Technology – Page 45 – Blog of Alexander Mamchenkov

Licq vs Kopete

$\"Kopete\"$ $\"LIcq\"$ Checked Kopete and Licq today. Kopete looks nice and supports many protocols, but have some problems with encodings (when using russian) while Licq is much lighter and faster, but supports only ICQ protocol.

Since I am using only ICQ (I need MSN only for one contact and am going to push that guy to switch to ICQ) I decided to keep Licq for default.

Firefox vs Konqueror

$\"Firefox\"$ $\"Konqueror\"$ For one more time I have proved to myself that Firefox is the best :) This time I decided to give a try to Konqueror (as from KDE 3.4.0) in hopes that maybe, due to the fact that I am running KDE, it will work faster and better than Firefox – I was wrong!

Not only that Konqueror is much slower than Firefox (I didn\’t benchmark this since I can see it as is) on startup and while rendering pages, it also do not comply 100% with a style. The issue with styles can be seen with forms: Konqueror do not obey CSS, instead it uses current KDE style of widgets to draw forms what causes (in some places) the whole site to be displayed not very good :(

Anyway – I gave up with Konqueror and came back to Firefox until next release of KDE when I am planning to try Konqueror one more time :)

Linux in Cuba

$\"Tux\"$ According to this post on Slashdot Cuba is dumping Windows for Linux and is working \”towards replacing Windows on all state owned computers\”.

Don\’t forget to read comments after the story – they are real fun :)

Database Management & Programming

$\"Exam\"$ Just finished writing Database Management & Programming exam in the college. Overall, the exam was quite easy and contained a questions on ERD, Symantic Objects, function dependencies, SQL and some other theoretical issues. I didn\’t expected this exam to be hard and it wasn\’t, so luckily I will get a good grade :)

Next exam is on General Physics which I am really afraid of since I am not quite friendly with the subject. The good thing here is that since the course is not about memorizing the formulas, but on the ability to use them – I will have a list of most frequently used formulas included at the last page of the exam paper ;)

Server Update

$\"RedHat$ I 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:

Samba based NT domain + File server
Mail (Exim + IMAPd)
Web (Apache)
FTP (ProFTPd)
Fax (HylaFax)
MySQL Databases
some minor/non-critical services

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 :)