DJS Consulting Tech Blog » White Box

Back to WBEL

Daniel — Sat, 04 Sep 2004 06:00:24 +0000

Today, I reinstalled WBEL 3.0. I was able to compile ndiswrapper (as I kept that on my FAT32 drive), and get the network card working smoothly very quickly. (In fact, it seems to be more reliable under Linux than WXP!) With the network up, it was easy to download Firefox, Thunderbird, and OpenOffice, and installing them was a breeze. (I decided to put them under /opt this time, trying to stick with the FHS.) I decided to mount my FAT32 drive under my home directory, as /home/summersd/drive_d. E-mail works fine, but Apache gives me a 403 (Permission Denied) error. MySQL doesn’t seem to be working either – I’ll have to play with that later.

A Month in Summary

Daniel — Tue, 31 Aug 2004 06:00:44 +0000

Well, the last month has been interesting. I was able to get my Windows and Linux installations synchronized by creating a mount point for my second drive under /mnt/drive_d . Under that, I created a directory called /thunderbird for my e-mail, and moved my e-mail and newsgroup folders over there. (The first time, I missed the “newsrc” file, which is important – it tells what newsgroups you’ve subscribed to and which messages you’ve read.) Under Windows, I pointed it to “D:\thunderbird\pop3.knology.net”, and under Linux, it was configured to “/mnt/drive_d/thunderbird/pop3.knology.net”. I then moved the “wwwroot” directory from “C:\Inetpub” to drive D:, and pointed IIS to the new location. Under Linux, I did something a little different. As “root”, I deleted the directory /var/www/html, and instead created /var/www/html as a symbolic link to /mnt/drive_d/wwwroot (the actual command is “ln -s /mnt/drive_d/wwwroot /var/www/html”). That worked great as well.

MySQL was more complicated, but I was eventually able to get it working as well. I created the directory “D:\mysql\data” for the data, then configured /etc/my.cnf under Linux to look at “/mnt/drive_d/mysql/data”. I kept getting “Could not connect to server using socket /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock”. After some digging, it appeared to be a permissions problem. All the documentation said that the default socket was /tmp/mysql.sock, so I changed my.cnf to point there instead, restarted mysqld, and it worked! So, I have no idea what a Unix socket it, but I know that now I have one!

I was also able to get DVDs playing using xine, compiling it myself, and using libdvdcss, I can even watch commercial DVDs. I’m really impressed with xine – it handles all kinds of media out of the box, including DivX and up to version 8 of WMV files. You can add codecs to it as well, to support almost anything you want to do from an audio or video perspective. Compiling the player took around 20 minutes, and compiling the front end took another 5. And, it was simple – download the .tar.gz file, do “tar xvfz [name].tar.gz”, “cd [name]“, “./configure”, “make install”. The “./configure” script is the key in the whole process – it looks at what you have installed, and creates make files that will work with your compiler.

Everything started going south, though, when I started having freezes. Eventually, I got to where I could not boot without a kernel panic, and then boot errors (which I detailed in this e-mail to the WBEL user’s list. Encouraged by my success over the past month, I decided to return to WBEL – it’s supposed to be more stable than FC2, and I bet that I can get ndiswrapper, the dual-booting web server, the common e-mail, and maybe even some other stuff working again.

yum yum yum

Daniel — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 07:00:29 +0000

I wasn’t able to sleep very well last night, so I didn’t do much tonight. One thing I did do, though, was run yum, which is, at a high-level, similar to Windows Update. WBEL recently released “Respin 1″ (that’s re-spin, not a new name – it’s code name is still “Liberation”), and running yum with no options will update every available package. After about 30 minutes of watching it download stuff, I went to bed – I’ll have to verify the results tomorrow.

The Adventure Begins

Daniel — Fri, 11 Jun 2004 07:00:01 +0000

Prior to today, I had been doing some research. I had some previous Red Hat 8.0 CD’s lying around from a previous failed attempt (which failed due to hardware issues, not Linux), and I had planned to use them. I had been reading a Red Hat newsgroup, and found that they were no longer giving away their stable, business-class flavor of Linux; instead, they had forked the project and started the Fedora Project. Folks were suggesting that people who wanted the stability, et. al. of Red Hat should take a look at White Box Enterprise Linux (WBEL).

The decision to acquire a new computer for me began this adventure. Before leaving to pick it up, I started the download of the three CD images for WBEL. Once I got home, I cannibalized some parts off it to repair an old machine I had here, and got that machine set up on WXP Pro for my kids. Then, I began the install. It went flawlessly – it recognized every piece of hardware I had. I then scooted it around so I could plug it into our router, configured the network (a breeze), and it worked. I’m looking forward to more playing tomorrow!