?
  • How much time the whole process can take?
  • How to make it with minimum downtime?

In addition – I have space (but a bit old) P3 machine which I can use in any way during the setup.
So what – any ideas???

I thought of moving as much as possible to the P3 machine (web,ftp,mail,samba,mysql), then reinstalling (fresh install) the main server, then move everything back from P3 machine, but I assume that someone may have some better ideas :)

Smart Package Manager

\"SmartI always like to watch the improvements of usability in Linux. This time I found another nice tool: Smart Package Manager. I haven\’t tried it a lot yet but it seems to be a bit more advanced than Synaptic – the tool I used before. Smart supports a variety of repositories and types of packages, can work both in GUI and CLUE, has KDE system tray integration addon and some other features.

VNC and XKB

\"vnc.gif\"Today I decided to work with my KDE desktop through VNC and I found out that additional keyboard layout that I have specified in my KDE settings was not working :( I have found a couple of errors both telling that XKB extension is missing.

Does anyone have had this problem before and if yes – is there any way out to make X server additional layouts work through VNC?

DVDRip

\"DVD::Rip\"For the past few days I had to rip around 8 DVDs and I have about 10-15 more to do. No doubt that DVD::Rip is the best application I could find for ripping dvds. It works very good and I have no problems with it. The only question is \”which settings are good for ripping?\”.

I am not quite familiar with video and ripping, so somehow I stopped on using xvid4 coded with fast interlacing, medium sound normalization, big frame, high quality resize and the final result to be the size of 2 cds (1.4 gb).

Looks ok, but maybe someone have better idea on how 1.4 GB can be used when ripping with DVD::Rip?