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Screen capture of VirtualBox running Fedora 8 (F8) and VMware running Windows 2003 Server R2 all running within a Fedora 8 host using compiz desktop effects.

dimdim is a free and open-source web conferencing product similar to webex. It allows for presentations to be done over the web and is very useful for discussions and demonstrations. I have installed the alpha and beta versions of the server and used the alpha version quite a few times and it has worked very well (the beta version has some stability issues).

Unfortunately an incompatibility had crept in when using the presenter from within a VMware image when that image was running on a host using compiz. Not a terribly common setup perhaps, although visually very appealing. An easy fix to the problem is to revert the VMware image video driver back to the non-vmware version installed along with the vmware-tools.

On Saturday I tried upgrading to Drupal 6 (from 5.5) and the upgrade scripts failed resulting in a rather horrible frankensite. I have not had time to debug the issue (it appears to have been a table conflict resulting in many invalid SQL statements that ended up corrupting the database used by Drupal). The good news is that recovery is quick and painless.

If you have not yet upgraded make sure you have a backup of your database, and install into a new location, not over your existing install (you can use symbolic links to preserve the name of the location you install to). To backup your database you can use mysqldump:

mysqldump -u adminuser -p databasename > backupfile.sql

where adminuser is the admin user account of your database server, databasename is the name of your drupal database, and backupfile.sql is the backup file that will be created. It will prompt you for your adminuser password.

To restore after the Drupal upgrade script does horrible things to your site, you need to:

Sometimes the failsafes on a system can get in the way of reconstructing things after a boo boo. For example, if you try and re-install a package over itself after accidentally removing a file -- yum won't let you. However it is relatively easy to recover if you know how.

The first step of course is determining which packages may have been damaged. To verify a package use rpm -V, and possibly --nomtime to avoid showing when files were modified, e.g.

rpm -V --nomtime packageName

Where packageName is the name of the package. To verify all packages on your system use something like this:

rpm -qa | xargs -t -n1 -ipName rpm -V --nomtime pName

Or, if you're looking for any damaged packages in a set of related packages you can do something like this:

rpm -qa | grep partOfPackageName | \

xargs -n1 -i pName rpm -V --nomtime pName

Where partOfPackageName is part of the package name.

I converted an old IBM A30p Thinkpad I had to be the MythTV (and general livingroom use) box hooked up to the livingroom TV. The laptop is nice and quiet, and fits unobtrusively on the TV stand. The laptop was upgraded to Fedora 8 with MythTV and some other nice packages. Everything installed and worked well except the output for video programs such as the MythTV playback went to the laptop screen instead of the TV, so the TV showed a blank screen on video playback.

The laptop has an old ATI radeon M6 LY and the new fglrx drivers do not work with it, so none of the current documentation was any good and there did not seem to be a solution when doing the usual googling. Fedora detected and correctly installed the "radeon" xorg driver and enabled hardware acceleration and proper resolution for the TV, but the old trick of using the MonitorLayout option to direct the video output to a specific device (i.e. to the TV instead of the small laptop screen) no longer worked.

After much experimenting I found that xrandr can be used to turn off the laptop display and force the video output to the TV screen, like this: